Anne Lister's Music at Shibden Hall

Anne Lister of Shibden Hall is an internationally celebrated figure. Her diaries - inscribed onto UNESCO's Memory of the World register as 'pivotal' for British history - inspired Sally Wainwright's TV drama series Gentleman Jack, Emma Donaghue's novel Learned by Heart, and the new Northern Ballet production by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and Peter Salem. They have been decoded, transcribed and mounted online thanks to dedicated volunteers working with the West Yorkshire Archive Service.

What is less well known is that Lister was an avid collector and consumer of vocal and instrumental music, which she described in her letters and diaries and performed privately with intimate female friends. Some of her music is extant in two bound volumes of printed sheet music, held at her family home at Shibden Hall, and in manuscript books held at WYAS. 

A team of researchers from the universities of York and Southampton are collaborating with Calderdale Museums, who manage Shibden Hall, to digitise Lister's music books and make them freely available online. Performances and films will further bring the extant scores to life both onsite and online. By digitising, interpreting, contextualising and performing her scores, the project brings Lister's musical and literary worlds together and into dialogue with other female diarists of the period, such as Jane Ewbank of York, whose social circles overlapped with hers. The project shares how music played a vital role in the inner affective lives of these women while constructing characteristic sound worlds in Georgian Yorkshire.