Knowledge Exchange

Alice has held two Knowledge Exchange Fellowships, each representing a partnership between The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) and the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS).

English Tunebooks of the Eighteenth Century

2019-20, Alice worked with EFDSS to study the tunebooks (manuscript music notebooks) in their collection that were made or used in eighteenth-century England.

In February 2020 Alice delivered a Library Lecture at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, giving a ‘guided tour’ of the eighteenth-century tunebooks in the collection.

A major output of the project was the podcast series Folk Tunes and Englishness, in which Alice talked to musicians, collectors, and researchers about the history of the tunes she studies, their performance today, and what makes music ‘English’.

Mapping English ‘National Music’ of the Eighteenth Century

2020-21, Alice used the historical sources in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library to track the publication and spread of repertoire across England, in order to map and thereby demarcate an ‘English’ repertoire for the eighteenth century.

As part of this research Alice asked present-day musicians what they would include in an ‘English’ tunebook: search for the hashtag #EnglishTunebook on social media to see what people suggested.