Musical Life

THE TWO VOLUMES of Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies (Zon 1999 and Dibble and Zon 2002) in some sense present an overview, representing the three types of scholarship I have described and covering every major area of musicology from the historiographic to the analytic. Taken as books they are not particularly successful; they are plagued by the fitful editing that seems to mark all the Ashgate books, and the categories into which the essays are gathered are a bit haphazard, driven by the extremely miscellaneous nature of the conference offerings. There are many detailed studies of small and precisely-defined topics: the Wheatstone concertina, the barrel organ, violin pedagogy, the work of various individual musicians and musical families; there are a number of studies of local history focusing either on domestic, town, or church music-making in Glasgow, Oxford, Yorkshire, Dublin, or Durham. There are numerous discussions about the genres and musical practices that particularly typified Victorian life: the immense popularity of oratorio and opera, other church musics such as psalmody, the practice of musicians' benefit concerts, and Britain's now-ubiquitous innovation, the concert program note.

Some of the individual contributions are unusually interesting and valuable, and – perhaps more germane in the present context – could be useful and thought-provoking for scholars in other fields. In the 1999 volume, Jeremy Dibble's “Parry as Historiographer” goes far beyond what its title suggests to explore the Victorian sense of history in general and of music history in particular. Dibble introduces C. H. H. Parry as a typical example of the progressive Victorian intellectual, not the most familiar guise in which we are accustomed to view him. The discussion brings to the fore a more fundamental reason than those Temperley considers for the musical “xenophilia” of the British: the intellectual commitment to organic and evolutionary models of history, rampant throughout the nineteenth century, led historians inexorably to trace the “development” of music in terms of the startling parade of Austro-German geniuses from Bach and Handel through Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (and so many others) directly to Wagner. That is, it was not just xenophilia tout court, but Germanophilia in particular that ruled the day, and it was felt to varying degrees everywhere in the Western world, not just in Britain.

So although Parry himself was not a believer in the “great man” theory of history as such, almost any other imaginable way of viewing music history – the development of musical genres, for instance – would lead inevitably along the same path. He was also heavily influenced by Herbert Spencer's campaign to out-Darwin Darwin, bringing natural selection (which Spencer, of course, called “the survival of the fittest”) to bear in the social and cultural arena. Unthinkable, then, that what survived could be other than what was fittest. Somewhat piquant in hindsight is Parry's commitment to exactly the sorts of values that the current generation of musicologists has worked for two decades to bring back into the field, to mend the discipline after the ravages of post-Sputnik empiricism and science envy. In 1887 he wrote: “One of the most interesting things about the history of music is the way in which it invariably illustrates in some way or other the state of society, and the condition of thought of the people among whom it is produced” (Zon 1999: 39). In the 1980s musicologists lost tenure for arguing as much.

Trevor Herbert's “The Practice and Context of a Private Victorian Brass Band” (Zon 1999) is a fully social history in attitude, and utterly engaging. The brass band phenomenon, a mainstay of the Victorian scene, was the result of a confluence of factors, including the instruments themselves, which in their modern form were joint products of industrial revolution and the development of commodity markets, and the widespread bourgeois prescription of music for the working class as a sop against the social upheavals that many anticipated. Most bands of the era were started by the management of factories or “works” for their own employees; this development is detailed in Russell (1997), while Herbert prefers to concentrate on the commercial aspects of the story rather than the political or ideological ones. Herbert stresses the rapidity with which bands became independent of the organizations that founded them, jealously guarding their traditions of autonomous management. The band tradition continues alive and well in Britain today, albeit under drastically different circumstances. I just heard the Elland Silver Band – a town band in West Yorkshire that has been performing since the mid-1850s – in Leeds in July of 2003. And as those who watch BBC television's “Ground Force” will be aware, the program's music is played by the Black Dyke Mills Band, one of the most prominent of the Victorian “works” bands, founded in 1855 with antecedents dating back to 1816.²

In any event, Herbert concentrates here on an entirely untypical group, the Cyfarthfa Band from Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, a private enterprise not associated with the local ironworks. Its players were not ironworkers but professionals hired by the band's founder and owner; the band used an unusual instrumentation, and did not enter contests – the raison d'être of virtually all amateur civic and works bands. (On one of the few occasions when it did, at the Crystal Palace in 1860, it was defeated by Black Dyke.) Herbert interprets the founding of this band as a gesture of social status, comparing it to the construction of a mock “castle” in the same town by another wealthy resident of the area, as “oases of culture” (111).

