Claire McGinn – Postdoctoral Researcher in Transmission in Motion (2020-2022)

Claire McGinn will conduct a two-year research project as part of TiM, supported by a Marie Curie Skłodowska Fellowship and in partnership with Museum Speelklok.

The present project will explore technical, conceptual, historical and performance-related aspects of the mechanical organ: outlining technological continuities between mechanical and digital machines for programmed music and the use of mechanical instruments later in the twentieth century; investigating ideas about expressive timing and the limits of performability associated with playback technologies; and tracing some of the experiences of the barrel organ’s most marginal performers at the height of its ubiquity in nineteenth-century Europe.

Her previous research considered political and economic dimensions of prominent classical-musical exports from the Baltic States, and she has also published on the temporal implications of prioritizing sonic over visual paradigms in environmental communications (2019) and on the relationship between gendered trauma and narrative structural conventions in written scholarship (2019). Claire has also worked as a freelance musician, in arts management, and in victim support.