Anna Braddick (UK)

The humanities have always remained a constant in my life. Art, music, poetry, history and theatre filled my home, and became the pursuits I naturally gravitated towards as a student. I have worked as a piano and music theory teacher, and undertaken a Foundation Diploma in Art and Design. It proved a challenge to settle on a degree, but not one I have regretted, and in 2023 I graduated from UCL with a BA in History. My time in London was thoroughly immersed in histories of gender and medicine, science and magic, music and art. My biggest revelation was that my subject was fundamentally interconnected with the wider humanities. It became an opportunity to marry my apparently disparate interests. I particularly enjoy grappling with the rich irony that music - as an act which brings order and meaning to noise - found itself in particular historical contexts to be a force for disorder. The language of harmony and concord inform my scholarly inquiry, and I am particularly interested in the gendered body as a location in which this was subverted in Early Modern England and Italy. Boethian philosophy spoke of inaudible spheres of music (musica mundana and musica humana), which instilled within music certain dubious origins.

This formed the basis of my dissertation, and is the path I intend to follow further during my upcoming year in Oxford. My endless fascination for the humanities has often been made to feel to my detriment. I hold enormous gratitude, therefore, to have been invited onto the Ertegun programme, where the interdisciplinary is celebrated. I feel strongly that musical education should not be a privilege for the few, when it is a universal language of expression that exists within us all. One of my greatest pleasures has been to bring music to the young people I work with, as a first encounter with a world that is all too often inaccessible. Outside of my music-making and history-writing, I keep myself busy through reading, drawing and museum-hopping. I am almost always knitting.