In the second conference volume, of particular importance is the report by Christina Bashford, Rachel Cowgill, and Simon McVeigh on their database project on “Concert Life in Nineteenth-Century London.” The report itself is an indicator of the growth and vitality of the field: demand is increasing for the kind of information such a database makes ready for the researcher. Despite the fact that the database has a purely empirical focus on concert life, the authors ground their discussion in changes within the discipline that acknowledge the social and cultural component to musicological study, and that make Victorian music “finally” a respectable field of study. Precisely because of British “xenophilia,” London was the unchallenged mecca for touring performers during the era; “absolutely everybody” came to London to play. For that reason, in designing this database it was impossible even to imagine simply amassing data (from concert programs, records of organizations, newspapers and the new music journals), so its designers borrowed an Australian methodology they call “slice history” – the exhaustive study of single years, a generation apart (to begin, they chose 1815, 1855, and 1895) – though they fully expect the database project to expand through different methods in the future. An interesting side issue is the perplexing matter of defining “London,” which was during the nineteenth century, as Victorianists know, both conceptually and legally a rapidly moving target.

Jean Marie Hoover's “Constructing Ireland: Culture and Politics in Stanford's Shamus O'Brien” is a rare venture into cultural politics, although its substance probably holds few surprises for those cognizant of the nineteenth-century Irish situation. “Stanford, along with his librettist, George H. Jessop, crafted a double-voiced work whose ambiguity between a cultural and a political perspective allowed its initial success in both England and Ireland” (126); that is, the opera had to appeal to the English sense of picturesque Irish exoticism without pleading the case of Irish national feeling against the English. Suzanne Fagence Cooper's “Aspiring to the Condition of Music: Painting in Britain 1860–1900” asks a question after my own heart – “why did so many late nineteenth-century artists invoke the experience of music in their paintings?” (251) – and suggests that some knowledge about Victorian music can assist art historians in coming to a fuller understanding of the period. The answers Cooper offers connect this frequent phenomenon to the Aesthetic movement, featuring a stress on sensuality, an experimental subjectlessness, and continental influence – as usual, more or less explicitly meaning Wagner – and she identifies these as three challenges to the regnant values of the art establishment of the time. To her analysis I would add another element that she does not invoke, at least explicitly: the degree to which music – and, more important, a vague but intense moral and emotional notion of “musicality” – entirely saturated Victorian culture.

To turn now to a volume that conceives “musical life” more broadly and from a different disciplinary perspective: Dave Russell's Popular Music in England, 1840–1914: A Social History, whose first edition (1987) is very well known, has been reissued in a second (1997), whose editors nod to the sea-changes in music scholarship that have occurred between the two. In short, they suggest, postmodernism, with its demolition of the boundaries between high and popular culture and its “legitimation” of popular music studies, has made this “genuine social history” even more significant than was understood before. As far as Russell's methodological orientation is concerned, he avows some sympathy with Gramscian analysis but is concerned not to cast popular music-making entirely as a mode of social control, an orientation common in some quarters; instead, he wishes to preserve the sense of choice, enjoyment, creativity, and hard work among the Victorian makers of popular musics as well as their listeners. And for all the editors' invocation of postmodern values, the book remains a very straightforward exposition, full of information and not structured to any great extent as a theoretical argument.

But that does not mean that Russell has no methodological lessons to teach. Especially striking is his discomfort with the standard theoretical and ideological definitions of the “popular,” as he reminds us that any such distinctions by musical genre were contradicted by the illimitable popularity of such “high-art” repertories as Handelian oratorio and Italian opera; nor would he be surprised that the Black Dyke Mills band played arrangements of Elgar's symphonies (see Richards 69). Russell uses a working definition cast in terms of the real-life musical practices of “the majority of the population” (2), and he always writes with the utmost respect for both musicians and listeners, in every musical venue. I wish this kind of global view of musical culture were more common in the flourishing study of today's popular music, with a less exclusive focus on a particular repertory (rock, rap, bluegrass, whatever) that replicates precisely the tunnel vision of traditional classical musicology, and more consideration of the musical lives of “the majority of the population”; to my knowledge, nobody is doing that now. Just to point up how striking this approach is, and what a rich picture it enables Russell to offer: an analogous study of popular music culture today would certainly have to include the Nutcracker ballet, concerts by competing sets of “three tenors,” sporadic crazes for Gregorian chant, and those midnight commercials on obscure cable channels touting CD collections of “the world's best-loved melodies,” just for starters. It would certainly yield a more accurate picture of the extraordinary diversity of contemporary musical lives.

Russell's book is divided into three sections, each representing an impetus, so to speak, for musical activity. Part 1, “Control,” discusses the determination of reformers and philanthropists to use music to instill certain habits and behaviors into the working class, along with various symptoms of workers' resistance to it – what he calls “the battle for the working class mind” (21). His discussion of one of the most salient of all Victorian-music topics, the issue of “music and morals,”³

reminds us – as do many of Russell's topics – that the same set of values and assumptions is also part of the history of “classical music,” a synergy at which we ought to be past surprise by this time.

