Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T15:28:51.616Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE CONDITION OF MUSIC IN VICTORIAN SCHOLARSHIP

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2016

Anna Peak
Anna Peak*
Affiliation:
Temple University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Many Victorian commentators, from Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin on, saw music as the most primitive of all the arts, an inarticulate precursor of language, and yet many Victorians, particularly towards the end of the century, also saw music as the purest of all art forms. The tremendous tension between these two views meant that music provided, and provides, an ideal way to understand more completely Victorian ideas about evolution, gender, and race in relation to aesthetics, although scholarship on music has only begun to consider those relationships. But as Vernon Lee long ago pointed out, in a series of thoughtful essays about music published in Fraser's Magazine and other periodicals in the 1870s and 1880s, music has always been slower to develop than other arts or fields of study. This is in fact why musicologists speak of “nineteenth-century music,” rather than Victorian music: the Romantic period in music, for example, is starting as the Romantic period in literature had largely ended; the English Musical Renaissance comes after the renaissance period in British literature; and so on. Musicology, likewise, is a comparatively young field, and the study of nineteenth-century British music – long limited to Gilbert and Sullivan, if considered at all – younger yet. Studies of literature that engage with music as an important part of the historical context of a given text depend on developments in musicology for a proper understanding of that context, which is why such works are comparatively few. Why music should be slower to develop than other fields is a question outside the scope of this essay, but the good news is that in the past ten years a number of useful and valuable works of scholarship on nineteenth-century British music have appeared, examining not only neglected composers and musical works, but also performers, concert organizers, music publishers, instruments and their history, and evolutionary, Orientalist, and nationalist discourses about music. This scholarship, valuable in itself, not only expands our knowledge of musicology and cultural history; by pointing out some of the deep connections between literature and music in the Victorian period, such scholarship also suggests new ways to think about literary forms, canon formation, and aesthetic theories.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 423 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CONSIDERED

Allis, Michael. British Music and Literary Context: Artistic Connections in the Long Nineteenth Century. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012.Google Scholar
Aspden, Suzanne, and Huebner, Steven. “Twenty Years.” Cambridge Opera Journal 21 (2010): 101–03.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asquith, Mark. Thomas Hardy, Metaphysics, and Music. New York: Palgrave, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banfield, Stephen. “‘What do you think of Stainer's Crucifixion?’ Current Victorian Musicology.” Journal of Victorian Culture 15 (2010): 119–29.Google Scholar
Barger, Judith. Elizabeth Stirling and the Musical Life of Female Organists in Nineteenth-Century England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.Google Scholar
Bashford, Christina. The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London. London: Boydell and Brewer, 2007.Google Scholar
Bashford, Christina, and Langley, Leanne, eds. Music and British Culture, 1785–1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Beale, Robert. Charles Hallé: A Musical Life. London: Ashgate, 2007.Google Scholar
Beer, Gillian. “The Senses in Musical Settings of Hardy's Poems.” Thomas Hardy Journal 22 (2006): 7–14.Google Scholar
Bennett, William Sterndale. Lectures on Musical Life. Ed. and intro. Temperley, Nicholas, with the assistance of Yang, Yunchung. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006.Google Scholar
Bennett, William Sterndale, and Bache, Francis Edward. Bennett & Bache: Piano Concertos. Shelley, Howard and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Hyperion Records. CDA 67595. CD. 2007.Google Scholar
Biddle, Ian, and Gibson, Kirsten, eds. Masculinity and Western Musical Practice. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009.Google Scholar
Bledsoe, Robert. Dickens, Journalism, Music: Household Words and All The Year Round.” New York: Continuum, 2012.Google Scholar
Bonds, Mark Evan. Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Brett, Philip, Wood, Elizabeth, and Thomas, Gary C., eds. Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. 2nd ed.New York: Routledge, 2006.Google Scholar
Bucknell, Brad. Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Burgan, Mary. “Heroines at the Piano: Women and Music in Nineteenth-Century Fiction.” Victorian Studies 30 (Autumn 1986): 51–76.Google Scholar
Byerly, Alison. Rev. George Eliot, Music, and Victorian Culture by Correa, Delia Da Sousa. Victorian Studies 47.1 (2004): 126–28.Google Scholar
Citron, Marcia J.Gender and the Musical Canon. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Clapp-Itnyre, Alisa. Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs: Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel. Athens: Ohio UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Clayton, Martin, and Zon, Bennett, eds. Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s–1940s: Portrayal of the East. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.Google Scholar
