I have a Ph.D in Ethnomusicology from SOAS, University of London (2017), an M.A. in Ethnomusicology (UBC 2008), and a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies (UBC 2006). My research focusses on the cultural study of musical instruments, multi-sited ethnography, historiography, music revival, and transnational subcultures and scenes.

While the jew’s harp has been one of the most popular musical instruments in Europe since the Middle Ages, it has long been seen as an object of little value, sitting at the junctions between classical and folk, public art and private enjoyment, and urban and rural. My research demonstrates how the jew’s harp and the study of “unpopular” music can be used to critically engage with the core concepts of value, virtuosity, and productivity at the centre of Western musical discourse.

Books

Coggins, Owen, and Deirdre Morgan. (forthcoming). Jew’s Harps & Metal Music: Folk Traditions in Global Modernity. Routledge.

Jew’s Harps and Metal: Folk Traditions in Global Modernity is an ethnomusicological and cultural analysis of jew’s harps and metal music around the world. The jew’s harp is an ancient and globally-distributed acoustic musical instrument which, like metal, is associated with mysticism, magic, the supernatural, marginality and outsider status. The jew’s harp appears on hundreds of metal tracks by bands from dozens of countries, spanning Nordic and Baltic regions, Patagonia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Indonesia and elsewhere. The book explores how local and traditional resonances of the instrument are deployed in metal’s contemporary responses to disenchantment and depictions of mythical pasts.
 
My doctoral research project is an ethnographic study of jew’s harp revival communities based on multi-sited fieldwork in Norway, Austria, Sicily, and online. My work uses the jew’s harp to examine how musical instruments reflect changing tastes, technologies, and social identities, and how transnational music communities are changing radically in the digital age. This research was supported by a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and a Research Scholarship from SOAS, University of London.
 

MA Thesis

Morgan, Deirdre. 2008. "Organs and bodies: The Jew’s harp and the anthropology of musical instruments". MA thesis, University of British Columbia.

The Jew’s harp is unique among instruments, and in its apparent simplicity it is deceptive. It has been adapted to a wide array of cultural contexts worldwide and a diverse range of playing techniques, which, upon closer examination, reveal much about the cultures that generate them. Drawing on perspectives from organology, ethnomusicology, comparative musicology, ethnography, material culture, and the anthropology of the body, I situate my approach to the study of musical instruments as one that examines the object on three levels: physically (the interaction between the human body and the body of the instrument), culturally (the contexts in which it is used), and musically (the way it is played and conceptualized as a musical instrument). Integrating written, ethnographic, and musical evidence, this study begins broadly and theoretically, then gradually sharpens focus to a general examination of the Jew’s harp, finally looking at a single Jew’s harp tradition in detail. Using a case study of the Balinese Jew’s harp genggong, I demonstrate how the study of musical instruments is a untapped reservoir of information that can enhance our understanding of the human relationship with sound.


Peer-Reviewed Articles

Morgan, Deirdre. 2018. “Cracking the Code: Recordings, Transmission, Players, and Smiths in the Norwegian Munnharpe Revival.” Ethnomusicology Forum 27(2): 184-212. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17411912.2018.1506942

Though it operates on the margins of the Norwegian folk music scene, the munnharpe (jew’s harp) revival has been active since the 1960s and today boasts an active network of festivals, musicians, and blacksmiths. After contextualising the instrument’s position within Norwegian folk music and outlining the history of the munnharpe community, I explore the transmission and revitalisation of the munnharpe tradition, suggesting that a large part of the revival’s success lies in the availability and accessibility of archival recordings. I examine the transmission of playing technique and repertoire amongst musicians, then compare it with instrument building transmission amongst blacksmiths, analysing how the dynamic between munnharpe players and makers has shaped the instrument’s musical and material spheres. Tracing the symbiotic relationship between archives, recordings, players, and makers, I argue that this interplay has been central to the revival in both its past and present iterations.
 

