The second meeting of the AHRC-funded "Mapping Music History" research network led by Dr Jonathan Hicks (University of Aberdeen) and Dr Louis Epstein (St. Olaf College) will take place at Harvard University at the end of October 2019.
Following our first meeting (at the University of Liverpool in September) focussed on relatively recent popular music and tourism, this meeting will look further back in time to the colonial geographies of the long nineteenth century. We’ll be discussing nine draft essays prepared by historical musicologists based in the UK, US, and South Africa. The authors are all approaching the topic of maps and mapping in different ways: from investigating the physical signs of audible trauma following the Franco-Prussian War to identifying the musical contours of internationally-governed Chinese treaty ports; from theorising the sonic climate of music history to documenting the Indo-British trade in raw materials required for early recording technology. It promises to be a productive meeting and an opportunity to talk in detail about what cartography means to the discipline of music history. We’ll be adding more information and resources to our project website – musicalgeography.org – in due course. For now, if you’d like to know more about this meeting or the research network more generally, please contact jonathan.hicks@abdn.ac.uk.