Music's War Poets
The First World War reflected in British classical music
University of California (UCLA)'s Center for the Liberal Arts and Free Institutions has invited Dr Kate Kennedy to give a lecture on 'Music's War Poets'.
Thursday 15 October, 9pm (BST) 1pm (Pacific Standard Time).
Kate Kennedy’s lecture is free and open to all.
Click here to register and recieve joining instructions by email.
The First World War is now remembered in Britain through its literature perhaps more than any other art form; we might be familiar with the names of poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. However, we are considerably less familiar with the parallel response of classical musicians to the war, both during and after the conflict. This lecture investigates the lesser-known music created in parallel to the poetry. It looks at how composers articulate their experience of the war through their work, both during and after the conflict.
Kate Kennedy is a Research Fellow in Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford, and lectures in music and literature. She is the Associate Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-writing, which is an international hub for the discussion of biography, autobiography and the many issues surrounding the ways in which we approach the narratives of lives. She has previously held research fellowships in both disciplines at the University of Cambridge. She has published widely on music and literature of the First World War, and is the editor of The Silent Morning: Culture and the Armistice, 1918, and author of The Fateful Voyage. She is the editor of Literary Britten, and has recently co-edited with Dame Hermione Lee the critically acclaimed collection of essays, Lives of Houses. She is a regular broadcaster on the BBC, and her critical biography of war poet / composer Ivor Gurney will be published by Princeton University Press in May 2021.