Alexander Yashkin Daszkiewicz

Area of proposed thesis

Born in St Petersburg in 1882 to British parents and trained in Leipzig under Arthur Nikisch, Albert Coates (1882-1953) was an internationally famous conductor and composer. Reflecting on his appointment as chief conductor at the LSO in 1919, The Times claimed that "there can scarcely be a musician in this country with so wide and cosmopolitan an experience”. In the age of the rapid development of recording technologies, he became one of the leading conductors of his time - for example, he made the first complete recordings of Scriabin’s Le Poème de l’extase (1920), Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll (1921), Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (1923, notably sung in English), Bach’s Mass in B minor (1929), as well as the famous recording of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, with young Vladimir Horowitz at the piano (1930). Yet at his death in 1953, The Times observed that he had fallen between “the two stools of national character and international sympathy.” Despite his reach and influence, Coates has received no sustained scholarly attention, and his place in the history of twentieth-century music remains largely unexamined.

My DPhil project is the first academic biographical study of Albert Coates. More broadly, I use his career as a case study to examine wider questions of musical mediation: the evolving role of the conductor in the early twentieth century; the tensions between national identities, individuals and the institutions that shaped canon formation, repertoire and performance traditions; and how these were transmitted and received, both physically across borders and in the “meta-space” of recordings. Coates’s life moved between the Russian Empire, Germany, Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and South Africa, so it offers an unusual vantage point on how musical meaning was negotiated, and sometimes contested, across the institutionalised national frameworks of the first half of the twentieth century. My research draws on archival work in Russia, Britain and South Africa, and on approaches from cultural sociology, reception studies and recording history, to reconstruct a career whose sources are scattered across institutions and languages. Finally, I ask why Coates was forgotten, and how his memory has been shaped by obituaries, reference works and national narratives since his death in 1953.

Research interests

Nationalism and National Identity in Music, Archival Research, Music, Politics and Society, The Social Role of Conductors, Biography and life-writing in Musicology, Recording Studies, Politics of Music Transmission in the Twentieth Century, Historical Reception Studies, Russian and Soviet Music in Britain, British Music in Russia and USSR, Digital Humanities (DH), Digital Musicology, Social Network Analysis (SNA), Nineteenth-century art-song (Russian romans/romance), Female Composers of the Russian Empire, Women’s music-making in the nineteenth century Russia, Socio-ethnomusicology (instruments of Central Asia)

Funding

Romanoff Foundation

Degrees

BMus (Hons) Music (King's College London) and MSt in Music (Musicology) (University of Oxford)