Attitudinal shifts occurring in the late century placed more emphasis on the quality of musical experience – even for workers and the urban poor – and the involvement of do-gooders gradually gave way to municipal provision for public music-making. There was always an underlying social motive, however: the following explanation from Viscount Folkestone about sums it up: “to cultivate a taste for good, high-class amusement among the poorer classes in the hope of withdrawing them from lower places of resort, to introduce an element of brightness into their lives, and to establish a better feeling between the different classes by bringing them into clear contact with each other”(41).

Russell's section on “Capitalism” (Part 2) considers the influence of entrepreneurial effort in both the popular music industry and the development of the music hall. Along with essentially informative chapters on these two venues, there are also two interpretive chapters, dealing respectively with “Social and Political Comment in Music Hall Song” and “Patriotism, Jingoism and Imperialism.” Russell's sociological background serves him well in considering how certain musical phenomena – “arrangements” of popular works, for example – entailed the entrepreneurial cooperation of a number of otherwise distinct groups: music publishers, piano manufacturers, concert promoters, and musicians themselves. Another very engaging example is his revelation of the often-excoriated street music as a highly competitive market; two kinds of street musicians battled each other for territory, the one genuinely hoping to entertain listeners and the other intending only to extort bribes from those who wished for silence.

Russell dwells on the difficulty of “reading” the songs of the music hall as class-specific utterances with any kind of interpretive assurance: on the one hand, the music hall was a business, commercially driven, not “some pure expression of popular views” (109); but on the other hand, “audiences simply do not consume cultural products which fail to connect with at least some of their values” (111). Discursively, his careful insistence on complexity and nuance can come across as a certain tepidness in his text – against which, in fairness, the reader is bound to struggle. A good example is his account of historians' debate over the real attitudinal role of the music halls during the expansion of empire at the end of the century. Russell does not want us to assume either that the energy and sometime virulence of the songs on imperialist or warmongering topics was a straightforward reflection of lower- or middle-class views, or that the vast quantity of such material (the music hall was, after all, the original site of the “jingo song”) could be explained away as the manipulation of easy public sentiment by a calculating management. On the whole, he concludes, music hall songs no doubt did play a role as both shapers and reflectors of public opinion. Perhaps we would like to have a clearer and more polemically rousing conclusion, but this mixed one certainly seems the most likely.

Part 3, “Community,” deals with the many versions of voluntary amateur music-making; the author stresses this longest section, wishing readers to keep always in view the popular capacity for musical creativity and enjoyment. There are chapters on brass bands and choral societies, and a general methodological consideration of the problem of relating music to social change in any directly informative way. Amateur music, like other popular activities, shows the effect of the ripening industrial revolution in the course of the century: the availability, and then the gradually increasing affordability, of musical instruments and of printed music are in some very real sense the heart of the story. Russell's persistent theme here is the distortion that has resulted from mainstream traditions of scholarship; in particular, the conventions of historical musicology have missed almost all of this story, either because scholars took at face value the boasting of publishers, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists who insisted that they alone had “brought” music to the working class, or because they gave too much credence to middle-class curled-lip descriptions of what went on in the pubs, the streets, the Nonconformist churches, and other venues of working-class musical activity. Consider, in contrast, this entirely characteristic sentence: “the brass band represents one of the most remarkable working-class cultural achievements in European history” (205).

Music Makers

MEIRION HUGHES's The English Musical Renaissance and the Press 1850–1914: Watchmen of Music (2002) follows upon an earlier book on the topic co-authored with R. A. Stradling. The very titles and terms Hughes employs in this later study substantially make his argument, “watchers” and “watched” representing music critics and composers respectively and the extraordinary king-making powers the former had over the latter. He borrows his title from one of the critics, J. A. Fuller Maitland⁴

(29), and it can be taken as expressing one of the more vivid symptoms of the turn-of-the-century view of music as a function of elite society that required guarding along with their propertied estates. Pervasive themes are familiar – nationalism, empire, and class – and the “land without music” trope proves irresistible to critics excoriating audiences for their failures of taste and appropriate enthusiasm.

The so-called “English musical renaissance” has become a contested entity (see Frogley), but Hughes is arguing that, whatever we may make of the term, “the revival of English music in the second half of the nineteenth century could not have taken place without the support of journalists” (1). The revival is at least partly attributable to the very late arrival of progressive taste in Britain; around 1850 critics and public alike maintained a complacent fixation on the conservative romantic style of Mendelssohn, offering fierce resistance to Wagner and “music of the future” until the 1880s. Or, to refine that observation a bit, the musical press occupied itself for a half century in a pitched battle between the forces of musical conservatism and progressivism, which only slowly weighed toward the latter as the decades went by. That is, within most publications there was a kind of continual ricochet between the Wagnerian and anti-Wagnerian critical positions, persistently the most important axis of taste from mid-century onwards.

