10/06/2026
🎼 Anne Lister on tour!
Last week, members of our Collections Team carefully transported two volumes of music collated and played by Anne Lister to Langton Hall to be filmed as part of a research collaboration between the Universities of York and Southampton and Calderdale Museums - ‘Intimate Places: Music, Space and Self in Anne Lister's Yorkshire 1805-25’.
Thanks to this project, Anne Lister’s music books will be digitised and made freely available online later this year. Watch this space for further updates!
Below is a shortened summary of the project, with the full version available via the University of Southampton’s website at https://sound-heritage.ac.uk/news/anne-listers-music-shibden-hall
‘Anne Lister was an avid collector and consumer of vocal and instrumental music, which she performed privately with intimate female friends and gathered together to preserve in three bound volumes, two of which you can see here...
By digitising, interpreting, contextualising and performing her scores, both printed and manuscript, the project is bringing Lister's musical and literary worlds together and into dialogue with other female diarists of the period, such as Jane Ewbank of York, whose social circles overlapped with hers. The project shares how music played a vital role in the inner affective lives of these women while constructing characteristic sound worlds in Georgian Yorkshire.’
