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NB. Do Not Book This Event If You Have Booked Workshop C2 or C3. Both Workshops Do Not Finish Until After This Event.
Until recently, histories of the guitar and mandolin in Britain overlooked the extraordinary contribution made by thousands of musical women during the late Victorian and Edwardian period. The first English ladies’ band was formed by aristocratic women in 1886, and for two decades gave regular performances of serious classical music in London’s major concert venues. During the 1890s, hundreds of similar ladies’ bands were formed across England (and Scotland), mostly by middle class women. Clara Ross’s band was highly regarded by fashionable London society, and mostly performed her own music. This talk examines the history and repertoire of these late Victorian bands; Paul and John will illustrate this talk with their playing.
Paul Sparks has worked as a mandolinist and guitarist with various British orchestras, and completed his PhD thesis – A History of the Neapolitan Mandoline from its Origins until the early Nineteenth Century (City University) – in 1989. He has written three books for Oxford University Press – The Early Mandolin (1989, with James Tyler), The Classical Mandolin (1995), and The Guitar and its Music (2002, with Tyler). He and John Mackenzie have been performing music for mandolin and guitar together for almost fifty years.