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“Teaching the lessons of the past through the music of the future”
By Richard Simpson From our earliest days on the long winding path to becoming historians we are taught adulterating source materials is an almost sacrilegious offence. But what would happen if we had never been taught this central tenet of our academic discipline?
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Played to death: bringing music back to life
Written By Anastazja Grudnicka | @AGrudnicka Every once in a while I come across a certain kind of evidence that stays on my mind long after I move on with my research. Sometimes it’s the source itself, other times it’s the circumstances in which a particular text, object, picture appears that makes it echo at the…
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Sweet harmony or rough music? Singing in the seventeenth century
By Carys Brown | @HistoryCarys If you’ve ever been in a roaring rugby crowd, a church full of carol singers, or even just broken into song in the shower, you’ve probably noticed that singing can have a powerful effect. The physical, psychological, and social benefits of singing are now widely recognised, although the underlying reasons behind…
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‘Rejoice Moscow, Russians are in Paris!’: The curious history of a popular melody
By Jimmy Chen Within the collection of Cambridge University Library, there is a piece of sheet music for a Russian song dating from the Napoleonic Wars. Insignificant at first glance, this simple song can provide important insights into European musical culture in the early nineteenth century.
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A cracked voice…
Writer Graham Palmer (@GP_writer) explains how he’s using music to explore the past in his exciting collaborative project, Cracked Voices. Warning: my history is suspect. It is fake news. I am not a historian. But I am fascinated in the way we are all complicit in fashioning stories, in interpreting our own lives and those of others…
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