Cole, Suzanne. Thomas Tallis and His Music in Victorian England. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008.Google Scholar
Colligan, Colette, and Linley, Margaret, eds. Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011.Google Scholar
Cooper, Victoria L.The House of Novello: Practice and Policy of a Victorian Music Publisher, 1829–1866. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.Google Scholar
Cowgill, Rachel, and Holman, Peter, eds. Music in the British Provinces, 1690–1914. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.Google Scholar
Cowgill, Rachel, and Rushton, Julian, eds. Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.Google Scholar
Dibble, Jeremy. John Stainer: A Life in Music. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007.Google Scholar
Drinker, Sophie. Music and Women: The Story of Women in Their Relation to Music. 1948. New York: Feminist, 1995.Google Scholar
Eastham, Andrew. “Walter Pater's Acoustic Space: ‘The School of Giorgione’, Dionysian Anders-Streben, and the Politics of Soundscape.” Yearbook of English Studies 40 (2010): 196–216.Google Scholar
Ehrlich, Cyril. The Piano: A History. London: Dent, 1976.Google Scholar
Ellsworth, Therese, and Wollenberg, Susan, eds. The Piano in Nineteenth-Century British Culture: Instruments, Performers and Repertoire. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.Google Scholar
Faulk, Barry J.Music Hall and Modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture. Athens: Ohio UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Fillion, Michelle. Difficult Rhythm: Music and the Word in E.M. Forster. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2010.Google Scholar
Fothergill, Jessie. The First Violin. London: Bentley, 1877.Google Scholar
Frogley, Alain. “Rewriting the Renaissance: History, Imperialism, and British Music since 1840.” Music and Letters 84.2 (2003): 241–57.Google Scholar
Fuller, Sophie, and Losseff, Nicky, eds. The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.Google Scholar
Fuller, Sophie, and Whitesell, Lloyd, eds. Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002.Google Scholar
Gates, Eugene. “The Music Criticism and Aesthetics of George Bernard Shaw.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 35.3 (2001): 63–71.Google Scholar
Gillett, Paula. Musical Women in England, 1870–1914. New York: St. Martin's, 2000.Google Scholar
Golding, Rosemary. “Musical Chairs: The Construction of ‘Music’ in Nineteenth-Century British Universities.” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 6 (2009): 19–37.Google Scholar
Gray, Beryl. George Eliot and Music. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989.Google Scholar
Gregory, E. David. The Late Victorian Folksong Revival: The Persistence of English Melody, 1878–1903. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2010.Google Scholar
Gregory, E. David. Victorian Songhunters: The Recovery and Editing of English Vernacular Ballads and Folk Lyrics, 1820–1883. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2006.Google Scholar
Hughes, Meirion. The English Musical Renaissance and the Press, 1850–1914: Watchmen of Music. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.Google Scholar
Hughes, Meirion, and Stradling, R. A.. The English Musical Renaissance, 1840–1940. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Hyde, Derek. New-Found Voices: Women in Nineteenth-Century English Music. 3rd ed. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998.Google Scholar
Kimber, Marian Wilson. “Mr. Riddle's Readings: Music and Elocution in Nineteenth-Century Concert Life.” Nineteenth Century Studies 21 (2007): 163–81.Google Scholar
Kimber, Marian Wilson. “Ringing Bells in Accompanied Recitation and Musical Melodrama.” Journal of Musicological Research 34.3 (2015): 249–65.Google Scholar
Kimber, Marian Wilson. “Victorian Fairies and Felix Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream in England.” 19th-Century Music Review 4 (2007): 53–79.Google Scholar
Kramer, Lawrence. Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.Google Scholar
Kramer, Lawrence. Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. “Impersonality and Evolution in Music.” Contemporary Review 42 (1882): 840–58.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. “Musical Expression and the Composers of the Eighteenth Century.” New Quarterly Magazine 8 (1877): 186–202.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. “Studies of Italian Musical Life.” Fraser's Magazine 18.105 (Sept. 1878): 339–61.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. “Studies of Italian Musical Life.” Fraser's Magazine 18.106 (Oct. 1878): 423–46.Google Scholar
Lee, Vernon. “Studies of Italian Musical Life.” Fraser's Magazine 18.107 (Nov. 1878): 566–79.Google Scholar
Leighton, Angela. “On ‘the Hearing Ear’: Some Sonnets of the Rossettis.” Victorian Poetry 47.3 (2009): 505–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leppert, Richard. The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.Google Scholar
Lightwood, James T.Charles Dickens and Music. 1912. New York: Haskell House, 1970.Google Scholar
Loesser, Arthur. Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History. 1954. New York: Dover, 1990.Google Scholar
Mabilat, Claire. Orientalism and Representations of Music in the Nineteenth Century British Popular Arts. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.Google Scholar
McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.Google Scholar
