Thank you for participating in our 2025 series: 
Music & the Regency

Enjoy the full library of recorded events below.

​​Professional musicians Penelope Appleyard (soprano) and Jonathan Delbridge (pianist) are bridging the worlds of literature, history and classical music with their Regency inspired concert programmes and recordings. In this talk they reveal the new song they have commissioned, recorded and released to celebrate Jane Austen’s 250th Anniversary - a musical setting of her teenage poem ‘Ode to Pity.' They will discuss the concert programme it was written for (Sense & Musicality), introduce the historic square piano they use to perform it, and will intersperse their speaking with live performances! Soprano Penelope Appleyard is an early music specialist known for the clarity and agility of her voice. She is a natural performer and storyteller, and with a particular love for chamber music, enjoys researching and devising entertaining programmes to bring historic music to new audiences. To this end she has loved delving into the musical world of Austen, and was recently invited to sing at the Global Jane Austen Conference at Southampton University. She has performed as a soloist and ensemble singer in recital, concert and early opera at prestigious venues internationally and with many of the UK's leading groups, has appeared on numerous recordings, and as a soloist on BBC Radio3. In 2019 she was awarded honorary membership of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire where she had received a Distinction for her Post-Graduate Diploma in Vocal & Operatic Studies. Prior to this she received a First Class degree in Music and English & Creative Writing, followed by a Distinction for an MA in Music Performance, from the University of Chichester. Additionally to her performing work she teaches singing and flute from home and online. www.penelopeappleyard.co.uk Pianist Jonathan Delbridge enjoys a busy, varied freelance career as a performer and tutor, recently having founded The South Somerset Music Centre, the home of his extensive teaching practice. As a soloist he gives exciting and varied concert programmes on both piano and organ, now including his beautifully restored Broadwood Square Piano (1814). He has performed at a wide range of venues from the Royal Albert Hall and Birmingham Symphony Hall to his own village Church in Somerset, being a champion for professional music making in the local areas of his rural home county. Jonathan has a special interest in English piano music and was recently awarded a Fellowship from the National College of Music for his thesis entitled ‘A Study of the Piano Music of George Frederick Pinto’ and as a result has been named “one of the greatest experts on this composer alive today”. He has recently produced a disc entitled ‘The Story of the Square Piano’, featuring music that explores the history and prominence of these instruments. He is in particular demand as an accompanist and has collaborated with many leading soloists. www.jonathandelbridge.com The Little Song Party: West-Country based voice and piano partnership Penelope Appleyard and Jonathan Delbridge perform creative and entertaining recital programmes on historical themes. They are currently focussing on domestic music of the Regency era. Frequently to be found in period costume, chauffeuring 209 year old Broadwood square piano Lady Catherine around the UK in a Skoda estate, Penelope and Jonathan are now touring their programme 'Sense & Musicality' on the theme of Jane Austen and Music, in celebration of the writer's 250th Anniversary. Penelope commissioned 'Ode to Pity', a rare song setting of an Austen poem, especially for this programme. Composed by Donna McKevitt, this featured as Gramophone's 'Video of the Day' upon release and has appeared in Spotify's New Classical Releases playlist - possibly the first time a square piano has appeared there! With research and original scripts by Penny, they are delighted to be appearing in festivals, concert series and historic sites nationwide, and are currently taking bookings well into 2026. In their first few months performing together they have already given sold out performances at the Newbury Spring Festival and Jane Austen's House, filled Bath Abbey for their debut at the Jane Austen Festival, and been featured on BBC Radio3's Breakfast Show. Following the success of debut recital ‘Sense & Musicality’, new programmes 'A Prettyish Kind of Little Wilderness' and 'Jane Austen's Christmas Gaiety' are in production, the latter to be premiered on the VOCES8 Foundation’s popular online series ‘Live From London’. www.thelittlesongparty.com 🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5607618168750080

