Irving, David R M
ICREA Research Professor at Institució Milà i Fontanals (CSIC - IMF).
Humanities
Short biography
David R. M. Irving studied violin and musicology at Griffith University and the University of Queensland, and undertook his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge. He was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge; held a post-doctoral position at King's College London; then taught at the University of Nottingham, the Australian National University, and the University of Melbourne. He became an ICREA Research Professor in 2019 and is based at the Institució Milà i Fontanals-CSIC (Barcelona). His research spans from music in early modern intercultural exchange to early modern global history and historical performance practice. He is co-general editor of the forthcoming Cultural History of Music series from Bloomsbury, and co-editor of the Cambridge University Press journal Eighteenth-Century Music. His awards include the Jerome Roche Prize from the Royal Musical Association and the McCredie Musicological Award from the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Research interests
My research stands at the nexus of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and global history, examining the role of music in intercultural exchanges during the early modern period. I have worked on musical and cultural repercussions of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and British colonialism in early modern Southeast Asia; I have also studied the role of music in Catholic missions (especially the Jesuits) in the early modern world. I aim to develop new conceptual frameworks and theoretical models for global histories of music, and to explore the impact of global colonialism on musical thought and practice in early modern Europe. I am currently tracing the rise of "European music" as a conceptual, aesthetic, and philosophical category, and am critiquing the emergence of cultural essentialism and exceptionalism in music historiography. I am also a violinist, have deep interests in organology, and am active in the field of historical performance practice.
Key words
Music and colonialism; early modern global history; intercultural exchange; musical hybridity and syncretism; music and religion