But according to the picture Hughes paints here, an even more important driving force behind the “renaissance” was developing nationalism and the belief that music had a role to play in it, which meant support for British composers and a heated search for “the” English oratorio, opera, and symphony. This was a more serious business than may be quite credible nowadays. A critic in the Morning Post in 1882 commented of Hubert Parry that “if he had been less German and more English … art would have been better served and his own aspirations more reasonably fulfilled. Native talent is on trial, and it is necessary that all our rising musicians should be loyal and true to themselves and to the cause. Unity is strength, not only physically, but morally. With a definite purpose supported by all who wish well to the art they profess, English genius must come to the front and hold the position again it once occupied so proudly” (141). The rhetoric resembles the contemporary language of empire, with England taking its rightfully superior place among the nations of the world despite dire warnings about invasions by “Slavic hordes”; but the critics disagreed about which hallmarks to look for in British genius, the classicizing allegiance to Mendelssohnian style or the more adventurous signs of the “music of the future.”

Hughes includes important critics in all types of publications – newspapers and monthly magazines, the general press and the specialized musical press – but in the limited space I have available I will focus on the effect of all this watching on the composers (the “watched,” the second part of the book) since I imagine they are more widely known to readers and may be of more interest. Because the book is episodic, moving from one name to another without much of an overriding narrative, I will focus on the critical fate of one or two composers certainly familiar to readers to exemplify the kinds of issues that Hughes's book illuminates.

The striking chapter title “Sullivan: Jumbo of the Moment” comes, astonishingly, from an obituary for Sir Arthur Sullivan written by Fuller Maitland for the Cornhill in March 1901; Maitland deplores the composer's huge popularity with the British (not to mention the American) public and whines that such “‘Jumboism’ is more and more the characteristic defect of the English race” (136). As Hughes details here, Sullivan had many supporters among the watchers – whom he cultivated assiduously – at the very classical start of his compositional career. Trained impeccably at the Royal Academy of Music and at the Leipzig Conservatory, he composed in all of the approved genres – symphony, concerto, concert overture, even oratorio – to moderate, if mixed, success as far as the reviewers were concerned.

But ultimately he lost favor because of his failure to become the long-looked-for “English Beethoven.” More drastically, he had periodically (though never definitively) turned his back on the whole effort, recognizing all too well that his personal and financial ambition were better served by the overwhelming success of the Savoy operettas he wrote with W. S. Gilbert. Where art is a religion, such apostasies count as more than mere career choices; Sullivan's failure, as Hughes notes, was “depicted as really a moral and spiritual one” (117). The historical irony that these theater pieces remain universally beloved and in virtually continual worldwide production more than a century later would never have crossed the minds of the watchers; they damned the operettas with the singularly unprescient epithet “ephemeral.”

But the Jumbo was also a lion, as it turned out, certainly with the public if not with the critics, and his funeral was one of those extravaganzas that were such a specialty of the era, organized “with all the funerary pomp that the British state could muster” (136) and supervised by Victoria herself. If the gatekeeping critics could only have recognized the situation, they would have understood that the Great English Composer had made his appearance after all.

Edward Elgar, the “‘Self-Made’ Composer,” is the one most likely nowadays to be cited as quintessentially “English,” although socially he was not the sort of avatar the watchers had hoped for. Elgar painstakingly attempted to make his own reputation (with the help of his friends among the critics) as a kind of bard – that is, an “unlettered” but intuitively gifted adviser to kings; he played up a similarity to Hardy, with whom he was often associated. Rather than bardic timelessness, though, this son of a Malvern shopkeeper found forms of perpetuity in the “nation of shopkeepers” more tellingly redolent of his class: Harrod's sponsored a performance of his first symphony as part of its 60th anniversary celebration; today Elgar finds himself pictured on a £20 note. And there is his other, more musical albeit peculiarly American, form of perpetuity, the Elgar piece to which everyone in the United States graduates from everywhere, kindergarten through university, the first Pomp and Circumstance march, premiered in October 1901 and therefore one of the very first enduring post-Victorian cultural phenomena.⁵

Paula Gillett's Musical Women in England (2000) is concerned with a very different group of music-makers, women who were trying to succeed in the professional music world of Victorian Britain – and her focus is indeed on professional careers, not on the familiar world of amateur music to which women were consigned and for which they were held responsible in the domestic setting. Of course it is a story of discrimination and discouragement: what else could it be, since the underlying, grounding mode of social organization – even in class-ridden Victorian Britain – was gender? But this book is not just another “ain't it awful” saga; Gillett's opening gambit is to stress the contributions that women in fact made to British musical life during the period, and she provides a gratifying amount of new information to what is otherwise a sadly familiar story, suggesting a number of ideas I have not encountered heretofore. (For instance, why have none of us thought before now that the gradual acceptance of violin-playing by middle-class girls at the end of the century owed something to the fact that the long-iconic piano had managed to seep downward culturally and economically into the working classes?) As we read from chapter to chapter, Gillett is continually able to introduce us to new angles, new evidence, and fascinating stories we have not come upon before.

