Traditional Tunes and Popular Airs: Speakers Announced
This event has now taken place.
The 4th Traditional Tunes and Popular Airs (TTPA) conference took place at Cecil Sharp House, London, on Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 November 2025, bringing together researchers working on ‘traditional’ and ‘popular’ tunes as transmitted and transformed in all manner of musical styles and genres, performance contexts, levels of society, historical periods, and geographical locations.
Programme and Speakers announced
Saturday 8 November
9.30am Registration, tea and coffee
9.50am Welcome
10am - 11.30am Session 1 – Historical Approaches in Tunes Research: Musical Spheres and Discursive Framings
1.1 Kirsten Gibson and Kathryn Roberts Parker with Oskar Cox Jensen
Challenging boundaries, changing perspectives: Ubiquitous tunes in Early Modern England
1.2 Amelia Le Plastrier
Mad Tom of Bedlam: The dance, the ballad, and the chaos of misinformation.
1.3 Sandra Joyce
Carolan beyond the harp: Transmission and transformation in printed collections of music
11.30am - 12 noon Coffee Break
12 noon - 1pm Session 2: Tunes, Texts and Transformations
2.1 Laura Planagumà-Clarà
“To the tune of Marizápalos”: Contrafacta in eighteenth-century Catalonia
2.2 Martin Nail
A pleasant Scotch tune, called, The Broom of Cowdenknowes
1pm - 2pm Lunch
2pm - 3.30pm Session 3: Pedagogy, Styles and Evolving Identities
3.1 Alice Little
Eighteenth-century tunes, styles and national identity
3.2 Niall Keegan
Recipes for Jelly-babies: The use of scores in the pedagogy of Brendan Mulkere
3.3 Nicola Beazely and Rowan Piggott
Exploring the landscape of instrumental folk music from England: An examination of creative and contemporary style
3.30pm - 4pm Coffee Break
4pm - 5.30pm Session 4: Tunes, Tonalities and Transcriptions
4.1 Jennifer Hesoun
In crooked cardinal directions: Mapping music and caves of the Cumberland Plateau
4.2 Stephen Rees
Praise the Lord! We are a diatonic nation. Or, here come the modes
4.3 Avril McLaughlin and Niall Keegan
Mixed modalities: Terminologies, perception and uses of modality in the performance practices of Irish traditional musicians
5.30pm - Closing notices
5.45pm - End
7.30pm - Music and song session, Storrow Hall (downstairs at Cecil Sharp House)
Sunday 9 November
9am Registration, tea and coffee
9.25am Welcome
9.30am - 11am Session 5 – Collecting, Publishing and Studying
5.1 Stephen Miller
‘Three splendid old songs’: Manx folk songs and the collections of Dr John Clague and the Gill brothers
5.2 Sean Goddard
Early recordings of English folk dance material: 1912-1921
5.3 Vic Gammon
Hans Nathan: Homage and critique
11am - 11.30am Coffee Break
11.30am - 12.30pm Session 6: Archival Sources and Communities
6.1 Celia Pendlebury
The extraordinary archive of Winster Morris Dancers: The benefits of maintaining archives in tunes research and the information gained from Winster’s archives – tune history and variation, methods, sources
6.2 Fiona Cormack and Thomas Gold
The Dorset Fiddlers: Enriching community, creativity and local identifiers through traditional tunes
12:30pm - 1:30pn Lunch
1.30pm - 3pm Session 7: Transforming Traditions
7.1 Ilduara Vicente Franqueira
The connection between Juan Montes and the Celtic tradition
7.2 Maureen Kelly
Cor des Alpes: Creating and sustaining heritage through performance practice
7.3 Mollie Carlyle
Shanties ashore: The Transformation of maritime work songs in 20th-century folk revival movements
3pm - 3.30pm Coffee Break
3.30pm - 5pm Session 8: Reinterpreting and Reimagining Traditional Tunes
8.1 Mick Verrier
A famous flower of melody: Sweet William and the radio-ballad songs of Ewan MacColl
8.2 Inna Lisniak and Taive Särg
Contemporary transformations in the practice of Ukrainian and Estonian folk music performers
8.3 Em Burrows
Travelling circuits: Reinterpreting British folk music through electronic practice
5pm Closing notices
5.15pm End
Organisers: Julia Bishop, Alice Little and Tiffany Hore (Director, VWML)
