Boiled Banged Mush
England’s reputation for bad food is unfair. It distracts from the country’s reputation for bad music. Emily Cockayne, formerly at Oxford University and now an associate lecturer with the Open University, is doing her bit to correct the imbalance.
Cockayne studied the two centuries she believes were crucial for establishing Britain as a vibrant producer of boiler-factory-quality music. Her complacency-rattling report, "Cacophony, or Vile Scrapers on Vile Instruments: Bad Music in Early Modern English Towns", appeared in 2002 in the journal Urban History….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.