The 2018 Gilbert & Sullivan panel at New College, Oxford: (l-r) Brooks Kuykendall (UMW); Benedict Taylor (University of Edinburgh); and Martyn Strachan (Edinburgh).
Brooks Kuykendall, professor and chair of the Music Department, spoke at the fourth biennial conference The London Stage and the Nineteenth Century World, hosted by New College Oxford (April 6-8, 2022). As at the previous three conferences, he was on a panel of specialists of the Gilbert & Sullivan operas. For 2022, his presentation was entitled “‘The end of my capability in that class of piece’: the Gilbert/Sullivan collaboration at its breaking point.” The panel, convened by Dr. Benedict Taylor (University of Edinburgh) concerned the genre developed by Gilbert & Sullivan, which is the topic of a larger project of Kuykendall’s.
Most of Kuykendall’s research has centered around British music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, extending beyond Gilbert & Sullivan to the music of Elgar, Stanford, Vaughan Williams, Walton, and Britten, among others; he also writes a blog on textual issues in music, Settling Scores.