About

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 themes such as 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 and has co-edited several volumes of essays on related topics. Her recent work includes articles on the role of the violin during the Anglo-Irish War and concert listening practices in Britain. Dr. Bashford has published extensively in prominent music journals and contributed to music dictionaries. She is currently working on a book titled Violin Culture in Britain, 1870-1930, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Prior to her position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she was on the faculty of Oxford Brookes University and served as the Managing Editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. She has been involved in digital humanities projects and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2018. She holds degrees from the University of Oxford and King's College, University of London.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• World Wide Web
• Art
• Visual arts
• Media studies
• Public relations
• Law
• Library science
• History

Selected publications

• Staging Chamber Music: Towards New Intersections of Performance Practice and Concert History

  2025-06-26

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Utilizing examples unearthed in the author’s study of London concerts in the 1830s and ’40s and drawing on experience gained from practical work with present-day performers, this chapter argues for imaginative research collaborations between historians of nineteenth-century concerts and practitioners of historically informed performance to rethink how chamber music is staged and experienced in the present day. As such, it calls for an imaginative blending of what we know about the practicalities and aesthetics of nineteenth-century concert life with current initiatives in ‘period’ performance. Specifically, the chapter assesses how London concert-givers and players addressed the paradoxes between the domestic culture and ambience of chamber music, on the one hand, and its public performance, on the other, showing how they adapted (often large) concert venues to those ends. It examines practices of close listening and the sometimes surprising ways in which Victorian chamber music audiences were drawn into “connected” modes of listening and appreciation. And it encourages performers to pay attention to historical programming conventions to help them find fresh ideas for concert content and order. The chapter does not advocate exacting reconstructions of past events in the mode of popular “living history”, but suggests that detailed knowledge of how concerts of the past operated could play a significant role in energizing public performances in the twenty-first century.

  PublisherDOI

• Violin Culture in Britain, 1870–1930

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-09-13

  book1st authorCorresponding

  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 about 1930. Highlighting the spread of string playing among thousands of people previously excluded from taking up a stringed instrument, it shows how an infrastructure for violin culture coalesced through an expanding violin trade, influential educational initiatives, growing concert life, new string repertoire, and the nascent entertainment and catering industries. Christina Bashford draws a freshly broad picture of string playing and its popularity, emphasizing grassroots activities, amateurs' pursuits, and everyday work in the profession's underbelly—an approach that allows many long-ignored lives to be recognized and untold stories heard. The book also explores the allure of stringed instruments, especially the violin, in Britain, analyzing and contextualizing how the instruments and their players, makers, and collectors were depicted and understood.

  PublisherDOI

• Enriching Cultural Heritage Communities: New Tools and Technologies

  Interacting with Computers · 2024-04-19 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract This paper explores ways in which scholarly skill and expertise might be embodied in tools and sustainable practices that enable communities to create and manage their own digital archives. We focus particularly on tools and practices related to the recording and annotation of digitized materials. The paper is based on co-production practice in two very different kinds of community. Although the communities are different we find that tools designed for a specific community are valuable for others, thus offering the promise of general tools to support community-centred digitization and potentially also traditional archival practice.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reframing ephemera: digitisation, community music-making, and archival value(s)

  Routledge eBooks · 2023 · 2 citations

  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science

  Live musical performances play a powerful role in defining human communities across the globe, yet such intangible temporal/spatial experiences tend to leave only faint traces on the historical record. The Internet of Musical Events: Digital Scholarship, Community, and the Archiving of Performance (InterMusE) project is working with local concert-giving institutions to digitise diverse source types relating to musical events and linking them together in the form of a dynamic digital archive, enabling them to “speak” to each other despite their apparently incompatible formats and geographical dispersal. Modelling new approaches to the open-access presentation of music-historical research based on digitally enabled collaboration, the project adopts an intensely collaborative and egalitarian approach to working alongside these musical communities to understand and preserve their heritage. This chapter explores community archives of musical ephemera as sites of co-produced, “post-custodial” collecting and preservation that can radically transform approaches to digitisation, community music-making, and archival value(s).

