Music, Heritage, Place: Unlocking the Musical Collections of English County Record Offices

This project will be the first systematic investigation of the musical heritage held in England's county record offices. It will create new understandings of what kinds of music were made, used and circulated in England's regions between c.1550 and c.1850. Through archival and musicological research, we will uncover the local enterprise involved in the production of musical materials--print and manuscript--in early modern towns and villages. We will reveal previously untold stories about the men and women associated with these musical materials, including how they gained musical knowledge and the role of music in their everyday lives. Harnessing practice research, we will show how our discoveries of musical heritage open new creative possibilities and how they can be reimagined for the present day.

By exploring musical sources in local archives, the project will make a major intervention in the field of music history. We will challenge dominant scholarly narratives that focus on elite musicians based in major cities and cultural centres, instead showing the importance of vernacular repertories circulating at all social levels. We will reinterpret early modern English music as translocal, grounded in specific communities and linked to local concerns, but also making connections across geographic boundaries. New insights will be gained into how historical communities created a sense of belonging through making and adapting music.

Building on a pilot study that worked with stakeholders to establish the extent and significance of musical heritage in local archives, the project will investigate over 600 music manuscripts and items of printed music held in England's 46 county record offices. These musical sources are largely unknown to researchers, musicians and wider audiences, and have not been catalogued in any detail. New knowledge gained about the contents, material features and provenance of these sources will be shared by creating records in the database of project partner Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM), the leading global tool for locating musical sources. We will also create collection-level descriptions in the Cecilia database run by project partner IAML UK (International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres). In addition to expanding these major research tools, we will share the project's insights via 4 refereed articles aimed at musicologists, book historians and folk music scholars.

Our work with local archives is particularly timely in the current era of local authority budget cuts. By combining our specialist musical expertise with the local knowledge of curators, we will gain insights into the significance of their musical holdings. Further knowledge exchange will occur in crowdsourcing workshops with members of the West Gallery Music Association and the English Folk Dance and Song Society, enabling their participation in our analysis of vernacular repertories.

The project will use methods of practice research to explore how the archival discoveries can be reworked for present-day audiences and can inspire a new generation of musicians. Performances arising from the research will be presented at four summer festivals reaching audiences across England. We will lead a residential course for the National Youth Folk Ensemble in conjunction with project partner the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Our discoveries in local musical heritage will enrich school curricula in literacy, history and music, via schools workshops in north-east England (in collaboration with Music Partnership North and North Tyneside Music Hub) and singing workshops in schools in Surrey and Hampshire.

Through our combination of archival and practice research and our ethos of co-creation, the project will show how new knowledge of local musical heritage can transform understandings of English music history and give cultural and social benefits to communities across the country.