As a violinist and music historian, I frequently shift between two states. The liveness of the present musical moment – the ‘now’ – in which fingers trill in haste, the bow quivers, and sweat drips from brow to the stagefloor. It is a moment that could be ruptured in a nanosecond, the air sliced with a snapped string or a coughing, wheezing audience member. And yet…
Als Geiger und Musikhistoriker bewege ich mich häufig zwischen zwei Zuständen. Da ist die Lebendigkeit des gegenwärtigen musikalischen Moments – des „Jetzt“ –, in dem die Finger hastig trillern, der Bogen zittert und der Schweiß von der Stirn auf den Bühnenboden tropft. Es ist ein Augenblick, der in einer Nanosekunde zerreißen könnte, die Luft durchschnitten…
Spring 2025 was an incredibly vibrant period of academic exchange for the GOING VIRAL team. Early April alone saw members of our group presenting at parallel conferences across Europe – in Spain, the Netherlands, and the UK – spanning the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, and auditory history. The month concluded with a trip to a conference on architectural history in Atlanta…
In the South-East of Paris, almost touching the Seine, a large complex of buildings forms the hospital of the Salpêtrière. At the heart of this hospital stands a church. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, around this church, a conflict arose between some of the Salpêtrière patients and the general administration of public hospitals in Paris. They disagreed on religious duties and the freedom of conscience…
The so-called ‘emotional turn’, which has shaped historical disciplines since around the year 2000, has so far had surprisingly little impact on musicology and other music studies. Talking about emotions, especially in music-historical contexts, is still a bold endeavour – attempts are often met with one version or another of...
My doctoral research concerns the hybrid colonial military band derived genre tanjidor practised by the orang Betawi (Betawi people) of the Greater Jakarta Metropolitan Area (Jabodetabek). The musical characteristics of tanjidor Betawi are derived from several influences, including: European, owing to the…
Last June, Marie and I flew to Vancouver to take part in the NACHE (North American Chapter of the History of Emotions) conference. These are my recollections of that trip.
A recent examination of the death records from the 1630 Venetian plague that have survived at the Archivio di Stato di Venezia revealed the life of one doctor, ‘Medico Monteverdi’, who worked as a doctor through the deadly plague of 1630. He happened to be none other than Massimiliano Monteverdi, son of the Maestro di Capella of the Basilica di San Marco, the famous composer Claudio Monteverdi.
On 10-11 October 2024, GOING VIRAL held its first international workshop entitled “Music, Emotions and the Body”.
The core themes of GOING VIRAL are ephemeral phenomena: music and emotions, in the specific situation of health crises. In our research, we are constantly faced with the difficulty of putting these ephemeral phenomena into words – and binding them in the media of language and writing. How we can...
