This book traces the role played by music within asylums, the participation of staff and patients in musical activity, and the links drawn between music, health, and wellbeing. In the first part of the book, the author draws on a wide range of sources to investigate the debates around moral management, entertainment, and music for patients, as well as the wider context of music and mental health. In the second part, a series of case studies bring to life the characters and contexts involved in asylum music, selected from a range of public and private institutions. From asylum bands to chapel choirs, smoking concerts to orchestras, the rich variety of musical activity presents new perspectives on music in everyday life. Aspects such as employment practices, musicians’ networks and the purchase and maintenance of musical instruments illuminate the ‘business’ of music as part of moral management. As a source of entertainment and occupation, a means of solace and self-control, and as a device for social gatherings and contact with the outside world, the place of music in the asylum offers valuable insight into its uses and meanings in nineteenth-century England.
A pioneering work which delves into and reveals the links between music, moral instruction and social reform. This book discusses the role of music in programmes of personal improvement and social reform in nineteenth-century Britain. The pursuit of morality through music was designed not just to improve personal and communal character but to affect social change and transformation. The book examines the musical education of children, women and men through a variety of literature published for various educational settings including mechanics' institutes. It also considers the role of music in narratives of social programs and community-building projects that sought to promote utility, well-being and freedom from the strictures of Christianity as the dominant moral and cultural force. The first book to connect the threads between music, moral instruction and social reform across the educational life cycle in nineteenth-century Britain, it shows how these threads are found in unlikely places, such as games, manners books, economics treatises and short stories. It deftly illustrates the links between everyday life, popular culture and discourses of morality and social reform of the period.
This volume of primary source material examines music and society in Britian during the ninteenth century. Sources explore religion, politics, class, and gender. The collection of materials are accompanied by an introduction by Rosemary Golding, as well as headnotes contextualising the pieces. This collection will be of great value to students and scholars.
Tracing the experiences of women who were designated insane by judicial processes from 1850 to 1900, this book considers the ideas and purposes of incarceration in three dedicated facilities: Bethlem, Fisherton House and Broadmoor. The majority of these patients had murdered, or attempted to murder, their own children but were not necessarily condemned as incurably evil by medical and legal authorities, nor by general society. Alison C. Pedley explores how insanity gave the Victorians an acceptable explanation for these dreadful crimes, and as a result, how admission to a dedicated asylum was viewed as the safest and most human solution for the 'madwomen' as well as for society as a whole. Mothers, Criminal Insanity and the Asylum in Victorian England considers the experiences, treatments and regimes women underwent in an attempt to redeem and rehabilitate them, and return them to into a patriarchal society. It shows how society's views of the institutions and insanity were not necessarily negative or coloured by fear and revulsion, and highlights the changes in attitudes to female criminal lunacy in the second half of the 19th century. Through extensive and detailed research into the three asylums' archives and in legal, governmental, press and genealogical records, this book sheds new light on the views of the patients themselves, and contributes to the historiography of Victorian criminal lunatic asylums, conceptualising them as places of recovery, rehabilitation and restitution.
Can the concert hall be as erotic as the bedroom? Many Victorian writers believed so. In the mid-nineteenth century, acoustical scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz and John Tyndall described music as a set of physical vibrations that tickled the ear, excited the nerves, and precipitated muscular convulsions. In turn, writers—from canonical figures such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, to New Women novelists like Sarah Grand and Bertha Thomas, to anonymous authors of underground pornography—depicted bodily sensations and experiences in unusually explicit ways. These writers used scenes of music listening and performance to intervene in urgent conversations about gender and sexuality and explore issues of agency, pleasure, violence, desire, and kinship. Sounding Bodies shows how both classical music and Victorian literature, while often considered bastions of conservatism and repression, represented powerful sites for feminist and queer politics.
