Public Research Seminar: Kirsten Gibson
Royal Birmingham Conservatoire - Workshop 2
200 Jennens Road, B4 7XR
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Music, Heritage, Place: Musical Materials and Music Making in the Long-Eighteenth Century
Kirsten Gibson (Newcastle University)
Music, Heritage, Place: Unlocking the Musical Collections of England’s County Record Offices is a collaborative project that is uncovering the music manuscripts and printed music from c.1500 to c.1850 held in local archives across England. By investigating the music made and used in England’s regions, the project challenges dominant histories of English music as based in major cities and cultural centres and creates new decentralised understandings of English music. This presentation introduces the musical materials that are at the heart of this project and the people and communities who made and used them. It explores some of the emerging themes, illuminating patterns of musical learning, circulation and place, taste and repertoire, and what these sources tell us about the role of music in everyday life for a range of music makers in England during the long eighteenth century.
Kirsten Gibson is Head of the School of Arts and Cultures and Professor of Early Modern Music and Culture at Newcastle University, UK. Her research focusses on situating English music from the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries in wider cultural, social and political contexts. Her work has appeared in Early Music History, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Renaissance Studies, Early Music, The Library and Music & Letters for which she was awarded the MLA Richard S. Hill Award (2026). She is co-editor (with Ian Biddle) of Masculinity and Western Musical Practice (2009) and Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300–1918 (2017), and (with Stephanie Carter and Roz Southey) Music in North-East England, 1500–1800 (2020). She is currently a Co-Investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘Music, Heritage, Place: Unlocking the Musical Collections of England’s County Record Offices’, a collaboration between Royal Holloway, University of London and Newcastle University.
Running time approx. one hour and 30 minutes