Handling and annotating music
Department of Music - 25 November 2022
U of A’s musicology professor Fabio Morabito explores what it meant to be interested in music before the advent of recording technologies.
If you have ever stepped into a library, you know how to get hold of a music score or a book you are looking for: you browse the catalogue and request the item you’re after. It is a search mostly based on who wrote something, who published or produced it. What tends to be forgotten in this way is the experience of previous owners or users of that item.
As part of a project funded by the British Academy, and in collaboration with the British Library in London (UK), U of A’s assistant professor of musicology Fabio Morabito explores how people used and interacted with music in the 19th century. Before the invention of recording technology, music relied on the same technology of “recording” and preservation used for literature. Music could be written down and copied by hand; circulated widely in printed form; it could be annotated, kept in libraries, discarded, and much much more. But performances could not yet be preserved as sounds. Listen to Dr. Morabito discussing the origins of today’s mass music consumption in people’s hands, rather than ears!
As part of the same digital series, Discovering music: 19th century published by the British Library, Dr. Morabito has written two articles that connect the 19th-century practice of collecting musicians’ autographs to the origins of modern fan culture in the West, as well as the beginnings of musicology as an academic discipline.
Check them out here: “The 19th-century album” and “Autograph collectors,” in Discovering music: 19th century, The British Library 2022.