Author Archives: Verseandmusic.com

About Verseandmusic.com

Michael Craske researches transgressive poetics, music, aesthetics, and perhaps transgressive anything at Queen Mary, University of London (but mainly Swinburne, Wagner, and T. S. Eliot). He was once involved in diplomacy, of a Middle Eastern kind...

An Evening with the Gladstones

Posted on April 10, 2018

Last month I attended a hugely successful ‘Sounding the Salon’ event, which recreated an after-dinner concert originally given on Wednesday 12 March 1873 by Mary Gladstone – the daughter of the Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone – at the concert’s … Continue reading →

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Sounding the Salon: ‘An Evening with the Gladstones’

Posted on March 4, 2018

This exciting event is happening on Thursday (8 March, 2018) at the British Academy at Carlton House Terrace. It’s a re-creation, in the original space, of a concert that took place in 1873, the details of which come from the … Continue reading →

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Song, scandal, and a princess: We are not Sure of Sorrow (1898)

Posted on December 3, 2017

When I started this project, I would not have imagined Swinburne’s languid ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ from Poems and Ballads, First Series (1866) ever inspiring popular music, and certainly not the tone of this piece by Charles Paston-Cooper (1867-1941). Weary … Continue reading →

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Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain Conference, 2017

Posted on June 22, 2017

Glad to say that along with the other members of the Sounding Victorian consortium, I’m going to be talking about my research and the project at the Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain Conference at the University of Birmingham next week!  

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‘East to West’ by Charles Villiers Stanford (1893)

Posted on March 5, 2017

By far the most complex recreation I’ve attempted, this is a section of a setting by Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) of Swinburne’s ‘East to West’. The lyrics were commissioned by Stanford for the ‘Chicago World’s Fair’ or the ‘Chicago Columbian … Continue reading →

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Sounding Victorian

Posted on January 24, 2017

The School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, has published a blog post about this site and the consortium that it’s to become part of, Sounding Victorian. To read this post on AllthingsSED, please click the image … Continue reading →

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‘The Hounds of Spring’

Posted on December 23, 2016

Muriel Elliot’s setting of Swinburne’s ‘When the Hounds of Spring’ from his Greek tragedy Atalanta in Calydon (1865), must have been hugely dramatic in performance, and not least at its premiere in the extraordinary venue of the Crystal Palace in 1906. The … Continue reading →

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