Music as a Science of Mankind offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the intellectual representation of music in British eighteenth-century culture. From the field of natural philosophy, involving the science of sounds and acoustics, to the realm of imagination, involving resounding music and art, the branches of modern culture that were involved in the intellectual tradition of the science of music proved to be variously appealing to men of letters. Among these, a particularly rich field of investigation was the British philosophy of the mind and of human understanding, developed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which looked at music and found in its realm a way of understanding human experience. Focussing on the world of sensation - trying to describe how the human mind could develop ideas and emotions by its means - philosophers and physicians often took their cases from art's products, be it music (sounds), painting (colours) or poetry (words as signs of sound conveying a meaning), thus looking at art from a particular point of view: that of the perceiving mind. The relationship between music and the philosophies of mind is presented here as a significant part of the construction of a Science of Man: a huge and impressive 'project' involving both the study of man's nature, to which - in David Hume's words - 'all sciences have a relation', and the creation of an ideal of what Man should be. Maria Semi sheds light on how these reflections moved towards a Science of Music: a complex and articulated vision of the discipline that was later to be known as 'musicology'; or Musikwissenschaft.

This collection of sixteen new essays, all commissioned from cultural and musical historians, was inspired by the themes and approaches of Professor Cyril Ehrlich's pathbreaking work on British social history in music. This volume discusses issues such as the music marketplace, piano culture, musicians' work patterns, music institutions, concert history, and national and urban identities - all with a clear focus on art music traditions. The cultural importance of serious music, from Belfast to Calcutta, has long been assumed for the period but rarely demonstrated. Here the issue is interwoven with the social and economic realities confronting music and musicians in Britain across the 19th century.

The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction seeks to address fundamental questions about the function, meaning and understanding of music in nineteenth-century culture and society, as mediated through works of fiction. The eleven essays here, written by musicologists and literary scholars, range over a wide selection of works by both canonical writers such as Austen, Benson, Carlyle, Collins, Gaskell, Gissing, Eliot, Hardy, du Maurier and Wilde, and less-well-known figures such as Gertrude Hudson and Elizabeth Sara Sheppard. Each essay explores different strategies for interpreting the idea of music in the Victorian novel. Some focus on the degree to which scenes involving music illuminate what music meant to the writer and contemporary performers and listeners, and signify musical tastes of the time and the reception of particular composers. Other essays in the volume examine aspects of gender, race, sexuality and class that are illuminated by the deployment of music by the novelist. Together with its companion volume, The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry edited by Phyllis Weliver (Ashgate, 2005), this collection suggests a new network of methodologies for the continuing cultural and social investigation of nineteenth-century music as reflected in that period's literary output.

This provocative volume of essays is now available in paperback. The contributors to this volume - musicologists, sociologists, cultural theorists - all challenge the view that music occupies an autonomous aesthetic sphere. Recently, socially and politically grounded enterprises such as feminism, semiotics and deconstruction have effected a major transformation in the ways in which the arts and humanities are studied, leading in turn to a systematic investigation of the implicit assumptions underlying the critical methods of the last two hundred years. Influenced by these approaches, the writers here question a prevailing ideology that insists there is a division between music and society and examine the ways in which the two do in fact interact and mediate one another within and across socio-cultural boundaries.

Culture does not become ""culture"" until it is consumed. This is the radical new interpretation of early modern social history presented in The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800. 21 US and 4 european contributors, from a wide range of historically oriented fields (historians of society, politics, ideas, science, literature and the arts), explore topics such as the formation of a culture consuming public, the development of a literary canon, the role of consumption in the formation of the modern state, elite and popular forms of cultural consumtpion and the place of women as consumers of cultur.

William Boyce: A Tercentenary Sourcebook and Compendium is published in celebration of the three-hundreth anniversary of the birth in 1711 of England’s leading eighteenth-century composer. It is the first book to be devoted to a musician who more than any of his contemporaries carried the flag in the broadest sense for English music during a period that was inevitably dominated by the towering figure of Handel, who was then resident in London. By the late 19th century, however, Boyce had become generally known only as a composer of anthems and the national song, ‘Hearts of Oak,’ and as the editor of a monumental historical anthology of English anthems, Cathedral Music, which was still in use at that time. The emergent ‘Baroque revival’ led to a gradual broadening of awareness of Boyce from the 1890s onwards. Yet it was only following the initiatives inspired by the bicentenary of his death in 1979 that a significantly wider public appreciation of the quality and range of his achievements came about. Previously neglected works were revived, new recordings made, scholarly articles written, and new editions of his music began to be published. This book brings together diplomatic transcriptions of all the most significant contemporary documents relevant to Boyce’s personal and family life, his career as a composer, editor, theorist, teacher, conductor, Master of the King’s Music, and the reception history of his music. They are accompanied by critical commentaries whenever necessary. The range of sources drawn on includes memoirs, histories, diaries, letters, poems, concert programmes and related press reports, chapel royal, court and parish archives, prefaces to Boyce’s own publications of his music and those edited by others, advertisements for performances of his works and related press reports, details of his subscriptions to musical and literary works, and materials that throw light on his character and professional relationships with the poets, playwrights, churchmen and other musicians with whom he collaborated within the vibrant, burgeoning, and sometimes colourful, English musical culture of his time. The book’s ‘Catalogue of Works’ constitutes the first comprehensive listing of Boyce’s musical output to have been published, and the select, historical ‘Discography’ is the first catalogue of recordings to have been devoted to the composer’s works.