Fashion Music and Art in London in 1850
illiam Weber, in his pioneering study of music and the middle class in London, Paris and Vienna in the first one-half of the nineteenth century, revealed that 'past 1848 a commercial concert world had emerged in each city, over which the center grade exerted powerful, if not dominant, control'.1 While the proliferation of concerts was remarkable, it should be borne in mind that they involved fewer organizational issues than, say, opera. Britain's population doubled in the threescore years after 1870, just the increase in musicians was sevenfold, a fact Cyril Ehrlich puts down to expanded demand 'derived, in big measure, from an efflorescence of commercial entertainment'.2 Antagonisms provoked by commercial interests in music began in the same period. Composers were kickoff to depend for their livelihood on the wealdiy bourgeoisie. It was not simply a matter of ensuring that the bourgeoisie attended their concerts. To earn a living, musicians were diversifying - teaching, writing and publishing - as wed as performing and composing. Publishers sponsored in areas of their commercial interest: Novelio supported oratorio concerts; Roosey ran ballad concerts; Chappell was involved in the founding of St James's Hall and promoted the house's music at the Monday and Saturday 'Pops'.
In tandem with the growdth of a commercial music industry, the term 'pop' changed its significant during the grade of the century, moving from well known to well received to successful in terms of canvas music sales. A related development was the reluctance to take every bit a folk song annihilation with an identifiable composer, an effective means of excluding commercial popular song. Folk music came to mean national music, an ideological shift adjustment it with bourgeois aspirations and identity rather than the lower grade.three In London, during 1855-59, William Chappell felt comfy giving the title Popular Music of the Olden Time to a collection of traditional songs. In the 1890s, however, Frank Kidson explained that he was driven to collecting the material he published as English Peasant Songs by the desire to counter the accusation that England had no national music.four The concept of a national music brought with information technology the notion that it was to be institute in the country rather than the town.
For Raymond Williams, copyright and royalty are the 2 significant indicators of the changed relations brought about by professionalization and the capitalist market for cultural appurtenances.5 The enforcement of copyright protection on the reproduction and functioning of music was an enormous stimulus to the urban music market place, affecting the large numbers of writers, performers and publishers based in London. In Britain, the Copyright Act of 1842 immune the author to sell copyright and performing right together or separately. The star organization developed alongside the London music hall: Marie Lloyd, George Leybourne, the Great MacDermott, Albert Chevalier and Gus Elen were amongst the well-nigh admired. In the final stages of professionalization in the music hall mergers and the germination of chains of halls worked to remove those aspects of music hall culturally linked to particular cities (like London, Newcastle and Glasgow) and replace them with a national model.
Ticket prices were used to produce a class hierarchy of concerts. Pricing policy ensured a sociady-sectional audience at London'southward Royal Combo Society concerts. Fifty-fifty afterwards the Society moved from the Hanover Foursquare Rooms to the large St James's Hall in 1869, the cheapest unreserved seats were 5s and 2s 6d.6 The New Combo Society, founded in 1852, was in the hands of wealthy music lovers and, when it moved from Exeter Hall to Hanover Square in 1856, the price of seats rose and a 'more exclusive audition' was obtained.vii On the other hand, concerts such as those begun on Saturdays by August Mann in the Crystal Palace in 1855 necessitated pop programming and a small access charge in gild to fill the enormous hall. Thus a type of programming was developed in the big city that differed from what was establish in the village halls and small town assembly rooms.
By 1865, London's concert life was entirely professional, 'amateurs no longer playing along, withal less pretending to "direct" the proceedings' (Ehrlich 60). The aristocracy began to find themselves unable to afford the high fees of international stars for their individual concerts and, consequently, their salons were on the wane during the 2nd half of the century From the 1830s on, the heart-form audition had grown and so had middle-class domestic music-making. Taken together with the professionalization of music functioning, the result was that amateur music-making lost the condition information technology had enjoyed formerly when dominated by the aristocracy. Moreover, ensembles that were previously ofttimes associated with amateurs, similar the cord quartet, tended now to exist left to professionals, as a result of the piano having assumed such a dominant role in drawingroom music. The disharmonize between the materialistic consumerism and spiritual yearnings of the suburbia are neatly illustrated by the domestic pianoforte: in Richard Leppert'southward words, 'Its physical presence commonly fetishized materiality. . . and, at the same fourth dimension, the music to be played on the instrument was valorized precisely considering of its immateriality'.9 Pianos 'for the million' were being advertised at 10 guineas in 1884,ten and hire purchase was introduced in London and New York to assist people buy pianos. British piano-making was concentrated in London, from where instruments weie transported to otlier parts of the country past rail. Along with the influx of pianos into working-class homes in the late nine teen til century came the sixpenny lesson.11
Another characteristic of the commercialization of music, its commodification, was most evident in the British sail music merchandise, aLso concentrated in London. Novello's successive reductions in the price of music meant that the amount of manus-copying was reduced. Cheap music was also to be had from Davidson, Hop wood and Crew, and Charles Sheard (the Musical Boutonniere serial).12 The halfpenny broadside ballad (usuady topical and frequently most a condemned murderer) and the street carol vocalist began to autumn into refuse in the late 1850s; yet ballad publishing had one time been a lucrative business, especially for James Catnach and his printing at Seven Dials.thirteen When his sister took over afterwards his deadi in 1841, she advertised that 'upwards of iv,000 different sorts of ballads are continually on sale with twoscore new penny song books'fourteen A broadside carol relied not on canvas music merely on common knowledge of a tune (it was indicated just by proper name).
