Music and sound in documents: a case study of music and asylum history

This chapter asks key questions about tracing music and sound in documentary archive materials, and the ways in which considering musical worlds and soundscapes adds a new dimension to historical and documentary research. The idea of ‘archival silence’ has become an important metaphor for scholars of critical archive studies, in turn offering new perspectives on what is, and what isn’t, accessible in archive and documentary collections. Using the term ‘archival silence’ more literally provokes questions about the ways music and sound can be investigated and explored via documents. The chapter will open with a number of key questions about what aspects of musical practice can be examined using documents, and how this, in turn, can enhance understandings of musical performance and experience. It also addresses the limitations of documentary evidence, exploring the range of sources available for studying music and the questions and gaps which often remain. I draw on creative and imaginary approaches to suggest ways in which these can be probed. The second part of the chapter focusses on the case study of music and the asylum. My recent research has drawn on a range of archive and document collections to examine the scope and role of music in the nineteenth-century asylum. I outline the key archival sources, critical approaches to using these to build up a picture of musical experience, and the limits and bounds to my project. Finally, I reflect on the potential importance of considering music and sound as key elements of documentary studies beyond music. The fleeting nature of aurality, and the difficulty of capturing aural experience, both mean that sound and music are frequently absent from both historical and contemporary research. This section builds on recent research to emphasise the key role of aural experience in critical documentary research, as well as the role of musicological studies in broader interdisciplinary contexts.