Old Ways, New Sounds: Folklore, Hauntology and Identity in British Music

Join us for an all-day seminar, exploring folklore, magic, and ritual in recent British music

This study day brings into focus intertwined strands of recent musical activity, those suggesting renewed attention to a nexus of overlapping themes of disappearing or forgotten ways of being: folklore, magic, the ritualistic, and the arcane.

These practices come during multiple crises, offering new modes of community-making in a contemporary society of acute atomisation, reestablished connections with natural forces during an era of climate emergency, and pathways to challenge modern epistemologies and post-industrial “business as usual”. Scholarly attention to these trends has been greater outside music—especially in film, literature, and media—but composers and musicians have been no less active than other artists in conjuring apparently lost pasts, connoted by such keywords as folk horror, the urban wyrd, and hauntology.

Within a British context, in the years leading up to and after the Brexit vote, questions of British national identity—or British national identities—have become ever more febrile, contested and convulsive, as well as seemingly polarised and irreconcilable. These questions intersect, ineluctably, with ideas of the folk, its (or their) folklore, whom it belongs to and who can contribute to it, alongside ideas of the land, who dwells in it, and to whom it belongs, and the juxtaposition of modernity—both high tech and mundane—with the magical or inexplicable. Perhaps unsurprisingly—to the extent that art reflects national trauma—the same period sees a welter of related cultural texts that foreground such concerns, including films such as Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) and Rose Glass’s Saint Maud (2019), or novels like Michelle Paver’s Wakenhyrst (2019), Lucy Rose’s The Lamb (2025) and Naomi Booth’s raw content (2025).

In a sort of mainstreaming of the themes and tropes which were already prefigured in the hauntological musics of, for instance, The Advisory Circle, Belbury Poly, Pye Corner Audio, Concretism, or The Caretaker, the horror often riffs on forebears from the 1970s. If 1970s Britain was riven by conflicts around class, race, gender, and sexuality, nonetheless at the time the direction of travel towards a more progressive society, where such disputes had been resolved, seemed settled. The backlash of the 1980s was as much a shock from the perspective of the 1970s as the Brexit vote was from the noughties. This study day focuses on music’s continuing engagement with this strand of cultural production in light of broader cultural shifts in Britain’s understanding of its national histories, societal, and environmental crises. It fosters dialogue between musicologists, practitioners, and thinkers from related disciplines to further insights in these areas.

The day includes words, reflections, and performance provocations from the following invited panelists:

• Naomi Booth (Professor of English, Durham University)
• Cameron Dodds (artist-composer and creative consultant)
• Ross Cole (Associate Professor of Music, University of Leeds)
• Robert Edgar (Professor of Writing and Popular Culture, York St John University)
• Steve Halfyard (Professor, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland)
• Adam Harper (Lecturer in Music, University of Oxford)
• Justin Hopper (writer and artist)
• Martin Iddon (Professor of Music and Aesthetics, University of Leeds)
• Kate Ledger (pianist and educator)
• Diane Rodgers (Senior Lecturer in Media, Sheffield Hallam University)
• Nina Whiteman (Reader in Composition at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a composition professor at the Royal Northern College of Music)
• Samuel Wilson (Reader in Music & Aesthetics, Guildhall School of Music & Drama)

Schedule:

09:30: Registration
10:00: Welcome
10:15-11:35: Panel 1 - “Some Folks”
11:35-11:55: Break (refreshments provided)

11:55-13:15: Panel 2 - “More Folks”
13:10-14:15: Lunch

14:15-15:35: Panel 3 - “Some More Folks”
15:35-15:50: Short break
15:50-17:00: Wrap up/discussion/next steps

Photo credit: Adam York Gregory

Made possible with funding from Music & Letters and Guildhall School of Music & Drama.