Talk by Professor Michael Denning (Yale University). This year's lecture explores the soundscape of "modern times", the musical and cultural revolution triggered by the worldwide recording of vernacular musics between the development of electrical recording in 1925 and the outset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s. The musical styles and idioms etched out onto shellac disks reverberated around the world, igniting the first great battle over popular music, becoming the sountrack of decolonisation and remaking our musical ear.

6.30pm - Drinks Reception

7.00pm - Talk

Michael Denning is William R Kenan Jr Professor of American Studies at Yale Univesity. He is the author of Noises Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (2015) and Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004).