For What Matters public lecture series

What if the soundtrack to England’s past had been hiding in dusty boxes, forgotten margins, and centuries-old diaries? The project Music, Heritage, Place, led by Royal Holloway, is uncovering the music that once echoed through village greens, parish churches and local taverns, and bringing it back to life for modern audiences. Described by BBC Radio 3 as ‘the Song Detectorists’, the project team are uncovering and cataloguing hundreds of musical sources between c.1550 and c.1850 in England’s local archives. This talk introduces the project’s discoveries, showing how music was woven into the lives of English communities in past centuries. Royal Holloway students will perform music discovered by the project.

Professor Stephen Rose is Head of Music at Royal Holloway. He is a specialist in music history of the 16th to 18th centuries, especially in German-speaking lands and in England. He uses methods from book history, social history and the digital humanities to understand how music travelled between communities, and to illuminate attitudes to the writing and performing of music in this era. He leads the collaborative project Music, Heritage, Place: Unlocking the Musical Collections of England's County Record Offices, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which is discovering and documenting the musical sources between 1550 and 1850 held in local archives, and opening new, decentralised understandings of English music in this period.

Kirsten Gibson is Head of the School of Arts and Culture at Newcastle University. Her work situates early modern music in wider cultural, social and political context, including early modern debates about music; music, gender and social class in early modern England; theorising history through sound studies; the sale and circulation of printed music in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries; the social and geographical spread of recreational music making; vernacular musical culture; and recovering evidence for musical life in early modern North-East England. Her work challenges traditional narratives of music history, bringing early modern musical culture into conversation with broader cultural histories, and establishing new perspectives on English music from the 16th to the 18th centuries.

Nancy Kerr is a performer, composer, educator, researcher and community musician with over 25 major folk releases in her discography and multiple commissions for new works including from the BBC, the Houses of Parliament and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Awarded BBC Folk Singer of the Year in 2015, she has been described as “One of the finest songwriters in English folk” (Songlines). In the Music, Heritage, Place project, Nancy explores collaborative “archive to live” practices, including the two series of The Song Detectorists for BBC Radio 3, festival performances, public workshops, and creating educational material for community and school musicians.

Admission is free, but booking is essential.

Richard Pyle Music Book, Hampshire Archives, 210M87/1