Bøker i Music in Britain, 1600-2000-serien

The London firm of Gray (later Gray & Davison) was one of Britain's leading organ-makers between the 1790s and the 1880s.

Casts new and valuable light on English musical history and on Enlightenment culture more generally.

In 1683 English court musicians and the Musical Society of London joined forces to celebrate St Cecilia's Day (22 November) with a feast and the performance of specially composed music. The most prominent composers and poets of the age wrote for these occasions, including Henry Purcell, John Blow, John Dryden and William Congreve.

This book explores the exchange of music, musicians and musical practice between Britain and the Continent in the period c.1500-1800.

The Symphonic Poem in Britain 1850-1950aims to raise the status of the genre generally, and in Britain specifically, by reaffirming British composers' confidence in dealing with literary texts.

An essential book for scholars and students of renaissance music, as well as the history of music publishing and print.

Building upon the developing picture of the importance of British music, musicians and institutions during the eighteenth century, this book investigates the themes of composition, performance (amateur and professional) and music-printing, within the wider context of social, religious and secular institutions.

Examines the life and work of Scottish cellist and antiquarian John Gunn (1766-1824) through newly discovered sources.

The first full-length biographical study of Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994).

The first full length study of Sir George Thomas Smart (1776-1867), musical animateur and early champion of the music of BeethovenSir George Thomas Smart (1776-1867) was a significant musical animateur of the early nineteenth century, who earned his living primarily as a conductor but was also significant as an organist, composer and recorder of events. Smart established successful and pioneering London concert series, was a prime mover in the setting up of the Philharmonic Society and the Royal Academy of Music, and taught many of the leading singers of the day, being well versed in the Handelian concert tradition. He also conducted the opera at the Covent Garden Theatre and introduced significant new works to the public - he was most notably an early champion of the music of Beethoven. His journeys to Europe, and his contacts with the leading European musical figures of the day (including Weber, Meyerbeer, Spohr, and Mendelssohn), were crucial to the direction music was to take in nineteenth-century Britain. This detailed account of Smart's life and career presents him within the context of the vibrant concert life of London and wider European musical culture. It is the first full length, critical study of this influential musical figure.JOHN CARNELLEY is Deputy Director of Music and Head of Academic Music, Dulwich College, London. He holds a PhD in Historical Musicology from the University of London (Goldsmiths College) and has previously published research on the eighteenth-century organ manuscripts of John Reading, held in the Dulwich College Archive.

Explores the political meanings that Italian opera - its composers, agents and institutions - had for audiences in eighteenth-century Britain.The reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) was pivotal for both politics and opera in Britain. In this study, Thomas McGeary brings together a wide range of sources to show how the worlds of politics and opera were entwined. The associations that Italian singing and singers acquired by the 1690s were used in partisan Whig-Tory writings. Rather than a foreign invasion, McGeary shows how the introduction of Italian-style opera was a native product that grew out of plans for a new theatre in the Haymarket. A crucial event for opera was Handel's arrival in London in 1710. While the criticism of opera by Whig writers such as Richard Steele and Joseph Addison is well known, McGeary uncovers how the early promotion and sponsorship of opera was, in fact, largely a Whig enterprise and cultural program. Indeed, major political figures (mostly Whigs) participated in the support and patronage of opera.Opera and Politics in Queen Anne's Britain will be required reading for opera scholars and cultural and political historians of eighteenth-century Britain, as well those interested in the vibrant literature culture of the period.

Combining approaches from reception studies and historical musicology, this book demonstrates how the representation of music at exhibitions drew the press and public into debates about music's role in society.International exhibitions were among the most significant cultural phenomena of the late nineteenth century. These vast events aimed to illustrate, through displays of physical objects, the full spectrum of the world's achievements, from industry and manufacturing, to art and design. But exhibitions were not just visual spaces. Music was ever present, as a fundamental part of these events' sonic landscape, and integral to the visitor experience. This book explores music at international exhibitions held in Australia, India, and the United Kingdom during the 1880s. At these exhibitions, music was codified, ordered, and all-round 'exhibited' in manifold ways. Displays of physical instruments from the past and present were accompanied by performances intended to educate or to entertain, while music was heard at exhibitors' stands, in concert halls, and in the pleasure gardens that surrounded the exhibition buildings. Music was depicted as a symbol of human artistic achievement, or employed for commercial ends. At times it was presented in nationalist terms, at others as a marker of universalism. This book argues, by interrogating the multiple ways that music was used, experienced, and represented, that exhibitions can demonstrate in microcosm many of the broader musical traditions, purposes, arguments, and anxieties of the day. Its nine chapters focus on sociocultural themes, covering issues of race, class, public education, economics, and entertainment in the context of music, tracing these through the networks of communication that existed within the British Empire at the time.

