Cello - In Search of a Voice - Kate Kennedy
Shownotes
How do we tell stories of past voices through a cello, the voice of its player? This lecture explores what it means to be separated from your voice, and to find it again.
Dr Kate Kennedy traces a journey she took across Europe with her cello, to uncover the stories of instruments and their players. The result was a host of eccentric, sometimes tragic, always extraordinary accounts of silencing and survival, from the Auschwitz orchestra to a shipwreck, and even a cello full of bees.
This lecture was recorded by Kate Kennedy on the 9th of September 2026
Dr Kate Kennedy is a biographer, cellist, and broadcaster. She is one of the foremost critics of twentieth-century music, and lectures in Music and English at Oxford University, and is a regular presence on BBC Radio 3.
Kate is the Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing and a Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, having previously held Research Fellowships in English and Music at the University of Cambridge. She is also Director of the Centre for the Study of Women Composers, Director of the Museum of Music History, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Her most recent book Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound was published in August 2024 with Head of Zeus / Bloomsbury. It is a group biography that weaves together four narratives of cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury, and misfortune. She is also the author of the Dweller in Shadows – A Life of Ivor Gurney (Princeton University Press), and editor of Literary Britten, Lives of Houses (co-edited with Dame Hermione Lee), and The Silent Morning – Culture and the Armistice 1918. Both Cello and Dweller in Shadows were shortlisted for the Royal Philharmonic Society prize.
The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/cello-voice
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