In this book yet another aspect of nineteenth-century British music has been broached and thoroughly investigated. Rosemary Golding has carried out exhaustive research on the gradual evolution of music as a subject for university degrees. What she has found is an extraordinary level of resistance to the idea, and a host of objections and difficulties that were only partially resolved by the end of the century. She has selected four universities for detailed discussion: Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge and London. Each of them approached the problem in its own way, but none of them, in her view, reached an entirely effective solution.

The ancient doctorates of music at Oxford and Cambridge were non-residential, and were awarded on the basis of an ‘exercise’ – a performance of a specially composed work, which at Cambridge (if my memory serves) had to be in at least eight contrapuntal parts. The degrees were not associated with any kind of instruction or examination. The sole musician on the faculty was the professor. Though sometimes offering lectures (as William Crotch did at Oxford from 1799 to 1806), he was in no way responsible for preparing candidates for the degrees, which thus provided little academic or professional standing.Footnote ¹

The new era began with the Reid bequest to the University of Edinburgh in 1838, which suddenly made available a substantial sum of money (over £68,000) dedicated to musical education. It compelled the trustees and university authorities to begin a discussion about the aims of musical education and how they could be attained. The discourse, much of which was held in public, spread to other universities and was maintained with little interruption throughout the Victorian period. Dr Golding’s thorough investigation covers a wide range of archival sources as well as many exchanges of opinion in newspapers and periodicals.

One of the main issues, especially prominent at Edinburgh in the early Victorian period, was whether music was to be considered an art or a science. Even more challenging, it seems, was the relationship between professional and academic proficiency. A degree was hardly needed for public success in performing or composing; should these skills be considered essential for academic recognition? The professional/academic dilemma was especially prominent in London, where the university’s primacy was challenged by the proximity of several conservatories. This, in turn, raised the question of whether music was a skill that could be taught by academic instruction, or an innate gift beyond the reach of education. An additional consideration was the relationship between music and the liberal education that was the traditional goal of universities – whether primarily scientific, as at Cambridge, or primarily literary, as at Oxford. Social questions played a large part in this discussion. The colleges of Oxford and Cambridge had always been the final ingredient in the making of a gentleman; but the Victorians hardly recognized music as a suitable subject for a gentleman to study. Golding considers that Cambridge worked out the best compromise on this issue, by offering both a BA in music for gentlemen and a MusB for rising professionals who sought social standing.

In addition to a widespread discussion of these issues, Golding provides an often penetrating assessment of the individual scholars who tried to resolve them, giving particular attention to Donaldson at Edinburgh, Ouseley and Stainer at Oxford, Macfarren and Stanford at Cambridge and Pole at London. The whole long and intricate process can be seen as the birth pangs of the discipline of musicology in its various branches. It would have been helpful to compare the very different struggles towards the same goal that were taking place in other European countries, above all Germany, to which Golding gives only passing attention. Perhaps that is asking too much for the first major publication of a recent graduate, which already contains the fruits of a very large research undertaking. We can hope that she will one day undertake a more general history of the discipline. Another factor that receives only slight attention is the link between Oxford and Cambridge and the Church of England. Victorian composers (and their styles of composition) can be divided into those who were linked to the church and the universities, and therefore enjoyed a steady income as organists, and those who depended entirely on the market place.

In a concluding chapter Golding points to certain ways in which the gulf between professional and academic musical goals has never been fully bridged. But she doesn’t take this argument far enough. In Victorian times academic musicians tended to reject anything modern, and consequently were often out of touch with current musical developments. In the twentieth century many universities in the Western world tried to redress this problem by appointing avant-garde composers to salaried posts. Their intentions were generous and progressive. But the unforeseen result was that the recipients, now free to ignore the musical public and the market place, developed types of composition (serial, aleatoric, microtonal and the like) that were supported by peer reviewers but had no chance of entering the mainstream. They were academics in a sense almost opposite to its Victorian meaning.

Like others in the series ‘Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, this book is handsomely produced and well edited, and has a full bibliography, listing many more sources than are cited in the text. The index, however, is rather limited, including 39 undifferentiated page entries under ‘history of music’ and only 25 persons out of the hundreds mentioned in the book.