Global Music History and Northern Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Conference.

Building on previous networks of trade and imperial expansion, the 18th and 19th centuries saw Northern Europe emerge as a power of industrialisation, colonisation, trade, and cultural exchange. Some areas (e.g. those connected to the British Empire) have already seen significant recent scholarship in global music history, while other areas of Northern Europe (e.g. Scandinavia) are ripe for a more systematic inclusion of approaches from global music historiography.

With this conference we seek to bring together scholars who are interested in creating critical narratives of Northern Europe and its global musical pasts (including music’s intersections with other artforms).

The conference is supported by HUM:Global Seed Money at the University of Copenhagen.

 

Deadline for proposals: 1 February 2026. We invite proposals for papers exploring global music histories connected to Northern Europe in the long 18th and 19th centuries. 

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Colonial histories; post-, de-, and anticolonial interventions
  • Resistance, rebellion, freedom struggle
  • Exploitation, appropriation, assimilation
  • Exchange, trade, diplomacy
  • Migration, movement, exile
  • Art music and popular repertoires.

We welcome abstracts (max. 250 words) for papers of 20 minutes (plus 10 minutes Q&A). please include a short bio (max. 75 words). Submit as a docx or pdf to mkv@hum.ku.dk by 1 February 2026.

Note: We define “Northern Europe” in the broadest sense, from the Low Countries and Northern Germany in the south to the Arctic in the north and from the Baltic region in the east to the British Isles in the west. We welcome papers on any topic related to this geographic area and its global reach, i.e. colonies, trade networks, diplomatic relations, diasporas etc.

 

Programme committee

Mikkel Vad, Jens Hesselager, and Peter Koch Gehlshøj, the University of Copenhagen.

Programme

 

10:00–11:00 Registration
10:45–11:00 Welcome
11:00–12:30 Musical colonizers
Phil Dodds, “The Appropriate Scale of Music: Swedish and Scottish Musical Conization in Southern Africa, 1770–1850”
Kanav Gupta, “Reconstructing the musical lives of British residents in colonial India in the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries”
Jens Hesselager, “18th and early 19th century musical visitors to the West Indies – real and imaginary. In search of Speneux, Fontalbe and Belinde. And Magdalena.”
12:30–13:30 Lunch
13:30–15:00 Travelling musicians
Pete Yelding, “Restoring innovative agency to perpetually othered musicians: the case of the Lucknow-Shahjahanpur Gharana in late nineteenth-century Northern Europe”
Eva Hvidt, “Asger Hamerik’s Time in Baltimore”
Holly Lawson, ““Ich bin Hamlet der Däne”: Shakespeare on the move in the career of Felicita Vestvali 1867-70”
15:00–15:30 Coffee break
15:30–17:00 Keynote lecture
Katherine Schofield: “Archives differing: collaborative music history, stereophonic methods, and the paracolonial Indian Ocean”
17:00 Reception

 

 

9:00–10:00 Cultural encounters
Matthew Madeley, “A Synthesis of East and West? John Foulds, Maud MacCarthy, Theosophy and the combination of European and Indian Music”
Erik Steinskog, “Missionaries and Modernism: Fartein Valen between Madagascar and West-Norway.”
10:00–10:30 Coffee break
10:30–12:00 Local, national, and international histories
Halvor K Hosar “Paradoxical Internationalism: Johann Abraham Peter Schulz’s Symphonies in Trondheim”
Axel Klein “On the challenges of writing a musical history of Ireland”
Eric Coutts, “Commerce, Slavery, and London Concert Life in the Eighteenth Century”
12:00–13:00 Lunch
13:00–14:00 Ethnographic imaginations
Thomas Overdijk, “Popular Entertainment and Biological Essentialism in the Colonial Netherlands”
Patrick Burke, “Musical Instrument Collections in Norway's Ethnographic Museums, 1856-1910”
15:00-17:00 Visit to the museum Davids Samling/The David Collection.

 

Click here to download the full programme with abstracts.

Registration

All are welcome at the conference. Non-presenters are asked to register here in advance and pay a small fee to cover lunch and coffee. Deadline for registration is Monday, May 11. Presenters at the symposium are automatically registered and funded.