Colloquium: Gavin Williams

Gavin Williams
Research Fellow, University of Cambridge

UNMAKING SOUND IN THE CRIMEAN WAR

This talk explores the noises and sonic legacies of the Crimean War
(1853_56): an intensely mediated conflict, involving telegraphy,
photography, early battlefield correspondents, and (in some metropolitan
centres, such as London and Paris) an overflow of printed music.
Sometimes dubbed the first media war, Crimea suggests numerous parallels
and divergences with the sonic experience of more recent wars – wars that
have much exercised recent musicological imaginations (Cusick 2008;
Goodman 2010; Daughtry 2015). As my talk will argue, the Crimean War is
also a productive vantage point from which to examine received wisdom
about sound and war – and a useful perspective from which to address
broader political and ethical questions raised by studying the sounds of
wartimes past and present.