Despite her exclusive focus on music professionals – this is not a sociological study of musical life like Russell's – Gillett does ground her discussion in categories of social history like Victorian philanthropy (of which female musicians were both organizers and beneficiaries), gender ideology, and that very British ambivalence about music that we have encountered before. She includes a rather shocking quotation from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, observing that performers deserved their high fees not only because of their long years of training but also because the public display of their talents was “considered, whether from reason or prejudice, as a sort of public prostitution,” a degradation for which they deserved compensation from society (6).

The introductory chapter of Musical Women can be taken as a good summary of Gillett's argument; it outlines several distinct arenas in which women musicians' experience of their profession differed markedly from that of their male counterparts; that is, it shows us precisely how gender can be isolated as a category of the analysis of social experience. The totality of public discourse about music – from concert reviews to textbooks on music appreciation – was saturated with gender; happily for modern readers, there is always a saving element of humor in the sheer nuttiness of these arguments, so secure in their essentialism that they excoriated both men and women for behaving outside gender norms rather than taking such behavior as counterevidence against the norms' “naturalness.” A woman's choice of musical instrument was as thoroughly gendered as everything else, at least at the beginning of the period; girls and women could not play those that distorted their faces or bodily postures or, needless to say, had a suggestively phallic appearance. There was an utter lack of parity in the kinds of careers that were available: fame and glory as soloists might be imaginable for the extraordinary few, but the vast majority could aspire only to mean livelihoods as peripatetic music teachers making house calls. Even then, Victorian family values meant that any female professional was expected to abort her career at an instant's notice if the family was in trouble or some family member required tending – and many, perhaps most, did so.

Female composers presented the most alarming challenge to Victorian mores, and they faced a vanishingly small likelihood of having pieces performed or published. Gillett gives a good deal of space to the discourses and practices that made women composers' lives and careers almost unendurable. Perhaps the most grotesque argument, offered by a critic for the Referee in 1911, suggests that women can never compose great music because they lack the most important spiritual impetus – the idealization of Woman as muse! (This, I believe, is a classic example of the no-win situation; imagine the public reception of a woman composer who did profess to adore women.)

Chapters 4 and 5 are a pair, intended to represent a sea-change from one end of Gillett's specified era to the other in attitudes toward women playing the violin. Gillett's premise is that the “informal ban” on violin-playing, although it was very strong earlier in the century, began to fade in the 1870s. The taboo itself is commonly ascribed to the ungainliness of the performance posture that made women “unattractive” as they played, but Gillett quite intelligently refuses to be satisfied by this explanation, in view of the genuine disgust contemporaries expressed when they saw such a performance. She delves for deeper cultural explanations in the violin's highly eroticized iconography (think of Man Ray's most famous photograph) and its long-standing mythic association with the satanic, sin, and death (as popularized in danse macabre and Totentanz traditions).

One of the richest sources of the ideologies of both gender and music has been Victorian fiction, which is explored by Gillett as it is also in Clapp-Itnyre (2002) and Weliver (2000). Of the three, Gillett is explicitly not engaged in literary criticism, which is neither her professional forte nor her purpose; instead, she uses the novels and stories she discusses as evidence of social attitudes. She is interested in the fates of musical female characters, the ways in which they are represented as seeking artistic and personal autonomy against long odds but almost invariably come to a bad end at the moralizing hands of Victorian society – whether their authors are smug or rueful about this outcome. There is the by-now obligatory account of “Armgart” and Daniel Deronda, George Eliot's most focused representations of female singers; Gillett has nothing particularly new to say about them, but uses the texts effectively to illustrate the kinds of ambivalence about female visibility, vanity, and emotionality that marked Victorian attitudes. More interesting is her discussion of far more unusual texts, including stories from music magazines as well as general ones and unfamiliar novels by Walter Besant (Armorel of Lyonesse), Albert Morris Bagby (Miss Träumerei), Elizabeth Godfrey (Cornish Diamonds), Mary Ward (Robert Elsmere), Berta Thomas (The Violin Player), M. E. Francis (The Duenna of a Genius), and Gissing (The Whirlpool). Many are brutal morality tales – but then there is also Sarah Grand's much more problematic, ambivalent, and challenging The Heavenly Twins.

