January 2019, Manchester Weinberg Conference

It may have been six months ago, but minds are still reeling from the amazing 'Weinberg: East and West' conference at the University of Manchester at the start of this year. Michelle Assay and David Fanning organised a fantastic four-day event, including concerts and a complete Quartet Cycle performed by the fantastic Quatuor Danel.

Egbert Baars, of the DSCH journal, attended and has uploaded an excellent gallery of photos from the conference. I've included a selection of photos below (reproduced here with permission):

From my workshop with the Quatuor Danel on the original version of Weinberg's First Quartet. 

Gidon Kremer, who paid us an extraordinary 'flying' visit, stopping by with enough time to perform and give a moving talk. 

The ensemble from one of the afternoon concerts (L-R): Marc Danel, Michelle Assay, Rosalind Dobson 

A video conference call with Victoria Bishops, Weinberg's first daughter. 

Conference delegates enjoying a meal before an evening concert. 

Truly exceptional, the Quatuor Danel: Marc Danel, Gilles Millet, Vlad Bogdanas, and Yovan Markovitch.

Performers and scholars. back row L-R: Larissa Zvereva, Vlad Bogdanas, Yovan Markovitch, and David Fanning; front row L-R: Inessa Dvuzhilnaya, Gilles Millet, Michelle Assay, Marc Danel, and Verena Mogl.

Conference sessions: Antonina Klokova and Verena Mogl.

Aleksander Laskowski.

Michelle Assay and David Fanning.

Group photo of performers, scholars, and general public.

For more of Egbert's photos, you can visit his website at: https://www.shostakovich.nl/manchester_2019/manchester_2019.html. 

Moscow Weinberg Conference, February 2017

In February 2017, the conference 'Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996): A Rediscovery' will take place in Moscow, arguably the largest ever event devoted to Weinberg's life and music. The conference will unite performers, theatre directors and stage designers, academics, and figures from Weinberg's life, in an extended programme over two weeks. The core of this revolves around 16-19 February, with four days of papers, talks, and interviews. All of this is hosted in the Bolshoi Theatre, a venue that imparts a high level of prestige to the proceedings. The wider conference programme includes concerts, film screenings, and three stagings of Weinberg operas (including two separate stagings of The Passenger).

The conference is co-presented by the Bolshoi Theatre and the newspaper Muzykalnoe obozrenie.

The operas presented are:

The Idiot - Directed by Evgeny Arye, musical direction by Michał Klauza (in a production receiving its premiere on 13 February).

The Passenger - Directed by Sergey Shirokov, musical direction by Jan Latham-Koenig (a new production that received its premiere on 27 January).

The Passenger - Directed by Thaddeus Strassberger, conducted by Oliver van Dohnányi (presented by the Yekaterinburg State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, in a production that premiered in September 2016).














The academic side of the conference brings together over 40 scholars from across the world (the conference languages are Russian and English). The four days of the conference are organised as follows:

16 February
'Staging History of Mieczysław Weinberg's operas - The Idiot in Russia today'

17 Feburary
'The Passenger: Past and Present'

18 February
'The Life and Legacy of Mieczysław Weinberg: Chamber Works'
(followed by an evening concert of Weinberg's chamber music)

19 February
'Mieczysław Weinberg: Identity, Biography, Personality'

Highlights of the panel sessions include:
- the creative team behind the Bolshoi Theatre's production of The Idiot
- A roundtable on The Passenger
- An interview and discussion with Zofia Posmysz, author of the novel, The Passenger, and herself a former Auschwitz prisoner.
- An interview and discussion with David Pountney, celebrated stage director, and main creative force behind the 2010 Bregenz Festival.
-  A roundtable discussion with Weinberg's friends, colleagues, and family. The panel includes Weinberg's widow, Olga Rakhalskaya, and his second daughter, Anna Weinberg, as well as Tommy Persson, who has been a driving force behind much of the Weinberg revival in recent decades.

I am honoured to be speaking on 18 February, as part of a day of talks on Weinberg's Chamber Music. I will be presenting a paper titled '"An Encyclopedia of the Genre": Weinberg's String Quartets', which summarises some of the findings from my doctoral thesis.

