BCMCR Research Seminar – Popular Music – Songwriting
1600-1730 Wednesday 16 May 2018
P424, Parkside, Birmingham City University
Brazillian resistance as cultural translation
Professor David Treece, King’s College London
In the context of Brazil’s post-2016 crisis, the presentation examines how a songwriting repertoire from the 1960s and 70s might still convey ideas of resistance to repression and authoritarianism across half a century of history and across the cultural and linguistic distance between Brazil and London. It explores the potential for song translation in mediating this process, reflecting briefly on a practical, performance-based interactive project undertaken with London audiences in 2017, entitled “The São Paulo Tapes: Brazilian Resistance Songs Workshops”. It argues that the post-1968 period of hardline repression marked a shift from the song of “protest” to that of resistance, whose poetic-musical language became distinctly lyrical, something that would need to be reflected in the translator’s work.
Romantic National Song Network
Professor Kirsteen McCue, University of Glasgow
The period 1750-1850 witnessed considerable social upheaval and political unrest. It was also a vibrant moment for printed song culture, both in terms of broadsides and chapbooks but also with the appearance of large ‘collections’ of ‘National’ songs which appeared across all four nations of the British archipelago. The current RSE-funded ‘Romantic National Song Network’ (PI: McCue) is exploring what these collections and popular printed song-sheets were, who was creating them and how they were being performed (see: http://rnsn.glasgow.ac.uk)
About the speakers:
David Treece is Camoens Professor of Portuguese at King’s College London, where he directed the Centre for the Study of Brazilian Culture and Society from 1996 to 2010. Since 2000 his work has concentrated on Brazilian popular music, song translation and the culture and politics of Afro-Brazilian identity. His book Brazilian Jive: From Samba to Bossa and Rap (Reaktion, 2013) brings together these most recent research interests.
Kirsteen McCue is Professor of Scottish Literature and Song Culture at the University of Glasgow where she is also Co-Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies. She has published widely on Romantic song culture and is currently completing an edition of Robert Burns’s Songs for George Thomson for the new Oxford Works of Robert Burns (see: https://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk)