Pleasures and entertainments

Second-year PhD student Becky Gribble is working on a thesis about Thomas Linley Jr., a brilliant composer and childhood friend of Mozart’s who died in 1778 in a tragic boating accident at the age of only 22.  She has just returned from presenting her work at a prestigious international scholarly conference:

Last week I attended the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (BSECS) Conference in at St Hugh’s College in Oxford. BSECS attracts scholars from English, history, modern language, art history, theatre and of course music departments from all over the world. The theme for this year was ‘Pleasures and Entertainments’, so there was lots of music—but always with plenty of interdisciplinary discussion.  I presented a paper of my own on the final day with a panel of other postgraduate students from Southampton. I talked about Thomas Linley’s education in the spa city of Bath. My colleagues covered a wide range of topics from the Haydn’s first English librettist, to young women improvising at the piano, to the effect of musical life of the now-forgotten (but still pretty scary) London Earthquakes of 1750.

I was also lucky enough to be awarded the Michael Burden Postgraduate Bursary for Musicologists, which helped with the costs of attending the conference.  As a self-funded student, this allowed me the chance to stay in Oxford (rather than travelling each day) and immerse myself in the experience. In this case, it also helped me avoid getting immersed in the floods that were plaguing the train line between my home and the conference! It also gave me a free ticket into the annual conference dinner, which was well worth it.

The conference was a great coming together of all the disciplines in the humanities. BSCES wasn’t the same as the music conferences I’d been to. There was a greater range of topics, and questions people asked me sometimes came from surprising directions. I heard interesting papers on topics from Shakespeare reception to card games to the (really fascinating) cultural history of the pineapple in eighteenth century Britain. I made new friends, met some top people in eighteenth-century studies and established useful contacts for the future.

This was the first BSECS conference I have gone to: I’ll certainly go back next time!