Nicholas Temperley is well known as a musicologist of the first rank, in particular for his pioneering work in the area of British music, beginning with his dissertation, Instrumental Music in England, 1800–1850 (PhD diss, University of Cambridge, 1959). This Festschrift, for Temperley, in honour of his eightieth birthday, comprises thirteen essays on varied aspects of British musical life from the later eighteenth century to the early twentieth. As editor Bennett Zon points out in his Introduction, few have worked as hard as Temperley at killing the myth of the ‘Land Without Music’ (p. 4), applying ‘critically reasoned musicology’ to the task in place of its ‘more apologetic nineteenth-century counterpart’ (p. 3). These essays are a testament to how much has been done in this area – much of it by Temperley himself, as acknowledged by several of the authors.

The disparate topics of the chapters, all stemming from research avenues largely opened up by Temperley, are neatly organized into four groups. These essays are framed by Zon's Introduction, and a bibliography of Temperley's publications. In the former we are treated to a sketch of Temperley's life, career, and contributions to scholarship, along with an overview of what is to come in the essays. The bibliography is remarkable reading in itself: a dozen books and monographs, more than two dozen book chapters, almost five dozen articles in periodicals, hundreds of entries in encyclopaedias, not to mention reviews. And then there are the critical editions, without which his own work and that of the next generation of musicologists would not have been possible. Finally, there are several arrangements and original compositions.

The four essays of Part I, ‘Musical Cultures’, form two complementary pairs: the first pair deals with public culture, in the forms of magazines and the concert hall, the second with the more private cultures of worship and home. Examining diverse musical contexts, from a local religious congregation to international currents and their influence, this segment of the book provides a very enlightening cross-section of Victorian musical society, useful both in itself and as backdrop for the succeeding essays. During the period 1894–1914, nine magazines and journals devoted to the violin were initiated, though no more than three were ever active simultaneously. The first essay, ‘Hidden Agendas and the Creation of Community: The Violin Press in the Late Nineteenth Century’, by Christina Bashford, explores this complex of violin publications, societies, and some of the personalities involved. The second essay, ‘Joining Up the Dots: Cross Channel Models in the Shaping of London Orchestral Culture, 1895–1914’, by Leanne Langley, chronicles the development of orchestral concerts and a concert-going public in London. Central to the story are the Queen's Hall Orchestra, London's first permanent orchestra, founded in 1895 by Robert Newman and Henry Wood, visits by the Lamoureux Orchestra, the arrival of many continental musicians, and the founding of the London Symphony Orchestra, the New Symphony Orchestra and the Beecham Orchestra. In ‘Charles Garland Verrinder and Music at the West London Synagogue, 1859–1904’, Susan Wollenberg charts the development of music at the synagogue (the first Reform congregation founded in Britain); issues addressed by the new congregation included the place of music (and especially the organ) in worship, and the introduction of female voices into the choir. Verrinder, the organist and choirmaster at the synagogue for some forty years, also composed and arranged music for services there, although he was himself not Jewish. The chapter includes examples of this music, as well as the specifications for the organ, both of which are illuminating. Part I closes with Derek B. Scott's essay, ‘Music, Morality and Rational Amusement at the Victorian Middle-Class Soirée’, which examines the Victorian preference for music as ‘elevating and morally refining’ and the ballad writers’ concern ‘to place sentimentality in the service of other aims… social, moral, religious and political rather than aesthetic (p. 83). The chapter is enlightening, but a few of the song references seem obscure (at least to this American reader), leaving one to fill some gaps.

The second section of the book, ‘Societies’, deals with musical organizations – public, private and ideological – painting a more detailed picture of the workings of musical Britain in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first two essays give us a better understanding of how music – especially music from abroad – was introduced into England, via channels both highly visible and somewhat hidden. This is balanced by an examination of the role of music, particularly music for amateurs, in a large and important social movement. Simon McVeigh's ‘Trial by Dining Club: The Instrumental Music of Haydn, Clementi and Mozart at London's Anacreontic Society’, reveals the vital role the Anacreontic Society played in London's musical life in the last third of the eighteenth century, both as a meeting ground for amateurs and professionals, and as a semi-public trial venue for composers and works new to London. The cases of Haydn, Clementi and Mozart are considered closely as examples, and the differences in the Society's judgments are revealing. Michael Allis details a very different venue in ‘Performance in Private: “The Working Men's Society” and the Promotion of Progressive Repertoire in Nineteenth-Century Britain’. This small and short-lived (1867–68) organization explored ‘repertoire and modes of performance unlikely to figure highly in the public sphere … in a congenial atmosphere of mutual enthusiasm for the progressive approach’ (p. 139). The group consisted of six members only, the best known now being Edward Dannreuther and Karl Klindworth. The interestingly varied repertoire for the society's two seasons is given in an appendix. Part II concludes with ‘American Songs, Pastoral Nationalism and the English Temperance Cantata’ by Charles Edward McGuire. The temperance movement ran parallel on both sides of the Atlantic; McGuire treats the musical aspects of the British movement, especially the relatively large-scale productions known as ‘temperance cantatas’, which were highly didactic and designed for amateur performance. There were some transatlantic borrowings, but also some notable differences.

