11 and 12 May 2026, London
King’s College London DORMEME
Call for Papers
The sixteenth century saw increased availability of musical material. The expansion of printing generated another route for transmitting music, in addition to oral and manuscript circulation. How did this shape individual interactions with musical material in early modern Europe and beyond? Who engaged with music books, and what forms did that engagement take?
Books containing music were used in performance of various kinds, in education, as part of collections, and more besides. Traces of these uses and others survive in alterations and annotations in and on the books. Using these as a starting point, we seek to understand better the readers and users of music books within the context of a changing cultural, religious, and political landscape.
This two-day conference explores how people engaged with books containing music in early modern Europe as part of the ongoing project DORMEME: dissemination, ownership, and reading of music in early modern Europe. Its aim is to bring together scholars of music, books, and history to examine divisions between material and textual, visible and audible, and print and manuscript. We will bring the music book into conversation with wider book culture and address the distinction between the music book solely as a tool for performance and as a material text inviting myriad interactions. By looking beyond these artificial distinctions, we hope to advance our knowledge of musical and non-musical literacy, the practical applications of books, and of the people who used them.
Papers might include but should not be limited to:
reading and annotating habits of individual owners or groups of owners
types of ownership — collective, institutional, and individual
reading broader changes (e.g. religious, musical, intellectual, and societal change) in users of music books
literacy at different levels, and education
conventions of annotation (regional, temporal, genre-specific)
annotations in multiple copies of the same book
sociability and the book
cultural adaptation and exchange: multi-lingual, multi-confessional users of books
using annotations to understand past and inform future performance
The project team has been conducting copy-based analysis of polyphonic music books printed between 1500 and 1545 held in Europe and North America. Speakers are welcome to contact us if they would like access to our raw data to enhance the research for their papers.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers by 1 December 2025. Speakers will be notified by mid-January.
The conference will be held at King’s College London (Strand Campus) on 11 and 12 May 2026. We encourage attendance in person, but it will be possible to audit the conference remotely. In exceptional circumstances it may be possible to accommodate pre-recorded presentations.
DORMEME project team: Elisabeth Giselbrecht (PI), Louisa Hunter-Bradley, and Katie McKeogh
DORMEME is a UKRI Frontier Research Grant, running 2023-2028. It was successfully evaluated by the ERC and funded by the UKRI Horizon Europe guarantee (EP/X025888/1). For more information about the project.
For details of the King’s College London Data Protection Policy.
Supported by UKRI UK Research and Innovation
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