Though visions of Austen as a strictly “domestic” novelist have long been discarded, most accounts of her relationship with music continue to emphasize narratives of containment, highlighting themes of gentility and female accomplishment. This talk in contrast explores how music making shaped perceptions of people and lands far beyond the British home. The heterogenous and highly international vocal and instrumental music in Austen’s repertoire explored relationships with Scotland, events on the Continent including the French Revolution, and Britain’s colonial expansion, among many other topics. In constructing the musical scenes in her fiction, Austen (and her early readers) drew upon music as a way of apprehending and exploring the world. Jeanice Brooks is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton (UK). She has research interests in early modern and twentieth-century French music, domestic music in eighteenth-century Britain, music and gender, and museum sound. She is the author of Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France (Chicago, 2000) and The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger (Cambridge, 2013). She has edited essay collections including Nadia Boulanger and Her World (Chicago, 2020), Nadia Boulanger: Thoughts on Music (Rochester, 2020), Sound Heritage: Making Music Matter in Historic Houses (Routledge, 2021) and most recently, the Renaissance volume of the Cultural History of Western Music (Bloomsbury, 2023). Her current project, At Home with Music: Domesticity and Musical Culture in Georgian Britain, explores the role of music in material and ideological constructions of home. 🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5607618168750080

In Austen’s England, music-making was an activity rich in social meaning. However, as a multifaceted performance of one’s social class, nationality, and gender, music-making had to be managed carefully. Austen’s novels offer a valuable window into the restrictive musical culture of Regency England, revealing nuances about how different kinds of people were allowed to engage with music. This talk will explore the complicated web of anxieties (especially xenophobia, homophobia, and class slippage) at work in the musical culture of the time, the gendered subtext of “frivolity”, and what we can learn from Frank Churchill (among others) about the many dangers of male music-making during this period. Lidia Chang is a flutist and musicologist whose work examines the intersection of gender, literature, print culture, organology, and music performance practices in Europe during the long eighteenth century. She has served as the managing editor for Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture and has presented her research at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s annual and regional meetings, the American Musical Instrument Society, the Galpin Society, the American Musicological Society, the North American British Music Studies Association, and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 2023 Lidia found her dream job at Colorado College as an assistant professor in the music department. 🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5607618168750080

In Austen’s novels, we encounter music in a variety of forms and scenes with the pianoforte at their center. While Austen doesn’t mention keyboard pieces by their titles, she alludes to one style in particular that 18th-century music in its popular and utilitarian manifestation: the “air.” An air can designate a variety of styles and forms but most commonly indicates a song-like vocal or instrumental tune. In Austen’s mentions, they are delineated as Scotch, Irish, or Italian airs and are played on the pianoforte for dancing or for entertainment purposes. By the turn of the 19th century, however, tunes were gradually evolving into larger musical forms, most commonly serving as the primary motive for sonata movements and sets of themes and variations. This is evident in the wealth of representations contained in Austen’s personal music collection. Through examining the music that she was practicing when she was writing, we gain a richer understanding and more intimate view of the hands behind the pen. Laura Klein, pianist and historical musicologist, specializes in British keyboard music and performance practices of the long 18th century. Her current research centers on the music contained in the Austen Family Music Books collection. She founded The Jane Austen Playlist in 2019, a historical music project that features the music of the Austen family in digitized notations, companion recordings, and dramatically narrated performances. An active performer and presenter, she gives frequent concerts and lecture recitals online, throughout the United States, and in the United Kingdom. Klein is Affiliate Professor of Piano at Colorado Christian University and is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Colorado Boulder. Link to playlist of pieces featured in Laura's talk: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT2RxkRAjSpgs4Nd6BFcSLEvz7zTbHRJL

