Wednesday Seminar Series

The Music, Medicine & History Network hosts a series of online seminars where guest speakers can share their research and their practice.

Wednesday 14th May 2025 3-4pm (UK)

SESSION POSTPONED

Dr Jessica Campbell & Dr Matthew McCullough

New Voices in Music, Medicine & History

Dr Jessica Campbell, Edinburgh University

‘While the sense of music and of song are in mine ear, I half forget my pain’: Music, Madness, and the Patient’s Experience

This paper explores why music came to occupy such an integral part of nineteenth-century British asylum treatment and culture and, crucially, how patients responded to it. How was music experienced from the patient’s perspective? Was it used as a ‘sonic straitjacket’ by asylum authorities to regulate mad minds and bodies? (MacKinnon, 2018) Or was music a potential source of ‘acoustical agency’ for patients, who interpreted, felt, and used the corporeal and affective qualities of music for their own ends? (De Nora, 2000). By considering these key questions, this paper seeks to challenge the myth of both the silent asylum and the silent patient, and to demonstrate that through an attention to musical sound, we can gain a deeper, more holistic understanding of the varied dimensions of the patient’s experience of asylum life. 

Dr Matthew McCullough, Durham University

‘Music Against Death‘ – British Music and the First World War, 1915-1921

Samuel Hynes’ notion that, during the First World War, England’s cultural trajectory was adumbrated by a period of patriotic fervour, a ‘turn’ of prevailing despondency, and a ‘Myth of War’ is seen broadly replicated in British music. Yet, at present, only British music of the patriotic and Myth-making periods have received significant attention. Here, socio-political, morale-boosting, and commemorative functions dominate. But the ‘turn’ – roughly between 1915-1921 – provides a wealth of neglected ‘war music’ where, as death catalysed creativity, music focused not on war, but on loss and mourning. This presentation discusses this oft-neglected period of British war music, underscoring the use of artistic languages of mourning to mediate bereavement. Tentatively framing this within Douglas Davies’s ‘words against death’ phenomenon, it proffers an understanding of music as a complex human response to loss, hopefully encouraging new interdisciplinary conversations around artistic cultures and humankind’s creative engagement with its own mortality.

Zoom link: https://newcastleuniversity.zoom.us/j/81677072668

Forthcoming seminars

Check back here soon for our Autumn 2025 events…

Past Seminars