The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century

by Watt, Paul; Collins, Sarah; Allis, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780190616922
• ISBN10: 019061692X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2020-08-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Paul Watt is Associate Professor of Musicology at Monash University, Melbourne. He has published widely on the musical, cultural, intellectual, and religious history of the nineteenth century in journals such as Music & Letters, Musicology Australia, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, the RMA Research Chronicle, and the Yale Journal of Music & Religion. He is the author of Ernest Newman: A Critical Biography (2017) and The Regulation and Reform of Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century England (2018). He is a contributor to The Oxford Handbook of Opera (2014), The Cambridge History of Music Criticism (2019), The Cambridge History of Atheism (2020), and The Routledge Handbook of Street Culture (2020).

Sarah Collins is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Western Australia. She is the author of Lateness and Modernism: Untimely Ideas about Music, Literature and Politics in Interwar Britain (2019), and The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott (2013), as well as the editor of Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject (2019). Her work has appeared in journals including the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Twentieth-Century Music, Music & Letters, and Musical Quarterly.

Michael Allis is Professor of Musicology at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Parry's Creative Process (2003) and British Music and Literary Context: Artistic Connections in the Long Nineteenth Century (2012), and has edited the music criticisms of Aldous Huxley (2013) and selected letters of Granville Bantock (2017) - which won the 2018 C.B. Oldman Award. He has published widely on music/literature connections and British music of the nineteenth and early twentieth century (Bantock, Bax, Elgar, Holbrooke, Parry, Stanford, Warlock), and is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Victorian Culture.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century
Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis

Part I: TEXTS AND PRACTICES

1. History, Historicism, Historiography
Kevin Karnes

2. Criticism
Noel Verzosa

3. Figures and Forms of Analysis Practice
R?my Campos

4. Biography and Life-Writing
Christopher Wiley

5. Travel Writing
Michael Allis

6. Philosophy and Aesthetics
Lawrence Kramer

7. Fiction and Poetry
Michael Halliwell

8. Ephemera
Catherine Massip

Part II: NETWORKS AND INSTITUTIONS

9. Newspapers, Little Magazines, and Anthologies
Paul Watt

10. Learned Societies, Institutions, Associations, and Clubs
Jeremy Dibble

11. Churches and Devotional Practice
Martin Clarke

12. Libraries and Archives
Matthias Lundberg

13. Universities and Conservatories
Peter Tregear

14. The Concert Series
Simon McVeigh

Part III: DISCOURSES

15. Musical Canons
William Weber

16. Landscape and Ecology
Daniel M. Grimley

17. The National and the Universal
Sarah Collins

18. Science and Religion
Bennett Zon

19. Popular Song and Working-Class Culture
Gillian M. Rodger

20. Emotions
Michael Spitzer

21. Time and Temporality
Benedict Taylor

22. Ethics
Tomas McAuley

23. Music Scholarship and Disciplinarity
Michel Duchesneau