Afterword: Music, Sound, History

This afterword offers historiographical context for historical writing on music, stretching back to the pioneering work of Eugene Genovese and Lawrence Levine in the 1970s. For the articles in this special issue, it suggests Christopher Small’s concept of “musicking” as a useful way to think about music as social practice and proposes that these articles take on added power when read in relation to the recent scholarship on the history of the senses and especially of sound. Finally, it encourages historians’ expanded use of music as an interpretive tool.