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CONNECT The magazine of Kellogg College | 2019CONTENTS5 27 16 40 6 28 19 42 10 31 20 46 14 36 23 47 Welcome From the President Dermot Turing lecture The origins of Enigma codebreaking Placebos Powerful treatments or irrational belief? Snapped Who’s been spotted at our recent events? The secret history of music by women Spotlight on composer Barbara Strozzi Transforming futures Scholarships that change lives Alumni profile Macarena Hernández de Obeso The key to our future The new Centenary Commission on Adult Education Profile: Bindu Vinodhan Transforming lives in India Changing spaces Enriching student life within Kellogg’s walls MCR News All the latest news and developments The main event Key dates for your diary Lifelong learning The launch of a new scholarship Profile: Daniel Arellano-Flores Meet the Hub Café’s manager The Enigma legacy Kellogg’s Bletchley Park Week Thank you To all our loyal supportersWelcome to the first edition of Connect, which showcases the activities of the Kellogg community, including the tremendous work of our alumni globally. Kellogg is Oxford’s most international College, with students from over 90 nationalities. We are proud to be enabling part-time study – with more than two thirds of our students opting to work in this way. We have a truly diverse student body in terms of age – reflecting our commitment to lifelong learning. I’m delighted that two Kellogg fellows are serving on the Centenary Commission on Adult Education, launched to promote opportunities for education throughout life – as reported in this edition of Connect. Highlights over the past year include success in the University’s Oxford Graduate Matched Funding Scholarship scheme, with a scholarship from the McCall MacBain Foundation matched and endowed, which will enable a fully-funded scholarship to be offered through Kellogg College in perpetuity. Bringing the academic and business worlds together through our Bynum Tudor Fellowship is always a highlight in Kellogg’s calendar. Our 2018-19 Bynum Tudor Fellow, Dr Ralph Walter, took to the stage to deliver a fascinating talk to a packed Hub on ‘Managing People, Money, and Corporate Culture’. The Fellowship is awarded to innovative and dynamic thinkers with the aim of integrating and developing professional and academic knowledge. Ralph fits the bill perfectly, with a distinguished career in business and investment management, and a Distinction in his Oxford Master’s. Several of our former Bynum Tudor Fellows remain active in Kellogg life as Visiting Fellows, including Dr Marcy McCall MacBain, who has spoken at International Women’s Day and other events; Lord Bilimoria, who continues to host tours of Parliament for our students; and Sir David Brown, who has taken our collaboration with Bletchley Park to a new level, by being appointed as Chair of the Bletchley Park Trust. I’d like to express the admiration and appreciation of the entire Kellogg community to all four – Dr Ralph Walter, Dr Marcy McCall MacBain, Lord Bilimoria, and Sir David Brown. We will have a host of thought- provoking talks at Kellogg over the Oxford Alumni Weekend of 20th– 22nd September 2019 when we will be pleased to welcome you back to College, and to our flagship alumni Gaudy Dinner on Saturday 21st, at which Lord Bilimoria has agreed to be the after-dinner speaker. This will be an excellent opportunity to connect with Kellogg friends old and new – and if past experience is anything to go by, over a glass of Cobra beer. Looking further ahead, we will be celebrating 30 years of Kellogg in 2020, with an exciting programme of events to mark this landmark anniversary for the University. I hope to see you in Kellogg before too long. Professor Jonathan Michie President, Kellogg College Welcome 5 CONNECT MAGAZINE6 CONNECT MAGAZINE O ne of the last things I did while still a Lecturer in Literature at the Department for Continuing Education was help establish the wonderful cross- disciplinary Masters in Literature and Arts course (MLA). Shortly after the programme had received the green light from the University, I made the leap from literature scholar to full-time author, happily retaining my connection to Kellogg as a Visiting Fellow. Thinking about the MLA inspired me to be more adventurous in my own work, to do a bit of discipline-jumping myself. The result was my book Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music, which was not only a joy to research and write, but also – nearly three years on – is creating waves in the music world in ways I could only have dreamed when I first considered the project. Amongst many lovely initiatives, Venus Unwrapped, a year-long festival of music showcasing work by women composers and performers across the musical spectrum, is particularly special to me. It kicked off in January, with a concert of music by Barbara Strozzi, one of the remarkable figures who appear in my book. The only surviving portrait of the composer – described by one prim academic as impressively décolleté and in which Barbara, not yet 20, fixes an almost world-weary gaze upon the viewer – shows her holding a viola da gamba. On the table lie duet music and a violin. She is, perhaps, waiting for a musical (and sexual) partner. The portrait suggests that Barbara was musician, composer and courtesan, a very Venetian entwining of the sex and music industries. By 1655, Strozzi was in her mid-thirties, the mother of three, maybe four, children by the wealthy Giovanni Vidman. Vidman was now dead, leaving Strozzi without a protector. So a certain Antonio Bosso wrote to his master, Carlo II Duke of Mantua, sending news from Venice, Carlo’s favoured destination for gambling, music, and sex – and waxing The secret history of music by women Kellogg Visiting Fellow Anna Beer has helped drive an upsurge of interest in female composers – including the music of 17th century composer Barbara Strozzi. Here Anna considers how Strozzi’s story has been written out of history, just like that of so many other brilliant women of music.7 CONNECT MAGAZINE Portrait of composer Barbara Strozzi8 CONNECT MAGAZINE lyrical about the composer Barbara Strozzi. It’s possible, but unlikely, that she hoped the Duke would replace Vidman. Not only was Carlo ten years her junior, but he had plenty of other men and women to choose from nearer to hand. Instead, it was musical patronage that