California Southwest Region
The World of Jane Austen’s Music
December 5, 2009
Soprano Ashley Knight
The room was aglow, festooned with red-ribboned wreaths, golden balls and boughs of fir. The nightingale voice of soprano and UCLA graduate student Ashley Knight filled the air, her singing enriched by the piano accompaniment of Robert Winter, famed musicologist and UCLA professor.
Welcome to the “The World of Jane Austen’s Music,” the theme for JASNA-Southwest’s December 5, 2009, Jane Austen’s Birthday Celebration at the Los Angeles Athletic Club. For the more than 100 people who attended, it was a chance to be transported to the drawing room of a 19th Century English manor house, and to be surrounded by the beauty and civility of that time.
Professor Winter based his lively presentation, which was half lecture, half performance, on music in Jane Austen’s personal collection, her references to music in her novels and the film adaptations of her work. He explained how sensuous power of an augmented 6th chord was used to great effect in the Romantic Period and he pulled back the curtain on musical accuracies and inaccuracies depicted in three cinematic versions of Pride and Prejudice and in Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility. Ms. Knight sang eight selections, including Mozart’s “Voi Che Sapete” from The Marriage of Figaro, the song of desire that Elizabeth Bennett sang during her second visit to Pemberley.
Robert Winter with the inevitable Colin Firth
After a sumptuous three-course lunch of roasted herbed pork loin, chicken wrapped in feuille de brik or spinach and cheese tortellini, time travel back to the 1800s continued. Annie Laskey, who “calls” English Country Dances in the Los Angeles area, lectured on the origins of English Country dances and demonstrated the basic dance steps that underpin hundreds of dances from the period. Participants then found partners and formed lines to dance two favorites of the era, “Knole Park” and “The Duke of Kent’s Waltz,“ accompanied by the live music of violinist Mary Ann Sereth and pianist Guinevere Saenger.
Philippa Besant of The Wayfarers, the celebrated British walking tour company, gave a slide-show outlining a new walking tour(debuting in the summer, 2010) of Jane Austen’s beloved Hampshire countryside.
Carla Washburn and Jan Bickel, vice presidents in charge of programs for JASNA-Southwest, organized the December event. The next meeting will be held in Spring 2010. Please look for details on www.jasnasw.org.
—Jaye Scholl