Music and Victorian Liberalism examines the role of music in nineteenth-century British liberalism, showing how music served as a vehicle for teaching, promoting and cultivating liberal ideals as well as a means for social control. Music, in many ways, offered a meaningful way to put liberal ideals into practice through education (including Tonic Sol-Fa), public concerts, print culture and so on. While Tonic-Sol Fa and aspects of education in Britain have been addressed in scholarship,Footnote ¹ liberalism and music has been largely unexplored until the past decade.Footnote ² As the first book-length study of this topic, these essays demonstrate how ‘music and its associated discourses helped to perform this struggle between liberal ideas and the realities of social living by serving variously as an avenue for self-cultivation, a technology of liberal power brokers, a mediator of social relations, and a tool for actualising a liberal mode of life’ (p. 12).

This well-conceived collection of essays edited by Sarah Collins, which grew out of a symposium in London and a panel at an American Musicological Society meeting, consider Victorian liberalism broadly. Eleven chapters – including an introductory chapter on ‘Aesthetic Liberalism’ by Collins and an Afterword by Peter Mandler – cover a range of aspects of music within Victorian liberalism. The nine central essays are grouped into three sections, ‘Cultivation and/as Control’, ‘Dissent, Individualism and Agency’ and ‘Character and Emotion’, that aptly highlight significant intersections of music and liberalism. All chapters explore, to some degree, the tensions between ‘older, skeptical readings of liberal practices of self-rule’ and ‘the recent turn toward a more affirmative view of non-coercive practices that preserve individual agency’ (p. 5).

In the first chapter, Collins points to the pervasiveness of music in Victorian England and the surprising lack of scholarship on music and liberalism. This volume draws upon the recent revisions in the ‘perceived separation between the aesthetic, the ineffable and the humane on the one hand, and the economic, the rational and the procedural on the other’ (p. 3) but also seeks to provide a nuanced view of music's various roles within liberalism. The rest of the chapter outlines tensions between ‘the function of the aesthetic within Victorian liberal thought’ (p. 3) and blends a useful, yet brief, literature review with introductions to the chapters that follow. Here, Collins points to themes that cut across the three titled sections, most notably the aesthetic experience and political views, music and education, and the cultivation of control. While this chapter serves as a good introduction to the succeeding chapters, it assumes the reader has at least some familiarity with Victorian liberalism and music.

The three essays of ‘Cultivation and/as Control’ explore the use of music as a means for moral uplift and progress in public education in schools, public institutions and public music events on Sundays. Erin Johnson-Williams provides a nuanced consideration of the differences in music's role in education between social classes and how, in the lower classes, music became a tool for teaching liberal social tenets, particularly in the form of musical drills. This exploration of an aspect of music and education that is often neglected in music scholarship offers a useful study of the challenges of liberal reform in education, especially the dissonances between using classical music repertoire in militaristic and disciplinary drills for rote learning. Rosemary Golding's history of music and mass education provides a valuable overview of music's role in mass education, including educational reforms, music teaching methods, and the use of music in prisons and other public institutions. Golding dives deeper into the tensions between cultivation and control by looking at how music, through systematic mass education, became ‘a form of improvement’ (p. 62) used for civilizing ‘the working classes’ (p. 60). After a summary of music in Victorian public institutions, Golding examines the place of music in educational reforms in the 1840s and 1870s as well as contemporary writings on music education. This reveals that music education went beyond moral development and played an important role in evolving discussions of politics, philosophy and social changes during the nineteenth century. Johnson-Williams's and Golding's chapters complement one another, and might have been better served by being placed together rather than as book ends of this section. In the middle chapter of this section, Simon McVeigh explores the role of liberalism in the rise of Sunday musical events, especially the activities of the National Sunday League (NSL). With concerts generally taking place on weekdays, and later in the nineteenth century on Saturday afternoons, performances of classical music remained less available to the working classes due to the Sunday Observance Act of 1781. As McVeigh shows, the advent of Sunday concerts (primarily band concerts in public parks) goes beyond simply ‘opening up concert culture’ (p. 40), it also illustrates how music played a role in promoting and acting out liberal policies. These concerts imposed ‘respectability and bourgeois values on the working classes’ (p. 58) but also transformed ‘working-class individuals into citizens of a broadly unified liberal polity’ (p. 59).

The middle section, ‘Dissent, Individualism and Agency’, shifts the focus to two women who pushed the boundaries of gender roles and the impact of these roles on liberalism and music. Kate Bowan's essay on Eliza Flower, a largely forgotten figure who, in many ways, flouted conventions, offers insight into the early days of ‘new’ liberalism and the direct impact of music on these new ideals. Flower was a composer whose work was admired by Browning, Mendelssohn and others. Her most significant sphere of influence was within the circle of William Johnson Fox and South Place Chapel, ‘a crucible of emerging liberal thought’ (p. 85). As a member of Fox's congregation and later as his lover, Flower had a significant influence on his inner circle, particularly John Stuart Mill, who helped cultivate ideas that became ‘the seeds of New Liberalism’ (p. 107). Rooted in contemporary literature, an examination of Rosa Newmarch's poems and correspondence by Philip Ross Bullock illustrates how, for cultured women, music provided ‘an intense form of emotional and even physical intimacy’ (p. 116). As a product of a liberal family and, later, a staunch critic of liberalism, Newmarch was well versed on the changing landscape of liberalism as well as music. A study of allusions to female homosexuality in her poems and her discussions of Tchaikovsky's music and sexuality in her critical writings demonstrates how Newmarch influenced ‘modern discourses of homosexuality’ (p. 121) and empowered ‘sensitive and attuned readers to fashion their own narratives in a spirit of imaginative sympathy’ (p. 125).

