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Hazel Brooks, SSCM 2020, Early Music, Volume 49, Issue 1, February 2021, Pages 164–165, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caab016
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Extract
The Society for Seventeenth-Century Music’s Annual Conference 2020 was initially due to take place in Cleveland, Ohio during April, but had to be cancelled at short notice due to worldwide Coronavirus lockdowns. The organizers initially considered rescheduling the event to June, but with the pandemic still raging, it was decided to hold a virtual conference online. This event took place over three days, between 26 and 28 June, and almost all of the original programme was retained.
The programme encompassed a huge variety of topics. Given that the papers to be presented were selected the previous November, two of the papers in particular were extraordinarily topical in relation to current events, which could not have been foreseen. The first of these, given by Sarah Koval, discussed musical representations of plague and death in Shirley’s Cupid and Death (1653), which had music by Matthew Locke and Christopher Gibbons. Koval pointed out that reading sources about the death tolls, bills of mortality, fear and enforced isolation during 17th-century plague outbreaks in the midst of the current Coronovirus pandemic brought these sources uncannily to life—something that audience members, listening from their locked-down homes all over the world, could easily relate to. The other paper that took on a heightened immediacy was given by Arne Spohr, who examined ambiguous attitudes towards blackness in early modern Germany, with particular reference to the musical rhetoric in Samuel Capricornus’s setting of a text from the Song of Songs, ‘Ich bin schwarz’ (1664). The context of the prominent ongoing protests of the Black Lives Matter movement lent this paper a strong emotional resonance.
