Exploring how music is used to portray the past in a variety of media, this book probes the relationship between history and fantasy in the imagination of the musical past. The volume brings together essays from multidisciplinary perspectives, addressing the use of music to convey a sense of the past in a wide range of multimedia contexts, including television, documentaries, opera, musical theatre, contemporary and historical film, videogames, and virtual reality. With a focus on early music and medievalism, the contributors theorise the role of music and sound in constructing ideas of the past. In three interrelated sections, the chapters problematise notions of historical authenticity on the stage and screen; theorise the future of musical histories in immersive and virtual media; and explore sound’s role in more fantastical appropriations of history in television and videogames. Together, they pose
provocative questions regarding our perceptions of ‘early’ music and the sensory experience of distant history. Offering new ways to understand the past at the crossroads of musical and visual culture, this collection is relevant to researchers across music, media, and historical and cultural studies.
Introduction – James Cook, Alexander Kolassa, Alexander Robinson, Adam Whittaker I. Using and Misusing Early Music 1. ‘Official’ (televisual) History, Music and the Reinforcement of Popular Imagination: the Case of David Starkey’s Monarchy - Alexander Robinson (Independent Scholar) 2. Damon Albarn, Dr Dee, and situation specific medievalism: An ephemeral fantasy or a disposable commodity?- Ralph Corrigan (Independent Scholar) 3.Shakespeare, the early modern, and period song in the American silent cinema - Kendra Leonard 4. Early Music in the 'Early Game'- Jennifer Smith (University of Huddersfield) 5. A masked ritual and backwards priests: Aural and visual corruption in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut - Daniel Trocmé-Latter (University of Cambridge) II. Early music, immersive media, and virtual histories 6. Audiovisual Interaction in Virtual Worlds: Seeing Sound and Hearing Objects in Visual Cultures - James Cook (University of Edinburgh) 7. Half-real worlds? Immersion and the representation of musical pasts in virtual reality- Adam Whittaker (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire) 8. Authenticity in sound design for virtual reality - Stephen Tatlow (Royal Holloway University of London) III. Early music out of time and space 9. Haunted by the Past: Music and Folk Horror in Children of the Stones - Alexander Kolassa (The Open University) 10. Pixels et al.: Multi-layered representation of past(s) in theaudio, visual, and ludic elements of Shovel Night and other screen media - Dean Chalmers (University of Edinburgh) 11. The endless knot: Turning the seasons in Harrison Birtwistle’s Gawain (1991) and David Lowery’s The Green Knight (2021) - George K. Haggett 12. A Jolly Good Thirteenth -Century Romp: Galavant architextuality, and the intertextual performance of race, gender, and social class in a medievalist musical comedy for television - William A. Everett (University of Missouri)
James Cook is Senior Lecturer in Early Music at the University of Edinburgh. Alexander Kolassa is a Lecturer in Music at the Open University, UK. Alexander Robinson is a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the CESR, Tours, France. Adam Whittaker is Head of Pedagogy at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire,UK.
