These two volumes attest to the increased solidification of the field of British music studies in recent years. One is a primary source, though heavily annotated: the composer, teacher, and conductor William Sterndale Bennett's mid-Victorian lectures on music to various bodies of amateur enthusiasts out for a spot of rational recreation (the London Institution and the Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society) and to students and interested parties at Cambridge University. The other, while dressed up in new garb (namely, a volume with a purported focus), is mostly a set of conference proceedings from the fourth Biennial Conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (MNCB) held at Leeds University in 2003, though its editors call it a “collection … to develop themes within the teeming musical life of Britain during the nineteenth century” (1). Both are diffuse volumes, with subjects that are interesting and wide-ranging, of use to the general scholar of British studies and the music scholar alike.

It is by now well known that Great Britain was one of the largest consumers and supporters of art and popular music—if frequently drawn from foreign visitors—in the nineteenth century. The purported purpose of Lectures on Musical Life is to present documentation on public, rational-recreation lectures that provided “influence of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic leadership on the taste of consumers of music” (1). These claims, however, are far too modest for what the volume eventually accomplishes. Through their long introduction and the copious footnotes that accompany each lecture, Nicholas Temperley and Yunchung Yang present a window into most elements of British musical culture of the nineteenth century. Among other subjects, the footnotes touch on the growing interest in Johann Sebastian Bach's music in Victorian England (in which Bennett was a driving force), mid-Victorian tastes in opera, politics within orchestral program planning, and the continued use of eighteenth-century music histories well into the nineteenth century, such as those by Charles Burney and John Hawkins. Even though much of the information Bennett presents within these lectures is now known to be inaccurate, the format and the conservative tastes presented in these short talks go a long way toward explaining the continued fascination with George Frederick Handel and Felix Mendelssohn in the era and the attempts throughout the middle of the century to raise Bach to the same standard as Handel and to promote the instrumental music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as the model, contra Richard Wagner, for English composers. Visible within these pages as well is the solidification of the German canon within English taste, from Bach and Handel through Mendelssohn, and the on-again, off-again desire to promote an indigenous English opera throughout the century.

Temperley, of course, is one of the major progenitors of British music studies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His work as an author, editor, and organizer of scholarly societies (including the Midwest Victorian Studies Association and the North American British Music Studies Association) is seminal in the field. Most of the contributors to Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music are indebted to his work, usually directly. He frequently shows up in the footnotes of the essays. The importance of this volume is that it embraces the notion that “Continental music” in Britain was indeed British music; it moves the study convincingly from “English music” to “British music” (something lacking in the previous MNCB proceedings volumes) and notes the presence of such in parts of the Empire, including India and Canada. In essence, the volume helps move the study of British music from the insular to the wider world of nineteenth-century contexts. With the foundation of the Centre for History of Music in Britain, the Empire, and the Commonwealth at Bristol University at the same time this volume was in press, the idea of expanding the study of British music beyond its own borders certainly seems to be in the air. Indeed, the contributors to this volume are just as likely to quote from the works of Edward Said as staple referents Eric Hobsbwam and Temperley.

Major themes in the previous conference proceedings volumes have been music and gender, music and literature, and music of the English provinces. This volume returns to most of those themes (with the exception of music and literature) but includes a great deal more about music beyond England and delves impressively into issues of conceptions of “English” (or “British”) identity versus that of the “other,” especially in essays by Corissa Gould (English vs. Indian identities in Edward Elgar's Crown of India) and Claire Mabilat (English vs. generic “oriental” in nineteenth-century English opera). The volume is divided into three sections: the first is devoted to the presence of Continental music in Britain, including essays on the growing enthusiasm for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, tone poems, the British reaction to Franz Lizst's death, and Italian opera in Dublin. The second section, on varied elements on British identity, includes essays on art music meant to evoke elements of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish identity; Alexander Mackenzie's 1903 tour of Canada, presenting British music at multiple festivals there; and how English music historians throughout the long nineteenth century came to terms with the representation of non-Western music. The third section draws together a number of essays on theater and popular performance, such as the essays by Gould and Mabilat, mentioned above; the reception of blackface and black minstrels; and the nineteenth-century reception history of George Frederick Handel's Acis and Galatea. Particularly excellent within the volume are David Wright's essay on the organization of coronation music for Edward VII, Rachel Cowgill's essay on the lengthy process of reception and acceptance of Mozart's Requiem, and Julian Rushton's study of Henry Hugo Pierson's Shakesperean tone poems. All of the essays, though, are of great interest and well written.

And yet, one of the main problems with this volume is that the papers are so short. Often they do not seem to be any more developed than the papers given at the conference in 2003. Perhaps this decision was made to allow for a greater variety of subjects within the volume. What is lost is depth: many of the essays present great amounts of previously unknown archival material—which is valuable to have—but consequently do not present a sophisticated interpretive apparatus to explain its meaning or import. Stephen Cockett's discussion of the incidental music for Henry Irving's version of the play The Bells is a case in point: the introduction is solid but too short, most of the essay is given over to narrating the play to the reader and describing the incidental cues and where they occur within the play, and the conclusion is almost miniscule. Given that the editors chose to include a CD with a realization of these cues, this essay could have been twice its length and still had much more to say. I hope that Cockett will elaborate on this important work in further publication; additional investigation of the cues he has analyzed is essential for the study of the genesis of film music scores in the twentieth century.

Part of this lack of development can be undoubtedly attributed to writing experience. Of the seventeen essays, five are by graduate students who were still working on their PhDs at the time of publication. While the graduate student essays are all solid work, some seem to strive to reinvent the wheel, such as Isabel Parrott's essay on Bennett's place within the popularization of Bach in the nineteenth century: she lists none of the modern discussions of either Bennett or research into the Victorian engagement with Bach. Yet aside from this lacuna, the essay is engaging and illuminating, and her archival recoveries valuable.

For whatever reason, Ashgate did not see fit to provide a closing bibliography for Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music, nor does its index refer to the modern authors used, so one must go through every footnote in order to trace the chain of scholarship. Further, styles of footnote citation are not always consistent. However, this is much better than what Boydell did with its references. The publisher decided to start footnote numbering anew on each page within Lectures on Musical Life. This works when the footnotes do not run on to the next page, but since the book is so well documented, they often do so.

These, though, are small points. Each volume, though serving a different purpose, is meant for the same audience: the growing group of interdisciplinary scholars at work on the study of British music. Within both, there is much that is new, new interpretations of the familiar, and new facts and facets of British life and culture that should become familiar to all of those who study the era, not just historians and theorists of music.