Hearing the Crimean War

Gavin Williams is a musicologist and Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at King's College London. He wrote a PhD dissertation at Harvard University on sound and media in Milan ca. 1900, and was then a postdoctoral fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. He has published articles and book chapters on Futurist music, Italian opera and ballet, and soundscapes in nineteenth-century London, and is currently writing a book on the imperial geographies of recorded sound during the first half of the twentieth century.

• List of ContributorsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Sound Unmade Gavin Williams Sound, Technology, Sense 1. Sympathy and Synaesthesia: Tolstoy's Place in the Intellectual History of Cosmopolitan SpectatorshipDina Gusejnova 2. The Revolution Will Not Be Telegraphed: Shari'a Law as Mediascape Peter McMurray 3. Gunfire and London's Media Reality: Listening to Distance between Piano, Newspaper and TheaterGavin Williams 4. Overhearing Indigenous Silence: Crimean Tatars during the Crimean WarMaria Sonevytsky Voice at the Border 5. Orienting the Martial: Polish Legion Songs on the MapAndrea Bohlman 6. Who Sings the Song of the Russian Soldier? Listening for the Sounds and Silence of War in Baltic RussiaKevin C. Karnes 7. A voice that carriesDelia Casadei Wartime as Heard 8. Operatic Battlefields, Theater of WarFlora Willson 9. Earwitness: Sound and Sense-Making in Tolstoy's Sevastopol StoriesAlyson Tapp 10. InConsequence: 1853-6Hillel Schwarz Bibliography Index

This focused collection of essays explores the soundscapes of the Crimean War from an admirably diverse range of disciplinary and geographical perspectives. In doing so, it not only offers an ambitious rethinking of the transnational phenomenon of the Crimean War but also serves as a ground-breaking exemplar for the historical study of aurality.