  PublisherDOI

• FAIR but Flexible: Designing for Dynamic User Contributions in Digital Musicology Resources

  2022-07-25 · 2 citations

  article

  The FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) have become an established paradigm for scholarly data management, but effectively assume an established dataset to share, collected or curated by a professional scholar or archivist. In contrast, the InterMusE project is working with amateur-led concert societies whose members will not be conversant with standardised ontologies or data standards. Furthermore, their archives are valuable both to them and for a range of scholarly study (e.g. musicology, history, sociology), but will inevitably be digitised in a piecemeal fashion with incremental additions and annotations by academics as well as community members. Community and scholarly reuse is a central aim for the data produced, but the FAIR principles need to be re-imagined in order to create a digital resource that is both FAIR and flexible. Based upon the real-world experiences of InterMusE, this paper highlights the FAIR issues at play, and presents its approaches to addressing these issues designed to improve the sustainability and impact of smaller, dynamic digital musicology resources.

  PublisherDOI

• Tools and technology to support rich community heritage

  Electronic workshops in computing · 2022-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  <p class="first" id="d1021803e153">This paper explores ways in which scholarly skill and expertise might be embodied in tools and sustainable practices that enable communities to create and manage their own digital archives. We focus particularly on tools and practices related to the recording and annotation of digitised materials. The paper is based on co-production practice in two very different kinds of community. Although the communities are different we find that tools designed specifically for one are valuable for others, thus offering the promise of general tools to support community-centred digitisation and potentially also traditional archival practice.

  PublisherDOI

• Towards a Foundation for Collaborative Digital Archiving with Local Concert-Giving Organisations

  2021 · 3 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  The centenaries of former chapters of the British Music Society (BMS), established in 1918, have prompted their governing bodies to take stock of their histories and build on the cataloguing, documentation and preservation of their archival collections. The InterMusE project aims to support this shared instinct to archive by capturing and, crucially, linking different forms of data regarding the musical events provided by three of these local concert-giving organisations, beginning with the digitisation of their collections and with a view to producing a dynamic, open-access digital archive. This paper outlines our approach to establishing a foundation for developing a new kind of digital archive for musicology that is both valuable for researchers, fulfils the needs of the societies and their communities, and sheds light on community music-making on a national and, ultimately, international scale. By carrying out a series of preliminary scoping exercises, including informal interviews and archival-collection assessments, we can compare current archiving and preservation activities across the societies. These conversations bring emerging themes, issues and challenges into focus, raising pertinent questions that will inform our development of transformative tools and techniques for community digitisation projects.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Democratising Digitisation : Making History with Community Music Societies in Digitally Enabled Collaborations

  2020 · 2 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Media studies

  In post-COVID times we are focusing quite rightly on the plight of our major cultural institutions; but just as important are the local societies that enrich our community life, including amateur music societies, devastated by stringent social-distancing requirements and the health and safety implications of live performance in small spaces. We propose a vision of digitally enabled collaboration that may help these societies rebuild their sense of community and purpose, by working together with academics, archives, and a major US arts centre to reconnect with their past and enrich understanding of their own histories and traditions within a broader national context.

  OA PDF

• Interpreting the Role of the Violin in the Ballykinlar Internment Camp during the ‘ Anglo–Irish War’ of 1919–1921

  Music and Letters · 2019-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Music-making in the internment camp at Ballykinlar in Ireland during the ‘ Anglo–Irish’ conflict, 1919–21, was one of several purposeful recreational activities that the British military permitted for prisoners. Apparently cherished by its participants (including the celebrated republican Peadar Kearney) were elementary group lessons in the classical violin and Irish fiddle, which were taught by fellow inmates Martin Walton and Frank O’Higgins, using inexpensive, imported instruments funded by the Irish White Cross. Scrutinizing a range of primary sources, this essay explores how the class functioned in the harsh situation of detention, and attributes its tolerance, even encouragement, by the British to a neo-Victorian paternalistic value-system. It further considers the appeal and meaning that the violin held for students, highlighting its possible value and function as a psychological coping mechanism in the face of ‘barbed-wire disease’, a motivating connection to Irish heritage, home life, and contemporary culture, and even a means of enacting covert resistance to British oppression.

  PublisherDOI

• Postlude: Not an End

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2019-10-01

  book-chapter

  The Great War—the “war to end all wars”—ended nothing. In fact, the social and political consequences of the war, as well as the musical ones, continue to resonate even today. After a fifteen-year hiatus, during which the great powers nursed their wounds and grudges, the run-up to the continuation started: Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. And after World War II, there was Korea … and Algeria … and Vietnam … and Iraq …...

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rachel Cowgill

  University for the Creative Arts

  19 shared

• Alan Dix

  Swansea University

  12 shared

• Nicholas Temperley

  10 shared

• John Ella

  Leeds College of Music

  9 shared

• Yunchung Yang

  9 shared

• Suzanne Cole

  Suffolk Horse Society

  9 shared

• Jeremy Dibble

  9 shared

• John Stainer

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (2018)