The study of music in nineteenth-century Britain is occasionally criticized for its tendency to become insular: concerned with institutions, archives, details of relationships and networks, and the contributions of men and women whose names are largely absent from performing or analytical repertoires. Recent scholarship on music in nineteenth-century Britain, combined with successful conferences and seminars, continues to deepen our understanding of this period and its social history, with a strong focus on people and their economic, political and social contexts. Mundane as this might seem to some music scholars, much of this work is immensely valuable in building a picture of the ways in which music was not only composed and performed, but also listened to, thought about, studied and theorized. Indeed, topics such as gender, race, class and place – which have become so important across musicological scholarship in recent years – have long been established as worthy of consideration in this context. Research drawing on archival materials, newspapers, collections of concert programmes, letters and diaries, rather than analysis of musical works, has been at the centre of this world and continue to offer rich seams of evidence for the careful researcher.
Leanne Langley’s scholarship, from her work on the English musical press and music dictionaries to her meticulous studies centred on the Queen’s Hall and the musical life of Regent Street, has formed part of the bedrock of documentary research for many scholars. Via her work co-convening the ‘Music in Britain: A Social History Seminar’ series at the University of London’s Senate House, her conference presentations and wide public engagement work, as well as her contributions to the RMA itself – in addition to her many publications – Langley has been a central part of the project establishing the study of music in nineteenth-century Britain as a vibrant and valued intellectual pursuit. Thus, her new book charting the history of the Royal Musical Association from its foundation in 1874 to the present day has been eagerly awaited by scholars writing on music in nineteenth-century Britain, and will form an important gathering point for many of the ideas and insights around music in the late-nineteenth century that have characterized musicological research in this area in recent years.
The Royal Musical Association (RMA) has built a global reputation as a figurehead for music research; its conferences, publications and prizes enjoy international reputations. It not only reflects and supports the highest-quality research in music, but also actively works to ensure that this research is disseminated widely and includes projects across the full range of research activity, such as composition, performance and education. Initiatives supporting PhD students and early-career scholars sit alongside celebrations of established scholars and lifetime contributions. In recent years it has also become an important force working on behalf of music scholars, within and beyond the UK, particularly in the context of increasing pressures on Higher Education and the closure of several important departments, the threats made to resources and archives, changes to the working environment within and beyond universities and the disappearance of political support for music both as a school subject and a career. With projects and working groups that focus on issues ranging from Equality, Diversity and Inclusion to displaced scholars, the RMA stands at the core of both activity and identity within British music scholarship and practice at the Higher Education level.
The occasion of the 150th anniversary of the RMA in 2024 provided an excellent opportunity to look both backwards and forwards. Anniversary events – a fundraising drive for new fellowships, a ‘time capsule’ of recordings from across the generations and a celebratory conference – all sought to capture the spirit of the RMA’s history, while cementing the foundation for the future. Langley’s masterful history of the Association also does both: she captures the rich archival and documentary history that characterizes the early years, but also provides the reader with much food for thought by examining changes to the discipline and the RMA’s responses more recently.
The present volume, however, goes well beyond providing a history of an intellectual institution and its context and development, for it captures the history of music as a discipline – the pre-history of what music scholarship is based on today. For while universities were active during the second half of the nineteenth century in developing music degrees and encouraging the nascent study of music history and analysis, it was at the RMA that musical research was most effectively supported and shared. Thus a major contribution of this book is as a cultural history of music as an intellectual pursuit and as a subject of research.
Langley’s history also connects the Association to other concerns that were widespread in the historiography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The RMA, she notes, was intended to help shore-up the social standing of music both as a leisure pursuit and a profession: it connected music with science, as well as the arts, drawing in the Victorian polymaths whose association with music was important for its development as an intellectual discipline. It was also concerned with ‘Englishness’, a theme that pervades much musical analysis of English works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, here applied to the ways in which music was studied. Langley considers in particular the relationship between the RMA and the International Musical Society, including the broader international contexts, their impact on the Association, and its defence of a deliberately ‘English’ form of musical research.
Langley’s history focuses on the people, networks and contexts that defined the Association and its development. Throughout, she balances the views and activities of individual scholars against the formal approaches and interventions of the Association. The first two chapters of the book will most concern readers of this journal, for they focus on the history of music as an intellectual pursuit in Britain from the early nineteenth century, and the foundation and early years of the Association. As a result, my primary emphasis in this review will be on those two chapters.
Chapter One addresses the background to the RMA’s foundation with a particular focus on individuals, organizations and publishers involved in music study during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, much of which draws on Langley’s own research. The chapter opens with a survey of individual contributions to musical studies, from prefaces to collections of national airs and biographical studies of great composers to acoustical experimentations. It also covers several scholarly organizations from the mid-century which, building on the work of individual scholars, began to publish volumes of music editions, again drawing on national traditions, ancient music or the music of a specific composer.
