Sound Heritage

Music making was integral to life in English country houses during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet the sounding history of heritage properties is largely silent today. Conventional training often leaves musicologists and early music performance researchers poorly equipped to deal with domestic repertoires, and they frequently lack broader understanding of country house history. Conversely, country house historians and heritage professionals often lack the knowledge necessary to interpret musical holdings in historic properties, or to reconstruct a house's musical history when music collections are lacking. Domestic music making has received increased scholarly attention in recent years, and curators, conservators and visitor experience consultants have become increasingly aware of how attention to music can enhance understanding of a house's history and stimulate engagement from today's visitors. Research to date has involved a series of discrete projects, however, each valuable in its own right but necessarily offering only partial perspectives.
This research network will bring together scholars of history, historical musicology, and historically informed performance practice with heritage professionals in curation, conservation and visitor experience in a broader collaborative effort to gain a richer understanding of the way that music functioned in the country house. Activities will include three study days, each focussing on a different strand of the broader theme of country house music making. The three study days will address challenges to historical music research in heritage properties; issues in the research management of music collections in historic houses; and interpretive approaches to music for use in heritage today. The network aims to pool and extend existing knowledge and to improve communication and partnership between academics and heritage sector researchers. A stronger research base will in turn stimulate development of innovative ideas for the practical deployment of musical research in heritage properties.

This project will involve benefits for a wide array of non-academic audiences. The heritage sector professionals who participate in the network will gain opportunities for significant knowledge exchange with academic researchers, providing ways of disseminating their own work more effectively within academic communities and of tapping into the scholarship produced in academic circles. Curators and conservators will gain significant new knowledge about music, a crucial element that has been largely absent from existing understandings of country house life. This knowledge will aid them in constructing research materials for use in heritage properties (the historical material used in visitor guides, room cards, and information files produced by curators) and in managing the musical collections in their care. By learning more about musical life in country houses, visitor experience consultants from the heritage sector will gain a new understanding of how music can enhance their work in interpreting properties for visitors; they will be provided with tools both for presenting music-making in country houses, and for using music to help with interpretations of other aspects of the material and historical context. The network can thus be considered as providing career development for this group, and a context for the development of valuable lasting relationships with music researchers.

Through the work of heritage professionals, the volunteers who staff many country houses and the larger public who visit them will in turn benefit from the network's activities. One goal of the network is the construction of tools for the deployment of musical research in historic properties in imaginative and innovative ways. We aim to stimulate production of better information for use in properties, including not only printed or online material for distribution (eg guidebooks, brochures, websites) but also in the briefing documents and information files supplied to volunteer room guides, house managers, and others who interact with heritage visitors on the ground. We also aim to explore other possibilities for display and interpretation, including events, interactive displays and multimedia tools. Visitor experience consultants involved in the network will help other participants to understand the challenges and possibilities, and will help us most effectively to adapt the network's outputs and activities to the needs and interests of volunteers and visitors.

Professional performers involved with the network will benefit from insights into new or little-known repertories, and will have opportunities for experimentation and development of new modes of presentation that are better adapted to domestic repertoires than the standard concert hall approach. They will gain new contacts in the heritage sector as an outlet for their work, and in cases where they regularly perform with their own or others' performing groups (eg Harvey Davies, who leads the Pleyel Ensemble) they will provide a means of disseminating information and ideas through the wider early music world.

The activities of the performers in the network will also stimulate benefits for a wider public of music listeners, whether or not they are also regular visitors to country houses. Early music listeners may be attracted to events at heritage properties because of the repertoires and performers rather than the location, but in attending will gain a new understanding of how the music fits into historic material contexts. The production of commercial recordings and concerts by the network's historically informed performance researchers will help to improve understanding and communication between the heritage sector and the mainstream early music world.