Gillett invites us to ponder a paradox of social change: the very attitude shifts that made musical careers respectable for girls by the end of the century simultaneously made them economically unavailable as enormous numbers of them flooded the music schools and glutted the market. It is a relief that she also offers a peroration on the women's movement, stressing its enabling force for these women musicians as for so many others.

Representation

BECAUSE OF ITS EMOTIONAL intensity and because the Victorians believed that it revealed character, music served as an extremely handy iconic system for the conveyance of social attitudes of all sorts. Both Phyllis Weliver's Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction and Alisa Clapp-Itnyre's Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs explore this terrain, using fiction to understand the interaction of music with gender in Victorian representational practices; in a general sense both books are about the same thing, but there is a world of difference between them. In short, the sophistication of Weliver's readings, and their firm grounding in intellectual history, make Clapp's pale by comparison.

Indeed Weliver provides discussions of several scientific topics – mesmerism and hypnosis, the science of mind, reproductive medicine, and of course evolution – as rich as those of the novels she reads. (Her title is very unfortunate; it does not adequately represent the cultural richness of her book, nor on the other hand the specificity of its focus on scientific discourse. It claims both too much and not enough.) She concentrates on “perceptions of musical women,” and an unusual aspect of her book is its focus on constructions of gender through non-literary discourses, especially the scientific, which are then fed back upon her readings of the fictional works.

Even more unusually, Weliver also reads some “musical aspects” of narrative structure in the novels; this notion I find considerably less persuasive, although suggestive. Similarly, in her discussion of The Mystery of Edwin Drood she draws an analogy between musical fugue and the psychological “fugue” that describes the dissociative states of hypnosis, mesmerism, drunkenness and drug-induced stupor. This I think is a mistake; beyond the surface commonality of the word's etymology – “flight” – the iconic meanings of the two, within their separate realms, seem quite incommensurable. While psychological fugue is a mental illness or disorder, a musical fugue is the most orderly type of composition, the epitome of reason and authorial control, and is virtually always used to signify that apollonian status when it appears in musical and non-musical texts alike.

The second chapter, on “music, mesmerism, and mental science,” may be the most fascinating and seems to me to make the most original contribution. She identifies a considerable group of late Victorian novels in which “foreign villains” play a substantial role and observes that music and mesmerism are their recurring characteristics – the downside of, or a late reaction to, that British “xenophilia” for foreign musicians? Weliver provides a rich scientific history here, but at the same time she reads the science culturally: not only do these case studies involve music with suggestive frequency, but the iconic cases invariably involve a male doctor and a female patient (one recalls the familiar later photographs of Charcot's hysteria patients at the Salpêtriére in Paris), raising central symbolic questions of agency. Whose knowledge, and whose power, are revealed by these mesmeric – or later, hypnotic – demonstrations? (For reasons not quite clear, the fictional locus classicus, George du Maurier's Trilby, is discussed only later in a conclusion to the book.) The resulting system of representation had profound implications for the perception of women's musical powers, especially virtuosic powers, across the board; this notion produces some very fruitful results when put into dialogue with Gillett's account of violin-playing women. Weliver brings the ideas to bear on a discussion of sensation novels, studying East Lynne (briefly), The Woman in White, and Lady Audley's Secret to explore their representations of sensuous (mesmeric?) female power or – conversely, and mostly in the next chapter – the fear of “insane” or “evil” power over women exerted through music.

On one level it is obvious that the ubiquitous use of female musicality as a feature of nineteenth-century courtship can be read through Darwin's understanding of music as an aspect of sexual selection; this was as true in real life – that is, as an analytic category of social history – as in the fiction of the era, and it is a popular interpretation especially of George Eliot's novels, where music plays so evident a role in the relationships between women and men. The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda are discussed here, in connection with recapitulation, natural selection, and related topics to do with evolutionary theory.

From time to time, there are small mistakes where Weliver's argument seems to have overtaken the textual evidence. Rosamond Vincy, for example, is said to play “shallow … finishing-school music” (209) and “standard parlor music” (217) – which is exactly what we would expect from her in the hands of a lesser author and which, in terms of sexual selection, could attract only a somewhat indifferent mate. Eliot insists, though, that Rosamond plays “noble music,” and plays it very well except for the fatal tendency to parrot her teacher's interpretation mechanically instead of searching with truly musical insight for one of her own. This is an extraordinarily subtle charge under the circumstances, a musical sin that would take the expert ear of a Klesmer to recognize, and I think we can forgive Lydgate for being taken in by it; but Weliver is not so sympathetic to his musical gullibility. (And, speaking of small mistakes, the phrase “a cappella” – meaning “as in the chapel” – refers to choral music sung without instrumental accompaniment, not to a vocal solo.)

