Music, Home, and Heritage: Sounding the Domestic in Georgian Britain is funded by the AHRC, and began in September 2017. The project is led by Professor Jeanice Brooks (University of Southampton) and Dr Wiebke Thormählen (Royal College of Music). Some outputs and activities from the project are featured on the Sound Heritage site.
The project asks how listening to and performing music figured in understandings of home, family and domestic space in Georgian Britain. It seeks both to expand knowledge of the sounding history of Georgian domestic interiors and to explore how to integrate this understanding more fully into heritage interpretations of historic houses today. It considers the meanings that performers and listeners attributed to music in domestic settings, and explores how emotional or spiritual aspects of musical practice figured in the transformation of houses into homes. It will track the increasing delineation of domesticity from public life, and investigate how this intersects with historical narratives on the professionalisation of music, on class structures and on the formulation of family and gender roles. We will probe how music traversed geographical and social space, particularly through dance music, oratorio and opera, which linked familial leisure with forms of public entertainment.
This enhanced understanding of domestic musical practice will be integrated into our exploration of new models for making domestic music visible and audible for heritage visitors today. Music was an important daily activity for many past residents of historic houses, and evoking this activity can help to people the properties in visitors' imaginations, while at the same time providing a powerful antidote to the static sense that historical settings convey for some audiences. Better knowledge of the role of music in domestic architecture, decoration and social life, and of musical links to artefacts and objects, can provide powerful new interpretive tools and highlight connections between tangible and intangible heritage. Through a series of practice-led interpretation experiments, this project will result in case studies for effective interpretation of music in historic houses, and it will contribute to further collaborative research on best practice in the field through partnership with heritage sector professionals.
The project includes an ambitious plan of primary research, including consideration of family papers (diaries, correspondence, accounts, inventories); extant music collections identified with specific houses and owners; music produced for domestic consumption, including arrangements of dance, opera and oratorio; historic guidebooks and furniture catalogues; and extant material settings. The historical research will lead to scholarly outputs in musicology and dance history, while also providing the musical materials underpinning the heritage studies research. In collaboration with the British Library, the research team will conduct a census of musical materials in UK historic houses, substantially enhancing existing research tools while providing the first overview of the material traces of domestic music available for use in heritage interpretation today. With the support of project partner Sydney Living Museums, the project will synthesise existing research on the use of music in historic house interpretation, and devise frameworks for future work in the field. A case study on dance will generate new understandings of how this key social activity was deployed in the home, and result in new recordings of dance music for use by historic dance companies and within the heritage sector. With project partners The National Trust, we will construct a case study at Erddig, providing a detailed history of music making in the house and devising a method for telling the larger story of the property and its occupants through and with music. At Boughton House, a case study mounted in collaboration with the Buccleuch Living Heritage Trust will explore how domestic consumption of stage music worked to construct understandings of private and public space and social identities; an exhibit and performance will bring together objects and sounds from these different realms to create a new interpretation of their relationship.
Music, Home, and Heritage builds upon several previous Southampton research projects including At Home With Music, The Austen Family Music Books recording and digitisation projects, and the work of the AHRC-funded Sound Heritage network.
Professor Jeanice Brooks is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton.
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Dr Katrina Faulds is a postdoctoral Research Fellow in Music at the University of Southampton.
From September 2017, I am working on the AHRC-funded project Music, Home and Heritage: Sounding the Domestic in Georgian Britain, coordinated by Professor Jeanice Brooks. Prior to this I was administrator for the Sound Heritage network, which was also funded by the AHRC.
In 2005 I graduated from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam with a Masters-equivalent diploma in fortepiano performance, after completing undergraduate studies in Australia. Since 2012, I have performed regularly with Dr Penelope Cave as an early keyboard duet partnership. In 2015 I completed a PhD in historical musicology at the University of Southampton, under the supervision of Professor Jeanice Brooks. My thesis looked at dance and dance music across the turn of the nineteenth century and its connection with elite female identity.
I have presented a number of conference papers, often in conjunction with Dr Cave, in the UK, Norway and Paris. I have also given papers at Sound Heritage Ireland (2016) and Sound Heritage Sydney (2017) symposia.
Project Administrator - Music, Home and Heritage Research Project Music
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