December 4, 2025

EagleEye

A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff

Kuykendall Pursues Gilbert & Sullivan From a Musicological Angle

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Music Professor and Chair Brooks Kuykendall

Music Professor and Chair Brooks Kuykendall

Music Professor Brooks Kuykendall, currently in the second year of a Waple Professorship, has seen some of the fruits of his research emerging in the last few weeks: his article on fandom in the 1920s and 30s in the Gilbert & Sullivan Society (a preliminary version of which was presented for UMW’s Social Research Colloquium) has appeared in Transformative Works and Cultures; and, together with Benedict Taylor of the University of Edinburgh, he curated the “Gilbert and Sullivan” module for the Victorian Literature unit of Oxford Bibliographies.

His larger, ongoing Waple project involves a new assessment of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas in generic terms, not operetta or proto-musical, but more rooted in continental operatic traditions. He will heads to London and Bristol in November for further research.

Front page of the “Gilbert & Sullivan” Oxford Bibliography

Kuykendall Among NABMSA Founders Honored

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Jennifer Oates (Carroll College), Christina Fuhrmann (Baldwin Wallace University), Charles McGuire (Oberlin College & Conservatory), Brooks Kuykendall (University of Mary Washington), and Deborah Heckert (SUNY-Stonybrook)

In the summer of 2003, five American graduate students leaned against a stone wall during a tea break at a conference at the University of Leeds and asked “Why do we always have to come to the UK to talk about British music?” They decided to plan a conference but ended up founding a society: the North American British Music Studies Association. Twenty years after that first conference in Oberlin, Ohio, in June 2004, the organization returned to Oberlin for the 11th biennial conference.  At that meeting, the membership surprised the five founders by naming them lifetime members of the society, including UMW Professor of Music Brooks Kuykendall. And, in a development that the founders of NABMSA could not have anticipated, one participant of this year’s conference–faculty at the Royal Academy of Music in London–wondered “Why does it feel like we have to come to the USA to talk about British music?”

Kuykendall Returns to New College, Oxford to Speak on Gilbert & Sullivan

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The 2018 Gilbert & Sullivan panel at New College, Oxford: (l-r) Brooks Kuykendall (UMW); Benedict Taylor (University of Edinburgh); and Martyn Strachan (Edinburgh).

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.

 

 

UMW Presents a Palette of Pandemic-Era Arts

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Soon after the University of Mary Washington Chamber Choir performed live in the James Farmer Hall atrium last March, UMW went totally online, and singing was deemed a “super-spreader” activity. Last fall, UMW Choirs sang together again – virtually – performing In Te Domine Speravi. The new piece by composer Sarah McDonald focuses on isolation, […]

Mary Talks: ‘Frank Sinatra and the Development of the Concept Album’

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Join us on campus for our next Mary Talk of the 2019-20 academic year.

James Brooks Kuykendall, professor and chair of the music department at UMW, will present “Frank Sinatra and the Development of the Concept Album.”

Frank Sinatra (1915-1998) was one of the greatest American performing artists—leaving a legacy both as a singer and as an Oscar-winning film star. Less appreciated, perhaps, was his pioneering artistic vision. At the advent of the long-playing record, Sinatra recognized its potential not merely as a medium for a series of songs all on one disc, but for a sustained artistic statement. In his 1950s series of Capitol Records albums (including In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, Close to You, Come Fly with Me, and Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely), Sinatra explored how to create musical coherence in large-scale structures. In so doing, he shaped the work of successive musicians across all genres.

Wednesday, November 13
7:00-8:30 p.m.
Digital Auditorium,
Hurley Convergence Center
On Campus

Doors will open at 6:30 p.m. The lecture will end at approximately 8 p.m., allowing time for a Q&A session with Professor Kuykendall. Please join us for light refreshments at the conclusion of the program. This event is free, but registration is requested so we will know to expect you. If you haven’t already, register today!

You can attend this Talk either in person or online! To attend on campus, click “Register to Attend in Person” below. If you instead would like to view the Talk online (either live or at a later time), click “Register to View Online,” and you will receive a link to view the online video.

We look forward to seeing you either on campus or online!

Register to attend in person. 

Register to view online. 

 

Kuykendall Links Shakespeare and Bach at Society for Textual Scholarship Conference

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Kuykendall found that these two works borrow interludes from Bach settings, as indicated.

Music Department Chair Dr. Brooks Kuykendall combined text-critical theories about Shakespeare with Bach sources at the interdisciplinary Society for Textual Scholarship conference in New York City, March 20-22.  His paper, entitled “The sources of Bach’s passaggio chorales:  all ‘bad quartos’?” reconsidered traditional views of copyists’ manuscripts of Bach organ works in light of theories which have developed around the early editions of some of Shakespeare’s plays–editions which are markedly different from the standard texts as performed today.  Early Bach sources reveal that his works were similarly contested from the start.

Kuykendall Publishes Critical Edition of Stanford Orchestral Works

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Stanford: Orchestral Song Cycles (ed. Kuykendall and Kang), A-R Editions, 2019.

Music Department Chair Brooks Kuykendall’s new edition of works of Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) is now in print from A-R Editions.  The volume includes two of Stanford’s most popular works, Songs of the Sea (1904) and Songs of the Fleet (1910); both are orchestral song cycles setting texts of Henry Newbolt.

Kuykendall chronicled the development of this volume–a collaborative undergraduate research project–recently on his blog Settling Scores.