Dr Jenny Nex

Curator, Musical Instrument Collection and Lecturer in Musical Instruments

  • Heritage Collections

Contact details

Biography

Background

Following her early education in Cambridge, Jenny studied music at the University of Edinburgh from where she went on to specialise as a singer in historical performance at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She gained her MA in Museum and Gallery Management from City University in 1997 and in August 2005 took over as Curator of the Museum at the Royal College of Music. In 2013, she moved to a similar role in the Musical Instrument Museums Edinburgh based at St Cecilia’s Hall. Jenny’s research interests include the context, design and construction of historical musical instruments and in particular the business and economic activities of musical instrument makers working in London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which she explored in her PhD from Goldsmiths College in 2013. Jenny was jointly awarded the Frances Densmore prize by the American Musical Instruments Society for the work she published in The Gaplin Society Journal in 2014 with Dr Lance Whitehead. The work investigated the records of the Sun Fire Office between 1710 and 1779. Jenny continues to sing whenever possible, notably with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus and the choir of Old Saint Paul's Church.

Undergraduate teaching

An Introduction to Musical Instruments (Course Organiser)

Music and its Instruments (Course Organiser)

Individual sessions for a range of courses in different schools

Postgraduate teaching

MMus, MScR, PhD students

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Current research interests

Economic and business perspectives of musical instrument making firms in the 18th and 19th centuries Women as musical instrument makers

Past research interests

• Jenny Nex (2023) ‘Musical Instruments as Traded Commodities’, Shaping Sound and Society: The Cultural Study of Musical Instruments edited by Stephen Cottrell (London: Routledge), 212-29 • Jenny Nex (2023), ‘A note on string-making’, The Great Vogue for the Guitar in Western Europe: 1800-1830, edited by Christopher Page, Paul Sparks and James Westbrook (Boydell & Brewer), 269-71; awarded the chitarra d’oro prize in the ‘musicology’ category by the Convegno internazionale di chitarra in 2024 • Jenny Nex (2019), ‘Edinburgh’s last International Exhibition and its Music’ in Music and the Second Industrial Revolution, Music, Science and Technology 2, edited by Massimiliano Sala (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers), 3-28 • Arnold Myers & Jenny Nex (2019), ‘The Development of Industrial Brass Instrument Making in Britain’ in collaboration with Professor Arnold Myers in Music and the Second Industrial Revolution, Music, Science and Technology 2, edited by Massimiliano Sala (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers), 177-98 • Jenny Nex (2018) ‘Inventions and ideas on the peripheries of British piano design between 1752 and 1832’ in Muzio Clementi and British Musical Culture: Sources, Performance Practice, Style edited by Luca Lévi Sala and Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald, (London & New York: Routledge), 84-102 • Jenny Nex (2011), ‘Longman & Broderip’, chapter in The Music Trade in Georgian London, ed. Michael Kassler (London: Ashgate), 9–96 • Jenny Nex & Lance Whitehead (2010) ‘The Stringed Keyboard Instruments of Ferdinand Weber’, Aspects of Harpsichord Making in the British Isles, The Historical Harpsichord Volume V, (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press) ed. John Koster, 117–153 • Jenny Nex (2010), ‘Women in the Music Trade in Georgian London’, Instrumental Music and the Industrial Revolution, ed. Roberto Illiano & Luca Lévi Sala (Bologna: Ut Orpheus Edizioni), 329–359
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