Date/Time: Wednesday 19 February 2025, 4.00pm

Venue: G.13, Ground Floor, Armstrong Building, Newcastle University

Angela McShane (History, Honorary Reader in History, University of Warwick) discusses Finding the 'popular' in 17th-century political song market: Interrogating taste-led record and ballad collecting in order to develop a choice-driven model for analysis.

In this talk, Angela attempts to address the methodological challenge of understanding where politically inflected songs sat within the landscape of early modern Britain’s dynamic and taste-driven popular song markets. She briefly posits a ballad-specific analytical model with which to assess the commercial success of individual titles and the shifting tastes and trends within the trade. However, given that evidence of commercial success may not be enough to assess the aesthetic value or reach of a song, the talk mainly focuses on the difficulties of uncovering evidence of contemporary consumer tastes from a ballad archive that consists largely of collections amassed for reasons other than musical choice. Theorizing from modern discussions of taste-making, and new primary evidence of modern and early modern popular music buying, she frames a pleasure- or choice-led analytical model with which to investigate the intersections between popular musical tastes and the consumption of politically inflected songs in key collections formed by seventeenth-century collectors.

Angela McShane is an Honorary Reader in History at the University of Warwick. She is a social and cultural historian, researching the political world of the broadside ballad (and the political and material histories of intoxicants and the everyday). She has published widely on political balladry, including numerous book chapters, and journal articles in Past and Present, Renaissance Studies, Journal of British Studies, Journal of Early Modern History, Popular Music Journal and Media History and is also the author of a reference work, Political Broadside Ballads in Seventeenth Century England: A Critical Bibliography (2011). A monograph on the broadside ballad trade and its politics in seventeenth-century Britain is forthcoming with Boydell and Brewer. She is a Co-Investigator for a related website and imminent co-authored book: Our Subversive Voice: The History and Politics of English Protest Songs, 1600–2020 (https://oursubversivevoice.com/) and is the co-creator of the double prize-winning website project: Christopher Marsh and Angela McShane, 100 Ballads (https://www.100ballads.org/).

Part of the 2025 Early Music @ Newcastle festival

Free admission