Part III, ‘National Music’, recounts rather different approaches to creating a British national music in the nineteenth century. This section begins with ‘The British Vocal Album and the Struggle for National Music’ by Peter Horton. The British Vocal Album was a series of songs published 1841–51, inspired by the German lied, with the hope of elevating British music ‘to a level with that of any country in Modern Europe’ (pp. 201–2). The project, headed by James William Davison, eventually published 32 songs by 11 composers (including Davison). The chapter examines the collection in light of its relationship to other events and currents in Victorian British music. Julian Rushton's ‘Musicking Caractacus’ recounts the various dramas based on the historical events (the first century Roman invasion of Britain) of which Caractacus was a part, from Shakespeare on, including a French opera by Antonio Sacchini (1788), an adaptation for London by Lorenzo da Ponte (1797), and finally Elgar's setting of a libretto by H.A. Acworth (1898). Rushton focuses on this last, discussing it in terms of its origins and reception; he concludes by placing the work in a larger context: a comparison of the British Empire with the Roman. This part of the book deals most directly with the ‘problem’ of England in nineteenth-century European culture – its reputation as ‘the Land without Music’. The British Vocal Album was an interesting attempt to tackle the issue directly (and the excerpts included in the essay show that some of the songs are quite attractive indeed); the subject of Caractacus may be seen as a British answer to the antiquarian operatic subjects favoured by Continental composers.

The final group of essays, ‘Methods’, concerns itself with varied but uniquely British aspects of performance practice and music education. These concluding chapters explore not the end products of British music (i.e., works and institutions), but rather the processes by which British music solved its problems and created its particular identity. Peter Holman's essay, ‘The Conductor at the Organ, or How Choral Music and Orchestral Music was Directed in Georgian England’, provides a fascinating look into the solutions worked out in England in Handel's day, and in the succeeding generation or two, to the problem of conducting oratorio-sized forces. In particular, the issue concerned the conductor serving simultaneously as organist; the eventual solution was to place the organist at the front, back to the audience, with the organ itself at the rear, connected to the keyboard by mechanically ingenious mechanisms known as ‘long movements’. The leader (concertmaster) also played a role, in a system known as ‘dual control’, a modus operandi that persisted into the 1830s. ‘William Cole's View of Modern Psalmody’, by Sally Drage, covers a similar period, but concerns provincial church music, especially that of non-Anglican denominations. William Cole (1737–1824) was a polymath living in Colchester. His library indicates that he was acquainted with the music of Palestrina and Lassus, as well that of contemporary British composers, and his published works, all sacred, show him to be an accomplished if conservative composer. In 1819 he published A View of Modern Psalmody, being an Attempt to Reform the Practice of the Singing in the Worship of God. In this, Cole defends the use of the organ, but condemns ornamentation, improvised interludes, and so forth; with regard to singing, he was against ‘lining out’ and the adaptation of popular melodies for church use. He also addresses such issues as whether choral texture should be tenor- or treble-led, dynamics, making the character of the music match that of the text, inter alia. This chapter has much of interest, not least for those studying parallel practices in America. Philip Olleson's essay, ‘Samuel Wesley and the Development of Organ Pedals in England’, traces Wesley's (1766–1837) two careers, as a performer on the organ and as a composer of organ music. English organs acquired pedal boards rather late; even when Wesley discovered Bach's music (which came as something of a revelation to him) in 1808, there were practically no organs in England on which he could perform many of these works as written. This situation improved over the succeeding decades, but his published compositions make only modest use of the pedals, with the exception of two voluntaries dedicated to Thomas Adams (1785–1858), who was known for his pedal technique. (There is no cross-reference, but reference to the specifications for the 1869 organ at the West London Synagogue [pp. 75–6], will illustrate the development of the Victorian organ). The final essay, Bennett Zon's ‘Recapitulation and the Musical Education of Victorian Children: The Child's Pianoforte Book (1882) by H. Keatley Moore’, explores the pedagogical phylogeny of Keatley Moore's work, derived from that of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) and Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), whose pioneering work in education had many followers in England, and especially Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). ‘Recapitulation’ here refers to the idea that, ‘from a developmental standpoint … each child recapitulates the totality of human evolution’.Footnote ¹ This view had its opponents, and the interplay between the camps is fascinating in its own right; this was, after all, the age of Darwin. Keatley Moore's piano primer is based on principles originating in Froebel's work and expanded in Spencer's (that is to say, on recapitulationism): everything, even the development of the C clef, is organized and presented in evolutionary terms. This essay is rich in its implications for research into other areas and eras with regard to musical pedagogy.

The essays all contain figures, illustrations and musical examples as appropriate. I would have liked a general bibliography (or even end-of-chapter bibliographies), as that would facilitate further research. It is interesting to note some obvious ‘omissions’: outside the chapter on Caractacus, Edward Elgar is mentioned only once; Arthur Sullivan figures in only two chapters, Ralph Vaughan Williams in only one; Charles Villiers Stanford, Ethel Smyth, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor appear not at all. That some of the ‘usual suspects’ have gone missing is not, however, to be taken as a fault, but rather as an indication of how far the study of nineteenth-century British music has come since Temperley made it a part of mainstream musicology.