Dr Wiebke Thormahlen

Reader in Music, Acting Head of Doctoral Programmes and Area Leader for History

Doctoral Supervisor

Wiebke Thormählen joined the Royal College of Music in September 2013 as Area Leader in History.

Her research, previously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and The Austrian Academic Exchange Service, explores the formulation of music as a language of emotions and its particular role in educational theories and policies since the eighteenth century. Having worked on aesthetic and educational ideals in Viennese salons of the late 18th century during her PhD, she now focusses on Britain in the late Georgian period, exploring music in domestic settings with a particular focus on arrangements of large-scale works, and domestic devotional music. Her interest in music as a social activity extends outwards from the domestic to the development and meaning of amateur choral societies in England.

She has contributed articles and reviews to the Journal of Musicology, Eighteenth-Century Music, Early Music, Notes, Acta Mozartiana and Neues Musikwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch and is currently working on a book exploring the meaning of different forms of “musical engagements” in early 19th-century London.

Wiebke is a Co-Investigator on Music, Home and Heritage, Sounding the Domestic in Georgian Britain, a three year AHRC-funded research project with the University of Southampton, and the National Trust.

Selected publications

Thormählen W (2020), Feel-good tunes: music aesthetics, performance and well-being in the Eighteenth Century, in J Kennaway and R Knoeff (eds.), Lifestyle and Medicine in the Enlightenment: The Six Non-Naturals in the Long Eighteenth Century (pp. 243-63), Routledge [ISBN 9781138610705].

Thormählen W (2019), From dissent to community: the Sacred Harmonic Society and amateur choral singing in London, in S Rutherford and R Parker (eds.), London Voices 1820-1840: Vocal Performers, Practice, Histories (pp. 159-78), University of Chicago Press [ISBN 9780226670188]

Thormählen W (2019), Two chapters in the Bloomsbury Cultural History of the Emotions: Music and dance, in Vol. 5, S Matt (ed.) A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Age of Romanticism, Revolution and Empire (1780-1920) (pp. 55-74); and Music and dance, in Vol.6, J Damousi & J Davidson (eds.) A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Modern and Post-modern Age (1920-2000+) (pp. 77-122), [ISBN 9781472515063].

Gouk P, Kennaway J, Prins J, & Thormählen W (eds.) (2018), The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind, and Well-being, Routledge [ISBN 9781138057760]. Includes chapter by W Thormählen: Framing emotional responses to music: music-making and social well-being in early nineteenth-century England (pp. 93-106).

Thormählen W (2015), The muse as hero(ine): gender and creative process in Hildegard von Hohenthal, in T Irvine, W Thormählen & O Wiener (eds.), Musikalisches Denken im Labyrinth der Aufklärung: Wilhelm Heinse’s Hildegard von Hohtenthal (pp. 187-206), Are Musikverlag [ISBN 9783924522506].

Thormählen W (2014), Lamenting at the piano: domestic music-making and well-being in eighteenth-century Britain, in W Sandberger (ed.), Göttinger Händelbeiträge: The Power of Musick: Music and Politics in Georgian Britain (pp. 144-160), Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht [ISBN 9783647278322].

Thormählen W (2014), Physical distortion, emotion and subjectivity: musical virtuosity and body anxiety, in J Kennaway (ed.), Music and the Nerves, 1700 – 1900 (pp. 191-215), Palgrave Macmillan [ISBN 978-1-137-33950-8]. [DOI].

Thormählen W (2010), Playing with art: musical arrangements as educational tools in van Swieten's Vienna, Journal of Musicology, 27 (3), 342-76 [DOI]. On RCM Research Online.

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Faculties / departments: Research, Academic staff