The first book to explore the contribution made by the military to British music history, Music & the British Military in the Long Nineteenth Century shows that military bands reached far beyond the official ceremonial duties they are often primarily associated with and had a significant impact on wider spheres of musical and cultural life.
For decades, scholars have been trying to answer the question: how was colonial Burma perceived in and by the Western world, and how did people in countries like the United Kingdom and United States form their views? This book explores how Western perceptions of Burma were influenced by the popular music of the day. From the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824-6 until Burma regained its independence in 1948, more than 180 musical works with Burma-related themes were written in English-speaking countries, in addition to the many hymns composed in and about Burma by Christian missionaries. Servicemen posted to Burma added to the lexicon with marches and ditties, and after 1913 most movies about Burma had their own distinctive scores. Taking Rudyard Kipling’s 1890 ballad ‘Mandalay’ as a critical turning point, this book surveys all these works with emphasis on popular songs and show tunes, also looking at classical works, ballet scores, hymns, soldiers’ songs, sea shanties, and film soundtracks. It examines how they influenced Western perceptions of Burma, and in turn reflected those views back to Western audiences. The book sheds new light not only on the West’s historical relationship with Burma, and the colonial music scene, but also Burma’s place in the development of popular music and the rise of the global music industry. In doing so, it makes an original contribution to the fields of musicology and Asian Studies.
Professionalisation was a key feature of the changing nature of work and society in the nineteenth century, with formal accreditation, registration and organisation becoming increasingly common. Trades and occupations sought protection and improved status via alignment with the professions: an attempt to impose order and standards amid rapid social change, urbanisation and technological development. The structures and expectations governing the music profession were no exception, and were central to changing perceptions of musicians and music itself during the long nineteenth century. The central themes of status and identity run throughout this book, charting ways in which the music profession engaged with its place in society. Contributors investigate the ways in which musicians viewed their own identities, public perceptions of the working musician, the statuses of different sectors of the profession and attempts to manipulate both status and identity. Ten chapters examine a range of sectors of the music profession, from publishers and performers to teachers and military musicians, and overall themes include class, gender and formal accreditation. The chapters demonstrate the wide range of sectors within the music profession, the different ways in which these took on status and identity, and the unique position of professional musicians both to adopt and to challenge social norms.
Bands structured around western wind instruments are among the most widespread instrumental ensembles in the world. Although these ensembles draw upon European military traditions that spread globally through colonialism, militarism and missionary work, local musicians have adapted the brass band prototype to their home settings, and today these ensembles are found in religious processions and funerals, military manoeuvres and parades, and popular music genres throughout the world. Based on their expertise in ethnographic and archival research, the contributors to this volume present a series of essays that examine wind band cultures from a range of disciplinary perspectives, allowing for a comparison of band cultures across geographic and historical fields. The themes addressed encompass the military heritage of band cultures; local appropriations of the military prototype; links between bands and their local communities; the spheres of local band activities and the modes of sociability within them; and the role of bands in trajectories toward professional musicianship. This book will appeal to readers with an interest in ethnomusicology, colonial and post-colonial studies, community music practices, as well as anyone who has played with or listened to their local band.
Recently, studies of opera, of print culture, and of music in Britain in the long nineteenth century have proliferated. This essay collection explores the multiple point of interaction among these fields. Past scholarship often used print as a simple conduit for information about opera in Britain, but these essays demonstrate that print and opera existed in a more complex symbiosis. This collection embeds opera within the culture of Britain in the long nineteenth century, a culture inundated by print. The essays explore: how print culture both disseminated and shaped operatic culture; how the businesses of opera production and publishing intertwined; how performers and impresarios used print culture to cultivate their public persona; how issues of nationalism, class, and gender impacted reception in the periodical press; and how opera intertwined with literature, not only drawing source material from novels and plays, but also as a plot element in literary works or as a point of friction in literary circles. As the growth of digital humanities increases access to print sources, and as opera scholars move away from a focus on operas as isolated works, this study points the way forward to a richer understanding of the intersections between opera and print culture.
Of the many brass bands that have flourished in Britain and Ireland over the last 200 years very few have documented records covering their history. This directory is an attempt to collect together information about such bands and make it available to all. Over 19,600 bands are recorded here, with some 10,600 additional cross references for alternative or previous names. This volume supersedes the earlier “British Brass Bands – a Historical Directory” (2016) and includes some 1,400 bands from the island of Ireland. A separate work is in preparation covering brass bands beyond the British Isles. A separate appendix lists the brass bands in each county
This collection explores the role of military masculinity in shaping nineteenth-century British culture and society. It covers a period that was framed by two of the greatest wars the world had ever known, and punctuated by many smaller conflicts. Bringing together contributions from a diverse range of leading scholars, it offers fresh, interdisciplinary perspectives on an emerging field of study. The chapters draw upon historical, literary, visual and musical sources to demonstrate the centrality of the military and its masculine dimensions in the shaping of Victorian and Edwardian personal and national identities. Focusing on both the experience of military service and its imaginative forms, it examines such topics as bodies and habits, families and domesticity, heroism and chivalry, religion and militarism, and youth and fantasy. Reflecting the two principle areas of investigation for scholars working in the field, the book is divided into two sections: 'experiencing' and 'imagining' military masculinities. The section on experience considers the realities of military life in this period, and asks to what extent they produced a particular kind of gendered identity. The second section moves on to explore the wider impact of martial masculinities on culture and society, asking whether nineteenth-century Britain can be regarded as a warrior nation. These two sections ultimately demonstrate that the reception, representation and replication of masculine values in Britain during this period were far more complex than might be assumed. This collection will be required reading for anyone interested in the cultures of war and masculinity in the long nineteenth century.
This book correlates early American history during the Revolutionary War with the musical tradition of America. The growth and topics of American colonial and Revolutionary era music, especially in the military, are used as insight to military trends and American culture.
Rarely studied in their own right, writings about music are often viewed as merely supplemental to understanding music itself. Yet in the nineteenth century, scholarly interest in music flourished in fields as disparate as philosophy and natural science, dramatically shifting the relationship between music and the academy. An exciting and much-needed new volume, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century draws deserved attention to the people and institutions of this period who worked to produce these writings. Editors Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis, along with an international slate of contributors, discuss music's fascinating and unexpected interactions with debates about evolution, the scientific method, psychology, exoticism, gender, and the divide between high and low culture. Part I of the handbook establishes the historical context for the intellectual world of the period, including the significant genres and disciplines of its music literature, while Part II focuses on the century's institutions and networks - from journalists to monasteries - that circulated ideas about music throughout the world. Finally, Part III assesses how the music research of the period reverberates in the present, connecting studies in aestheticism, cosmopolitanism, and intertextuality to their nineteenth-century origins. The Handbook challenges Western music history's traditionally sole focus on musical work by treating writings about music as valuable cultural artifacts in themselves. Engaging and comprehensive, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century brings together a wealth of new interdisciplinary research into this critical area of study.
