Date/Time: Wednesday 15 January 2025, 3.00pm

Venue: Online, via zoom

Melancholia, Nostalgia and the Romance: Healing through music c. 1800

This presentation takes a new look at the popularity of the romance, a French song tradition, in the decades straddling 1800 among amateur musicians and composers. This genre, known at the time for its naturalness and directness of expression, became a vehicle for intimating distressing emotions encountered in daily life or elicited by the contemporary violent political upheavals of the French Revolution and its ensuing wars. As such, they fostered certain embodied, but also aestheticized emotional practices (Scheer, 2012), and they created a socially sanctioned space for expressing less desirable feelings. Focusing specifically on the expression of melancholia and nostalgia—two emotions that were often thought of as pathological—I explore the multiple intersections between practices and discourses of singing and composing romances and contemporary medical views. This highlights the fluid boundaries between aesthetic and medical discourses at the time and provides new insights into early-nineteenth-century physiological notions about the therapeutic nature of musical practices.

Dr Annelies Andries, Utrecht University

Zoom link: https://newcastleuniversity.zoom.us/j/82360930870