The rift between art and amusement
y the second half of the century a stardom had arisen between 'art music' and 'pop music', even if non expressed exactly in those terms. It may be seen as prove for Pierre Bourdieu'south argument that social groups need to reach distinction for themselves in matters of gustation, and then that their social and aesthetic superiority is conjoined.15 The increment in urban populations and ascent of the suburbia brought a need for public demonstrations of social standing, since it was no longer mutual noesis who was important Attention concerts was, amongst other tilings, a means of displaying status (Run into Weber 25-26). Popular forms with a working-class base often offer participation (for instance, the music hall vocal's chorus), whereas higher forms are more than probable to exist objects of aesthetic contemplation.
In 1860, a writer in Macmillan's Magazine identifies a 'higher class of music', referring to music of the Austro-German tradition, at that time beginning to be labelled 'classical music'. This is not of a kind associated with female accomplishments; it Is a serious 'homo's music', in Lawrence Levine's terminology a 'sacralized' music.17 The writer mentions an sometime friend, much fond to quartet playing, who 'would every bit shortly have thought of sawing his dear 'Stead" upward for firewood as of admitting his wife into the music-room during the commemoration of the mysteries'.18 The writer does, however, beg 'young ladies' to educate the ears of their fa tilers and brothers by playing a little bit of Beethoven or Haydn occasionally. Simultaneously, composers found that they were being held to task by high-minded critics for producing depression (that is, entertaining) music. The London weekly Figaro, commenting on the first nighttime of Gilbert and Sullivan'southward The Magician (1877), expressed its 'disappointment at the downwardly art course that Sullivan appears to be drifting into'.19 Another review, in The World remarked: 'Information technology was hoped that he would soar with Mendelssohn, whereas lie is, it seems, content to sink with Offenbach'.twenty
In the commencement half of the century, popular music had been acceptable in the 'best of homes', simply from now on the message of 'loftier art' was that the re was a 'better class of music' and some other kind (soon to be seen equally degenerate) that appealed to 'the masses'. Taken together with the increasing 'sacralization' of culture, it meant that the value of bourgeois female 'accomplishments' was to be reassessed, and that the once praised working-course 'rational recreations', such equally Tonic Sol-fa choral singing, and playing in brass and military bands, were to seem comparatively dedicated to the shrine of fine art.
New markets for cultural goods
he platonic for London'due south social reformers was a single, shared culture, bringing together the city'due south different classes and ethnic groups; simply the reality was that the economic science of cultural provision in the capital necessitated focusing on item consumers. Onetime markets had to be developed, new ones created and, where necessary, demand stimulated. The diverse markets for cultural goods, where unlike social groups partook of their pleasures, were noted in London at mid-century: 'The gay have their theatres - the philanthropic their Exeter Hall — the wealdiy their "ancient concerts" — the costermongers what they term their sing-vocal'.sup>21 Cultural value fluctuates with the social status of the consumer, and punch consumer's power to define legitimate gustatory modality. Cultural competences have a social 'market price' (they possess value), which is why Bourdieu speaks of cultural majuscule. The working class serve as a 'negative reference betoken' for bourgeois efforts to learn cultural stardom (57). What for a working-grade audition might be down-to-earth, manifestly-speaking and funny, for the conservative audience might appear every bit rude, vulgar and silly. It is not simply the dissimilar classes, but also the differing fractions within a class that possess a characteristic 'system of dispositions' that Bourdieu terms a 'habitus' (vi). A cultural struggle occurs when the values of a electric current market are upset by the formation of a new market that prices those values differently. The existence of competing markets in cultural goods is shown in Gilbert and Sullivan'due south Patience (1881), where Bunthome the fleshly poet and Grosvenor the idyllic poet compete for aesthetic status and vie for attending in a village full of eager, female consumers of poetry. Significantly, Bunthome explains away the interest in his rival as 'insipidity' - a lapse of gustatory modality. Moreover, he uses marketing language, claiming that since Grosvenor'south arrival 'insipidity has been at a premium'.
