Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain
About the Book Series
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.
John Varley Roberts and Religious Musical Life in Nineteenth-Century Britain
1st Edition
By David Baker
April 21, 2026
David Baker chronicles the extraordinary life and achievements of John Varley Roberts (1841-1920), a working-class Yorkshireman who became a popular composer and one of Victorian England's most celebrated choral trainers as well as Organist of Magdalen College, Oxford. Roberts’s influence was ...
A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity: Scotland’s Printed Music, 1880–1951
1st Edition
By Karen E. McAulay
October 30, 2024
Late Victorian Scotland had a flourishing music publishing trade, evidenced by the survival of a plethora of vocal scores and dance tune books; and whether informing us what people actually sang and played at home, danced to, or enjoyed in choirs, or reminding us of the impact of emigration from ...
Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow, 1870–1904
1st Edition
By Hannah L. Scott
January 29, 2024
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. ...
French Music in Britain 1830–1914
1st Edition
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 ...
Music and World-Building in the Colonial City: Newcastle, NSW, and its Townships, 1860–1880
1st Edition
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, ...
Richard D’Oyly Carte
1st Edition
By Paul Seeley
September 30, 2020
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 ...
The Musical Life of Nineteenth-Century Belfast
1st Edition
By Roy Johnston, Declan Plummer
August 14, 2020
Roy Johnston and Declan Plummer provide a refreshing portrait of Belfast in the nineteenth century. Before his death Roy Johnston, had written a full draft, based on an impressive array of contemporary sources, with deep and detailed attention especially to contemporary newspapers. With the deft ...
Sound, Sin, and Conversion in Victorian England
1st Edition
By Julia Grella O'Connell
June 30, 2020
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...
The Music Profession in Britain, 1780-1920: New Perspectives on Status and Identity
1st Edition
Edited
By Rosemary Golding
June 30, 2020
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 ...
Michael Costa: England's First Conductor: The Revolution in Musical Performance in England, 1830-1880
1st Edition
By John Goulden
December 12, 2019
Among the major changes that swept through the music industry during the mid-nineteenth century, one that has received little attention is how musical performances were managed and directed. Yet this was arguably the most radical change of all: from a loose control shared between the violin-leader,...
Arthur Sullivan: A Musical Reappraisal
1st Edition
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 ...
Figures of the Imagination: Fiction and Song in Britain, 1790–1850
1st Edition
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 ...