When and where does modernism begin?

Is it in Paris in Spring 1907, when Pablo Picasso, inspired by the African masks he has seen on display in the Palais du Trocadéro, returns to his studio to paint Les Demoiselles d’Avignon?

Or, is it in the semi-desert region of South Africa in the 1870s, when teenage governess, Olive Schreiner, writes her first novel: The Story of an African Farm?

In the first origin story, Europe is the site of modernist innovation. Here, African art is viewed as little more than a repository of “primitive” imagery, in need of reinvention by the European artist in order to become truly “modern”.

In the second origin story, a South African writer produces a highly experimental, already-modernist novel that establishes forms and ideas that would later appear in, even influence, the development of English modernist literature.

One of these origin stories is more widely known that the other because modernism is primarily associated with early-twentieth century European and American artists and writers. Familiar figures from literature include James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. And writers associated with the Bloomsbury Group, such as Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster.

Yet Schreiner wasn’t alone amongst her countryfolk in using innovative literary techniques to engage with conditions of modernity. Others came in her wake. These pioneers included Solomon Plaatje, the first black South African to write a novel in English. Others were H.I.E. Dhlomo, a pioneering poet, playwright, essayist and journalist; poet Roy Campbell, who became embroiled in friendships and feuds with members of the Bloomsbury Group; and novelist William Plomer, one of the most prolific writers for the Hogarth Press, run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

In this talk, Jade Munslow Ong will discuss a range of South African origin stories, taking in both South Africa’s modernism and modernism’s South Africa. She will offer an account of the modernist aesthetics and politics established and promoted by South African writers. And she will explore the debt owed by English modernists to the South African innovators that preceded, coincided with, collaborated on, and influenced their work.

Event schedule

6.00 pm – Doors open, tea and coffee served

6.30 pm – Talk starts

7.30 pm – Drinks reception for members and special guests

8.30 pm – Event ends

We are very grateful to the University of Salford for hosting this year’s Percival Lecture. This is a members-only event and places are limited. Booking opens 1st February 2024.

In this event, talented performer and PhD student Xiaoxiao Hou will guide us on an exploration of the application of music psychology to daily life. We will unravel the intricate connections between melody and the human psyche, and examine how a nuanced understanding of music psychology enhances wellbeing, elevates performance, and enriches cognitive processes.

Xiaoxiao Hou will introduce her current doctoral project, Music and Dementia. This research project focuses on the therapeutic potential of music in the care of elderly people and those with Dementia. Xiaoxiao will discuss the methods we can use to understand the transformative potential that music plays in our lives and how this can support our relationships with those whose practical memories are fading.

There is increasing evidence that musical memory may be different to the kind of day to-day memories that can be affected by Dementia. Music can go to places where other things do not. And the shared experience and friendships that enjoying music together may bring can also have a positive benefit.

Xiaoxiao has had personal experience of how music can affect memory, and her talk will offer a personal take on how music applications can enhance our lives. Her grandmother, a talented performer on the guzheng (Chinese zither) developed Dementia but was able to perform relatively late into her illness. This gave Xiaoxiao an insight into how music can influence our capacity to adapt to challenges and a desire to help people with this condition.

She will also explore how music applications need to consider the impact that culture and background have on the practical implementation of this tool. Music should be specifically tailored to the choices of individuals – and people with Dementia are well able to express their preferences.

Music critics almost universally consider Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony one of Beethoven’s greatest works. It is regarded as one of the supreme achievements in the history of music. Composed between 1822 and 1824, it was premiered at the Kärthnertortheater in Vienna on 7 May 1824. Since then, the symphony – or at least, its ground-breaking final movement with its setting of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ – has become arguably the best-known of all pieces of classical music, influencing many later composers.

Its melody is familiar to hundreds of millions of people across the world – who might never have heard it in its original context. This is thanks to its reproduction in films, video games, children’s books and TV adverts. It is also a work that, more than any other piece of classical music, has been used – sometimes appropriated – in connection with significant movements and events in European culture and politics.

Wagner conducted the Ninth Symphony to mark the laying of the foundation stone of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1872. And his descendants chose it as the work with which to reopen the same theatre in 1951, as they tried to distance themselves from the Nazi Party.

On Christmas Day 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducted the symphony in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. From 1972 onwards, the ‘Ode to Joy’ was adopted as a European anthem by first the Council of Europe and then the European Union. And in 2019 Nigel Farage’s Brexit MEPs notoriously turned their backs when an arrangement of Beethoven’s melody for saxophone quartet was played in the European Parliament.

Michael Downes explores these and other significant performances of the work, including the Viennese premiere, examining the motivations of those who have programmed it and considering the reasons for its ubiquity.