Wiebke Thormählen

Professor Wiebke Thormählen, historian and violinist, explores music as a social and educational activity at the intersection of domestic and public music-making. She is curious about the role music takes in the individual and collective construction of identities. In practice and in writing, she has a particular interest in arrangements of large-scale works for small-scale performance, domestic devotional music, and in the different ways in which audiences have engaged with opera in the home through a variety of materials from eighteenth century caricatures to twenty-first century live streams.

Between 2017 and 2022, she was co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project “Music, Home and Heritage: Sounding the Domestic in Georgian Britain.” Notable publications include the Routledge Companion to Music, Mind and Well-being: Historical and Scientific Perspectives (2018, co-editor), and Sound Heritage: Making Music Matter in Historic Houses (2022, co-editor), a collection bringing together musicologists, historians, and museum and heritage professionals.

Wiebke has performed with leading period instrument ensembles in the US, The Netherlands and the UK.  Her approach to research and teaching is significantly influenced by this experience as she explores musical materials through their tangible properties and through the interactions they afford.

• Music in the Long Eighteenth Century (especially Britain and Austria)
• Sound Heritage and Material Culture
• Music Arrangements (especially 1750-1830)
• Music and Emotions / Medical History
• The idea of “engagement” with music and its various forms (dance, lectures, choral singing, collecting etc.)

As a social and cultural historian of music, Wiebke reads music as a series of historically conditioned practices that locate meaning in the act of music-making, both social and solitary. Her research, previously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and The Austrian Academic Exchange Service, focusses on the idea of “engagement” as fundamental to our every day interaction with the world yet variously determined by or shaping subjective, normative, ideological and institutional patterns of interaction.

Wiebke explores these modes of engagement and their meaning-making across three historical moments: the engagement with music as it moves across home and public spaces around 1800; the institutionalisation of professional engagement with music and with the instruction of music through particular training models around 1900; and the use of sound and music to construct or enhance new narratives in the museum and heritage sector today. Her work draws on methodologies in the history of emotions, medical history, material history and practice-based research. Currently, her work focusses on Britain drawing occasionally on her previous work in Austrian archival materials exploring the intersection of aesthetics and practice around in Vienna around 1800.

Wiebke has contributed articles and reviews to the Journal of Musicology, Eighteenth-Century Music, Early Music, Notes, Acta Mozartiana and Neues Musikwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch; she has presented her research at numerous conferences in the US, the UK and mainland Europe; she regularly converses on 18th-century musical culture in pre-concert events, programme and CD notes, festivals and educational events, and she has contributed to numerous BBC radio and television productions.