Cheryll Duncan

Professor Cheryll Duncan is a musicologist who specialises in professional music culture in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, with a particular focus on legal records of the period. Her research has investigated matters ranging from e.g. performance contracts, music copyright, organ building and concert administration to musicians’ lifestyles and self-fashioning. Cheryll’s essays have appeared in major journals including Cambridge Opera Journal, Early Music, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, Music & Letters, Opera Journal and Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle. She contributed a chapter to Geminiani Studies (ed. Christopher Hogwood), and biographical entries to Grove Music Online and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Her monograph on the violinist, composer and concert promoter Felice Giardini was published by Routledge in 2020, and in that year she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of her contribution to historical scholarship.

• Baroque music
• Professional music in late 17th and 18th century Britain
• Opera in London
• Musicians and the law
• Music publishing and copyright

Cheryll is currently writing a short monograph on the eighteenth-century flautist, composer and teacher Lewis Granom, drawing on a recently discovered equity lawsuit which explains the unusual genesis of his flute treatise (1766).  Future projects include Giovanni Francesco Crosa and opera in London 1748–50, and a study of the early eighteenth-century singer Jane Barbier.