This book surveys the role of music in British culture throughout the long Romantic period.

A stimulating new approach to understanding the relationship between music and culture in the long nineteenth century.

Recent scholarship has vanquished the traditional perception of nineteenth-century Britain as a musical wasteland. In addition to attempting more balanced assessments of the achievements of British composers of this period, scholars have begun to explore the web of reciprocal relationships between the societal, economic and cultural dynamics arising from the industrial revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the ever-changing contours of British music publishing, music consumption, concert life, instrument design, performance practice, pedagogy and composition. Muzio Clementi (1752–1832) provides an ideal case-study for continued exploration of this web of relationships. Based in London for much of his life, whilst still maintaining contact with continental developments, Clementi achieved notable success in a diversity of activities that centred mainly on the piano. The present book explores Clementi’s multivalent contribution to piano performance, pedagogy, composition and manufacture in relation to British musical life and its international dimensions. An overriding purpose is to interrogate when, how and to what extent a distinctive British musical culture emerged in the early nineteenth century. Much recent work on Clementi has centred on the Italian National Edition of his complete works (MiBACT); several chapters report on this project, whilst continuing to pursue the book’s broader themes.

This book offers a novel interpretation of the sudden and steep decline of instrumental virtuosity in its critical reception between c. 1815 and c. 1850, documenting it with a large number of examples from Europe’s leading music periodicals at the time. The increasingly hostile critical reception of instrumental virtuosity during this period is interpreted from the perspective of contemporary aesthetics and philosophical conceptions of human subjectivity; the book’s main thesis is that virtuosity qua irreducibly bodily performance generated so much hostility because it was deemed incompatible with, and even threatening to, the new Romantic philosophical conception of music as a radically disembodied, abstract, autonomous art and, moreover, a symbol or model – if only a utopian one – of a similarly autonomous and free human subject, whose freedom and autonomy seemed increasingly untenable in the economic and political context of post-Napoleonic Europe. That is why music, newly reconceived as radically abstract and autonomous, plays such an important part in the philosophy of early German Romantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Schelling, and Schopenhauer, with their growing misgivings about the very possibility of human freedom, and not so much in the preceding generation of thinkers, such as Kant and Hegel, who still believed in the (transcendentally) free subject of the Enlightenment. For the early German Romantics, music becomes a model of human freedom, if freedom could exist. By contrast, virtuosity, irredeemably moored in the perishable human body, ephemeral, and beholden to such base motives as making money and gaining fame, is not only incompatible with music thus conceived, but also threatens to expose it as an illusion, in other words, as irreducibly corporeal, and, by extension, the human subject it was meant to symbolise as likewise an illusion. Only with that in mind, may we begin to understand the hostility of some early to mid-19th-century critics to instrumental virtuosity, which sometimes reached truly bizarre proportions. In order to accomplish this, the book looks at contemporary aesthetics and philosophy, the contemporary reception of virtuosity in performance and composition, and the impact of 19th-century gender ideology on the reception of some leading virtuosi, male and female alike.

This book analyzes representations of the places of British slavery - Africa, the Caribbean, and Britain - in writings by planters, slaves and travellers.

Illuminates Britons' changing sense of themselves in relation to their Eastern others during an age of empire and revolution.