This collection of essays explores the interrelationship of music and theology in relation to the religious, musical and social history of nineteenth-century Britain. The book examines the role of music in the diverse religious life of a century that encompassed the Oxford Movement, Catholic Emancipation, religious revivals involving many different denominations, the production of several landmark hymnals and greater legal recognition for religions other than Christianity. The book therefore provides a valuable guide to the music of this complex historical period.

This volume of primary source material examines music and British national identity during the ninteenth century. Sources explore the reception of British music, continental and other foreign music, English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish music, and Empire. The collection of materials are accompanied by an introduction by Rosemary Golding, as well as headnotes contextualising the pieces. This collection will be of great value to students and scholars.

The publication of The London Pianoforte School (ed. Nicholas Temperley) twenty years ago, launched a proliferation of research on music for the piano during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also expanded research into the developments of musical life in London--for a time the centre of piano manufacturing, publishing and performance. However, nothing has focused on the piano exclusively within Britain. The eleven chapters in this volume explore major issues surrounding the instrument, its performers and music within an expanded geographical context created by the spread of the instrument and the growth of concert touring.

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 music at the University of Edinburgh, in the early nineteenth century, that the idea of music as a university discipline commanded serious consideration. The debates that ensued considered not only music’s identity as art and science, but also the broader function of the university within education and society. Rosemary Golding traces the responses of some of the key players in musical and academic culture to the problems surrounding the establishment of music as an academic discipline. The focus is on four universities: Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge and London. The different institutional contexts, and the approaches taken to music in each university, showcase the various issues surrounding music’s academic identity, as well as wider problems of status and professionalism. In examining the way music challenged conceptions of education and professional identity in the nineteenth century, the book also sheds light on the way the academic study of music continues to challenge modern approaches to music and university education.

How was music depicted in and mediated through Romantic and Victorian poetry? This is the central question that this specially commissioned volume of essays sets out to explore in order to understand better music's place and its significance in nineteenth-century British culture. Analysing how music took part in and commented on a wide range of scientific, literary, and cultural discourses, the book expands our knowledge of how music was central to the nineteenth-century imagination. Like its companion volume, The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (Ashgate, 2004) edited by Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff, this book provides a meeting place for literary studies and musicology, with contributions by scholars situated in each field. Areas investigated in these essays include the Romantic interest in national musical traditions; the figure of the Eolian harp in the poetry of Coleridge and Shelley; the recurring theme of music in Blake's verse; settings of Tennyson by Parry and Elgar that demonstrate how literary representations of musical ideas are refigured in music; George Eliot's use of music in her poetry to explore literary and philosophical themes; music in the verse of Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; the personification of lyric (Sappho) in a song cycle by Granville and Helen Bantock; and music and sexual identity in the poetry of Wilde, Symons, Michael Field, Beardsley, Gray and Davidson.

This volume illuminates musical connections between Britain and the continent of Europe, and Britain and its Empire. The seldom-recognized vitality of musical theatre and other kinds of spectacle in Britain itself, and also the flourishing concert life of the period, indicates a means of defining tradition and identity within nineteenth-century British musical culture. The volume benefits not only from new archival research, but also from fresh musicological approaches and interdisciplinary methods that recognize the integral role of music within a wider culture.

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 ones which scholars today continue to grapple with: the nature of the middle class(es) and their role in cultural definition; the concept of taste publics distinct from social status; and the establishment of the musical canon. This classic text is reissued here in Ashgate's Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain series, though of course the book ranges beyond its study of London to discuss in detail the contrasting concert life of Paris and Vienna. This edition features a substantial new preface which takes into account the significant work that has been done in this field since the book first appeared, and provides a unique opportunity to assess the impact the book has had on our thinking about the European middle class and its role in musical life.