As part of a major conference organised by Canterbury Cathedral and Canterbury Christ Church University, our Keynote Lecture is open to the public. Our speaker is Professor Rachel Cowgill, Head of Music and Drama in the School of Music, Humanities and Media, University of Huddersfield.
Starting from contrasting statements of music’s worth by Thomas Carlyle (1852) and George Bernard Shaw (1903), Professor Cowgill will explore the ways in which music was used by Victorians to define the moral character of space and place in the urban environment. She will also consider Victorian ideas of music as a landscape to be traversed in the imagination, and the impact such notions had on the cultivation, presentation, and reception of musical performance in nineteenth-century Britain.