Dr Paul Newton-Jackson
Centre for Research Collections Fellow, July - October 2023
Home Institution: University of Edinburgh
Paul Newton-Jackson is a musicologist and historian whose research explores links between music, politics and society in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Originally from Hamilton, New Zealand, Paul completed his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. His PhD dissertation, entitled Georg Philipp Telemann and the Invention of “the Polish style”: Musical Polishness in the Early Modern German Imagination (2022) examined seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cultural and political relations between Poland and Germany through the lens of music and dance. He has published articles and reviews in Eighteenth-Century Music, Early Music, and Music & Letters, and his article ‘Early Modern Polonaises and the Myth of “Polish Rhythms”’ will appear in The Journal of Musicology in April 2024. In November 2023, Paul will commence a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at KU Leuven in Belgium, researching cultural exchange in sacred music between Scotland and the Low Countries during the sixteenth century.
Project title: Mahogany, Ivory, and Tortoiseshell: Towards a Political Ecology of Eighteenth-Century Keyboard Instruments
How did the carapace of a tropical hawksbill sea turtle reach a keyboard-making workshop in eighteenth-century Hamburg? What journey did the wood from a tree growing in the Caribbean rainforest take in order to become a mahogany panel on a spinet manufactured in 1780s Edinburgh? Focusing on German and Scottish keyboards in the University of Edinburgh’s musical instrument collections, this project traces non-European plant- and animal-derived materials from their source to the finished instrument. In doing so, it sheds light on early modern global networks of resource extraction and trade, and the patterns of human and environmental exploitation which often underpinned then. Thus, through an exploration of the ecological and colonial material histories of these high-status objects in the University’s collections, this project works to gain a better understanding of past injustices and their present-day legacies.