Christina Bashford

Bio

Christina Bashford is a music historian who works in the sphere of cultural musicology, examining the functions and meanings of music, music-making, and its associated activities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her focus is on Britain and its relationships with other nations, and her research explores a range of themes, including the tensions between the sacralization of music and its commodification, changing intersections of class, gender, and national identity, and the role of music in situations and times of war.  She is the author of The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London (Boydell Press, 2007). She has also co-edited three volumes of essays: Music and British Culture, 1785-1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich (with Leanne Langley; Oxford University Press, 2000);  The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800-1930 (with Roberta Montemorra Marvin; Boydell, 2016); and Over Here, Over There: Transatlantic Conversations on the Music of World War 1 (with William Brooks and Gayle Magee; University of Illinois, 2019).  Her recently published work includes an article in the centennial prize issue of Music & Letters, “Interpreting the Role of the Violin in the Ballykinlar Internment Camp during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919-1921” (May 2019) and “Concert Listening the British Way?” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries (2019).

Dr. Bashford has published other articles and reviews in Music & Letters (winner, Jack Westrup Prize, 1991), the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, the Journal of Victorian Culture, Musical Quarterly, Notes, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and Eighteenth-Century Music. She has also contributed to several essay volumes, and has written more than thirty articles for music dictionaries, including The New Grove Dictionary of Music (2001) and the Cambridge Berlioz Encyclopedia (2017).  In 2021 she took up an NEH Fellowship to work on her book, Violin Culture in Britain, 1870-1930: Music-Making, Society, and the Popularity of Stringed Instruments (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming fall 2025).

Prior to coming to Urbana-Champaign, she was on the faculty of Oxford Brookes University in England; before that she served as the Managing Editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992).  She has been involved in several digital humanities projects on performance history and has recently joined the team of the community-oriented Internet of Musical Events (University of Illinois and University of York, UK).  In 2018 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK).  She is a Past President of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association  (2015-17) and the North American British Music Studies Association (2020-24).