For a full listing of the Conference schedule, please see the following link:
Conference programme

Any questions should be directed to the conference email address: weinberg.moscow2017@gmail.com

Watch this space for a full conference report.

Summer 2016 Update

Here's an update of Weinbergian news and events for the summer months of 2016 - with a new publication, and a Weinberg conference!

In the single biggest piece of news in my own work, my thesis was submitted in June, and I passed my PhD viva a few days ago (with minor corrections). Expect a link of some sort to read the full finished thesis in a few weeks.

Weinberg Studies
Several events have occurred in the relatively-quiet field of 'Weinberg Studies'. Firstly, the German-language journal 'Die Tonkunst' featured in their April issue a series of papers from a 2012 Hamburg conference on 'Weinberg in the Brezhnev era'.

This excellent volume features six articles (with one in English), discussing Weinberg's place in Soviet music, Socialist Realism in the stagnation era, and further focuses on Weinberg's cello sonatas and Polish-language works. The contents runs as follows:

RMA Research Students' Conference, Bristol

I will speaking as part of this year's Royal Musical Association Research Students' Conference, held at Bristol University. My paper is titled '"Keepin' it Real?" Psychoanalysis and Socialist Realism', utilising several ideas from my current work on my thesis project (abstract below). I will speaking on Friday 9 January at 10:50 in the Albert's room at the music department of Bristol University.

'Keepin' it Real?' Psychoanalysis and Socialist Realism

Socialist Realism was an aesthetic doctrine enforced throughout the Soviet Union from the mid-1930s onwards. It was broadly defined as art that ‘depicts reality in its revolutionary development’. Socialist-realist art reflected the long-term goals of Soviet communism - not necessarily the everyday reality of life for Soviet citizens. In music this translated into works appealing to as broad an audience as possible, with emphasis on tunefulness, accessibility, and folk traditions. The complex layers of meaning in socialist realist music have often been noted. It can, however, be all too easy to dismiss socialist-realist music, opting instead for works that pushed against the trend. This is where my link between socialist-realist music and psychoanalysis emerges.

Utilising the writings and theories of Lacan, Žižek, and other post-Freudians, psychoanalysis has been gaining attention and significance as a fruitful and useful method for cultural-analysis, including music. Psychoanalysis questions constructions of concepts such as self, dialogue, society, and meaning, all through the gaze of a multitude of thinkers. It has proved particularly suited to music observed to be rich in  psychological meaning – including composers such as Schoenberg and Scriabin. Its methods are ideally suited to application for the joint world of politics-meets-kitsch that is socialist realism.

In this paper, I will be outlining some basic definitions of socialist realism, and of psychoanalysis. With these in place, I formulate an outline approach for analysis of socialist-realist works through the guise of various post-Freudian methodologies.

RMA Research Students' Conference 2014

For anyone attending, I will be speaking at the RMA Research Students' Conference next week, held at the University of Birmingham. My paper is entitled 'The Influence of Anxiety', and I will be speaking at 14:45 on Wednesday 8th January in the 'Psychology of Music' session.

My paper is on the significance of Harold Bloom's book The Anxiety of Influence, and its applications in musicology, followed by wider thoughts on the aesthetics of influence in music (with a few references to my work on Weinberg). Please find my paper abstract below:

Daniel Elphick, The Influence of Anxiety

Harold Bloom’s theories of influence in poetry are well known and many scholars have sought to apply them to wider fields of art. His aggressive vision of artistic influence has new authors ‘appropriate’ their predecessors’ works leading to an Oedipal elimination of the father-figure of influence. Bloom’s theories have proved highly significant in musicology, but also problematic. This paper seeks to give a brief overview of Bloom’s writings and move to a review of Musicologists’ attempts to utilise his theories as set out in the book The Anxiety of Influence. It becomes apparent that these cannot be easily adapted to music since they perpetuate the contested concept of ‘originality as progress’. I seek to demonstrate this with short case studies of friendships between composers that cannot be easily moulded to fit alongside Bloom’s aggressive writings. With these, I suggest a new template of musical influence, utilising thoughts from T.S. Eliot, Benjamin Britten and several others authors simultaneously calling for a reassessment of this complex issue from the perspective of musicology.