Dr Kate Kennedy
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drkkennedy.bsky.social
Dr Kate Kennedy
@drkkennedy.bsky.social
Research Fellow at Wolfson College Oxford and Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. @ox.ac.uk

➡️ drkatekennedy.com
➡️ Tweets @DrKKennedy
➡️ Instagram drkatekennedy
The @suttonhoo.bsky.social @nationaltrust.org.uk lyre — an imaginative reconstruction from the fragments of the #AngloSaxon original discovered in the burial mound 🪕

The last time a lyre was heard here, it was before the #Vikings… and they probably didn’t play Oh When The Saints Come Marching In 😅🎶
November 17, 2025 at 10:17 AM
At Hatchlands Park @nationaltrust.org.uk with the OAE’s keyboard specialist Stephen Devine, revelling in a wealth of historic instruments 🎹✨ But I’m here to explore #Napoleon ’s piano — his wedding gift to his teenage bride, who sobbed in her carriage all the way from Vienna 🎼💔

#NationalTrust
November 17, 2025 at 10:05 AM
🎆 Fireworks on the weekend at BBC Radio 3's Record Review!

Explosive playing from my choices of Sinfonia of London, @thehalle.bsky.social, and super-cellist Gautier Capucon 🎻✨ Expect resurrection, celebration, and more!

📻 Listen here: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

#Radio3 #RecordReview
BBC Radio 3 - Record Review, Gershwin's 'An American in Paris' in Building a Library with Ben Gernon and Andrew McGregor
Ben Gernon chooses his favourite recording of Gershwin's 'An American in Paris'.
www.bbc.co.uk
November 10, 2025 at 9:37 AM
Reposted by Dr Kate Kennedy
Lovely record track choices on Record Review, @drkkennedy.bsky.social with Andrew McGregor, #BBCradio3
"Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound" by Dr Kate Kennedy, Head of Zeus.

I'm not reading the reviews until I finish this wonderful journey into the cello - personal to Kennedy and the 4 cellists whose lives she actually charts.

#Cello #Biography
November 8, 2025 at 7:53 PM
If you haven’t yet tuned in… podcast available via website, Spotify, Apple Music! 🎧 with Sarah Dowd on @historyffs.bsky.social!

👉 Listen, follow, rate, review now: podfollow.com/historyffs

#HistoryFFS #MusicAndMemory #HistoryPodcast #WWII #CulturalHeritage #Cello @oxmusicfaculty.bsky.social
October 30, 2025 at 9:05 AM
Reposted by Dr Kate Kennedy
From the conclusion of this year’s ‘On Life-Writing’ series: @drkkennedy.bsky.social and Hermione Lee answered the enduring question facing biographers— ‘How Close is Too Close?’.
October 22, 2025 at 9:59 AM
Reposted by Dr Kate Kennedy
Thrilled by these amazing reviews just days after our triple-episode launch ❤️

Thank you @drkkennedy.bsky.social, Louisa Rogers & @nickhewitt4.bsky.social! Next episode drops 28 October.

podfollow.com/historyffs

We’d love to hear what you think!

#HistoryFFS #HistoryPodcast #NewPodcast #ListenNow
October 24, 2025 at 3:29 PM
Had a wonderful conversation with Sarah Dowd on @historyffs.bsky.social! - exploring music, memory, and the missing cello that connects generations. 🎻

Out now via website, Spotify, Apple Music! 🎧

👉 Listen, follow, rate, review: podfollow.com/historyffs

#HistoryFFS #HistoryPodcast #Cello
October 21, 2025 at 8:37 AM
Reposted by Dr Kate Kennedy
Couldn’t imagine a better way to start the series. Thank you, Kate, for such a beautiful discussion about sound, silence, and remembrance - it set the tone perfectly for HistoryFFS.
October 16, 2025 at 5:54 PM
Reposted by Dr Kate Kennedy
Great new #History podcast coming next week “History For F***'s Sake”

@historyffs.bsky.social

Episode 1: with the fabulous Kate Kennedy @drkkennedy.bsky.social

#History
#BritishHistory
#skystorians #academicsky
#historyeducation
#podcast

youtube.com/shorts/2bdtG...
History For F***'s Sake Episode 1: Kate Kennedy
YouTube video by HistoryFFS
youtube.com
October 15, 2025 at 4:00 PM
🚨🎙️ Episode 1 streaming next Tuesday 21 October 2025 ✨Excited to be opening the brand new @historyffs.bsky.social podcast series!

