AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

106 Friday evening AMS Philadelphia 2009
specialist in French baroque dance music, Rose Pruiksma will address productions of Lully’s
Persée and Bourgeois gentilhomme.
trAnsAtlAntic connections
Philip olleson, President, royal Musical Association, chair
Sponsored by the Journal of the royal Musical Association and Routledge
The topic of “Transatlantic Connections” has been chosen to highlight patterns or aspects
of musical-cultural exchange between Europe and North America, a developing research area
that links several forthcoming articles in the Journal and recent publications generally (such as
Nicholas Temperley’s Bound for America: Three British Composers [University of Illinois Press,
2008]). The intention is to explore this theme in relation to a broad range of musics and across
two centuries.
FederALS ANd CoNFederAteS: BRITISH AUDIENCES
AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
Brian Thompson
Chinese University of Hong Kong
This paper explores Henri Drayton’s stage work Federals and Confederates, or, everyday Life
in America. The Philadelphia-born Drayton was well known on both sides of the Atlantic as
a leading baritone of his era. He had travelled to Europe to study singing in the 1840s and
afterwards settled in London to pursue a career in opera. In the 1850s, he created his Parlor
Opera Company, which featured himself and his wife, the soprano Susanna Lowe, in newly
composed one-act works. Following their success in Britain, the impresario P. T. Barnum
brought the Draytons to New York, where they became a sensation. A tour of the South was
less successful and the Draytons returned to Britain in the spring of 1861, just as war was
breaking out in the U.S. Some eighteen months later, Drayton premiered Federals and Confederates.
The highly political work, in the style of Henry Russell’s “entertainments,” proved
to be a hit with British audiences. Based on a close study of the libretto, several published
songs, and performance reviews, I shall discuss the structure, style, and politics of Federals and
Confederates, retrace Drayton’s many engagements that year, and attempt to explain some of
the reasons for his success.
AMERICAN MUSIC IN AND AROUND
NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRISTOL
Stephen Banfield
University of Bristol
England enjoyed and encouraged American musical imports for most of the nineteenth
century. Yet it is easy to overlook what arrived when, and how, and to make assumptions
about popular song in particular based on twentieth-century patterns of exchange. The newly
digitized pages of the Bristol Mercury document phases of often forgotten influence in a representative
city. First, blackface minstrelsy rapidly increased the awareness of and market for
American songs, performance tropes, and cultural images, though later British minstrelsy was
hardly a showcase for American popular music (a designation never used). Then the Civil War