The first regional history of music in England.Music in the West Country is the first regional history of music in England. Ranging over seven hundred years, from the minstrels, waits, and cathedral choristers of the fourteenth century to the Bristol Sound of the late twentieth, the book explores the region's soundscape, from its gateway cities of Bristol and Salisbury in the east to the Isles of Scilly in the west, and examines music-making in tiny villages as well as conditions in important centres such as Bath, Exeter, Plymouth, and Bournemouth. What emerges is both a study of the typical - musical practices which would apply to any English region - and a portrait of the unique - features born of the region's physicalisolation and charm, among them the growth of festival culture, the mythologising of folk music, the late survival of parish psalmody and nonconformist carolling, and the unique continuance, today, of a professional resort orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Banfield's vividly written and extremely readable history of music in the west country considers an array of subjects, firmly centred on people's stories: musical inventions and theidea of tradition, music as cultural capital, the economics of musical employment and the demographics of musicianship, musical networks, the relationship of the hinterlands to the metropolis, the influence of topography, the importance of institutions and events, and the question of how to measure value. A study in prosopography, it shows how people went about their lives with music and explores how things changed for them - or did not. STEPHENBANFIELD is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Bristol.

How was large-scale music directed or conducted in Britain before baton conducting took hold in the 1830s?This book investigates the ways large-scale music was directed or conducted in Britain before baton conducting took hold in the 1830s. After surveying practice in Italy, Germany and France from Antiquity to the eighteenth century,the focus is on direction in two strands of music making in Stuart and Georgian Britain: choral music from Restoration cathedrals to the oratorio tradition deriving from Handel, and music in the theatre from the Jacobean masque to nineteenth-century opera, ending with an account of how modern baton conducting spread in the 1830s from the pit of the Haymarket Theatre to the Philharmonic Society and to large-scale choral music. Part social and musical history based on new research into surviving performing material, documentary sources and visual evidence, and part polemic intended to question the use of modern baton conducting in pre-nineteenth-century music, Before the Baton throws new light on many hitherto dark areas, though the heart of the book is an extended discussion of the evidence relating to Handel's operas, oratorios and choral music. Contrary to near-universal modern practice, he mostlypreferred to play rather than beat time. PETER HOLMAN is Emeritus Professor of Historical Musicology at Leeds University. When not occupied with writing and research, he organises performances of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, mostly directing them from the keyboard. He is director of The Parley of Instruments, Leeds Baroque, the Suffolk Villages Festival and the annual Baroque Summer School run by Cambridge Early Music.

This collection situates the North-East within a developing nationwide account of British musical culture.Music in North-East England provides a wide-ranging exploration of musical life in the North-East of England during the early modern period. It contributes to a growing number of studies concerned with developing a nationwide account of British musical culture. By defining the North-East in its widest sense, the collection illuminates localised differences, distinct musical cultures in urban centres and rural locations, as well as region-wide networks, and situates regional musical life in broader national and international contexts. Music in North-East England affords new insights into aspects of musical life that have been the focus of previous studies of British musical life - such as public concerts - but also draws attention to aspects that have attracted less scholarly attention in histories of early modern British musical culture: the musical activities and tastes of non-elite consumers; interactions between art music and cheap print and popular song; music education beyond London and its satellite environs; the recovery of northern urban soundscapes; and the careers of professional musicians who have not previously been the focus of major published musicological studies. STEPHANIE CARTER is a music historian and archivist. KIRSTEN GIBSON is Senior Lecturer and Head of Music at Newcastle University. ROZ SOUTHEY is a music historian and novelist. CONTRIBUTORS: Stephanie Carter, Kirsten Gibson, Roz Southey, Diana Wyatt, Magnus Williamson, Matthew Gardner, Simon D.I. Fleming, Christopher Roberts, Eleanor Warren, Andrew Woolley, Stephen A. Marini, Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Amelie Addison, Barbara Crosbie, Oskar Cox Jensen.