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.
Edited
By Therese Ellsworth, Susan Wollenberg
October 06, 2017
Since the publication of The London Pianoforte School (ed. Nicholas Temperley) twenty years ago, research has proliferated in the area of music for the piano during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and into developments in the musical life of London, for a time the centre of piano ...
By Paul Rodmell
August 30, 2017
The first book devoted to the composer Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) since 1935, this survey provides the fullest account of his life and the most detailed appraisal of his music to date. Renowned in his own lifetime for the rapid rate at which he produced new works, Stanford was also an ...
By Meirion Hughes
March 29, 2017
The importance of nineteenth-century writing about culture has long been accepted by scholars, yet so far as music criticism is concerned, Victorian England has been an area of scholarly neglect. This state of affairs is all the more surprising given that the quantity of such criticism in the ...
By Fiona M. Palmer
October 31, 2016
Today Vincent Novello (1781-1861) is remembered as the father of the music-publishing firm. Fiona Palmer's evaluation of Novello the man and the musician in the marketplace draws on rich primary sources. It is the first to provide a rounded view of his life and work, and the nature of his ...
By William Weber
January 27, 2017
First published in 1975, Music and the Middle Class made a trail-blazing contribution to the social history of music, bringing together sociological and historical methods that have subsequently become accepted as central to the discipline of musicology. Moreover, the major themes of the book are ...
By Gordon D.W. Curtis
November 28, 2016
William Sweetland was a Bath organ builder who flourished from c.1847 to 1902 during which time he built about 300 organs, mostly for churches and chapels in Somerset, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, but also for locations scattered south of a line from the Wirral to the Wash. Gordon Curtis places ...
By Jennifer L. Oates
November 28, 2016
Hamish MacCunn’s career unfolded amidst the restructuring of British musical culture and the rewriting of the Western European political landscape. Having risen to fame in the late 1880s with a string of Scottish works, MacCunn further highlighted his Caledonian background by cultivating a Scottish...
By Rosemary Golding
November 28, 2016
Until the nineteenth century, music occupied a marginal place in British universities. Degrees were awarded by Oxford and Cambridge, but students (and often professors) were not resident, and there were few formal lectures. It was not until a benefaction initiated the creation of a professorship of...
By Bennett Zon
November 24, 2016
’In a word, I shall endeavour to show how our music, having been originally a shell-fish, with its restrictive skeleton on the outside and no soul within, has been developed by the inevitable laws of evolution, through natural selection and the survival of the fittest, into something human, even ...
By Pippa Drummond
November 22, 2016
A history of the English music festival is long overdue. Dr Pippa Drummond argues that these festivals represented the most significant cultural events in provincial England during the nineteenth century and emphasizes their particular importance in the promotion and commissioning of new music. ...
Edited
By Paul Rodmell
November 17, 2016
In nineteenth-century British society music and musicians were organized as they had never been before. This organization was manifested, in part, by the introduction of music into powerful institutions, both out of belief in music's inherently beneficial properties, and also to promote music ...
By Karen McAulay
November 17, 2016
One of the earliest documented Scottish song collectors actually to go 'into the field' to gather his specimens, was the Highlander Joseph Macdonald. Macdonald emigrated in 1760 - contemporaneously with the start of James Macpherson's famous but much disputed Ossian project - and it fell to the ...