Be the first to listen 👉 historyffs.com Also available on Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

#HistoryFFS #Podcast #Cello #MusicHistory @oxmusicfaculty.bsky.social
October 16, 2025 at 9:02 AM
🎶📚 FREE EVENT @goldsmithsuol.bsky.social 🎶📚

Join me & @elliechan.bsky.social for 'Music, life-writing & how to write about what you can’t hear.'

📅 15 Oct | 🕔 5–6pm | 📍 Goldsmiths (Richard Hoggart Building)


More info 👉 www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id...

@goldsmithsenglish.bsky.social
October 13, 2025 at 11:44 AM
✨ Here's the front-page review of Cello by Thomas Laqueur in this week’s @lrb.co.uk! 🎻

👉 Full review here: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

📖 Only £10.11 on Amazon: www.amazon.co.uk/Cello-Journe...

#Cello @headofzeus.bsky.social @oxfordlifewriting.bsky.social @londonreviewbookshop.co.uk
Thomas Laqueur · A Different Life: Can cellos remember?
Cellists and violinists in particular are haunted by the musicians who played their instruments before them and those...
www.lrb.co.uk
October 7, 2025 at 8:34 AM
📻 This Sunday 12 October at 19:30 📻

Tune in and listen to the re-release of my BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature, ‘The Cello and the Nightingale’, and hear why Beatrice Harrison’s famous recording made history. 🎶

👉 www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

#BBCRadio3 #radio3 #cello @oxmusicfaculty.bsky.social
BBC Radio 3 - Sunday Feature, The Cello and the Nightingale
Kate Kennedy examines the events surrounding one of the BBC's first outside broadcasts.
www.bbc.co.uk
October 6, 2025 at 12:34 PM
👏 Well played – the Brahms and that lovely cello tune in the #Haydn slow movement sounded great! 🎶

A triumphant concert Saturday night for #Oxford Sinfonia at University Church Oxford, brilliantly conducted by Dexter Drown 👏🍷 A well-earned drink afterwards!

#ClassicalMusic #LiveMusic #Cello
September 29, 2025 at 8:48 AM
Reposted by Dr Kate Kennedy
One whole week of Duet! It’s been an absolute whirlwind of incredibly enriching conversations with @petroc.bsky.social @elizabethalker.bsky.social and @drkkennedy.bsky.social and SUCH a delight to see this whimsical little book out into the world. Available now in all good bookshops!
September 24, 2025 at 2:45 PM
Explored how we see music - instruments as art, sound as colour. We could have talked for hours @ @wolfsonoxford.bsky.social. @elliechan.bsky.social @oxmusicfaculty.bsky.social @duckworthbooks.bsky.social @headofzeus.bsky.social @oxfordlifewriting.bsky.social
September 24, 2025 at 2:13 PM
Reposted by Dr Kate Kennedy
September 20, 2025 at 11:06 AM
🎻 Next week at New Paths Music Autumn Festival!

📍 Toll Gavel United Church, Beverley (near Hull)
📅 Thursday 25th September 2025

Stories of shipwrecks 🚢, beehives 🐝 & hope.

🎟️ Tickets 👉 www.ticketsource.co.uk/new-paths-mu...

