Skip to content

Atlantic Sounds: Ships and Sailortowns > Colloquia > Colloquium 1 - London, 8 February 2013

Colloquium 1 - London, 8 February 2013

Across the Western Ocean: Songs of Liverpool and the Sea

Thursday 7th February 2013 at 9pm in the Crown & Goose, Camden
www.crownandgoose.co.uk/

Gerry SmythMusican and academic Gerry Smyth will be performing songs and shanties from his latest album 'Across the Western Ocean: Songs of Liverpool and the Sea'. Audience participation mandatory!

If you would like to attend this musical event prior to the conference to be held on the following day please reserve your place at atlantic-sounds@open.ac.uk

 

 

Colloquium 1: Historical Perspectives on Music and Seafaring

Friday 8th Feburary 2013 at The Open University, Camden www3.open.ac.uk/contact/maps.aspx
 
Music has always had an important presence in cross-cultural encounters around the Atlantic rim (including the Americas, Africa and the Caribbean), both on board ships and in sailortowns. Perhaps the most obvious subjects of study are the sea-songs devised to aid the hard physical labour of work on sailing ships but which also often emerged from experiences on shore, with many recalling the dangers and pleasures of life in port. Beyond these work songs, music has played various roles from mediating in early modern colonial encounters to providing entertainment. Musical traditions and musical instruments have been transported across the Atlantic and have subsequently impacted on music-making in ports and beyond. Music has also disseminated ideas about seafaring to the wider publics, particularly in popular song but also in art music. In modern times, the evolution of transatlantic leisure travel gave music an explicit role as entertainment for passengers but also provided opportunities for the musicians on board to encounter diverse musical styles. The study of music on ships and in sailortowns informs not only our understanding of historical seafaring practices; but also provides a lens through which the nature of cross-cultural encounters and fusions, many of which pre-date mass immigration into Britain and our resultant multicultural society, can be examined. 
 
If you would like to attend this event please reserve your place by emailing atlantic-sounds@open.ac.uk

Programme

10:30 Coffee and Welcome
 
11:00 David Cashman (Australian Institute of Music, Sydney)
Brass Bands, Icebergs and Jazz: The First Fifty Years of Music on Passenger Ships (1889-1939)
 
12:00 Stan Rijven (Music critic)
Slowbalization and the 6th continent, a Dutch perspective.
 
12:45 LUNCH
 
1:45 Mike Brocken (Liverpool Hope University)
The mono-historical myth of Liverpool’s Cunard Yanks
 
2:30 Gerry Smyth (Liverpool John Moores University)
Across the Western Ocean: Songs of Liverpool and the Sea
 
3:15 George Burrows (University of Portsmouth)
‘Anything Goes’ on an Ocean Liner: Musical Theatre as Dialogic Heterotopia
 
David Cashman (Australian Institute of Music, Sydney)
Brass Bands, Icebergs and Jazz: The First Fifty Years of Music on Passenger Ships (1889-1939)
 
Next year, 2014, marks 125 years since the first musicians were employed by shipping lines to entertain passengers on long sea days aboard steamships, a vocation that continues to providemany music graduates the option to earn a living for a few years while seeing the world aboard a modern cruise ship. Despite this heritage, almost no research has been conducted into the history of music on passenger shipping. As a move towards addressing this lacuna, this paper provides a general overview of the first fifty years of shipboard musical performance. Beginning with the first steward-musicians of the Norddeutcher Lloyd Line, the paper charts the major changes in commodified musical performance during the golden age of passenger shipping, finishing with the outbreak of World War 2 and the postwar development of the jet airliner. Shipboard musical performance of the time reflected the contemporary tastes of high society and, while often conservative in its reflection of land-based popular culture, was at the cutting edge of entertainment technology of the time. Shipboard musical performances are found to have changed in response to passengers demands for increasing luxury and sophistication while they travel. Modern cruise musicians face many of the same problems and demands as their fore runners. Only through study of their predecessors, however, can the role and job of these musicians—as well as cruise ship music and commodifed touristic music in general—be understood and contextualised.
 
Stan Rijven (The Hague, Netherlands)
Slowbalization and the 6th continent, a Dutch perspective.
 
