The joint conference of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library and the Traditional Song Forum
With the support of the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA), Cymdeithas Alawon Gwerin Cymru (Welsh Folk Song Society), and the Elphinstone Institute (University of Aberdeen)
Saturday 20 July and Sunday 21 July 2024
For over two hundred years, and for a variety of reasons, ‘folk’ song and music enthusiasts have ventured into the field and become collectors – gatherers of material which has greatly enhanced our understanding of the vernacular culture of the past.
Their activities have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, and to mark the centenary of the deaths of two key figures – Cecil Sharp and Sabine Baring Gould – and the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ella Mary Leather, we are organising a wide-ranging assessment of the collectors’ lives and works, with a major two-day conference.
We will investigate collectors as individuals and networks, their achievements and failures, motives, methods, strengths and weaknesses, social and political context, the contemporary collector, and the underlying ethics of collecting itself.
Papers accepted include:
- David Atkinson: What Is in the Collections?
- Malcolm Barr-Hamilton: W. Percy Merrick (1868-1955) – a blind folk song collector
- Julia Bishop: Collecting with the Dictaphone: James Madison Carpenter's Recordings and Transcriptions of English and Scottish Ballads
- Catherine Ann Cullen: “They Call Me Jack of All Trades”: Four multi-tasking ballad collectors born in nineteenth-century Ireland, and how their several occupations and experiences coloured their interest in gathering songs
- Carol Davies: Gwilym Davies: Prolific collector
- Angela Fogg: Seven sons, 800 children’s games and more. The life and collecting of Alice Gomme.
- Martin Graebe: Sabine Baring-Gould – 100 years on
- Chris Greencorn: “‘Genuine, but better variants known elsewhere’: Helen Creighton’s Folk Song Collecting in Nova Scotia
- Rhidian Griffiths: Observers of Welsh traditional song
- Áine Heneghan: “The man who saved a feast of music from the famine years”: James Goodman as a Collector of Irish Traditional Music
- E. Wyn James: Welsh Folk-Songs in Aberystwyth, London and Paris
- Elen Wyn Keen: The champion of collectors and his Canorion
- Andrew King: Dr Farquhar MacRae – Collector and traditional singer
- Caroline Macafee: Weighing the catch: quantitative analysis of singers and song transmission
- Paul Mansfield / Hugh Miller: Context and interaction – issues in writing about historical song collecting
- Stephen Miller: “Your last proposal about music hunting sounds charming. We must think it over.” W.H. Gill and J.F. Gill as Manx Folk Song Collectors
- Lynn Noel: Joanna Colcord: A Sailor’s Life, a Collector’s Legacy
- Brian Peters: 'Not to bury Sharp, but to crucify him': A critical appraisal of the academic assault on England's foremost folk song collector'
- Peter Snape: Anne Geddes Gilchrist: Folk Song Collector and Scholar
Lunch on both days is included in the ticket price.
Tags:
History