The North American British Music Studies Association

The North American British Music Studies Association is excited to share our next Online Colloquium event: Oskar Cox Jensen, “Ballad Singing: Music and History.”

The importance of street balladry to much of British social, cultural, and political history between, say, 1580 and 1850, is hard to deny. Its importance as an aspect of British music in the same period is a messier issue. In this paper, Oskar Cox Jensen – historian by training, musicologist by paycheque – considers both the relationship between street ballads (a medium, not a genre) and their wider musical culture, and the relationship between our modern disciplines.

Oskar Cox Jensen is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in Music at Newcastle University. His current project is Mainstream Song, Class, and Culture, 1520–2020. His most recent, co-edited monograph is Our Subversive Voice: The History and Politics of English Protest Songs, 1600–2020. He is an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker and writes novels as Oskar Jensen.