Category: music
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Ravenscroft’s Brentford Catch
This afternoon I spent a thoroughly enjoyable hour with my family recording Thomas Ravenscroft’s catch about Brentford for a colleague who is going to give a talk there next month. The term catch is interchangeable with what is now the more familiar name, ’round’ – the word used to describe simple, popular songs like Frere…
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Emotional responses to music
It’s probably a couple of years since I last undertook an online course with FutureLearn, but a few weeks ago I signed up for a short course from Griffith University called Music Psychology: Why Does “Bohemian Rhapsody” Feel so Good? It was a simple introduction to some of the basic principles of music psychology, and…
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MedRen 2018 Part 1
This is the first in a short series of posts about my trip to the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference in Maynooth during July 2018. The Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, known as MedRen, was a slightly scary undertaking for me. I’ve only been to one music conference before, where I presented a paper on…
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Performing Reformation Ballads in Manchester
The end of October was very busy, what with several Historical Association meetings in London as well as two public engagements. The first of these was a speaking engagement at Ewecross, but the second was something a bit different – a 45 minute performance of Tudor ballads at the John Rylands Library event to commemorate…
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Chris Marsh on Gender Roles in Popular Ballads
At the end of September I killed several birds with one stone by taking a short trip to London. As well as attending a Historical Association committee meeting, I spent an afternoon in the British Library and an evening at the Royal Historical Society lecture given by Professor Christopher Marsh, ‘The woman to the plow…
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Back to the book
Since my children returned to school the push has been on to complete the final stages of my book manuscript. It’s due to go to the publisher at the end of September, so I’ve been doing all the tedious things that come with completion. Things like making sure all the images that I am using…
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Video, eo, eo
Sorry for the naff title, which I nabbed from a song from my all-time favourite film, but over the last couple of days video seems to have been one of the twin centres of my life. On Friday, I will speak at the Mary I conference in London the conference, but I won’t actually be…
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Summer holidays with history
After being rather unwell at the beginning of 2016, I decided that this summer I would spend as much time on holiday as I could. This was only made possible by the fact that we have access to a caravan that is currently in Oban, and we have a trailer tent, and it meant that…
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The Ladie Marques and the Lusty Gallant
With apologies for the length of the delay between posts (brought about by a computer faliure), here is the second piece about Elizabeth Parr and William Elderton: William Elderton’s A proper new balad in praise of my Ladie Marques (London, 1569; STC (2nd ed.) / 7562) is unique among the surviving early ballad epitaphs in…
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2015 and on
The big highlight of 2015 has to have been passing my viva and becoming a doctor. I’m still quite pleased with the way my thesis looks sitting on the shelf, even though I never got it bound (Manchester only requires electronic submission of corrected theses). I like it the way it is. And graduation…
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