When talking music, mentioning merseybeat means looking for Liverpool and by noting New Orleans jazz surely will pop up. The same goes for Buenos Aires (tango), Rio de Janeiro (samba) and Havana(son). This paper focuses on the ways musical styles and harbours got connected, with an accent on the Dutch maritime musical history. Instead of considering the ocean as a barrier we should regard it as a 6th continent connecting all others. Before radio- and digital waves, music was worldwide transmitted by seawaves during a long-term process of slowbalization. Especially at the turn of the 19th century on the hightide of colonialism (1880-1940) the ocean functioned as a highway for the massive movement of migrants,missionary and military who carried instruments, rhythms and rhymes with them. Inbetween sailortowns transformed into musical melting pots where different styles mixed into new hybrids. Because of its seafaring past the Dutch played a formative role in the development of kroncong(Djakarta, Indonesia), Malay music (Cape Town, South Africa), Sarnami geet and kaseko (Paramaribo,Surinam), Antillian waltz (Curacao, Dutch Antilles) and Indorock (The Hague, Netherlands). Thus a short sailing-trip to the former ebbtides of today's websites.
 
Mike Brocken (Liverpool Hope University)
The mono-historical myth of Liverpool’s Cunard Yanks
 
While all sea-faring cities across the globe have their myths and legends, one of the latter half of the 20th century's most enduring and most publicised myth is that of Liverpool's Cunard Yanks - those mostly local seamen who seemingly brought armfuls of R&B records back to Liverpool providing the city with some kind of popular music 'head start' over the rest of the United Kingdom in the 1950s. While the Cunard Yanks most certainly existed, it will be argued via this paper that if historians actually gather together diverse popular music-related source materials, such claims linking the Cunard Yanks to the R&B, and Rock 'n' Roll genres (rather than e.g. those from jazz, OST and the 'quality singers'), can be difficult to substantiate. It will be further suggested that such historical dogma actually emerged within specific contextual circumstances, and that the evidence for such emergence can be discovered in the years following the dissolution of the Beatles. It will be argued via an examination of source materials from the mid-1970s (the formative years of Beatles Tourism in Liverpool), that the Cunard Yanks became a symbolic historiographical lynch-pin for a period in which an appropriate popular music monohistory of  Liverpool (representing it as a westward looking 'edgy' city with a specific cultural capitalof collectivity) was required as an important identity-giving narrative. Such a narrative was in fact largely a construct to deal with local institutionalised opposition to any popular music heritage representing the city of Liverpool.
 
Gerry Smyth (Liverpool John Moores University)
Across the Western Ocean: Songs of Liverpool and the Sea In 2009
 
I began work recording an album of shanties and sea-ballads associated with Liverpool. The impetus for this project was both intellectual and personal, emerging from developing interests in local history and Liverpool’s exceedingly rich shanty tradition. Entitled Roll & Go: Songs of Liverpooland the Sea, the album featured stylised interpretations of a variety of material and was eventually released in June 2010. At that point I began work on a follow-up project: another album featuring musical material connected with Liverpool’s maritime heritage, performed by a variety of invited local Merseyside artists, both professional and amateur, in a range of genres from the popular tradition. The title of this album is Across the Western Ocean: Songs of Liverpool and the Sea, and it was launched in November 2012 at a concert in the Casa Bar in Liverpool.Whereas the first album is free-on-demand to those with an interest in the content, the second is on sale to the general public, with all proceeds going to the Royal National Lifeboat Institute station in Hoylake, where I live. In this paper I describe some of the practical and academic issues attending this latter project interms of its conceptualisation, organisation, recording, packaging, production and launching.
 
George Burrows (University of Portsmouth)
Anything Goes on an Ocean Liner: Musical Theatre as Dialogic Heterotopia
 
Ocean liners feature in several musicals of the 1920s and 30s and yet the significance of such spaces in shaping musical theatre has not been fully appreciated. This paper considers the ocean liner as a uniquely vital and modernistic space that not only left its mark on the narratives of musicals like Anything Goes but also helped shape the transnational aesthetic concerns of the figures who wrote such classic shows. The paper suggests that the liner can be conceived as an example of Michel Foucault’s notion of a heterotopia. By conceiving of the highly class-conscious yet transnational and escapist (other) space of the ocean liner in this way we are able to question nationalistic historiographies of the golden-age musical, which too often position it as a product of a specifically American imagination. Instead we find the liner and the musical as a transatlantic place of cultural dialogue and from this perspective, we can begin to account for the way the classic musical became an appealing and powerfully hybrid form that endured long after the era of the great ocean liners ended. As a case study, this paper considers the way in which liner culture contributed to the narrative of Anything Goes before it considers the marriage of American vernacular music and European art music values that are found in Cole Porter’s score and in those of his creative colleagues who frequently crossed the Atlantic aboard liners.