Jonathan Dove in conversation with Dr Kate Kennedy.

In this conversation, composer Jonathan Dove will talk to Dr Kate Kennedy (University of Oxford) about the relationship of his music to war and remembrance. Jonathan Dove has written works commemorating armed conflict (In Damascus and To An Unknown Soldier) and works invoking collective memory more broadly, as in his TV opera When She Died, a reflection on the death of Princess Diana. The conversation will be illustrated with musical examples.

This event launches the Aural Commemoration strand of the Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Series 2017-18 Post-War: Commemoration, Reconstruction, Reconciliation, which brings together academics, creative practitioners, field-workers and policy experts to explore and compare the ways in which commemorative practices across cultures both contribute to and challenge post-war reconstruction and reconciliation.

This event is free to attend but registration is essential.

About the speakers:

Winner of the 2008 Ivor Novello Award for classical music, Jonathan Dove has consistently explored what opera can be, and what audiences it can reach. He has written more than twenty-five operas of different shapes and sizes, including the highly successful airport comedy Flight. He has written two operas for television, When She Died and Man on the Moon, a church opera, Tobias and the Angel, and several chamber operas. 2015 brought the World Premiere of The Monster in the Maze, a community opera commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, Berliner Philharmoniker and the Festival International d’Art Lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence, performed under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle in three separate productions, for which Dove received a British Composer Award. Dove is currently working on an oratorio following a refugee’s journey to England. Marx in London (a comedy) will open in Opera Bonn next December.

Kate Kennedy is the Associate Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, and a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, having previously held two research fellowships at Cambridge University. She has published widely on music and literature of the First World War, and specialises in interdisciplinary biography, opera libretti and the writing of dramatised recitals. Her biography Dweller in Shadows: Ivor Gurney, poet, composer will be published by Princeton University Press in 2019, and she is currently working on a triple biography of Rupert Brooke and composers FS Kelly and William Denis Browne, entitled The Fateful Voyage. She is co-editor of The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice (Manchester University Press, 2013), The First World War: Literature, Music, Memory (Routledge, 2011) and has contributed numerous chapters for books and journal articles. She is the editor of Literary Britten (Boydell and Brewer, 2018) and co-editor with Hermione Lee of The Lives of Houses (Princeton University Press, 2020). Both her biographies have been featured on BBC Radio 3, and she is a regular broadcaster and academic consultant to the BBC, directing the commemorations for the First World War and for International Women’s Day for Radio 3, among other regular projects.

Please send all enquiries about this event to catherine.gilbert@ell.ox.ac.uk.