I have one mild objection to Weliver's method, especially that of the latter chapters – her attribution of characterization and plot strategy to Eliot's sophisticated knowledge of all the advanced thinkers discussed in this book, not only Darwin and Spencer but Schopenhauer and Feuerbach as well. Of course, Eliot's familiarity with these texts is well known and thoroughly documented, but surely her readers must have shared at least some aspects of this knowledge in order for her to have become the best-seller and the popular “sibyl” that she was. It would be interesting to know to what extent these systems of thought – and in what form – had seeped into popular consciousness as well as into the author's. The first section of the book fares rather better in this respect, since her discussion of mesmerism and hypnosis includes many accounts that the general public would have known and even several popular-culture manifestations.

Clapp-Itnyre's book on more or less the same topic suffers very greatly by comparison with Weliver's. (She has not put “women” in her title, but she stresses that gender is an analytic category for her nonetheless.) The writing is graceless and full of breathy schoolgirl-isms (“an amazing book,” “incredibly important”) and the editing is poor. Worse, her readings are not convincing and they tend to rest on extraordinarily literal-minded interpretations of the texts, while at the same time her moralizing evaluations emerge anachronistically from a century neither the characters nor their authors ever saw. The book is written with an air of exposé, as though we might not otherwise have suspected the Victorians of gender bias or of class inequities (here always called “elitism” or “classism,” as if a simple attitude adjustment were in order), or we might be horrified to learn that great composers actually needed to earn money. In short, it is naïve. In the same vein, the author refers throughout to Victorian ideological commitments a bit over-simply as “politics”; not that I would deny for a minute that they were political or had political implications, but surely this is too reductive a pigeonhole for these deeply-felt, sometimes almost comically earnest, views about how the social fabric should be textured and what role music had in that texturing. For Clapp-Itnyre is absolutely correct in arguing for the extremely central role that music had – or perhaps we should say that the idea of music had – in the Victorian moral universe.

Clapp-Itnyre tells us that “this book is primarily for the literary scholar” (xviii), and in fact it may be a little more successful as a sourcebook for those working on these novels than as a set of readings in themselves; it is unusual and potentially useful in that it discusses the social (“political”) contexts of actual pieces of music and musical genres as part of its central argument. The book takes its title from a paradox the author sees in Victorian beliefs about music, which they simultaneously considered heavenly and fatally dangerous. Really, though, this is not much of a paradox but rather two sides of the same coin: if music has moral force, it is only to be expected that that force can work either for good or for ill. It stands to reason that if good music makes you a better person, then bad music is certain to do the reverse.

Angelic Airs introduces five different musical repertories or varieties of music-making, each associated with a particular author or novel: domestic ballads, Methodist hymnody, pastoral music, professional music, and the late-century folksong revival. In each case (the three central ones concern George Eliot) Clapp-Itnyre argues that an author knowingly, if sometimes perversely, deploys the musical details to further plots, limn characters, and – more problematically – express opinions about current social issues and musical practices. I will discuss just a few of them by way of explaining my skepticism. It is often the case that Clapp-Itnyre's underlying ideas are interesting and suggestive, but the arguments are flighty and assert much more than they demonstrate. The chapter on Elizabeth Gaskell insists that the author “condemns” musical exhibitionism, class snobbery, and superficiality (52), but surely the fact that Gaskell uses a comic scene of amateurish musical display to characterize a young woman (or a moment of social weakness on the young woman's part) does not, all by itself, support such a ponderous claim. Clapp-Itnyre never seems to imagine that authors have any sense of humor, or – more crucially – that the narrator of a novel may be distinct from the novelist herself.

She provides highly interesting and knowledgeable information on the situation of English hymnody by way of approaching Adam Bede, including a discussion of sectarian differences in religious musical practice and principle that do in fact help us to understand Dinah's social situation better. But her reading turns out to devolve on the suggestion that Eliot has rewritten the hymn texts to suit her own brand of religious humanism – or, more accurately, that she has picked and chosen among familiar stanzas and even individual lines, “omitting most references to specific Christian doctrines (such as sin and redemption) and focusing instead on the human emotions of pain and joy” (84). This is interesting to consider, but it seems to me at least as likely that Eliot simply chooses stanzas and verses that support and forward her narrative – for instance, ones that will illustrate characters' emotional states or dilemmas – in ways that stanzas merely stating Christian doctrine will not. In discussing The Mill on the Floss, Clapp-Itnyre asserts that “Eliot exposes the gender and class biases of the pastoral tradition in music and literature. She does so by depicting a ‘true’ pastoral subject, Maggie, whose feminine power and lower-class status are antithetical to the pastoral musical world constructed by her rich, educated relatives” (120–21). But surely Maggie's mistreatment for both gender and class reasons are clear enough without invoking the pastoral, and surely nobody in the late nineteenth century would have felt the need to “expose” those biases of the ancient and very well understood pastoral literary tradition? Again, the argument feels overdone.

