Music and British Culture, 1785-1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich (review)

Music and British Culture, 1785-1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich. Edited by Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. [viii, 401 p. ISBN 0-19-81673-0-X. $99.] Music examples, illustrations, index.

The scope of Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley's Music and British Culture, a set of essays dedicated to and largely drawing from work of the great interdisciplinary pioneer Cyril Ehrlich, is an indication of how far studies in nineteenth- century British musical culture have come. The sixteen essays within the volume focus predominantly on the change of concert life in London from the first half of the nineteenth century (centered on performers and the often distracted enjoyment of the audience) to the second half of the nineteenth (celebrating predominantly Austro-German composers and a handful of classical works with an almost religious veneration). Other themes explored include the place of musicians in nineteenth-century British society, the conflicting desires to create more native compositional and performing talent within Great Britain, and the centering of a particular composer or arranger within this tradition (Samuel Wesley, Felix Mendelssohn, and Lucy Broadwood). Ten of the sixteen essays focus on music and its institutions within London; of the remaining six, three discuss musical institutions (economic or cultural) in other municipalities (Calcutta, Ulster, and Manchester); one posits Mendelssohn's journeys to Great Britain from 1829 forward as a catalyst for the rediscovery of his own Jewish identity; one discusses choral music as a symbol for nationalism in Wales; and one attempts to turn the often-heard "invented tradition" criticism of folk song on its head. All of the essays within this collection are strong, articulate, and well written; a few of them (such as the last mentioned, by Dorothy de Val) are provocative; and all of the work within this volume is important for scholars and enthusiasts of nineteenth-century music—even beyond that of Great Britain—to know intimately. For on this canvas are concise representations of the great shift from elite to middle-class musical culture, the use of music to promote respectability, and illuminations of the continual struggle for middle-class economic status and cultural respect in the music profession.

I do not envy the difficult task that Bashford and Langley must have had when they compiled the list of contributors for this volume. The editors balance essays written on both sides of the Atlantic well (although they did not draw from any authors outside of the English-speaking world), and included a number of leading scholars of British music and culture, such as Dave Russell (author of the extraordinarily valuable Popular Music in England: A Social History [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987]), Michael Musgrave (author of the thorough and necessary The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995]), and William Weber (author of The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992]). Yet there are a great many important voices in recent British music scholarship who are conspicuously absent: Bennett Zon, Nicholas Temperley, and Sophie Fuller, to name just three. Perhaps even more interesting (or vexing) is that the authors whom Bashford and Langley chose do not always seem to be aware of the great amount of interdisciplinary scholarship that has been published on this period within the last few decades. Of particular note is Trevor Herbert's otherwise well-written essay on nationalism and the Welsh choral tradition. Herbert uses the Celtic revival and reification of the bardic tradition as a touchstone for new choral nationalism in Wales, but does not even mention the standard historical and art history studies on the subject which support this part of his thesis (for instance, Stewart Piggott's The Druids [New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985]; or Sam Smiles's The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994]). Ironically, these omissions might be viewed as...