So much of our ‘common’ knowledge of music in nineteenth-century Britain is bound up with received ideas. This series disputes their validity through research critically reassessing our perceptions of the period. Volumes in the series cover wide-ranging areas such as composers and composition; conductors, management and entrepreneurship; performers and performing; music criticism and the press; concert venues and promoters; church music and music theology; repertoire, genre, analysis and theory; instruments and technology; music education and pedagogy; publishing, printing and book selling; reception, historiography and biography; women and music; masculinity and music; gender and sexuality; domestic music-making; empire, orientalism and exoticism; and music in literature, poetry, theatre and dance.
By Paul Rodmell
May 30, 2022
French Music in Britain 1830–1914 investigates the presence, reception and influence of French art music in Britain between 1830 (roughly the arrival of ‘grand opera’ and opéra comique in London) and the outbreak of the First World War. Five chronologically ordered chapters investigate key ...
By Hannah L. Scott
April 01, 2022
Late nineteenth-century France was a nation undergoing an identity crisis: the uncertain infancy of the Third Republic and shifting alliances in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War forced France to interrogate the fundamental values and characteristics at the heart of its own national identity. ...
By Helen English
February 01, 2022
Music and World-Building in the Colonial City investigates how nineteenth-century migrants to Australia used music as a resource for world-building, focusing on coalmining regions of New South Wales. It explores how music-making helped British migrants to create communities in unfamiliar country, ...
By Benedict Taylor
February 07, 2019
Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) was Victorian Britain’s most celebrated and popular composer, whose music to this day reaches a wider audience than that of any of his contemporaries. Yet the comic operas on which Sullivan’s reputation is chiefly based have been consistently belittled or ignored by the ...
By Roger Hansford
February 04, 2019
This new study of the intersection of romance novels with vocal music records a society on the cusp of modernisation, with a printing industry emerging to serve people’s growing appetites for entertainment amidst their changing views of religion and the occult. No mere diversion, fiction was ...
By Paul Seeley
November 30, 2018
The first biography of Richard D’Oyly Carte, this is a critical survey of the career of the impresario whose ambitions went beyond the famous partnership of Gilbert and Sullivan. Errors and misconceptions in current literature are challenged and corrected to give a truer portrayal of one of the ...
By Judith Barger
September 18, 2018
Nineteenth-century British periodicals for girls and women offer a wealth of material to understand how girls and women fit into their social and cultural worlds, of which music making was an important part. The Girl's Own Paper, first published in 1880, stands out because of its rich musical ...
By Julia Grella O'Connell
April 18, 2018
The plight of the fallen woman is one of the salient themes of nineteenth-century art and literature; indeed, the ubiquity of the trope galvanized the Victorian conscience and acted as a spur to social reform. In some notable examples, Julia Grella O’Connell argues, the iconography of the Victorian...
Edited
By Rosemary Golding
March 26, 2018
Professionalisation was a key feature of the changing nature of work and society in the nineteenth century, with formal accreditation, registration and organisation becoming increasingly common. Trades and occupations sought protection and improved status via alignment with the professions: an ...
Edited
By Michael Kassler
November 23, 2016
The English Bach Awakening concerns the introduction into England of J.S. Bach's music and information about him. Hitherto this subject has been called 'the English Bach revival', but that is a misnomer. 'Revival' implies prior life, yet no reference to Bach or to his music is known to have been ...
By Bennett Zon, Martin Clayton
November 15, 2016
Filling a significant gap in current scholarship, the fourteen original essays that make up this volume individually and collectively reflect on the relationship between music and Orientalism in the British Empire over the course of the long nineteenth century. The book is in four themed sections....
By Claire Mabilat
November 16, 2016
Representations of music were employed to create a wider 'Orient' on the pages, stages and walls of nineteenth-century Britain. This book explores issues of orientalism, otherness, gender and sexuality that arise in artistic British representations of non-European musicians during this time, by ...