McVeigh, Simon. “Trial by Dining Club: The Instrumental Music of Haydn, Clementi and Mozart at London's Anacreontic Society.” Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Temperley. Ed. Zon, Bennett. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. 105–38.Google Scholar
Mendelssohn, Michèle. “Rewriting the Genealogy of Minstrelsy for Modernity: ‘Cry and Sing, Walk and Rage, Scream and Dance.’” African American Review 48.1-2 (Spring / Summer 2015): 127–39.Google Scholar
Palmer, Fiona M.Vincent Novello (1781-1861): Music for the Masses. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.Google Scholar
Peak, Anna. “A Canon By and For the Working Class: Reassessing the Role of Music Periodicals in the English Musical Renaissance.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, U of Delaware, 12–13 Sept., 2014.Google Scholar
Peak, Anna. “Music and New Woman Aesthetics in Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus.” Victorian Review 40.1 (Spring 2014): 135–54.Google Scholar
Peak, Anna. “The Music of the Spheres: Music and the Gendered Mind in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 2010.Google Scholar
Picker, John M.Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Professor Huxley on Education.” Nature 27 (22 Feb. 1883): 396–98.Google Scholar
Scott, Derek B. “Music, Morality and Rational Amusement at the Victorian Middle-Class Soirée.” Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Temperley. Ed. Zon, Bennett. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. 83–101.Google Scholar
Scott, Derek B.. “The Sexual Politics of Victorian Musical Aesthetics.” Journal of the Royal Music Association 119 (1994): 91–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, Derek B.. Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Scott, Derek B. ed. The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009.Google Scholar
Sheppard, Elizabeth. Charles Auchester: A Memorial. 1853. 2 vols. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1891.Google Scholar
Solie, Ruth A.Music in Other Words. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004.Google Scholar
Solie, Ruth A. “No ‘Land Without Music’ After All.” Victorian Literature and Culture 32 (2004): 261–76.Google Scholar
Solie, Ruth A., ed. Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship. Berkeley: U. of California P, 1993.Google Scholar
Sousa Correa, Delia da. George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sousa Correa, Delia da, ed. Phrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music. Oxford: Legenda, 2006.Google Scholar
Steinberg, Michael P.Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music. Princeton: Princeton UP 2004.Google Scholar
Sutton, Emma. Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Sutton, Emma. Virginia Woolf and Classical Music. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Symonds, John Addington. “Is Music the Type or Measure of All Art?” Century Guild Hobby Horse 2.10 (1888): 42–51.Google Scholar
Taruskin, Richard. The Oxford History of Western Music. Volume 3: The Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Temperley, Nicholas. The Music of the English Parish Church. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979.Google Scholar
Towheed, Shafqat. “‘Music is not merely for musicians’: Vernon Lee's Musical Reading and Response.” Yearbook of English Studies 40 (2010): 273–94.Google Scholar
Tucker, Herbert. “Unsettled Scores: Meter and Play in Two Music Poems by Robert Browning.” Critical Inquiry 41.1 (2014): 24–52.Google Scholar
Wallace, Robert K.Emily Brontë and Beethoven: Romantic Equilibrium in Fiction and Music. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1986.Google Scholar
Wallace, Robert K.Jane Austen and Mozart: Classical Equilibrium in Fiction and Music. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1983.Google Scholar
Weber, William. Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris, and Vienna Between 1830 and 1848. 2nd ed. 1975. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.Google Scholar
Weliver, Phyllis. “A Score of Change: Twenty Years of Critical Musicology and Victorian Literature.” Literature Compass 8 (2011): 776–94.Google Scholar
Weliver, Phyllis. “Music, crowd control and the female performer in Trilby.” The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction. Ed. Fuller, Sophie and Losseff, Nicky. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 57–80.Google Scholar
Weliver, Phyllis. The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840–1910: Class, Culture and Nation. New York: Palgrave, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weliver, Phyllis. Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.Google Scholar
Weliver, Phyllis, and Ellis, Katharine, eds. Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013.Google Scholar
White, Harry. Music and the Irish Literary Imagination. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1891. New York: Barnes and Noble Collector's Library, 2003.Google Scholar
Wilson, Alexandra. The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Wood, Gillen D'Arcy. Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and Virtuosity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Yuen, Karen. “Bound by Sound: Music, Victorian Masculinity and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” Critical Survey 20 (2008): 79–96.Google Scholar
Zon, Bennett. Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Rochester: U of Rochester P, 2007.Google Scholar
Zon, Bennett, ed. Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Temperley. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012.Google Scholar