24th – 25th June 2025 | Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge

From the first lines of Gregorian chant in the ninth and tenth centuries to the movable type of the sixteenth, the desire to spread musical repertories beyond the moment of performance sat at the heart of why music was written down and remembered. How far was it possible for music to spread across both geographical terrain and chronological time in the pre-modern world? Which technologies supported its dissemination beyond the moment of performance? To what extent do the oral and the textual coalesce? How did cross-cultural exchange influence musical performance? And how did networks of transmission alter with evolving technologies and changing socio-political contexts? Moving Music is a two-day conference aims to bring together scholars from several different disciplines to explore how, when, where, and by whom music and sound was transmitted during the medieval and early modern periods. While the focus will be on Europe, submissions from scholars beyond this geographic limit will be encouraged. The conference will be hosted by Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and generously funded by British Academy. The keynote paper will be given by Dr Alice Hicklin, Dr Betty Rosen, and Dr Geneviève Young from the project Musical Lives: Towards an Historical Anthropology of French Song, 1100-1300 (MUSLIVE) at King’s College London. As part of the conference, attendees are invited to a concert of early music at Emmanuel College Chapel.

We invite submissions of 20-minute papers from contributors of any discipline and career stage.
Themes of the conference include, but are not limited to:

• Cross-cultural musical exchange
• The socio-political contexts of musical dissemination
• Musical literacy
• Musical technologies (eg. notation, instruments, printing)
• Oral tradition and musical dissemination
• Performance practices
• Network theory and musical prosopography
• Sound and soundscape studies
• Intersections of musical, visual, and material culture
• Medievalism and the transmission of music

Please submit an extract of 200 words as well as a short bio to Dr Katherine Emery at kne21@cam.ac.uk by 1st December 2024.