ResearchWorks: Reflections on researching the social history of music: Opera & the British

This paper traces the ‘biography’ of a large-scale research project, from initial idea to final publication and beyond. It takes as a case study a project by Wilson that explores British attitudes towards opera from the 1920s to today, with a particular focus on understanding the rise of the opera-elitism stereotype and uncovering a forgotten history of popular opera-going. The paper considers the stages and processes a researcher goes through when undertaking long-range musicological research. Topics to be considered include: how to choose and refine a research topic; the long ‘evolution’ of academic ideas; identifying and using sources; the writing process; maximizing a topic’s ‘outputs’; and navigating the publishing world. When considering the process of research and writing, particular attention will be paid to the challenges of handling an extended timeframe and the relationship between writing about music and writing about history and society in the broader sense. Publication is not the end of the story, and the talk will also discuss public engagement, drawing upon the author’s experience in broadcasting, journalism, collaborating with opera companies, and advising policy-makers. Finally, it will examine how this type of research can have ‘real-world’ implications for the opera industry and for public perceptions.

Speaker

Professor Alexandra Wilson is a musicologist and cultural historian. After holding Junior Research Fellowships at Worcester College and St Hilda’s College, Oxford, she taught at Oxford Brookes University for nineteen years, latterly as Professor of Music and Cultural History. She is currently a Research Resident at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and also holds a Senior Research Fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford. Her books include The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity (CUP), Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain (OUP), Puccini’s La bohème (OUP), and the edited collection Puccini in Context. As a cultural commentator, she can often be heard on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, and she works regularly on public engagement with all the UK’s major opera companies and many abroad. Her journalistic work has appeared in publications including BBC Music Magazine, Opera, The Critic, The Telegraph, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, and online platforms such as Engelsberg Ideas and Bachtrack. The project discussed in this talk was funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship and will be published as Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British (OUP, forthcoming 2025).

Guildhall School’s ResearchWorks is a programme of events centred around the School’s research activity, bringing together staff, students and guests of international standing. We run regular events throughout the term intended to share the innovative research findings of the School and its guests with students, staff and the public.