Public Research Seminar: Joanne Cormac

Joanne Cormac: Symphonic Travels: How Transnational Travel and Communication shaped the Symphony in the Long Nineteenth Century

In the 19th century a series of transformative technological leaps connected people more than ever before, enabling people, objects, and ideas to travel further and faster than ever before. My talk examines the journeys of one of Europe’s most politicised and successful cultural exports: the symphony. It argues that transnational discourses, networks, performance practices, and institutions shaped the development of the symphony in ways not previously understood.

The talk traces how these factors set in motion a series of radical reconceptualisations and redefinitions of the genre that transformed it from a plaything of the aristocracy to a genre compatible with the political and social needs of modernity.

Dr Joanne Cormac is Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham, specialising in 19th century music and culture. She is the author of Liszt and the Symphonic Poem (CUP, 2017), and editor of 30-Second Classical Music (Ivy Press, 2017) and Liszt in Context (CUP, 2021).

Her research has appeared in most of the leading musicology journals and has been funded by the AHRC, the Leverhulme Trust, and UKRI. She recently completed a project on the transnational history of the 19th century symphony. The findings are forthcoming in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and in a monograph she recently finished drafting. Her current project examines the musical legacies of the British Empire, funded by a £1.1m UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.

Running time approx. one hour and 30 minutes