What Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain sets out to do and what it achieves are slightly different things, but it is nonetheless a valuable collection of essays that explore an impressively wide range of contexts in which music and religion interacted in nineteenth-century Britain. Of the two keywords in the title, Song is explored more consistently and thoroughly than Scripture. The musical subject matter covers ballads, hymns, choral music, and Jewish and Christian liturgical chant, as well as performers, music publishing, and music scholarship. Song emerges as a compelling framework through which to investigate relationships between music and religion; more than merely describing repertoire, it encompasses practice, meaning, and identity.

In terms of Scripture, James Grande and Brian H. Murray’s introductory chapter notes that literary analysis has dominated scholarship on biblical reception in the nineteenth century and argues that the importance of song in mediating many people’s engagements with the Bible demands a broader range of critical approaches. They raise important questions about the practice of setting biblical texts to music, including matters of interpretation, exegesis, and distortion, inviting reflection on how musical developments affected biblical engagement and how biblical scholarship shaped musical composition and performance. Explorations of such questions are foregrounded in several of the chapters, but in others, they are at most implicit or subsumed into more general discussions of religion. This is directly acknowledged by Oskar Cox Jensen in his enlightening chapter “The Ballad and the Bible,” where he explains that his use of the term Bible “stands for wider forms of Christian activity, especially musical” (32).

Among those chapters that engage with Scripture most directly, those by Rachel Adelstein and Ayla Lepine do so in especially thought-provoking ways. Adelstein’s chapter is one of two dealing with Jewish topics, which is a welcome feature in helping to represent something of the diversity of religious thought and practice in the period. She explores how nineteenth-century British synagogue choirs negotiated biblical and political nationhood, noting how the music of composers such as Louis Lewandowski, the installation of pipe organs, and the increasing presence of women singers brought questions of heritage and modernity to the fore. Her argument that the flexibility afforded by choral singing of biblical texts allowed a questioning of attitudes to language, gender, ritual, and public presence, and through them changed the shape of Jewish identity in modernity, exemplifies the value of such carefully integrated interdisciplinary enquiry. Lepine’s chapter is focused on a case study of the crypt chapel of St. Sepulchre in the parish church of St. Mary Magdalene, Paddington, London. Her analysis of the chapel’s decoration, in which the walls are adorned with plainchant settings of biblical texts and the organ case decorated with biblical scenes associated with the Eucharist, highlights the interrelationships of religious devotion, scripture, music, and mission. The editors’ own chapters, respectively on the Sacred Harmonic Society and the hymn “The Son of God goes forth to war,” also engage in a precise fashion with biblical topics.

Grande’s chapter on the Sacred Harmonic Society and its association with Exeter Hall in London is one of several that explore the porousness, or even futility, of boundaries between sacred and secular, as the concert hall became a site of religious devotion. Jensen’s chapter highlights how the popular repertoire of ballad singers included hymns, carols, and other songs heavily imbued with biblical didacticism, while Jonathan Hicks’s chapter on the Old Hundredth hymn tune reveals surprising contexts in which it was used in Britain and beyond. Erin Johnson-Williams explores how the religious roots of the tonic sol-fa movement, popularized by Nonconformist minister John Curwen, lent a moralizing respectability to musical repertoire and practices that extended well beyond its more usual association with hymnody. Despite romanticized and unsupported claims about the persistence of tonic sol-fa singing schools in Wales, this chapter makes an important contribution in highlighting the commercial realities of religious music publishing, a context that is often overlooked. The chapters by Hicks and Johnson-Williams are among those that refer to the Bible only obliquely or fleetingly; as individual pieces of scholarship, they are none the worse for this and do much to advance understanding of religious musical culture in the period. The introductory chapter’s raising of questions about biblical scholarship and music, however, are among those that are not addressed thoroughly thereafter.

Bennett Zon’s chapter on Carl Engel’s The Music of the Ancient Nations (1864) is a welcome contribution in requiring readers to confront the presence and legacies of antisemitism in nineteenth-century scholarship, while also demonstrating how music provided much stimulation for discussion of religion and science. Matildie Wium’s chapter on Jenny Lind, meanwhile, provides a useful counterbalance to the more common focus throughout the essays on groups of people by highlighting the ways in which religious beliefs and values affected individual musicians and their careers.

Ultimately, Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain provides ample evidence to support the two revisionist claims made by its editors in their introductory chapter: that the nineteenth century cannot simply be understood as a century of secularization and that the notion that art, especially music, took religion’s place as the primary object of devotion misrepresents the intermingled musical and religious experiences of the majority of British residents. From the repertoire of street buskers to the massed choral performances of the Sacred Harmonic Society, and from church design and decoration to lucrative music publishing, religious words, melodies, concepts, and values were thoroughly embedded in British musical life and the day-to-day musical experiences of its people across boundaries of age, social class, and religious affiliation.