David Irving

Biography

David R. M. Irving studied at Griffith University, the University of Queensland, and the University of Cambridge. He received his PhD from Cambridge (Clare College) in 2007. He was subsequently a Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and held a post-doctoral position at King’s College London; he 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 (IMF), CSIC, in Barcelona. His research interests include the role of music in early modern intercultural contact, global histories of music, and historical performance practice. He is co-editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press) and co-general editor of the six-volume set A Cultural History of Western Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). Awards include the Jerome Roche Prize (Royal Musical Association) and the McCredie Musicological Award (Australian Academy of the Humanities). He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2015, and since 2019 has been a Corresponding Fellow. In 2021 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Irving’s 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. He has 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. His first book, Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila (Oxford University Press, 2010), examined the impact of Spanish colonialism on music in the Philippines, from the late sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries. From 2015 to 2019 he led the ARC Discovery Project Malay Music and Dance from the Cocos (Keeling) Islands at the University of Melbourne. Irving also aims 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. His latest monograph, The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century, is to be published by Oxford University Press in 2024. Another book project, Transitory Sounds: Early Music, Global History, and Decolonial Praxis, is under contract to University of Michigan Press. Irving has deep interests in early music and serves on the Steering Committee of the International Musicological Society’s Study Group “Global History of Music”.