Music in North-East England, 1500–1800 offers new insights into the musical life of this distinctive region, including networks created through public concerts and publishers’ subscription series, the interactions between art music and popular song, the consumption habits of amateurs, and northern urban soundscapes. While the geographic focus is one aspect that unites the essays in this collection, it is ultimately in the background; foregrounded instead are overlapping themes and common methodologies. This allows for many useful cross-conversations that explore the multivalence of musical circulation in the region through “connections, networks, transactions and translations” (8). This volume arose from an October 2014 study day in Newcastle, and the benefits of this intensive working group experience are evident in the affinities between individual essays. Extended collegial feedback generates fascinating scholarly intersections and opportunities for further study.

Stephanie Carter, Kirsten Gibson, and Roz Southey, the volume's editors, begin their introduction with the deceptively simple task of defining the region's geographical identity. By parsing out the political debates, relative and fluid boundaries, and the historiography of the region, they explore the rather limited historical narratives devoted to the area that heretofore cultivated the impression of “cultural barrenness” (6). While the idea of the northeast of England as a geographic region did not mean anything for people before the nineteenth century, its place in the English imaginary was nevertheless characterized by its remoteness and industrial past. One productive scholarly trend that has begun to emerge, however, is investigating the region's position in the early modern book trade; print history scholars are examining the role publishers played in cultivating taste in Newcastle (John Barnard and Maureen Bell, eds., The Early Seventeenth-Century York Book Trade and John Foster's Inventory of 1616 [1994]). Musicologists tend to favor the eighteenth century and cultural centers in the southeast as evidenced by the content in collections like Christopher Hogwood and Richard Luckett's collection Music in Eighteenth-Century England (1983), which focuses heavily on Handel, and Trevor Fawcett's Music in Eighteenth Century Norwich and Norfolk (1979). More recently, however, Southey's Music Making in North-East England (2006) offers a counter narrative to this view of the region's identity by examining it through the lens of musical activity, a tactic employed by several essays within the current collection. Southey's work in particular, and her collaborations with Eric Cross, also demonstrates that the northeast was not actually behind the times (6), but rather that it was a vibrant and cosmopolitan regional center in frequent musical contact with London. The essays in this volume confirm this assertion on an even greater scale.

This particular collection of essays makes perhaps its most important contribution through the diversity of methodological approaches employed by its contributors. Linda Austern, Candace Bailey, and Amanda Eubanks Winkler's collection Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England (2017) provides a rich template for this type of scholarship that questions the “hard divisions” of popular and elite, oral and written, professional and amateur, that modern scholarship has imposed upon early modern English musical culture that were not necessarily rigid categories in historical practice (10). The contributors for Music in North-East England likewise engage with innovative methods ranging from sound studies to performance studies, material culture, and nuanced examinations of musical circulation and archival materials. This multivalence allows for a more nuanced understanding of the production, consumption, and reception of music in the northeast and the impact of its networks and influence beyond its geographical boundaries. Indeed, the collection is organized in four large sections that speak to the musical richness and interconnectivity of the region: “Centres of Musical Activity,” “Sources,” “Recreation and Education,” and “Print and Popular Song.” In the volume's spirit of interconnectivity, however, conversations occur beyond these divisions. Chapters in “Centres of Musical Activity” by Simon D. I. Fleming and Matthew Gardner, for example, examine Durham city's concert series, positing a more cosmopolitan sensibility to the musical programming than previously suggested; Southey's chapter in the “Recreation and Education” section explores the far-reaching effects of Durham resident George Bowes's household band. Likewise, several chapters map out networks of influence and circulation, painting the northeast of England as a dynamic hub through which music, and musical culture, circulated within and beyond the region. The role of subscription series as well as publishers and their professional networks is convincing evidence in the chapters by Christopher Roberts, Oskar Cox Jensen, and Matthew Gardner as city centers like Newcastle and Doncaster asserted their cultural and political identities through the publication and dissemination of printed music. Even examinations of manuscript sources, such as Eleanor Warren's chapter on the liturgical use of the York Antiphonal and Andrew Woolley's investigation into amateur musical taste as evidenced by the Blakiston Manuscript, are fascinating and interdisciplinary contextual histories of these primary source documents and provide exciting pathways for future scholarship. Perhaps most innovative, however, are the essays that engage with traces of embodied performance and evidence-based reimaginings of the region's musical life. Magnus Williamson reconstructs the soundscape of pre-Reformation Newcastle, combining archaeology, primary source documentation, and data studies; Amanda Eubanks Winkler offers a glimpse into the musical activities of the early modern English grammar school and the pedagogical benefits of performance, including religious indoctrination; and Barbara Crosbie cross-examines the business and politics of popular print and balladry through not only the market transition from broadside to folk song, but also song culture and the act of performance.

We are fortunate to have the depth of scholarship in this collection that enriches not only early modern English music studies but also British cultural studies. Musicological essay collections may seem to be the purview of specialists, and volumes like this one dedicated to a seemingly narrow focus in both geographic and chronological terms might seem niche or, at worst, exclusionary. These essays, however, engage less with technical analyses of music but rather utilize historical, archival, and interdisciplinary methodologies that will prove accessible to a wide range of humanities scholars. When taken in sum, this collection provides a kaleidoscopic view of musical life in the northeast of England. Scholars from a variety of disciplines will find methodological intersections here to enrich their future studies.