Music Faculty Releases New Book on Violin Culture

Violin Culture in Britain, 1870-1930: Music-making, Society, and the Popularity of Stringed Instruments by Christina Bashford

Professor Christina Bashford’s new book, Violin Culture in Britain, 1870-1930: Music-Making, Society, and the Popularity of Stringed Instruments, was published last month by Cambridge University Press. Interweaving a social history of string playing with a collective biography of its participants, this book identifies and maps the rapid nationwide development of activities around the violin family in Britain from the 1870s to around 1930. Documenting this remarkable movement, it explores how thousands of people previously excluded from taking up a stringed instrument became musicians and why the the idea of the violin took hold in the British cultural imagination. Bashford, an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK), teaches in Musicology at the School of Music.

Research and writing for this project were supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Center for Advanced Study, the Campus Research Board, and an FAA Project Completion award.