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters

Morgan, Deirdre. 2023. “Arcadian Tones: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of the Austrian Maultrommel.” In Shaping Sound and Society: The Cultural Study of Musical Instruments, edited by Stephen Cottrell, Routledge: 189-211.

In eighteenth century Central Europe, a curious phenomenon occurred. During a one-hundred-year period, several virtuosos of the Maultrommel (jew’s harp) appeared. These performers were renowned in courts and concert halls across the Habsburg Empire for playing on up to sixteen Maultrommeln at a time. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the virtuosos had disappeared, and the instrument settled back into relative obscurity until its revival in the late twentieth century. What happened? What caused the Maultrommel’s sudden rise in popularity, followed by its disappearance for nearly a century? And how do Maultrommel players in Austria today engage with this former golden age in their own performance practice? Blending historical sources with ethnographic data, this chapter tells the story of the Maultrommel both as it is written and as it is remembered and reinterpreted by its present-day practitioners. I use the Maultrommel to trace developments in eighteenth century music, where composers turned increasingly towards folk melodies and instruments for source material, and argue that by the nineteenth century, technical advancements in musical instrument construction and the invention of more complex (and equal-tempered) free reed instruments like the harmonica, concertina, and accordion precipitated a dormant period for the Maultrommel. Finally, I investigate the instrument’s renaissance in present-day Austria, examining how the past is reframed through the use of historical playing techniques and reimagined through the lens of contemporary revival.
 

Morgan, Deirdre. 2016. “Excavating heritage: The Archaeology of Revival in the Jew’s Harp Traditions of Norway, Austria, and Sicily.” In Studien zur Musikarchäologie X, edited by Ricardo Eichmann and Lars-Christian Koch, 75-79. Rahden/Westfalen.: Verlag Marie Leidorf.

Since the late 20th century, the popularity of the jew's harp has been on the rise. Using ethnographic case studies of contemporary jew’s harp communities and their music (Norway, Austria, and Sicily), I use the international jew's harp revival to examine the connection between material culture and cultural identity. In particular, I examine how archival audio recordings are used as source material for jew's harp players, and suggest that these revivals are themselves a kind of archaeological process. In so doing, I show how the ethnographic present can contribute a deeper understanding of the past in the field of music archaeology.
 

Book Reviews

Morgan, Deirdre. 2017. Review of The Jew’s Harp in Britain and Ireland, by Michael Wright. Ethnomusicology Forum 26(2): 271-273. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/jSgdBqKzhniDbRkpXHHz/full

Jew’s harp player and scholar Michael Wright has conducted an encyclopedic survey of English-language sources to produce a compelling history of the instrument in Britain and Ireland. This book is a major contribution to the growing genre of jew’s harp studies, an area that has been chronically under-represented in musicological literature and has thus far consisted of only a handful of monographs and several pedagogical manuals. With this volume, Wright enhances our knowledge of the jew’s harp by constructing a detailed social history of a single geographic region, and demonstrates how deeply embedded these instruments have been in Western Europe since the Middle Ages.
 

Other Writing

Morgan, Deirdre. 2018. “Splendor Amsterdam’s Vision for a Sustainable Music Space.” VIM House, September 21, http://vimhouse.ca/splendor-amsterdams-vision-for-a-sustainable-music-space/


I was honoured to be commissioned to write a freelance article for VIM House, the Vancouver Independent Music Centre, about an artist-run centre in Amsterdam.

In a time when the social media feeds of Vancouver musicians are rife with posts from peers leaving the city to move to Vancouver Island or the Sunshine Coast in pursuit of affordable living, those left behind are faced with the narrative that Vancouver is becoming a cultural ghost town. To counter this dystopian vision and offer potential frameworks for supporting musicians who choose to stay in the city, VIM House hosted two discussions—at Gold Saucer Studio and at Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre at SFU Woodwards—in July 2018 with David Dramm, Anne La Berge and Norman van Dartel of Splendor, an artist-driven music space in Amsterdam. The three speakers provided tantalizing glimpses of collective effort and self-sufficiency, offering plenty to consider for a Vancouver music scene struggling to find its place.

