Traditional Tunes and Popular Airs Conference, Cecil Sharp House (November, 2025)

The opening days of November marked the beginning of what will be an intensive period of research activity for me, and the Traditional Tunes and Popular Airs (TTPA) Conference at Cecil Sharp House provided an intellectually rich starting point. Held in the historic headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, the conference unfolded within a space that has long shaped the study, circulation and ideological framing of British folk traditions. This setting sharpened the stakes of many conversations over the weekend: it is impossible to sit in Cecil Sharp House without a heightened awareness of how revivalist institutions have moulded both the sources we consult and the categories through which we interpret them.

The TTPA conference is notable for its interdisciplinarity, bringing together performers, historians, ethnomusicologists, archivists and community researchers. This year’s programme focussed on the movement of tunes across time and social contexts. Presenters engaged with questions of transformation, transmission and recontextualisation, examining how melodies shift between oral and written forms, how collectors and editors intervene in musical material, and how tunes navigate the porous boundary between 'traditional' and 'popular' idioms. For a scholar working on maritime music, where hybridity, functional context and transnational circulation are foundational, this thematic emphasis felt particularly resonant.

My own contribution, Shanties Ashore: The Transformation of Maritime Work Songs in 20th-Century Folk Revival Movements, sat comfortably within these broader discussions. In the paper, I traced the evolution of shanties from functional work songs aboard nineteenth-century merchant vessels to their mediated presentation in first-wave folk-song collections, their reanimation within the ideological frameworks of the second-wave revival, and their twenty-first-century resurgence in digital performance cultures. Presenting this material at TTPA allowed me to highlight an argument central to my current research: that shanty preservation has been profoundly shaped by revivalist politics, particularly the desire to stabilise fluid, improvisatory repertoire into forms that align with nationalistic or aesthetic expectations. The discussion that followed raised productive questions about mediation and the extent to which scholars can critically disentangle their work from revivalist legacies that remain embedded in our archives, methodologies and inherited taxonomies.

The conference experience extended beyond formal papers. On Saturday evening, the informal music-making session offered an illuminating counterpoint to the day’s analytical conversations. Listening to tunes passed fluidly around the room - each shaped by the stylistic habits, regional knowledge and personal histories of the performers - brought into sharper focus the tension between fixity and fluidity that recurred throughout the conference. It reinforced the central point that traditional music cannot be fully understood through printed sources alone. The vitality of live, communal performance offers insights into processes of variation and transmission that archives, by their nature, obscure. Of course, I sang 'A Drop of Nelson's Blood' as the sole shanty contribution to the proceedings.

This conference also served as the opening chapter of a month deeply orientated towards maritime musical culture. Later in November I will be attending a shanty festival aboard the Cutty Sark, an event that will bring the repertoire back into close proximity with the maritime heritage from which it emerged. I will then spend a day at the Victoria and Albert Museum, conducting archival research for an article on British maritime imaginaries in musical theatre, which considers how nautical themes and sonorities circulate in theatrical song across the long nineteenth century. The month concludes with another paper at the Music in 18th-Century Britain conference, where I will revisit the longstanding narrative linking Charles Dibdin with the development of sea-song culture, interrogating the assumptions that have allowed this connection to solidify within musicological discourse.

The TTPA conference offered not only a valuable forum for presenting my current work but also a timely opportunity to reassess the conceptual frameworks through which I approach maritime musical culture. The weekend’s discussions emphasised the necessity of attending to processes of mediation, institutional shaping and performative reinvention when engaging with repertories that have accrued multiple layers of revivalist interpretation. As I proceed to the Cutty Sark festival, the V&A research visit and the forthcoming paper on Dibdin later this month, the insights generated at Cecil Sharp House will inform both my methodological orientation and the broader theoretical questions underpinning my work on transmission, authenticity and the cultural afterlives of sea song. In this sense, the conference served as a significant point of departure for a sustained reconsideration of how maritime musical traditions are constructed, circulated and understood within contemporary scholarship.

Looking forward to the research ahead!

Dr. Mollie Carlyle