Charting the history of the Royal Musical Association over 150 years: from scientific roots and the long resistance of British universities to music study, to bringing UK musicology to worldwide recognition. This book is the first comprehensive history of the Royal Musical Association. Drawing on extensive archival material and exploring a host of colourful people, it paints an absorbing picture of scholarly achievement in Britain across 150 years. Founded in London in 1874 as a learned society for musical research, the Association emulated the venerable Royal Society in welcoming diverse backgrounds, but went further by including women. Charting its scientific roots and the long resistance of British universities to music study, the narrative shows how the Association published a strong body of research independently, blossoming from 170 members in the 1870s to more than 1400 today. Early joiners included the scientists William Pole and John Tyndall (a founder of climate science), the art historian Elizabeth Eastlake, and musicians from John Stainer to Agnes Zimmermann. Their goal was to 'investigate' and 'discuss' music rather than perform it or give concerts. Because no member was yet trained in what would later be called musicology, the papers covered an eclectic range of scientific, ethnographic and historical questions, broad in scope and responsive to heard music. Whether measuring acoustic phenomena, studying popular music or deciphering manuscripts of early polyphony, the Association promoted wide engagement as well as the establishment of academic musicology. Meanwhile, members including W.B. Squire, Edward J. Dent, Thurston Dart and Stanley Sadie transformed public understanding. Their work in music library development, opera, Musica Britannica, early music, criticism and music lexicography helped gain global recognition for British scholarship. With arts study under pressure in the current uncertain climate, the Association's recent concern for real-world issues in diversity, practice-based research and the vital role of music in schools remains true to its founding spirit.

Setting aside the pastiche of bullfighters and flamenco dancers that has dominated the U.S. image of Spain for more than a century, this innovative volume uncovers the roots of Spanish studies to explain why the diversity, vitality, and complexity of Spanish history and culture have been reduced in U.S. accounts to the equivalent of a tourist brochure. Spurred by the complex colonial relations between the United States and Spain, the new field of Spanish studies offered a way for the young country to reflect a positive image of itself as a democracy, in contrast with perceived Spanish intolerance and closure. Spain in America investigates the political and historical forces behind this duality, surveying the work of the major nineteenth-century U.S. Hispanists in the fields of history, art history, literature, and music. A distinguished panel of contributors offers fresh examinations of the role of U.S. writers, especially Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in crafting a wildly romantic vision of Spain. They examine the views of such scholars as William H. Prescott and George Ticknor, who contrasted the "failure" of Spanish history with U.S. exceptionalism. Other essays explore how U.S. interests in Latin America consistently colored its vision of Spain and how musicology in the United States, dominated by German émigrés, relegated Spanish music to little more than a footnote. Also included are profiles of the philanthropist Archer Mitchell Huntington and the pioneering art historians Georgiana Goddard King and Arthur Kingsley Porter, who spearheaded U.S. interest in the architecture and sculpture of medieval Spain. Providing a much-needed look at the development and history of Hispanism, Spain in America opens the way toward confronting and modifying reductive views of Spain that are frozen in another time.

This volume makes available some of the major writings of the Romanian ethnomusicologist Constantin Brailoiu.

In Praise of Harmony is the first critical and biographical study of Vogler to appear in English.

This book provides insight into how musical performances contributed to emerging ideas about class and national identity. Offering a fresh reading of bestselling fictional works, drawing upon crowd theory, climate theory, ethnology, science, music reviews and books by musicians to demonstrate how these discourses were mutually constitutive.