Activity
Paper presented at the Victorian and Edwardian Theatre in Performance conference, September 2023Description
How did incidental music function in the contested space of the melodramatic metropolis? And what did it suggest about the sonic coordination of urban spectacle? Those questions provide the point of departure for this paper, which explores the uses of music and noise in George R Sims’s The Lights o’ London (1881), a late-Victorian stage melodrama famed for its realistic enactments of city life. Using Michael Connelly’s conductor’s score for The Lights o’ London—a relatively rare example of a surviving melodrama score from this period—I investigate the relationships between the play’s incidental music and its portrayal of public space. The principal focus is the final act, set in Boro’ Market on Saturday night. This act entailed a gradual crescendo of on-stage noise, but almost no incidental music, and I argue that it is only with the absence of tunes from the pit that the on-stage crowd threatened to destabilize events.This much-discussed street scene thus provides an opportunity for addressing the intersection of the visible and the audible in late-Victorian melodrama. At the simplest level, it hints at the potential effects of semiotic doubling for audiences at the time: as the space of the stage became conspicuously crowded, the density of activity was marked both in the quantity of unruly bodies apparent to the eye and in the volume of noise they conveyed to the ear. Put together, this manifested an overwhelming sensation that was much remarked by commentators at the time. However, the unusual decision to include almost no orchestral cues in the last act implies that there were more complex representational practices in play. I suggest that music and noise were far from opposites in Sims’s theatrical scenario. The hawkers’ hollers, I argue, assumed the role of surrogate orchestra, dividing up the scene and its stage population into discrete, manageable chunks.
Building on existing literature linking nineteenth-century melodrama with anxieties around urbanisation, as well as broader discussions of crowds in realistic stagecraft, this paper picks up on the sonic choreography of the Boro’ scene in order to examine the audio-visual mediation of public unrest.
| Period | 13 Sept 2023 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Victorian and Edwardian Theatre in Performance: Music & Machinery – Stagecraft & Spectacle |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Newcastle, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | National |