Music Research Seminar at Royal Holloway
Join us for our recent Department of Music Research Seminar, featuring some of the world's leading researchers in music.
About the talk
This presentation will inform on the ‘Jamaican Airs’ source (Leigh 2020), a unique sheet music collection of melodies used for singing and dancing that were composed and performed by people of African descent living in and around late eighteenth-century Kingston. The songs have long been known to a small group of Jamaican historians but remain sidelined in musical discourses. I will offer an analysis of both the sheet music and literary commentary portions of the source, shedding light on its cultural origins and the music’s possible indigenous African meanings. African ideas and perspectives about the ‘Jamaican Airs’ were unknown to (or overlooked by) their anonymous transcriber, a man of European origin known to the Jamaican estate owner Edward Long (1734–1813). It is among Long’s papers that this rare manuscript survives today. This presentation will explore how Black Jamaicans used sound to shape and imagine their cultural environment, thereby assessing the scholarly implications of reversing the erasure of Black critical agency in colonial sources of early modern sheet music.
About the speaker
Wayne Weaver is a historian of eighteenth-century Jamaican music and sound. His doctoral thesis (in music) explored the contributions of Euro-colonial composers active in and around the island’s modern-day capital, Kingston. Focusing principally on the life, outputs and surrounding networks of the Anglo-Jamaican organist, Samuel Felsted (1743-1802), Wayne has traced how music was used alongside theatre and other public expressions to underpin a highly localised and racialised construction of white-Creole identity.
More broadly, Wayne’s research reshapes and reorients histories of colonial musicking to include details of people of African origin whose lives played out in and around homes, theatres, churches and other (outdoor) spaces where musical performances (black and white) were heard and overheard. Hosted at Royal Holloway, Wayne’s Leverhulme-funded research project The Acoustic Worlds of Eighteenth-Century Jamaica traces African Jamaican sonic and social cultures, centring on the roles played by Black women in the earliest accounts of Jamaican street pageantry. It also surfaces and interrogates new and forgotten sheet music likely known or heard by Black people living in Jamaica and elsewhere in the early modern Americas with a view to its syncretic 'Afro-Christian' spiritual interpretations.
Wayne has varied musical interests. As an organist, harpsichordist, choral director and teacher, he has served churches, chapels, cathedrals, schools, and musical establishments across Britain. His specialism in early modern Black Atlantic sound and its meanings is complemented by his participation within a team of scholars and performers on the Abolition Song and its Legacies project led by Dr Berta Joncus (Guildhall School of Music). Previously, Wayne was part of the Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre and Opera Network, led by Professor Julia Prest (University of St Andrews) and funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Wayne is an alumnus of Edinburgh University and Cambridge (Wolfson College), where his doctoral thesis was completed under the supervision of Professor Benjamin Walton. He is also a visiting lecturer in music at King’s College London.
Car parking
When you arrive for a College event at our Egham campus, please park in car parks 12 or 4.
Car park 12 can be accessed by turning right as you enter the main College gates and is located next to the tennis courts. If this car park is full, please drive further onto our campus to car park 4, which can be accessed by turning left at the mini-roundabout behind the Students’ Union. We would advise that you bring the College map to campus with you and give yourself plenty of time to park.
Blue Badge holders can find designated parking spaces in Car park 1W, as well as between Gardeners Lodge and the Williams Annexe. You can find these locations by looking at our campus map opposite. If you require any assistance on arrival, please contact our premises team in advance of your visit by emailing: premisesadmin@royalholloway.ac.uk and they will be happy to help.
Please note that we operate an Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system on certain parts of our campus, however if you are here for an organised event, parking is unrestricted for event guests in car parks 12, 4 or 14 (or display your blue badge permit if parking in a disabled bay). If you have any questions about parking, please email: premisesadmin@royalholloway.ac.uk
Dr Wayne Weaver (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Event schedule
| 4.00pm - 5.00pm | Talk / Presentation |
|---|---|
| 5.00pm - 5.30pm | Q&A |
| 5.30pm - 6.00pm | Seminar Drinks Reception |
Further information
Free admission to all. No advanced booking required.