#Cello #LiveMusic #Festival #Storytelling
www.ticketsource.co.uk
September 18, 2025 at 8:19 AM
Reposted by Dr Kate Kennedy
four cellos and their humans
Some thoughts on > Cello: A journey through silence to sound > by Kate Kennedy > Head of Zeus 2024 Kate Kennedy had her fledgling career as a professional cellist thrown off track by injury, as she explained in this extract from the book, leading her to reflect on what happens when the symbiotic relation between a musician and their instrument is broken by unfortunate events. Now she explores four examples of cellists who were separated from their cellos in more dramatic circumstances, dragging her own cello around Europe to find the places and soundscapes that these earlier cellos and their humans had inhabited. The instruments in question are, in chronological order: * The Cristiani Stradivari, and its eponymous owner, Lise Cristiani (1827-1853), who died on an epic concert tour through the Russian Empire, covering remote locations that possibly hadn't seen a cello before. The cello currently resides in a museum in Cremona. * A Gadigliano cello played by Hungarian composer Pál Hermann, who was murdered in the Holocaust. The cello was saved by relatives after his arrest, but the family sold it later and the author has been unable to find out what happened to it after 1952. * A Ventapane cello played by Anita Lasker when she was growing up in Breslau. She survived the Holocaust playing a different cello in the women's orchestra at Auschwitz concentration camp. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who turns 100 this year, has also written a memoir about this. The fate of her Ventapane is unknown. * The Mara Stradivari cello, which ended up floating in the Rio de la Plata when a ferry carrying its owner Amadeo Baldovino and his quartet sank in July 1963. (I don't understand how Baldovino could abandon the cello in search of some float to cling to - surely a cello in a wooden case floats well enough to keep the cellist above water?) It was rebuilt from fragments by W.E. Hill & Sons in London. Since then, it has served Heinrich Schiff and is now played by his alumnus Christian Poltera. It is thus the only one of the four instruments which is known to be still in active service. The book fits my obsessions with cellos, sense of place, soundscapes really well - the main difference to what I am trying to do with my musical memoir project is that the instruments in my family - and the ones I am currently rescuing / restoring - are in a more modest price range, there are absolutely no Stradivariuses involved in my instrumental adventures (even if some of the labels pretend otherwise). As many examples demonstrate, the exorbitant market value and cultural significance of the famous instruments isn't doing them a good service, in that many of them are now silently sitting in museums or safe vaults, instead of playing music. On the other hand, the shipwrecked instrument certainly wouldn't have been pieced together again if it hadn't been a Stradivarius. On a related note regarding the relation between insanely famous and common or garden instruments, the author discovered a hilarious entry in the logbooks of W.E. Hill luthiers regarding a visit by Albert Einstein and his violin in October 1933 (note 17 on page 433). The luthiers were quite disparaging about the quality of Einstein's violin and suggested that the only possible reason he might like its sound was that he had gotten used to it. In a blatantly unfair comparison, they showed him the Messiah Stradivarius (now residing in a glass case in the Ashmolean Museum) and let him bow a note on it. Still, Einstein left a happy note in their books, and didn't swap his beloved "Line" for an expensive model. (I still need to scan through the other endnotes in case there are more hidden treasures like this.) Related to the Cristiani and the Messiah in their museum displays, the author shares an interesting suggestion, namely that the displays should include recorded music from the same or a similar instrument, such that they could resonate with an appropriate sound. I would sign that petition immediately. In a more understanding future, we will regard it as cruelty to keep museum instruments in permanently silent environments. Useful things I learned from the book include the concept of whakapapa, a Maori term for genealogy including objects and locations, which reminds me of what I'm trying to do with my cello memoir and other family history endeavours. It was interesting to read about historic Breslau, as the parents of our old cellist came from there, but had left following railways job opportunities half a century before Anita was born. Also handy to learn about the traditional luthiers quarter in Paris (rue de Rome, near gare St. Lazare) and the museum in Cremona (where the Cristiani cello now resides), places to visit some time, but preferably travelling without a cello. I was pleased to see that I already have many of the cello books the author cited, but one blatant gap in my collection is the autobiography of Beatrice Harrison, who famously duetted with a nightingale (or possibly with a nightingale imitator) on live radio in the early days of the BBC. Another is Cellistinnen by Katharina Deserno (2019). Watch this space. The cover shows the Cristiani cello (the other side of it is on the back).
proseandpassion.blogspot.com
March 21, 2025 at 6:21 PM
Reposted by Dr Kate Kennedy
@solsetur there's a great book by Kate Kennedy called Cello that explains the bond between a cellist their instrument.
August 16, 2025 at 12:57 PM
Reposted by Dr Kate Kennedy
"Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound" by Dr Kate Kennedy, Head of Zeus.

I'm not reading the reviews until I finish this wonderful journey into the cello - personal to Kennedy and the 4 cellists whose lives she actually charts.

#Cello #Biography
September 13, 2025 at 10:20 AM
Reposted by Dr Kate Kennedy
Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound by Kate Kennedy (even if you know nothing about musical instruments, it's a real life detective mystery)
August 7, 2025 at 10:49 PM
Reposted by Dr Kate Kennedy
Just announced!

To celebrate the launch of her book ‘Duet’ Dr Eleanor Chan will be in conversation with Dr Kate Kennedy (author of 'Cello') on Monday 22 September.

Tickets are just £6.50.

Details: www.musicatoxford.com/whats-on/boo...
Book Launch: Dr Eleanor Chan's 'Duet' | Music at Oxford
To celebrate the launch of her book ‘Duet’ Dr Eleanor Chan will be in conversation with Dr Kate Kennedy.
www.musicatoxford.com
September 16, 2025 at 8:38 AM
🎙️ Listen to my radio interview on Cello 🎻 and exciting new writing projects on Selina MacKenzie's Lifestyles Show on @tre.radio

Link here (near top of announcements): drkatekennedy.com

#Cello #AuthorInterview #ClassicalMusic #Books #OnAir
September 15, 2025 at 12:54 PM