When, in 1838, the University of Edinburgh received General John Reid's bequest founding a Chair of Music, members of the Senatus were baffled by their duty to establish a Professorship in a subject previously absent from university curricula, at an institution with no apparent call, or desire, for musical instruction. There was, furthermore, no obvious precedent for such a post elsewhere. Oxford and Cambridge's music professorships dated back to the seventeenth century, but both had been virtual sinecures since not long after their foundation. The institution of the Royal Academy of Music in the previous decade provided no model for a university subject, as it catered primarily for young ladies and aspiring professional performers, with no obviously ‘academic’ form of study. German universities included musical study but were primarily concerned with history in terms of stylistic development, with compositional ends in mind. The trustees appointed to manage the Reid bequest faced the daunting task of creating an entirely new academic subject, which needed to be divorced from current musical study and practice in order to render it suitable for the university environment.