British Musical Life

Over the last quarter century, music historians have borrowed liberally from the playbooks of ethnomusicologists and those who study popular music. Once relatively rare, studies of the social and cultural history of Western art music have opened up the field of historical musicology to readers who might never have consulted a monograph on the music of Mozart or Brahms. That these publications only occasionally require specialist knowledge (like the ability to read music) is a good thing, as is their focus on particular communities and musical practices.(A short list of such books includes: Suzanne Lord, Music from the Age of Shakespeare: A Cultural History [2003], James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History [1995], Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini:A Social History of American Concert Life [1994], and Walter Salmen, ed., The Social Status of the Professional Musician from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century [1983].) Reception studies in music, perhaps the most familiar species of this kind of work among musicologists, used to address either the dissemination of sources or the question of compositional influence; now they too appeal to the nonspecialist by situating major figures in provocative contexts. (On Beethoven, for example, see Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero [1995], Tia DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803 [1995], David B. Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics, 1870–1989 [1996], and Esteban Buch, Beethoven's Ninth: A Political History [2003].) The two books under review here, among the latest contributions to these new directions in musicology, have much to offer those interested in British musical life during a particularly important time in its development.

Why is the "long" eighteenth century so important to the history of music in Britain? Though there were few first-rate indigenous composers, this is when the public concert came into its own, supplanting the aristocratic chamber concert and the church concert at the center of British musical life. The lively musical scene in London and the provincial cities was a big draw for British and continental musicians, including some heavy hitters like Handel and Haydn. For all intents and purposes, modern musical life—with its touring virtuosos, paying audiences, standard repertory, concert halls, impresarios, even publicity machines—began in eighteenth-century Britain; hence current scholarly interest in its customs and practices. Addressing this phenomenon from a variety of angles, Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain presents fourteen essays grouped into three parts: Part 1 ("Towns and Cities") examines concert activity in the most important British urban centers; Part 2 ("Sources and Genres") considers what was played; and Part 3 ("Contexts for Concerts") looks at singular events, personalities, iconic venues, as well as a few more general trends. Contributors include several distinguished musicologists, a few eminent historians with longstanding interests in music, and a number of up-and-coming junior scholars. At the core of their work is the public concert, which by mid-century (according to Simon McVeigh) "had crystallized into an event of its own, independent of the usual activities to which music formed an accompaniment, such as eating or drinking, dancing or conversing, praying or marching" (2).

There are several reasons why eighteenth-century Britain was a more hospitable place for concerts than were contemporaneous European nation-states. McVeigh notes that Britain had an essentially free market for music, with "no state or civic limitations, no guild restrictions, no quality control and no obstacles to foreigners" (9). In addition to providing valuable employment opportunities for musicians, public concerts lent cultural capital to cities like Bath, where civic pride required a concert series that would rival those in London. National pride, on the other hand, demanded that certain composers and works—Handel's Messiah, for instance—had to be presented regularly in the more important venues. Concerts had one great advantage over other kinds of public entertainment in Georgian England: unproblematic ideological...