Moving on to the institutions that preceded the RMA, Langley notes several examples of unsuccessful attempts to set up lectures and libraries attached to concert societies, and the subsequent significance of schemes which anticipated the RMA’s separation of music scholarship from musical performance. By the time the Musical Association was founded, it was scientists, literary scholars and cultural commentators, alongside a handful of professional musicians, who were attempting to establish music studies as a viable academic discipline. Langley considers important contexts – such as publishing and the university study of music – in relation to scholarly counterparts such as music history. While detail is given in places, the chapter, by necessity, is brief, and underlines the value, in time, of more extended research on topics such as early music collections, both public and private, music clubs and societies, and further investigations into early publications, including both periodicals and dictionaries. Nevertheless, Langley’s lucid and accessible prose stands as an important entry point to this context, introducing a range of key individuals and groups active in music scholarship prior to the foundation of the RMA.
Chapter Two centres on the foundation of the Association and its early years. Langley’s careful and detailed investigation of the language used in both formal documents and private communications elucidates the deliberate decisions of the founders to distance themselves from previous attempts to set up intellectual musical societies; she also provides interesting information about membership and purpose. Membership was open to anyone (including women) with related interests or expertise regardless of professional or class background, but the purpose of the new Association was defined narrowly. Langley suggests that by modelling itself on established intellectual societies rather than performing clubs, the RMA was both innovative and sustainable. Her conclusions are based on an astounding quantity of rich material that she has unearthed, including volumes of rules, numbers of members, names and the details of locations for Association and related activities. Her coverage of this material is at times dense, but will form an important source for further research in this area.
In some areas, Langley’s account reflects preoccupations of the present-day Association. Her overview of the membership includes consideration of its diversity, including nationality, sexuality and class. Her summary of papers and presenters from the early years includes a discussion of the role of women. She also covers the ways in which the Association has promoted its reputation and provided opportunities for social engagement – what might nowadays be termed ‘community-building’. Although the Association eschewed musical performance as a core part of its activity, there was no shortage of tea, coffee, dinners and musical entertainment during the early years.
A significant portion of this chapter considers the relationship between the RMA and its international equivalents, most notably the Internationale Musikgesellschaft (IMG). Langley examines this group’s London conference of 1911 in detail. Most important, the conference raised the profile of British music studies, giving the Association and its individuals the confidence to continue to engage internationally. Langley also gives space to the RMA’s support for what would now be termed ‘research infrastructure’, such as its publishing activities (including the introduction of article abstracts), access to printed texts and manuscripts and collaboration with specialist libraries. The chapter concludes with summaries of some 20 carefully curated articles – evidence, as Langley notes, of the high quality and continued relevance of scholarship now over a century old. The selection is both a testimony to the riches of musical research at the time, and a challenge to reconsider the context, scope and direction of present-day musicological concerns.
The remainder of the book carries the reader through the ongoing challenges and successes of the RMA, from falling numbers and lack of direction between the two World Wars to the Association’s role in establishing a viable academic discipline in the second half of the twentieth century. Larger sections focus on Edward J. Dent, Musica Britannica and successive editions of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980 and 2001) while the central theme remains the development of British (or English – the two are sometimes not differentiated) music studies both within and beyond the RMA. Langley considers, in addition, the context of rapidly changing relationships with European and North American academia, and a political background that resulted in the arrival of many European scholars during the first half of the twentieth century. The story of the Hirsch collection of music books and manuscripts (which arrived in Cambridge from Frankfurt in 1936), the 1938 investigation into the state of music research resulting in a set of resolutions and priorities to oversee the developing discipline, the RMA’s involvement in both home-grown and international projects such as the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) and Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) databases: all help to trace the changing face of British music and musicology, as well as fascinating tensions over scholarly identity and mission that will remain familiar to many readers.
The overall impression is of the deeply entangled nature of British music research, its institutions, people and contexts. Langley dives into some of these, skims over the surface of others and weaves a narrative that draws together numerous threads. The closing chapter, at least, is required reading for active scholars, explaining much about recent histories and current developments while also giving a hint of the author’s own convictions about the future of musicological research.
As we have come to expect from Boydell and Brewer, the volume is beautifully presented. Langley includes a generous selection of images, again balancing the recognition of individuals with key moments from the Association. The appendices, likewise, offer an important scaffold with details of individual contributions from the earliest years to the present day, while illustrating points that go well beyond the narrow focus of an institutional history. The index is comprehensive and clearly organized. The volume draws on a vast array of evidence, both from the RMA’s rich archives and beyond in its tracing of individuals and associated institutions; these are always clearly labelled and referenced. Secondary material is carefully referenced and points to the depth of scholarship on related topics, although the impression remains that there is still plenty of research left to undertake in this area. Throughout the text, lists, summaries and tables also give weight to Langley’s narrative, providing useful fodder for the many other historians who will go on to make use of the material in their own work.
Langley’s volume stands as a product of its time and as a monument to the enduring status and importance of the RMA – both its history and the present state of music research in Britain and beyond. It reminds us of our place in the centuries-long roster of music scholars, while inviting us to consider anew the purpose and nature of our work and that of the broader society in which we function. It captures the voices of the present, setting them alongside those of the past. As history, as source book, as monument, it offers an important and enduring addition to the literature.
