Dr Nalini Ghuman, Darius Milhaud Distinguished Professor of Music at Mills College, Northeastern University
“Decolonial Listening across Offa’s Dyke: English Music and Cymru/Wales”
In-person lecture, delivered in 53 Wall room 208.
Thursday, April 2nd, 2026, 4 pm.
Co-sponsored by British Studies Colloquium and Grant Hagan Society.
In this talk, Nalini Ghuman maps a vibrant history of transnational English-Welsh connections in British music in the first half of the twentieth century. Through music analysis, and perusal of letters, diaries, manuscripts and sketches, Professor Ghuman examines the bearing of multiple Welsh factors – people, language, place (environment/soundscape), folk song, mythology – on such composers as Edward Elgar, Peter Warlock, and Joseph Holbrooke, and demonstrates the vital role of bicultural listening in works ranging from the unpublished operas by Margaret More, the W. B. Yeats song cycle The Curlew by Warlock, to the Welsh folk song arrangements for choir (some unpublished) by Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Focusing on two hubs of music-making – the rural moorlands of Montgomeryshire and the dramatic mountains and coast around Harlech – Professor Ghuman traces the emergence of musical modernism outside the English metropole.
Considering what is at stake in the history of trivializing and marginalizing such transnational music-making, Professor Ghuman argues that decolonial listening is a timely, indeed urgent, project which plays a vital role in the mutual reconstitution of British music history through the music of countries formerly under English colonial rule. In this more capacious listening, nationalist misperception and colonial nostalgia give way to understanding the past through historically contextualized, materially grounded analysis in which British music-making can be heard in all its richness and continued resonance.
Nalini Ghuman is the Darius Milhaud Distinguished Professor of Music at Mills College, Northeastern University. Her research focuses on the enmeshment of British music with imperialism. She has published and presented widely, giving the keynote at the International Symposium, Rethinking Gustav Holst, for the composer’s sesquicentennial, a lecture on the Indian musical work and influence of Irish violinist Maud MacCarthy at the British Academy, and presenting programmes on BBC Radio. Her essay, ‘Inaudible Voices: transnational feminism, music, and listening in our time of crisis’, recently appeared in the Handbook on Feminist Political Thought (Elgar Publishing, 2024). Her research has won accolades, including BBC Music Magazine’s ‘Book of the Month’ (‘a pioneering book on a new subject’) for her book Resonances of the Raj: India in the English Musical Imagination, 1897-1947 (Oxford University Press, 2014), and the François Lesure Award for her review essay on race, sex, and friendship in the correspondence of Peter Warlock and Kaikhosru Sorabji (2022). Forthcoming publications include invited essays for three volumes, including ‘Indian-British Music-Making: Interaction, Improvisation, Insurgence’ in The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism. Her current book project, English Music, Colonialism, and Cymru, examines connections between Wales and English music to 1950. An active performer, she gave the USA’s West-Coast premiere of the first of John Foulds’ Essays in the Modes for piano and led a historic recreation of All India Radio’s 1930s Indo-European Ensemble from the violin at Mills College.