Emotions in Adversity: Disease, War, Crisis

GOING VIRAL: Music and Emotions during Pandemics (1679-1919)

Within day of Covid-19 reaching Europe in early 2020, music had emerged as one of the most prominent media for emotional engagement with the effects of lockdown, sickness and grief. Its remarkable primacy for expressing, navigating and shaping emotional pandemic experiences was quickly picked up by researchers and journalists who showed an immediate interest in finding evidence both for the role of music in past pandemics and for continuities across time. It quickly transpired, though, that they lacked established categories, shared methodologies and sufficient historical knowledge to describe and to compare the phenomenon adequately.

The study of music in pandemics, and especially of its emotional significance, is both underdeveloped and urgently needed - and has the potential to constitute a major new field of research on music, emotions and pandemics alike.

GOING VIRAL will be the first study to provide a comparative history of the imbrication of music in the emotional experiences of pandemics.