Wiebke Thormählen

As a social and cultural historian of music, Wiebke reads music as a series of historically conditioned practices that locate meaning in the act of music-making, both social and solitary. Her research, previously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and The Austrian Academic Exchange Service, focusses on the idea of “engagement” as fundamental to our every day interaction with the world yet variously determined by or shaping subjective, normative, ideological and institutional patterns of interaction.

Wiebke explores these modes of engagement and their meaning-making across three historical moments: the engagement with music as it moves across home and public spaces around 1800; the institutionalisation of professional engagement with music and with the instruction of music through particular training models around 1900; and the use of sound and music to construct or enhance new narratives in the museum and heritage sector today. Her work draws on methodologies in the history of emotions, medical history, material history and practice-based research. Currently, her work focusses on Britain drawing occasionally on her previous work in Austrian archival materials exploring the intersection of aesthetics and practice around in Vienna around 1800.

Wiebke has contributed articles and reviews to the Journal of Musicology, Eighteenth-Century Music, Early Music, Notes, Acta Mozartiana and Neues Musikwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch; she has presented her research at numerous conferences in the US, the UK and mainland Europe; she regularly converses on 18th-century musical culture in pre-concert events, programme and CD notes, festivals and educational events, and she has contributed to numerous BBC radio and television productions.

• Music in the Long Eighteenth Century (especially Britain and Austria)
• Sound Heritage and Material Culture
• Music Arrangements (especially 1750-1830)
• Music and Emotions / Medical History
• The idea of “engagement” with music and its various forms (dance, lectures, choral singing, collecting etc.)

Sound Heritage Network – Steering Group Member, University of Southampton. I was co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project “Music, Home and Heritage: Sounding the Domestic in Georgian Britain.”

Music, Medicine and History Network – Steering Group Member

Digital Humanities and Sensory Heritage Network (TORCH, Oxford University) – Core Member

Royal College of Music – Doctoral Supervisor

Arts and Humanities Research Council

Wellcome Trust

Austrian Academic Exchange Service (ÖAAD)

RNCM teaching:

Music in Context 1 and 2

Previous teaching in other institutions – selections:

• The History of the Orchestra
• History in Practice: when history meets performance
• Music and Emotions: historical and scientific perspectives
• Women in Music
• Music and Technology: Political and Moral Perspectives
• Music, Politics and Representation: London 1800-2012

Previous teaching in other institutions – selections:

• Research Projects
• German Opera 1800-1950
• Women in Music
• Issues and Topics in Eighteenth-Century Studies

Current supervision of PhDs:

• John Miller
• Gen Li
• Jiapeng Xin
• Lokyin Liu
• Christina Maxfield