Trevor R. Nelson, assistant professor of musicology in the School of Music, gave two presentations at the American Musicological Society National Conference and Music, Diplomacy, Propaganda: Towards New Directions.
“Staging Inclusion: Commonwealth Ideals in the Mid-Twentieth Century British Children’s Opera” at Music, Diplomacy, Propaganda: Towards New Directions (international conference hosted by the Université de Montréal) on Oct. 18, 2025.
Description: In Commonwealth studies, much attention is paid to Britain’s diplomatic efforts promoting the Commonwealth as the Empire’s nonhostile successor (Murphy 2018, Prior 2019). Domestically, the British government buoyed attempts to promote Commonwealth belonging particularly among young people by sponsoring children’s media espousing Commonwealth values. In exactly what ways were these values communicated, and was this propaganda effective? Drawing on Timberlake’s theories of children’s opera as political education (2015), Nelson analyzes select scenes from Britten’s Let’s Make an Opera! (1949) and Bush’s The Spell Unbound (1953). Nelson argues that divergent understandings of Commonwealth citizenship led young performers and audiences to reject these works’ political overtones. By attending to the political ramifications of children’s operas, music scholars come to a better understanding of how music worked as a tool in shaping post-imperial Britishness.
“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?
Nelson answers 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), Nelson focuses 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, Nelson reconstructs the questions and debates leading up to the ceremonies for Jamaica (1962), Kenya (1963), and Guyana (1966). Nelson argues 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.