Jane Austen and other women who enjoyed music, and who aspired to even a modest level of musical accomplishment, needed some training. What kind of musical education could women in the Regency era expect to receive? What does it indicate that Marianne Dashwood plays concertos, why is Mary Bennet interested in thoroughbass, and how would Jane Fairfax have encountered the compositions of J.B. Cramer? Contemporary manuals on female education offer a glimpse into what was then considered appropriate for musical study, and help us understand what it took for Austen, her characters, and the women of her time to achieve their musical goals. Kathryn L. Libin, Mary Conover Mellon Professor of Music at Vassar College, earned BM and MA degrees in piano performance at the Oberlin Conservatory and New York University, and a PhD in musicology at NYU. She has lectured and published on Mozart’s music and manuscripts, on music in Jane Austen’s life and works, and on musical sources in the Lobkowicz Library near Prague. Her articles on Jane Austen and music may be read in Persuasions (19, 22, 28, and 46), in the collection Elegance, Propriety, Harmony: Jane Austen and the Arts (2013), and in the Edinburgh Companion to Jane Austen and the Arts (2024). At Vassar she teaches a course on Jane Austen and Music in the Domestic Sphere.

In her surviving letters, Jane Austen mentions music occasionally among news of friends, neighbours and family. We know that she played the piano and sang, apparently practising regularly when she could. The memories of relations who were still young when she died – especially her niece Caroline – give us an idea of the place of music in her daily life. There is also rich evidence in the surviving music books from the collection of Austen and her family circle, much of which is copied in her own handwriting. Austen sometimes implies her dislike of public concerts and her appreciation of people who are honest about their lack of musical taste. At other times she expresses genuine enjoyment of a superior performance. Some of these attitudes are also displayed in the novels, but there are subtleties and ambiguities in the way she uses music and musicianship in her writing to illuminate her characters and sometimes to advance her plots. In this talk, I will discuss various aspects of music in Austen’s life and work and give some idea of the music that she played and sang. Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Associate Professor in English at Flinders University, South Australia. She has published and presented internationally on various topics, including Jane Austen, often with an emphasis on music. She was co-convenor of the ‘Immortal Austen’ conference in Adelaide, July 2017, and as a singer she has been curating and presenting programs of music from Austen’s personal collection since 2007. In 2021 she completed a detailed index of each of the 500-600 items in the Austen music collections digitized by University of Southampton, and her book She Played and Sang: Jane Austen and Music was published by Manchester University Press in 2024.

Italian opera in the 18th century, whether in Italy or London, was dominated by the castrati, male-identified singers who had been castrated before puberty to preserve their treble voices. With their haunting timbres and spectacular vocal techniques, the castrati were the superstars of their time. Among their most devoted admirers were women; it was well known, or salaciously assumed, that women were attracted to castrati because they were "safe" lovers, still capable of sexual activity but without the consequences of unwanted pregnancies. But the writings and experiences of these female fans reveal a more sophisticated appreciation of the artistry of their favorite singers, a blend of connoisseurship and enthusiasm that allowed for intellectual and emotional outlets that were not always available to women at the time. By the later 18th century the castrato phenomenon was beginning to wain, due to a number of factors: the rise of Enlightenment rationality that found the practice "barbaric"; the shift towards a more binary notion of gender; and changing operatic tastes. Yet at a time when castrati were increasingly viewed as "freaks", their female fans continued to admire and respect their artistry. This presentation will focus on the relationships between two late-18th century castrati and the women who admired them: that of Gaspare Pacchierotti with the novelist Frances Burney and her sister, the diarist Susan Burney Phillips; and that of Luigi Marchesi with the visual artist Maria Hadfield Cosway. By studying these relationships, we have an opportunity to treat fandom, and especially women's fandom, with the respect it deserves. Jeffrey Nigro has had a professional relationship with the Art Institute of Chicago for over 30 years, including serving as Director of Adult Programs in the Department of Museum Education from 2003 to 2010. Jeff is currently a Research Associate in the Arts of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium and an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Interpretation at the Art Institute. He also teaches Adult Education Seminars at the Newberry Library, and he is a former Regional Coordinator of the Greater Chicago region of JASNA. His essay, "Georgian Fangirls: Women and Castrati in 18th-Century London" appears in Women and Music in the Age of Austen, edited by Linda Zionkowski and Miriam Hart (Bucknell University Press, 2023).