A piano in a working-class cottage was more than furniture—it shaped how people moved, felt, and connected to the world outside their front door. This project recovers the lost soundscapes of ordinary English homes between the late-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, focusing on households that historians have largely ignored: cottages, lodging houses, petit-bourgeois parlours, and institutional homes. Existing music history tends to privilege elite drawing rooms and concert halls, leaving a gap in understanding how music functioned in everyday domestic life—how it structured emotional expression, family bonds, and social ties. By examining material objects like printed music books, instruments, diaries, and court records, the research will reveal music’s role in three areas: embodied practices and movement within the home; familial and social interactions; and connections between homes and the wider commercial, political, and cultural networks of the period. The findings will directly inform the Museum of the Home’s redisplay of its period rooms, and will produce musical soundtracks for visitors and a festival-symposium on music in the home. This is fundamental historical and musicological research with no immediate practical application, but it deepens understanding of how ordinary people experienced domestic life—a dimension that quietly shapes how we think about heritage, identity, and the social meaning of everyday objects.
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This project will explore the significance of music to lived experiences in non-elite English homes from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing on examples of different types of home from working-class cottages to petit-bourgeois households, lodging houses and institutional homes, it aims to provide understanding of the role played by music in relation to three key areas of domestic experience: (i) how it was entwined with embodied domestic practices and how it shaped expressive responses, emotional capacities and movement within the home; (ii) how it enabled and sustained familial relationships and other domestic social interactions; and (iii) how it connected homes to the places around them, and the commercial, social, cultural and political networks of the wider world. A wide range of sources have been identified to support the research including: the ‘material culture’ related to domestic music making (collected music books, printed manuscripts, instruments) housed in several metropolitan and regional collections (see the Cecilia database); inventories; domestic guidance and advice manuals; newspapers and periodicals; business records relating to the suppliers of manuscripts and instruments; diaries and personal papers; literary and artistic representations of music in the home; records of residential institutions; and court records (e.g. the Old Bailey Online). Alongside a PhD thesis presenting original new research on a neglected area of historical and musicological investigation, the findings of the project will contribute to the Museum of the Home’s redisplay of its eighteenth and nineteenth-century period rooms. The production of musical soundtracks for museum visitors and the organisation of a ‘Festival-Symposium’ on ‘Music in the Home’, with contributions from researchers, curators and musicians, will be additional outputs.
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