Explores the use of music as therapy and shows how it operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, undergoing change in response to broader cultural and religious movements.This book explores connections between the physical care of the sick based on the study of medicine, concepts of healing founded on religious thought, and the practice of music at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito (Hospital of the Holy Spirit) in Rome. The hospital was a unique institution that was regulated by the Roman Catholic Church but simultaneously reflected the significant shifts in scientific thought emerging during the period that coincided with post-Tridentine reforms in the church.The volume discusses the hospital''s foundation, architecture and links with the papacy. It also reflects on the then acceptable "ways of knowing" informed by religious concerns and medical traditions. The tripartite relationship between religion, medicine and music within the institution was complex. At times they existed side-by-side, at others they intersected. Drawing on extensive archival research such as financial records, decrees, records of apostolic visits and inventories as well as surviving musical sources (printed and manuscript), the book makes connections between intellectual beliefs about music and actual musical practices. It explores the early use of music as therapy and investigates the musical ideals and practices of the monastic regime which ran the hospital. In a wider sense, the book shows how music operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, and how it underwent change over time in response to broader cultural and religious movements.NAOMI J. Barker is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University. She is the author of various articles on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. This is her first book.ide-by-side, at others they intersected. Drawing on extensive archival research such as financial records, decrees, records of apostolic visits and inventories as well as surviving musical sources (printed and manuscript), the book makes connections between intellectual beliefs about music and actual musical practices. It explores the early use of music as therapy and investigates the musical ideals and practices of the monastic regime which ran the hospital. In a wider sense, the book shows how music operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, and how it underwent change over time in response to broader cultural and religious movements.NAOMI J. Barker is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University. She is the author of various articles on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. This is her first book.ide-by-side, at others they intersected. Drawing on extensive archival research such as financial records, decrees, records of apostolic visits and inventories as well as surviving musical sources (printed and manuscript), the book makes connections between intellectual beliefs about music and actual musical practices. It explores the early use of music as therapy and investigates the musical ideals and practices of the monastic regime which ran the hospital. In a wider sense, the book shows how music operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, and how it underwent change over time in response to broader cultural and religious movements.NAOMI J. Barker is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University. She is the author of various articles on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. This is her first book.ide-by-side, at others they intersected. Drawing on extensive archival research such as financial records, decrees, records of apostolic visits and inventories as well as surviving musical sources (printed and manuscript), the book makes connections between intellectual beliefs about music and actual musical practices. It explores the early use of music as therapy and investigates the musical ideals and practices of the monastic regime which ran the hospital. In a wider sense, the book shows how music operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, and how it underwent change over time in response to broader cultural and religious movements.NAOMI J. Barker is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University. She is the author of various articles on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. This is her first book.surviving musical sources (printed and manuscript), the book makes connections between intellectual beliefs about music and actual musical practices. It explores the early use of music as therapy and investigates the musical ideals and practices of the monastic regime which ran the hospital. In a wider sense, the book shows how music operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, and how it underwent change over time in response to broader cultural and religious movements.NAOMI J. Barker is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University. She is the author of various articles on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. This is her first book.
At Home in the Institution examines space and material culture in asylums, lodging houses and schools in Victorian and Edwardian England, and explores the powerful influence of domesticity on all three institutional types.
Examines the interaction between music and liberal discourses in Victorian Britain, revealing the close interdependence of political and aesthetic practices.
This open access book is the first comparative study of public, voluntary and private asylums in nineteenth-century Ireland. Examining nine institutions, it explores whether concepts of social class and status and the emergence of a strong middle class informed interactions between gender, religion, identity and insanity. It questions whether medical and lay explanations of mental illness and its causes, and patient experiences, were influenced by these concepts. The strong emphasis on land and its interconnectedness with notions of class identity and respectability in Ireland lends a particularly interesting dimension. The book interrogates the popular notion that relatives were routinely locked away to be deprived of land or inheritance, querying how often “land grabbing” Irish families really abused the asylum system for their personal economic gain. The book will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century Ireland and the history of psychiatry and medicine in Britain and Ireland.
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