Research Interests
From a young age I have been fascinated by musical instruments. During my undergraduate degree I studied a module on Anglo-Saxon England with Professor David Hinton at the time when we were thinking about dissertation topics. At the end of one of these lectures I asked him about the musical instruments of the period. He said that Graeme Lawson had certainly looked at the string instruments. By the end of the summer, I had begun to research them, including recreating the panpipes from Jorvik. This work led into my dissertation. Having pretty much completed my dissertation over the summer, during that year I decided I wanted to continue researching this topic in a masters. At this point I don’t think I realised it was part of a sub discipline: music archaeology. Originally planning on the social archaeology masters, a conversation with my personal academic tutor, due to the department not being sure if they would run the social archaeology masters led to him ringing the music department and arranging a meeting for me. They were very friendly, and assured me if I studied the musicology masters I could take archaeology modules. This I undertook, studying the osteo-modules from archaeology and a bit of 3-D modelling before writing my masters dissertation on the Hungate instrument. Within music I was fortunate enough to study the considerations to take into account when recreating instruments and also soundscapes and understanding the sounds and instruments in images. This all set me up for my PhD.
Entitled ‘Anglo-Saxon wind instrument: Classification, Characterisation and Function’, my thesis explored the appearance, use and context of the wind instruments of the Anglo-Saxon period in England. Through utilising an interdisciplinary approach and establishing methods of working together across disciplines, including archaeology, music, history, literature, acoustical engineering and mathematics, enabled the data to be assessed to create a comprehensive study of the wind instruments. Through such methods, it was demonstrated that horns (and potentially trumpets), hornpipes, bagpipes, reed pipes, flutes (both duct and end-blown such as panpipes) and the organ were present in Anglo-Saxon England. The creation of these instruments varied from the simple bone pipes to the complex organ. Analysis of the sources, allowed for a recreation of a rank of organ pipes, based on the organ that stood at Winchester, to be made for the first time, enabling subsequent experiments to be undertaken. In my thesis the instruments were found to be broadly used in two categories: those for entertainment and those with a practical use, whether that was horns for signalling in battle and on the road, or the organ to demonstrate the new religion of Christianity. Overall, my thesis demonstrated the wide range of wind instruments present in Anglo-Saxon England, including their diverse functions and methods of creation.
To learn more about the wind instruments of Anglo-Saxon England and this research, please click here.
Publications
Early Medieval Bone Pipes: Understanding the Sounds of These Instruments through Reconstruction, Exarc, 4. 2021. To read this click here.