Emily McCallum

Research

My dissertation examines the relationships between early-twentieth-century British orchestral and brass band music and the cultural conceptions and material realities of landscapes. I focus on the works by British composers, such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, George Butterworth, Edward Elgar, in addition to other sites of musical production, including colliery brass bands and railway musical societies. References to the sonic features of nature and landscape—frequently understood as utopic or pastoral musical renderings of visual-spatial impressions of environment—are recurrently found in the orchestral music composed in the early decades of the twentieth century.  Yet, by contrasting the varying idyllic conceptualizations and representations of landscape with the material realities of the land and its uses, I situate the production and reception of British musical depictions of landscape within the complex imperial and environmental contexts of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Britain was, at this time, experiencing various impacts upon the land, including war and developments in mining and transportation infrastructure, which led to divergent conceptualizations of landscape. Such changes influenced the understanding of the interconnectivity of artistic-cultural evocations of land and resource extraction. My research highlights intersecting musical and socio-economic activities around sites within Britain, where music evocative of landscape was created and heard in tandem with personal and public awareness of the various resource extraction practices of national and colonial land-resource development. This lens enables a new perception of how the socio-cultural relationship to land was understood, and how it shifted throughout the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.  

Musicologists have long participated in discussions of landscape and nature, and there are many studies on the substantial historical repertoire that engages this representation. For example, the work of musicologists such Aaron Allen (2012), Daniel Grimley (2006, 2012), and Kyle Devine (2019, 2021) productively address broader context of material and resource needs for musical activity and changes in sensibility across the English cultural landscape. While my project is indebted to this scholarly tradition, I hope to add insights of the practical-materialist contexts to our current understanding of British music. Interdisciplinary research is paramount to my work and throughout my study I bring longstanding musicological discussion of sound and landscape into recent conversations across the environmental and energy humanities. Scholars such as Andreas Malm (2016), Imre Szeman (2017), Cara New Daggett (2019), and Heidi Scott (2019) have discussed the various ways energy is fundamental to cultural production. I build on their work by researching how music reception and production worked to hide, expose, and naturalize different sources of energy.  

 While in Scotland I had the chance to work in various interdisciplinary settings, helping me think through and across disciplines to see how they can successfully fit together and work in harmony. In Aberdeen, I had the opportunity to workshop and develop two dissertation chapters: the first, about the broader industrial and urban environmental contexts of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony (1914), and the second about the relationships between railway infrastructure and music production, with a specific focus on Railway Musical Societies. 

My work on Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony explores how the composition is embedded within a broader network of connections between industrialism and musical culture. Although Vaughan Williams never confirmed a specific programmatic narrative for the piece, the symphony interlaces multiple references to London’s urban landscape, such as the chimes of Big Ben and the River Thames. The quotation of Big Ben’s clock chimes unmistakably anchors the symphony to its London setting, offering one of the most recognizable sonic references to the city. However, it serves as more than just a marker of location; it signifies the intertwining of urban industrialism, railway expansion, and London’s position within Britain’s empire. Early twentieth century time keeping was in flux. The Great Western Railway institutionalized railway time in 1840 eventually leading to the fixing of London as the 0 degree in Greenwich Mean Time, implemented in the 1880s. Thus, Vaughan Williams’s quotation of the clock chimes would have not only been an iconic marker of London’s soundscape, but also a reminder of near constant industrial expansion and a signal of the dominating position of London and the British parliament. 

Further, references to the Thames throughout the symphony also imply interesting connections to London’s industrial realities. The Thames was important to how London was imagined both in terms of its geographical role in dividing the city as well as its central position within London’s industrial expansion. The embankments, one of the largest engineering feats of the late nineteenth century, solidified the association of the Thames with manmade engineering triumphs and control. Many listeners associated the prologue and epilogue of A London Symphony with the river Thames, depicted primarily as soft with well blended timbres and little dynamic contrast. Yet, for many living in London in the early twentieth century, the river would have not necessarily symbolized a quiet and slow-moving environment, but instead a source of hard and strenuous employment. Those who worked at London’s ports would have witnessed a more chaotic and louder environment and Vaughan Williams’ musical representation does not align with this more chaotic and stressful environment some may have associated with the waterway. Rather, it seems that the leisurely space through which Vaughan Williams experienced the Thames, via the embankments, was the primary inspiration for the waterway throughout A London Symphony. 

LNER Musical Society program cover pages 1924; National Railway Museum Archives

My second chapter explores the connections between increasing railway expansion, music making, and mobility. By the turn of the twentieth century, Britain’s widely acknowledged and growing industrial achievements reverberated across the nation’s music industry. The development of railways, in particular, played a significant role in this transformation, and alongside the establishment of a national railway network, numerous railway company musical societies emerged. These societies were comprised of staff members who volunteered their time to rehearse and perform in either a choir or an orchestra. By the 1910’s, these orchestral ensembles and choirs had grown in size and popularity, and went on to have busy concert schedules. For example, by 1925 the LNER Society had already performed 130 concerts of their own, in addition to playing at other railway sponsored charitable events.  

I am interested in exploring how these musical societies played an essential role into how railway companies aimed to shape their public perception and emphasize their investments in local spaces as facilitators of cultural activities. As the interconnections between music making and railways became more entangled, they also increasingly contributed to the “normalization” of infrastructure as necessary, and then its eventual invisibility (Brennan, 2021). Rail companies quickly realized the benefit of trying to control and shape their public perception. They wanted to integrate themselves into society and culture, striving to ‘naturalize’ their presence.  

Musical societies were wrapped up in railway labour. The ensembles helped make the company’s large labour force visible (and audible)— useful in aiding railways mask or divert attention from their more ‘machine’ like realities and ‘personalize’ their otherwise impersonal or mechanical operations. Moreover, class politics were not lost on the railway executives who made up musical society committees. Their chosen art-music repertoire had certain class associations and the musical societies tapped into the uses of music for philanthropy and working-class education. Railway company investment in working class benevolence was popular at this time. Many companies organized benefits and fundraisers for various charitable purposes, such as raising funds for widows, orphans, and disabled employees. Music societies were commonly utilized as a resource by railway executives as entertainment at these events, and thus, music was at once a beneficial resource for the rail industry while also becoming industrialised and institutionalized itself (Rodmell, 2021). 

Further, railway musical society concert programs offer interesting insights into society activities and their programming and communications suggest the ways in which railways themselves became a form of domestic cultural product. Place and folksong-inspired pieces, especially those by British composers, were routinely showcased in musical society concerts. Interest in themes of land and landscape were also reflected in the program cover art for many concerts, especially starting in the 1920’s. Given the railway industry’s preoccupation and investment in the construction and alteration of landscape, it is unsurprising that these themes were reflected in programming choices.  

Railway musical societies illustrate one of the many connections between music making and industrialism in turn-of-the-century Britain and point to an intriguing and intimate relationship between industrialism and cultural production. I centre this relationship by drawing attention to railway musical societies in order to highlight the connections between cultural expression and economies of extraction and industrialism, in hopes of better understanding how music was entangled with industrial infrastructure and material resource, and how the fuel used to make music influenced its reception and production.  

Throughout my project, I try to consider new ways of thinking about extraction and landscape by attending closely to how the extractive industries influenced understandings of landscape and how extraction influenced music production and reception throughout the UK. Ultimately, my goal is to think about how I can contribute an alternative perspective foregrounding economic and industrial realities, a perspective that has been overlooked in past music literature which has, at times, separated music from contemporary materialist realities of economic and industrial change.