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A translation workshop, a composition workshop, a research seminar, and a closing concert.
Organisers: Emily Kilpatrick (RAM) and Jennifer Rushworth (UCL)
About the project
The aim of this project is to bring French poetry specialists, translators, composers, and musicologists together from UCL and the Royal Academy of Music (RAM), from undergraduate to professorial level, in order to investigate French art song.
The project responds to recent interest in women composers, including Lili Boulanger, and to recent experiments in song translation (including Jeremy Sams’ English singing translations of Schubert and Schumann). It is rooted in the academic specialisms of lead applicants Emily Kilpatrick (author of French Art Song and planning a new project on women as participants in and historians of French musical life) and Jennifer Rushworth (completing a book on Proust and the Art of Song and co-editing a book on Song in the Novel arising from a British Academy conference held in 2021). It also draws on the expertise of composers at the RAM and translators and translation theorists at UCL.
The intersection of music and translation is increasingly the subject of academic investigations (see, for example, the AHRC network on ‘Translating Music’ (2013-14 and subsequent publications)). The more specific question of song and translation (see especially theoretical articles by Peter Low) is essential for understanding both the history of song and its afterlives, including on the one hand the translation of German Lieder into French in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, on the other hand, our own diverse engagements with different song traditions in the present day. This project builds on the success of the collaborations from the 21/22 Music Futures stream instigated by Dr Tom Stern (UCL) and Dr Alex Hills (RAM), ‘The Vinteuil Centenary: Music, Memory and Repetition in Proust’.
About the team
Lead investigators: Prof. Emily Kilpatrick (RAM) and Dr Jennifer Rushworth (UCL)
In collaboration with:
Dr Alex Hills (composer and lecturer, RAM)
Prof Geraldine Brodie, Professor of Translation Theory and Theatre Translation (UCL)
Prof Timothy Mathews, Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Literature (UCL)
Daria Chernysheva (final-year PhD student in Creative Critical Writing, UCL)
If you would like to be involved please contact j.rushworth@ucl.ac.uk and ekilpatrick@ram.ac.uk