What insights can music offer about financial crises? My dissertation, “Hearing the Bubble: Music and the Rise of Modern Finance in the Age of Handel,” centers on the 1720 South Sea Bubble to explore how a diverse collection of musical works, institutions, and mediums—shaped by the convulsions of the early eighteenth-century boom-and-bust—can prompt us to think anew about the spectacular crash of the modern world’s first bubble economy, not merely as a dramatic episode in our economic past but as a momentous chapter in the history of modern culture.

From George Frideric Handel’s investment in South Sea stock, through the founding of Europe’s first joint-stock opera company, to the theatrical satire of The Beggar’s Opera, the South Sea Bubble left its indelible mark on some of the best-known subjects of Western music history. In writing a musical history of the South Sea Bubble, my dissertation—drawing from financial anthropology, New Economic Criticism, and the recent cultural and behavioral turns within the study of the British Financial Revolution—broadens radically the archival ambit of early eighteenth-century music historiography, exploring music’s significance in conjunction with documented practices of government, accounting, corporate management, and stock trading. Under this extended archival purview, I consider how these primary sources freely intersected with one another in a pre-disciplinary era when culture and politics, music and money, aesthetics and economics were not so easily separated. I ask how music, and the broader sonic culture of early modern English society, actively engaged in the political economy of Britain’s nascent Financial Revolution, both catalyzed and distressed by the bubble, and its persistence post-crisis.

This talk offers a synopsis of my dissertation while highlighting a pivotal chapter that investigates the financial-economic functions of English ballads amidst the burgeoning expansion of Britain’s paper economy. The 1720 crisis triggered an implosion of paper-based instruments: stock scrips, credit notes, newspapers, and pamphlets—as well as broadside ballads. Functioning as both entertainment and journalism, a unique strain of balladry which I call “bubble ballads”—viral songs replete with references to and commentary on the trading frenzy—burst forth in London’s Exchange Alley. While furnishing the cacophonous soundscape of London’s streets in South Sea heat, these ballads also disseminated (dis)information about the stock market, blurring the lines between music, literature, and finance.

Contrary to prevailing musicological wisdom, which views these ballads as mere trifles, dismissed as lowbrow and slipshod musical consumables, I argue for a reassessment of these musical-financial ephemera as valuable early modern media artifacts with a potency that belied their humble form. Subjecting the ballads to combined hermeneutic and media-material analyses, I bring music to bear on the recent historiographic turn towards a behavioral understanding of the nature of the South Sea crisis, seen as a public mania shaped by evolving economic narratives and their contagious spread. I contend that the ballads, acting as vectors of market narratives, exerted an active hand in inflating, sustaining and ultimately puncturing the speculative bubble. More specifically, I examine the bubble ballads in juxtaposition with contemporary financial documents by bringing our attention to their shared medium—paper. This reorientation towards the primary sources’ media attributes allows us to consider how musical meaning and asset value, of which these market artifacts were bearers, as forms of “paper knowledge,” thus imbued with an aura of imagination veering between permanence and change. I propose these ballads offer deeper insights into the underlying value mechanisms of the South Sea Company’s financial scheme, particularly the rampant development of derivatives finance it fostered, thereby shedding light on the epistemic fragility at the heart of the market maelstrom.

About the presenter:

I am a PhD student in musicology at Cornell University. My research broadly concerns the entwinement of music and political economy in history. I am currently finishing my dissertation, which is intended as a musical history of the world’s first modern financial crisis—the South Sea Bubble of 1720. It examines the reciprocal influences between the speculative crisis and contemporaneous musical practice and discourse, arguing that European musical life provides a vital framework for understanding the advent of modern financial capitalism both through and as cultural history. My research has been supported by fellowships and grants including from the Huntington Library, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies at UCLA, the Institute for European Studies and the Center for Historical Keyboards at Cornell University. I hold a BA in economics and philosophy and an MPhil in musicology from the University of Hong Kong. Between these two degrees, I earned an MSt in music with distinction from Oxford University. I am also an active pianist and harpsichordist, having received my professional training at the Royal Academy of Music in London and McGill University in Montreal.