David R. M. Irving studied at Griffith University, the University of Queensland, and the University of Cambridge. He held post-doctoral positions at Christ's College, Cambridge, and King's College London, then taught at the University of Nottingham, the Australian National University, and the University of Melbourne. Since 2019 he has been an ICREA Research Professor at the Institució Milà i Fontanals de Recerca en Humanitats, CSIC. His research interests include the role of music in early modern intercultural contact, the global history of music, and historical performance practice. He is co-editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press) and co-general editor of A Cultural History of Western Music (Bloomsbury Academic). Awards include the Jerome Roche Prize (Royal Musical Association) and the McCredie Musicological Award (Australian Academy of the Humanities).
Research interests
My research stands at the nexus of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and global history, examining the role of music in intercultural contact during the early modern period. I have worked on the musical repercussions of Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and British colonialism in Southeast Asia, and the role of music in various early modern Catholic missions. I aim to develop new conceptual frameworks for global histories of music, and to explore the impact of colonialism on musical thought and practice in early modern Europe. My latest monograph, The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024. I am working on another book project, Transitory Sounds: Early Music, Global History, and Decolonial Praxis (under contract to University of Michigan Press). I have deep interests in early music and also serve as Chair of the International Musicological Society's Study Group "Global History of Music".
Selected publications
- Irving, DRM 2025. "Iberian Sources for the Historiography of Musics in the Early Modern Moluccas (Maluku)." In Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Music in the Indonesian Archipelago, edited by Anna Maria Busse Berger and Henry Spiller, 15-40. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Irving DRM 2025, 'Arnold Dolmetsch, the Rebab, and the Revival of the Rebec." In Rabab, Rubeba, Rubāb: Fellbespannte Streichinstrumente im historischen und kulturellen Kontext, edited by Marina Haiduk, Thilo Hirsch, and Thomas Gartmann, 209-231. Musikforschung der Hochschule der Künste Bern. Baden-Baden: Ergon Verlag.
- Irving DRM 2025. "Global Soundscapes from the First Voyage of Circumnavigation, 1519–1522." In Soundscapes of the Early Modern Hispanophone and Lusophone Worlds, edited by Victor Sierra Matute, 287-312. New York: Routledge.
Selected research activities
The last twelve months have been a productive and fulfilling time. I published six book chapters, two journal articles, two edited journal issues, and a review. These works emerged from my ongoing work in several fields: music and colonialism; music in eighteenth-century Europe; music in early-modern religious missions; the material histories of musical instruments and the social and cultural implications of resource extraction (from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries); and the work of early-music pioneer Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940) and his family.
I presented numerous conference papers and seminars. I was also invited to give three keynote lectures, which I delivered at University College London, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society. Many of the talks were related to the burgeoning field of Global Music History. I chaired a session for the Study Group devoted to this area at the International Musicological Society’s Intercongressional Symposium in Valencia in July. In October I presented a colloquium for ICREA, with Joan-Pau Rubiés, on “European Music and the Global Enlightenment”.