Conference Presentations

2022 “Jew’s Harps in Underground Metal and the ‘Inverse Shock’ of Resistance Discourses between Global South and North.” Presented with Owen Coggins at the International Society for Metal Music Studies Biennial Research Conference, June 8.

2019 “Decolonizing British and North American Ethnomusicology/ies.” SEM-sponsored roundtable, Society for Ethnomusicology Conference, Bloomington, November 9.

2019 “I’m Up Next: Using Performance as a Fieldwork Strategy at Music Festivals.” British Forum for Ethnomusicology Conference, Aberdeen, April 14.

2018 “A Mere Boy’s Plaything: Children, Gender, and the Jew’s Harp.” Society for Ethnomusicology Conference, Albuquerque, November 18.

2018               “Archaic Fusion: An Analysis of Norwegian Munnharpe Style and Repertoire.” Analytical Approaches to        World Music, Thessaloniki, June 26.

2018                “Unworthy Objects: The jew’s harp and discourses of value in European Music.” British Forum for Ethnomusicology, Newcastle, April 13. Also presented at the Northwest Chapter Conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Bellingham, March 3.

2017                “Rustic Chivalry: Heroes, outlaws, and the Sicilian marranzano.” International Council for Traditional Music, Limerick, July 15. Also presented at the Society for Ethnomusicology, Washington D.C., November 10, 2016.

2016                “The Anatomy of Style: Playing technique as musical artifact.” AMS Popular Music Study Group, American Musicological Society & Society for Music Theory, Vancouver, November 3.

2016                “Speaking in Tongues: A multi-sited ‘insider’ ethnography of the international jew’s harp revival.” Researching Music: Interviewing, Ethnography, and Oral History. Institute for Musical Research, London, June 6.

2015                “The Death of the Drone: The rise, fall, and rebirth of the Maultrommel in Central Europe.” Society for Ethnomusicology, Austin, Texas, December 3.

2015                “Hidden Creators: The role of blacksmiths in the international Jew’s harp revival.” International Council for Traditional Music, Kazakh National University of Arts, Astana, July 21.

2015                “Revival/Continuation: Paradigms of transmission and boundaries of knowledge in the Norwegian munnharpe smithing tradition.” British Forum for Ethnomusicology & Société Française d’Ethnomusicologie, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, July 4.

2015                “The imagined community incarnate: Virtual connectedness and co-presence in the international jew’s harp revival.” Anthropology in London, University College London, June 15.

2015                “The Norwegian munnharpe revival: A dialogue between material and intangible culture.” Horniman Museum & Royal Anthropological Institute, London, March 26.

2014                “Cracking the Code: The role of archival recordings in the revival of the Norwegian munnharpe.” Society for Ethnomusicology, Wyndham Grand Downtown Hotel, Pittsburgh, November 13.

2014                “Excavating Heritage: The Jew’s harp revivals of Norway, Austria, and Sicily.” International Study Group on Music Archaeology 9th symposium, Ethnological Museum, Berlin, September 13.

2014                “Breathing Life to Iron: Audio recordings and the (re)making of the Jew’s harp virtuoso.” British Forum for Ethnomusicology & Analytical Approaches to World Music joint conference, SOAS, University of London, July 1.

2013                “Harnessing Participation: Social media as living cultural archive in the international Jew’s harp community.” British Forum for Ethnomusicology and ICTM-Ireland joint conference, “Ethnomusicology in the Digital Age”, Queen’s University, Belfast. April 6.

2012                “Hearing Balinese Genggong: the Jew’s harp and the anthropology of musical instruments.” British Forum for Ethnomusicology, Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford. November 24.