Book launch audio – Class, Control, and Classical music

The formal launch of my book was held on 22 November at City, University of London, very generously hosted by the Gender and Sexualities Research Centre and the Music Department – huge thanks to Ros Gill, Jo Littler, and Laudan Nooshin for making it happen. The event page is here.

I recorded the audio of all the talks (except the final one from Francesca Christmas from Trinity College London) and you can listen to the audio here (c.50 mins).

I was delighted to have as speakers Professor Geoff Baker (Royal Holloway, University of London), Christina Scharff (King’s College London), Anamik Saha (Goldsmiths, University of London) and Francesca Christmas (Trinity College London). I’ve also spoke for about ten minutes at the start about the genesis of the book and the key arguments.

There will be video available of the whole talk including a fantastic discussion with some really interesting comments and questions from industry and academic audience members in due course.

Southampton University research seminar – Class, Control, and Classical Music

I was delighted to be invited to the Music Department at Southampton University on 13 November 2019 to talk about my book. You can watch the talk below, as well as questions and discussion afterwards. The audio of the talk is available here (the audio is not that great on the video, however I’ve upgraded the quality for the audio so that should be ok).

I talked predominantly about how class inequalities in wider society affect young people playing classical music, and also about how the practices of classical music can sometimes entrench these inequalities. There’s a lot more in the book that I didn’t manage to fit into this talk – in particular about classical music and whiteness, as well as about gender, but this gives you a taster of some of the material (predominantly from chapter 4 of the book).

Anna Bull and George Burrows book launch

I was delighted to co-host a book launch with my colleague George Burrows from the School of Art, Design, and Performance at the University of Portsmouth. By chance we had both published books within a couple of months of each other with Oxford University Press music. So we decided to hold a joint book launch in Portsmouth. Rather than talking about our own books, we each introduced the other’s book – a rather nerve-wracking but overall very enjoyable way to do it.