Explores the musical background to Darwinism and the development of the relationship between science and the arts in Victorian Britain.

These essays examine the dynamic interplay between evolution and Victorian culture, mapping new relationships between the arts and sciences.

Current studies in disciplinarity range widely across philosophical and literary contexts, producing heated debate and entrenched divergences. Yet, despite their manifest significance for us today seldom have those studies engaged with the Victorian origins of modern disciplinarity. Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines adds a crucial missing link in that history by asking and answering a series of deceptively simple questions: how did Victorians define a discipline; what factors impinged upon that definition; and how did they respond to disciplinary understanding? Structured around sections on professionalization, university curriculums, society journals, literary genres and interdisciplinarity, Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines addresses the tangled bank of disciplinarity in the arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences including musicology, dance, literature, and art history; classics, history, archaeology, and theology; anthropology, psychology; and biology, mathematics and physics. Chapters examine the generative forces driving disciplinary formation, and gauge its success or failure against social, cultural, political, and economic environmental pressures. No other volume has focused specifically on the origin of Victorian disciplines in order to track the birth, death, and growth of the units into which knowledge was divided in this period, and no other volume has placed such a wide array of Victorian disciplines in their cultural context.

Theorizing Music Evolution is a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, with emphasis on nineteenth-century music-evolutionary texts by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. In a ground-breaking contribution to music theory and histories of science, author Miriam Piilonen argues for the significance of this Victorian music-evolutionism in lights of its ties to a recently revitalized subfield of evolutionary musicology.

Examines the interaction between music and liberal discourses in Victorian Britain, revealing the close interdependence of political and aesthetic practices.

Rarely studied in their own right, writings about music are often viewed as merely supplemental to understanding music itself. Yet in the nineteenth century, scholarly interest in music flourished in fields as disparate as philosophy and natural science, dramatically shifting the relationship between music and the academy. An exciting and much-needed new volume, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century draws deserved attention to the people and institutions of this period who worked to produce these writings. Editors Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis, along with an international slate of contributors, discuss music's fascinating and unexpected interactions with debates about evolution, the scientific method, psychology, exoticism, gender, and the divide between high and low culture. Part I of the handbook establishes the historical context for the intellectual world of the period, including the significant genres and disciplines of its music literature, while Part II focuses on the century's institutions and networks - from journalists to monasteries - that circulated ideas about music throughout the world. Finally, Part III assesses how the music research of the period reverberates in the present, connecting studies in aestheticism, cosmopolitanism, and intertextuality to their nineteenth-century origins. The Handbook challenges Western music history's traditionally sole focus on musical work by treating writings about music as valuable cultural artifacts in themselves. Engaging and comprehensive, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century brings together a wealth of new interdisciplinary research into this critical area of study.

The first comprehensive study of music and queer identities in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century English literature.

This book traces the role played by music within asylums, the participation of staff and patients in musical activity, and the links drawn between music, health, and wellbeing. In the first part of the book, the author draws on a wide range of sources to investigate the debates around moral management, entertainment, and music for patients, as well as the wider context of music and mental health. In the second part, a series of case studies bring to life the characters and contexts involved in asylum music, selected from a range of public and private institutions. From asylum bands to chapel choirs, smoking concerts to orchestras, the rich variety of musical activity presents new perspectives on music in everyday life. Aspects such as employment practices, musicians’ networks and the purchase and maintenance of musical instruments illuminate the ‘business’ of music as part of moral management. As a source of entertainment and occupation, a means of solace and self-control, and as a device for social gatherings and contact with the outside world, the place of music in the asylum offers valuable insight into its uses and meanings in nineteenth-century England.

This volume brings together new approaches to music history to reveal the interdependence of music and religion in nineteenth-century culture. As composers and performers drew inspiration from the Bible and new historical sciences called into question the historicity of Scripture, controversies raged over the performance, publication and censorship of old and new musical forms. From oratorio to opera, from parlour song to pantomime, and from hymn to broadside, nineteenth-century Britons continually encountered elements of the biblical past in song. Both elite and popular music came to play a significant role in the formation, regulation and contestation of religious and cultural identity and were used to address questions of class, nation and race, leading to the beginnings of ethnomusicology. This richly interdisciplinary volume brings together musicologists, historians, literary and art historians and theologians to reveal points of intersection between music, religion and cultural history.

Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Temperley is the first book to focus upon aspects of performance in the broader context of nineteenth-century British musical culture. In four Parts, 'Musical Cultures', 'Societies', 'National Music' and 'Methods', this volume assesses the role music performance plays in articulating significant trends and currents of the cultural life of the period and includes articles on performance and individual instruments; orchestral and choral ensembles; church and synagogue music; music societies; cantatas; vocal albums; the middle-class salon, conducting; church music; and piano pedagogy. An introduction explores Temperley's vast contribution to musicology, highlighting his seminal importance in creating the field of nineteenth-century British music studies, and a bibliography provides an up-to-date list of his publications, including books and monographs, book chapters, journal articles, editions, reviews, critical editions, arrangements and compositions. Fittingly devoted to a significant element in Temperley's research, this book provides scholars of all nineteenth-century musical topics the opportunity to explore the richness of Britain's musical history.