Strozzi sought. Bosso tells the Duke that a collection of her works has been well-received by its dedicatee, Anna de Medici, the Archduchess of Innsbruck. She has sent the composer ‘a small gold box adorned with rubies and with her portrait, and a necklace, also of gold with rubies’. And no wonder: amongst the collection’s riches is ‘Mater Anna’, honouring both the Archduchess and Saint Anne, mother of Mary and patron saint of Christian mothers, to whom Anna de Medici was devoted. Married at thirty to a man of eighteen, the Archduchess had successfully produced three daughters, but a son remained elusive through a relentless series of miscarriages and stillbirths. Strozzi’s work culminates in a heart-rending plea for mercy and support, reminiscent in its intensely emotional religiosity of works such as the sculptor Bernini’s Teresa in Ecstasy. All the composer’s ambition is evident, with each section of the work structured differently and producing its own, distinctive emotional impact. Strozzi would go on to publish three more volumes of music, becoming ever more confident and sophisticated as a composer, embracing works of greater scale and even more drama. The inventive, commanding composer is, however, not of interest to Antonio Bosso in his letter to Carlo II. Instead, he focuses on the necklace which Strozzi ‘prizes and shows off, placing it between her two darling, beautiful breasts (Oh, what tits!).’ At least two of Barbara Strozzi’s contemporaries could not look past the breasts to the composer. An anecdote that could have been about a woman’s composition, generously rewarded by another woman, becomes one about a shared knowledge of a woman’s ‘tits’. Perhaps we should be grateful that Strozzi’s ‘tits’, emblematic of her allegedly courtesan life, have given her some visibility in a musical landscape still dominated by men. But what gets lost is Strozzi the composer. For me, it seems important to honour her commitment to getting her music out into the world. Musicologists such as Ellen Rosand have shown that Strozzi prepared her works with great care, keeping errors or ambiguities to a minimum, making sure that nuances of dynamics, tempi and ornaments were all carefully explicated. These remarkable documents show a composer who cared about her musical legacy and wanted to ensure she had one. Strozzi is rare in her commitment to publication. Her male contemporaries were generally wary of the newfangled business of setting down scores, let alone printing them. Before Strozzi, Jacobo Peri wrote that his trade secrets, the very things for which he was renowned, could not possibly be ‘completely indicated in notation’. To learn properly one had to work directly with the master, man to man. After Strozzi, Antonio Vivaldi stopped publishing his music because he discovered there was little financial reward in doing so in a society without copyright. Strozzi could not hope to make money from publishing her work, but she could create a public. To an extent she succeeded. Some hundred years after her death, the eminent music writer Charles Burney named Strozzi as a composer considered by some as the originator of the cantata form in Italy. And yet Strozzi remains little known, despite that portrait, despite the eight volumes of music, despite Burney’s appreciation. Why? The answer, I believe, lies in some very deep- seated beliefs and practices surrounding women and music, beliefs already being challenged some 50 years before Barbara was born by another Venetian composer, Maddalena Casulana, the first woman to publish her own music. Casulana called out a ‘foolish error’: men were not the sole masters of the ‘high intellectual gifts’ necessary for composition and argued that those gifts might ‘be equally common’ among women. Today, most of us agree that there is no essential difference between male and female human beings, at least when it comes to an individual’s ability to compose music, but this knowledge seems powerless against other ideas about women and music: the continued sexualisation of the creative woman; pseudo- scientific views of what women are capable of (or not); the fear of women in positions of power. Which is why initiatives like Venus Unwrapped are so important, unlocking the secret history of music by women and, more importantly, unleashing their music. Strozzi kicked things off in January, and there is, a rich and complex body of works written by women just waiting to be explored and enjoyed, and, even more importantly, a rich and complex body of music written by women just waiting to be composed and performed. It was Virginia Woolf who wrote, famously and contentiously, that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ For a composing woman, even more is needed, as musicologist Suzanne Cusick has said: ‘because music is fundamentally about movement, sociability and change, women musicians do not so much need rooms of our own, within which we can retreat from the world, as we need ways of being in the world that allow us to engage with the often immobilizing and silencing effects of gender norms.’ Communities and platforms for women composers have existed in the past, beyond the nunnery or the home, but often fleetingly: the Medici court in Italy in the 1610s, the city of Venice in the 1650s, the court of the Sun King in France in the 1690s, a mansion in Berlin in the 1830s, the Mercury Theatre in London in the 1930s. These communities allowed Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Fanny Hensel and Elizabeth Maconchy – to name but five glorious composers – to flourish, at least for a time. I hope Venus Unwrapped will inspire more women composers to flourish today. 9 CONNECT MAGAZINE Anna Beer is an author and researcher who works across literature, history, music and creative writing. She is the author of four biographies: Bess: The Life of Lady Ralegh, Wife to Sir Walter (Constable); John Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot (Bloomsbury); Sounds and Sweet Airs: the Forgotten Women of Classical Music (Oneworld Publications); and Patriot or Traitor: the Life and Death of Sir Walter Ralegh (Oneworld Publications). She has also written several academic and educational publications. This piece includes an edited version of an article that appeared inThe Timesin January 2019. Composer Fanny Hensel (later Mendelssohn) benefited from a more accepting Berlin society in the 1830sNext >