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Street Music in the Nineteenth Century: Histories and Historiographies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2017

Paul Watt
Paul Watt*
Affiliation:
Monash Universitypaul.watt@monash.edu
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Abstract

This article highlights the paucity of musicological scholarship on street music in the nineteenth century but examines narratives of noise, music and morality that are situated in studies of street music in related literature. The article argues that a new history of street music in the nineteenth century is overdue and charts ways in which such studies may be undertaken given the substantial primary source material to work with and the proliferation and usefulness of theoretical studies in related disciplines.

Type
Introduction
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , April 2018 , pp. 3 - 8
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

1 Peter Wilton, ‘Street music’, The Oxford Companion to Music, accessed 17 June 2015.

2 ‘Street Music: Ethnography, Performance, Theory’, special issue of Journal of Musicological Research 35/2 (2016), edited by Paul Watt.

3 Literature in English on the nineteenth century that deals with noise, sound and street music (largely in England) – but to various degrees of depth and breadth – are Ronald Pearsall, Victorian Popular Music (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973); Winter, James, London’s Teeming Streets, 1830–1914 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar; Bailey, Peter, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Picker, John M., ‘The Soundproof Study: Victorian Professionals, Work Space, and Urban Noise’, Victorian Studies 42/3 (Spring 1999–Spring 2003): 427–453Google Scholar; Shesgreen, Sean, Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002)Google Scholar, Picker, John M., Victorian Soundscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Assael, Brenda, ‘Music in the Air: Noise, Performers and the Contest over the Streets of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Metropolis’, in The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Stink, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Heather Shore (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2003): 183–197Google Scholar; Martin Hewitt and Rachel Cowgill, eds, Victorian Soundscapes Revisited (Leeds: Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, 2007); Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘A Human Awful Wonder of God’ (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007); Scott, Derek B., Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th Century Popular Music Revolution in New York, Paris and Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Spedding, Patrick and Watt, Paul, eds, Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period, 4 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011)Google Scholar; Hendy, David, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening (London: CCCO Books, 2013)Google Scholar; David Atkinson and Steve Roud, eds, Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America: The Interface between Print and Oral Traditions (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), Boutin, Aimée, City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015)Google Scholar and Doggett, Anne, A Far Cry: Town Crying in the Antipodes (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2015)Google Scholar. Literature dealing principally with noise, with peripheral reference to street music, includes Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) and R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994).

4 Michael Allis, ‘Travel writing’, in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Paul Watt, Sarah Collins and Michal Allis (New York: Oxford University Press), forthcoming. Boutin, City of Noise.

5 Literature on street music inevitably discusses the opposition between sound and noise (see note 3, above). The literature in what might be loosely termed cultural studies is also extensive, but two examples that roundly problematize these concepts are Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon, 1986) and Josh Epstein, Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

6 Hendy cites Helmholtz from Thompson, Emily, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004): 132Google Scholar. The work cited in Helmholtz’s Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (Brunswick: Vieweg, 1863), translated into English by A.J. Ellis as On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1875). Douglas Kahn further explores the idea of sound versus musical sound in avant-garde and modernist music in his Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001): 101–22 though it is not clear whether he draws on the Helmholtz’s work.

7 Hendy, citing Picker, ‘The Soundproof Study’.

8 Hendy, Noise, 233 citing John Muir, Our National Parks (1901) in The Eight Wilderness Discovery Books (London: Diadem Books, 1992): 544.

9 Haweis, H.R., My Musical Life (London: W.H. Allen, 1884): 156Google Scholar.

10 Haweis, Music and Morals (London: Strahan and Co., 1871): 553Google Scholar.

11 Haweis, Music and Morals, 554.

12 Shaw, George Bernard, ‘Street music’, Dramatic Review, 2 January 1886. Reproduced in Shaw’s Music, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: The Bodley Head, 1981): vol. 1, 437–440Google Scholar.

13 Shaw, ‘Street music’, 437.

14 Shaw, ‘Street music’, 437–8.

15 George Bernard Shaw, ‘The Barrel-Organ Question’, Morning Leader, 27 November 1893 [signed ‘C. di B’]. Reproduced in Shaw’s Music, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: The Bodley Head, 1981): vol 3, 43–7; here 47.