New Funding for Sound Heritage Projects

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. 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.

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 practice-led experiments in 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 methodological frameworks for future work in the field. A case study on dance, carried out with professional and student musicians and dancers at the Royal College of Music, 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. A case study at Erddig, with project partners The National Trust, will provide a detailed history of music making in the house and devise 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.