Trevor R. Nelson, assistant professor of musicology in the School of Music, presented “So Long, Farewell: The Musical Politics of Westminster Abbey Independence Services, 1962–1966” at American Musicological Society National Conference in Minneapolis on Nov. 8, 2025.
Description: Spectacle and ceremony are well-understood tools of the British Empire, overwhelming the senses of spectator-participants and enculturating them into a particular worldview. Such scholars as Wendy Webster (2005), Nalini Ghuman (2014), and Sarah Kirby (2022) have analyzed how British colonial forces used music, spectacle, and ceremony to shape understandings of imperial order across the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, in both the metropole and the colonies. Furthermore, historians have noted ceremonies as key tools in crafting a post-colonial identity across the former British empire (Cannadine 2008, Kaul 2008, Kahn 2008). But what role did these ceremonies play in shaping the people of Britain’s national consciousness during the anticolonial moment of the 1960s?
I answer this question by analyzing music used to mark the independence of British colonies at ceremonial events in London across the 1960s. Using Katie Day Good’s framework for understanding spectacle as a pedagogical tool (2020), I focus on a series of ceremonies hosted by Westminster Abbey, intended to welcome former colonies as independent members of the British Commonwealth. Planned by the Abbey and the British Government’s Colonial Office, these spectacular events took the form of Anglican worship services and featured musical well-wishes to these independent nations. These pieces included hymns and instrumental works that would not feel out of place in the Abbey’s hallowed halls, leading to the ceremonies having a uniform sound, one distinctly British in nature, rather than idiosyncratic approaches highlighting the unique musical qualities of the varying nations. Drawing on materials from the British National Archives and the Westminster Abbey Archives, I reconstruct the questions and debates leading up to the ceremonies for Jamaica (1962), Kenya (1963), and Guyana (1966). I argue that, through music, one hears how the British Government’s desire to control and shape the Commonwealth in their national image led programmers to structure these events to please British attendees, rather than the newly independent nations they were supposedly honoring. By reframing spectacle from this vantage point, this project highlights how music can both support and undermine the crafting of national identity via ceremony.