It is Clapp-Itnyre's chapter on Daniel Deronda that gives the most pause.⁶

I cannot help but see it as an utterly perverse reading, an attempt to construe Gwendolen Harleth as a seriously aspiring musician who is thwarted unreasonably by the professional music world (that is, a misogynistic Klesmer) that strikes me as tantamount to misreading the entire novel. On the contrary, it seems evident enough in the text that what Gwendolen wants, at the outset of the story, is to be wealthy and to be admired. Music as such is the merest of notions for her, and the novel offers scant evidence that she has any talent, ever works at her music, or even thinks about it with any seriousness, unlike other female characters in the novel who function very successfully as musicians of talent and dedication. (Eliot may be unkind to her heroine, from an anachronistic point of view, but within the novel Gwendolen is nonetheless a clear enough moral lesson.) The problem, again, is Clapp-Itnyre's literal-mindedness. She does not recognize Eliot's irony or her authorial insistence upon humanizing her characters and sympathizing with their foibles. Many of the digs at Klesmer are surely meant to represent the attitudes of his insufferably bourgeois listeners – Eliot happily pokes fun at both – but this author takes them straightforwardly as Eliot's own criticisms of him and what he represents. On the whole, readers will be considerably happier with Phyllis Weliver's discussions of George Eliot than with Alisa Clapp-Itnyre's.

Bennett Zon's Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology (2000) is about another sort of representation altogether, the various categories of figurative language in which Victorian authors interpreted music's history. It is a fairly brief and thoroughly straightforward book that simply recounts the arguments of one author after another. It is unfortunate, I think, that Zon missed the chance for some cultural interpretation, nuance, or generalization; on the contrary, not even chronology is necessarily part of his argument. He is, however, admirably clear about what he is and is not doing here, and simply the fact that there are so many music histories for him to study is telling in itself, about the saturation of Victorian culture with music. It has to be said, alas, that the book is terribly badly edited and apparently not proof-read at all; its condition is actually dire enough to frustrate one's reading, and only aggravated by the author's penchant for neologisms like “discredability” (15) and “memorically” (144).

Zon organizes his histories around four main bodies of metaphoric language: politics and empire, the arts, religion, and science – meaning, for the most part, evolution. Of these, evolutionary historiography is the most familiar, having been most thoroughly explored by other writers, and the discussions of imperialism strike me as the most novel and interesting. In the chapter concerning the other arts or all the arts together as tropes for understanding music's history, it is only a shame Zon did not consider the reverse; it feels odd in this book not to encounter Pater at all, especially his highly influential and highly charged observation that all the arts “aspire to the condition of music.”

Zon's material is fascinating, and it could be very useful toward a number of different kinds of projects. But the book remains a little blurry in the underlying sense that, to a considerable extent, the tropes he discusses are not really “metaphors” at all. I do not mean to raise a technical quibble over definitions – a mare's nest, I am well aware – but a larger and more straightforward objection. If an author writes a history of music under the genuine conviction that all things evolve, including the arts, or the conviction that music is of divine origin or under divine control, or the conviction that commonalities among all the arts govern their development, then these are not “metaphors” but intellectual frames of reference, world-views, or even, in some cases, the polemical impetus for the whole endeavor. Sensibly enough, Zon construes metaphor as “figurative language” (1), but it is not at all clear that the templates here are figurative, to their authors; God is not a “metaphor” to Augustus Pugin, but very real indeed and the organizing principle of life as well as of history.

The last section of the book (206 ff) focuses this difficulty acutely, if a blur may be said to have a focus. Zon attempts to make an opposition between narrative and metaphor, remarking that nineteenth-century general histories of music “are narratival to the detriment of metaphor” and that in them “facts in themselves become more significant than any metaphoric template through which facts might be projected” (206). This is confusing, for historical narratives are themselves intensely metaphoric, as the historiographic work of Hayden White and many others has so vividly shown, and the “highly taxonomic approach” Zon attributes to the general histories strikes me as precisely contrary to “narrative” as we would ordinarily understand the term – more on the order, perhaps, of what White would call “chronicle.” It is evident that Zon intends a significant distinction here, but I am left with the feeling that I am not quite getting the point.

Taken all in all, what with the enormous variety of musicological method represented here, it is impossible to characterize in any simple way the current state of play in Victorian musical scholarship. Living with the situation on a daily basis, I am delighted that the era has come into focus as a field of musicological scholarship, but I still do not know whether “diversity” or “chaos” is the apter term to describe it. It will be exciting to see how it develops.