Browsing by Subject "Britain"

Dreams of a "tropical Canada" that included the West Indies occupied the thoughts of many Canadians over a period spanning nearly forty years. From the expansionist fever of the late nineteenth century to the redistribution of German territories immediately following the First World War, Canadians of varying backgrounds campaigned vigorously for Canada-West Indies union. Their efforts generated a transatlantic discourse that raised larger questions about Canada's national trajectory, imperial organization, and the state of Britain's Empire in the twentieth century.

This dissertation explores the key ideas, tensions, and contradictions that shaped the union discourse over time. Race, nation and empire were central to this discourse. Canadian expansionists' efforts to gain free access to tropical territory, consolidate British possessions in the Western hemisphere, and negotiate the terms under which West Indians of color would enter the Canadian federation reflected and perpetuated logics that were simultaneously racial, national, and imperial.

Canada-West Indies union campaigns raise important questions about the processes at work in the ideological and material formation of the Canadian "nation" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Employing a wide range of public and private manuscript material, diaries, travelogues and newspapers, this dissertation argues that Canadians' expansionist aspirations in the West Indies were inextricably connected to a national vision. To the campaign's advocates, acquiring colonial satellites - particularly in tropical regions - was a defining feature of nation-state formation.

This dissertation critically examines the ways in which British composers wrote large choral works for festival audiences combining liturgical and sacred texts with poetry to expand multi-text meanings beyond a strictly religious sphere. Processes of anthologizing are considered in the present study as a textual and poetic practice in music by Vaughan Williams, and a later generation of British composers. Analyzing the use of multiple text sources in choral music with orchestral accompaniment, this dissertation addresses the moral, gender, and nationalistic values that composers inscribed in sacred compositions, expanding the traditional understanding of the liturgical and biblical texts. Analytic readings will focus on textual and musical choices used by these composers, and on readings of the texts themselves. This is an analysis of a twentieth-century genre of sacred choral music in Britain emphasizing wider themes in the culture—nationalism, grief, Welsh linguistic history, and feminism—as they interact with religious and liturgical tradition.

The text sources in these works draw from multiple languages, time periods, and textual genres. For example, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Dona nobis pacem (1936) combines Walt Whitman poetry from Leaves of Grass with liturgical and biblical texts to create an anti-war message. Herbert Howells’s Hymnus Paradisi (1950) expands the liturgy of the Requiem Mass to include sacred texts to mourn the death of his son, Grace Williams adds Welsh texts to her Missa Cambrensis (1971) to represent the strength of the Welsh language during a linguistic movement in Wales. Finally, Elizabeth Maconchy proposes feminist perspective in the libretto of her dramatic cantata, Héloïse and Abelard (1979), using liturgical texts and sacred hymns to situate the medieval love story in the setting of the cloister at Notre Dame. In analyzing these works, I reveal a pattern of choral composition responding to the religious interests of the Church of England, while acknowledging the secularizing forces in British culture. Through their music, these composers spoke directly to their audiences, while imbuing traditional sacred forms with identifiably modern cultural attitudes and concerns.