2026 summer conference roundup
View of Thessaloniki over the Aegean Sea, from outside the IAML conference venue of Thessaloniki Concert Hall.
The project team presented their work at three conferences this summer. Joanna Bullivant, Frankie Perry, and David Lewis presented a themed panel at the 22nd International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music at the University of Toronto in June. Frankie presented her work on Elgar’s picture postcards and the implications of his epistolary and collecting practices for understanding 'picture postcard works' including In the South. Joanna discussed the meaning of themes in The Apostles in relation to biblical topography and eschatology. David presented a prototype digital companion to The Music Makers, explaining the dialogue between musicology and digital research that informed it.
Kevin Page and Frankie Perry presented posters at the Annual Congress of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres, which was held in Thessaloniki, Greece at the end of June and start of July. Kevin provided an overview of the digital architecture and of how the project’s musicology, cataloguing, and digital research strands fit together, while Frankie presented an overview of Elgar’s postcard corpus and displayed a couple of examples. The two posters can be viewed here:
The conference also provided a good opportunity to catch up with RISM colleagues. The Digital Libraries for Musicology annual conference was integrated within the IAML programme, where Sebastian Eck, who completed his MSc Digital Scholarship Practicum placement with the Elgar’s Themes project in 2025, presented his new article co-authored with Kevin Page. Prior to these conferences, David Lewis acted as chair of the programme committee for the Music Encoding Conference in Tokyo and also taught on the new Wrocław Digital Musicology School (an Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme).
Finally, in July Joanna presented a paper at the North American British Music Studies Association conference in Colorado Springs. Her paper used the 2025 film The Choral – about a fictional First World War performance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius – to explore how Elgar’s response to the conflict has been interpreted by filmmakers and scholars.