“New Musicology” outlined at conference to honour Cambridge Professor

The Cambridge University scholar, who is Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Music in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, will call for the creation of a new “socio-musicology” which uses the study of people and societies more widely to better understand the music they produce.

The conference, on “Musical Anthropologies”, has been arranged jointly by the Institute of Musical Research and the Royal Musical Association in honour of Professor Born’s work. It will take place on Saturday (November 29), at the Senate House, University of London.

Earlier this year Professor Born received the Dent Medal – a prestigious international prize for musicological research – in recognition of her contributions to the field.

She will be giving the Dent Medal Lecture at the conference itself, in which she will suggest that the way in which music is studied is ripe for expansion. Her presentation will argue that by exploring how areas such as social value systems, or technological change, affect the production and nature of music, musicology itself might overcome a “loss of confidence” that has been identified within the discipline. In this way the study of music could lead the way in forging productive new interdisciplinary modes of scholarship.

Much of Professor Born’s research has focused on using the study of human societies to better understand their cultural output. Her books have examined issues such as recent transformations in the nature of public service broadcasting or avant-garde music due to the influence of their changing social and historical context. The focus of this research has been on major cultural organisations such as the BBC and IRCAM, the Parisian computer music institute. Professor Born has pioneered a method of analysing the relationship between, on the one hand, music and other cultural forms as works or texts and, on the other hand, the broader social, institutional and historical conditions within which they were created.

She has also contributed to cultural policy and media work on public service broadcasting and the cultural sector in Britain and Europe and gave evidence to the House of Lord’s Select Committee on the BBC.

Professor Born is a Professorial Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, and holds a number of honorary posts and fellowships at other Universities and institutions. She will hold the Bloch Professorship in Music at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011-12.

Further details about the conference, including abstracts of all the presentations, can be found by clicking on the links to the right of this page.