The final group of essays, ‘Character and Emotion’, explores how music can embody liberal ideals. C. Hubert H. Parry, one of the most prominent and overtly liberal composers of the latter half of the nineteenth century, features prominently in three of these four chapters. Matthew Riley's comparison of the 1889 and 1910 versions of Parry's Fourth Symphony reveals the influence of liberalism on the composer's music. Parry titled the 1889 version ‘Finding the Way’, giving the four movements related subtitles (p. 132). The final iteration of the symphony sees Parry shifting emphasis from formal and tonal resolution with the overt influence of Brahms (which led some to call the work derivative) to a more unique expression, which better allowed him to articulate ‘Finding the Way’ and showed the more progressive influences of Mahler, Sibelius and Strauss. By contextualizing his analysis within Parry's writings, Riley offers an effective reassessment of the composer's musical process and his Fourth Symphony. Focusing on lived behaviors and reading practices, Phyllis Weliver examines how liberalism played a significant role, in part thanks to his wife Maude, in Parry's cantata Prometheus Unbound. While scholars have long acknowledged Parry's liberalism, exploring this through his family and friends exposes a more complicated picture. Parry's family and personal connections, including Maude, reveal links with liberal figures, including Herbert Gladstone, son of the politician William Gladstone. Among his friends and family, the composer was seen to ‘actualise liberal values’ (p. 153). Weliver discusses Parry's understanding of high Victorian liberalism of the 1870s and 1880s and the role liberalism played in Parry and Maude's courtship (something previous scholarship has overlooked), and she offers a compelling interpretation of Prometheus Unbound as ‘an allegory for [William] Gladstone's second administration (1880–1895)’ (p. 155). Bennett Zon places Parry within a broader discussion of sympathy, libertarianism and egalitarianism using John Rawls's concept of ‘overlapping consensus’ to ‘test the presence and activity of an underlying liberal concept – sympathy’ (p. 180). The chapter, in addition to grappling with definitions of liberalism and related components, centers on how the two aspects of Rawls's theory, libertarianism and egalitarianism, are manifested in music by focusing on two examples: Curwen's Tonic Sol-fa (libertarianism) and Parry's ‘evolutionary musicology’ (egalitarianism). This exploration of sympathy within music through these two case studies offers a fruitful examination of musical liberalism rooted in contemporary philosophy. Accounts of Wagner's conductorship of the Philharmonic Society in 1855 tend to emphasize the composer's negative comments on the experience and how his visit set the stage for British Wagnerism in the later part of the century. In the final essay of this section, Katherine Fry reassesses Wagner's London visit by considering it within the broader context of political and social history. From this perspective, Wagner's time in the metropole can be seen not as ‘an inevitable movement arising just as the level of ideas and works, but an historical event with roots in the material conditions of performance and travel’ (p. 219).

In the Afterword, Peter Mandler, a cultural historian, contextualizes the topics of preceding chapters within the general history of liberalism and offers his own view on how music engages with it. While much of the book focuses on aspects of ‘new’ liberalism, this closing essay offers a more nuanced view of ‘old’ and ‘new’ liberalisms, tracing a trajectory from its more conservative roots to a more inclusive view of society and, finally, to the First World War, which marked ‘the strange death of Liberal England’ (p. 228).Footnote ³ This broader perspective and Mandler's cohesive narrative provide a satisfying overview and roots the essays within a richer context. Though Mandler's chapter serves as the afterword, this chronological summary serves as a useful introduction to the topic, particularly for those less familiar with Victorian liberalism.

Collins has compiled a diverse collection of essays that engage with different aspects of ‘old’ and ‘new’ liberalism and various ways music participated in and served as a means for living according to liberal ideals. All chapters are exceptionally well researched and often use underused archives or primary sources. Most have tightly focused subjects that allow the authors to offer rich and nuanced (re)assessments of their subjects. While this is most noticeable in chapters dealing with compositions (Riley, Weliver), individuals (Bowan, Bullock), institutions (McVeigh), events (Fry), Johnson-Williams and Zon do an excellent job of handling broader topics with depth and clarity. Golding's broader topic serves as more of an overview versus the other essays, though her essay provides a useful context for the multiple references to education in nineteenth-century Britain. The range of topics encompasses a mix of expected subjects (e.g., Parry, education, Tonic Sol-fa, Sunday concerts) and less expected topics (e.g., Flowers, Newmarch, Wagner and the London Philharmonic). This results in a diverse yet cohesive book.

There are some minor editorial problems. For example, when authors quote or refer to other essays in the collection, page numbers are not included. (See Weliver's quoting of Riley on p. 171.) While the index is generally thorough, not all abbreviations are consistently included in the index. References to the NSL, for example, in McVeigh's chapter are not included in the National Sunday League entry of the index. This omits fourteen pages of NSL mentions, admittedly all restricted to McVeigh's essay. These are minor criticisms that in no way overshadow the importance and success of this excellent and much needed book.