Aristocratic taste in the eighteenth century was for ceremony and fbmiaiity; the bourgeoisie reacted against that by prizing individual character and feelings.sup>24 The fondness of the bourgeoisie for virtuosi, suggests Leonard Meyer, was considering 'paradoxically, the concept of genius is .. . egalitarian. For though geniuses are endowed with extraordinary powers and special sensibilities, these gifts are understood to exist innate rather than dependent on lineage or learning'.sup>25 Music was preferred that did not rely on previous creative cognition, and was valued as 'natural'. The subject of love was favoured because it cutting across form. As Sir Joseph Porter remarks in H.MS. Pinafore, 'love is a platform upon which all ranks meet'. The values of originality and individuality relate to conservative credo, being the virtues prized past leaders of industry.26
New markets developed for cultural goods, but certain classes and class fractions could merely acquire them if that market was socially suitable. A member of the 'respectable' centre class may have wished to hear George Leyboume (Figure 1), but may accept but felt able to attend his operation if lie appeared at St James's Hall rather than a music hall. By the end of the century, however, some of the music hall stars had, to use today's terminology, successfully 'crossed over' and won admirers in all classes, thus contributing to the growing 'respectability' of the halls.
In the first half of the century in particular, information technology should exist borne in mind that 'popular' did not necessarily mean 'low status': some of the virtuoso display pieces heard in salons were popular in style but of high status at that time. Promenade concerts had a petit bourgeois character, catering to a gustatory modality adult in cafes, taverns, parks and pleasance gardens. The pleasure gardens offer an example of the impact that a seasonal alter in the class character of the urban center's population had upon culture, since they were busiest in summer when the aristocracy were not in town. The music in pleasure gardens thus catered for those who lived in London and who were able to afford the one shilling admission fee.
Songs for the drawing-room market could be heard publicly at assembly rooms, diurdi halls and, later, carol concerts run by the publisher Boosey. The drawing-room ballad was the stimulus behind the first flowering of the commercial popular music industry in United kingdom and North America, which was evident in the production, promotion and marketing of the sheet music to these songs and the pianos to back-trail them. It should be noted how this type of urban commercial popular song differed from the popular traditional songs of the countryside. The crucial gene was the pianoforte accompaniment both because it was an essential rather than optional harmonic back up to most of these songs, and because a piano was not a portable instrument that could be taken to the village green (unlike, say, a concertina). Indeed, in London, the middle classes were united in their loatiling of those who had found a means of transporting 'street pianos' (often termed 'butt organs') into their neighbourhoods. The attempts that were made to outlaw the 'playing' of these instruments relate to the same bug of noise and execrable musicianship that are raised by Emily Cockayne in this issue.
The success of Gilbert and Sullivan's Trial past Jury (first performed on the same beak as Offenbach's La Perichole in 1875) showed the possibility of a market for English operetta. Gilbert and Sullivan were frequendy indebted to Offenbach, whose operettas were pop in London. The key to Gilbert's humor was the serious treatment of the absurd, showing the influence of burlesque, which in London occupied a middle ground between music hall and opera. Musical comedy grew out of burlesque in the 1890s; the new mixture travelled well, and Jones's The Geisha (1896) outstripped fifty-fifty the success of Gilbert and Sullivan'south The Mikado.27Sure varieties of popular entertainment that adult in the nineteenth century did win a cross-class appeal. Blackface minstrelsy conquered the middle grade with greater ease than the music hall (Run into Scott 87.) It began when New York entertainer Thomas Rice copied a disabled African-American slave's 'Jim Crow' trip the light fantastic routine in 1832.29 The first troupe, the Virginia Minstrels (fiddle, banjo, tambourine and bone castanets) formed in New York in 1842, calling themselves minstrels after the recent success enjoyed by the Tyrolese Minstrel Family Rice visited London in 1836, the Virginia Minstrels in 1843, and troupes soon formed in England, often known as Christy minstrels after E.R Christy's minstrels. Blackface minstrels inscribed racism, just subverted bourgeois values past celebrating idleness and mischief rather than work and responsible behaviour, their blackface mask assuasive an inversion of dominant values.30 They had a broad appeal, all the same, and in London the Moore and Burgess Minstrels were in permanent residency at the smaller St James's Hall. The enormous cantankerous-class popularity of the minstrel songs of Stephen Foster (his first success, 'Oh! Susanna!' dates from 1848) meant that, from that time on, there existed a style that was recognizably American to London audiences.
The diaries of Charles Rice, a comic vocaliser who sang in London taverns during the 1840s, throw interesting lite on the years leading upward to music hall.31 The tavern concert room, with its lower centre-grade patrons and professional or semi-professional entertainment, has a more direct link to the music hall than do the song and supper rooms effectually Covent Garden and the Strand, which were frequented by the aristocracy and wealthy middle form. West End halls, like the Oxford, were the only music halls to attract patrons of a higher class status; suburban halls relied on patronage from the working class and lower centre class (tradesmen, shopkeepers, mechanics and clerks). Charles Morton had difficulty trying to encourage the centre class to attend his yard hall, the Canterbury, a major obstacle being that information technology was located in Lambeth.32 Dave Russell has commented on the regular, though not entirely trustworthy, claims of middle-course attendance fabricated past music hall journals in the 1880s.33 In the 1890s, heart-class attitudes became more favourable to music hall, swayed past the 'new grapheme of the amusement' (Höher 86), in a word, the respectability striven for past managers (including their moves to encourage the attendance of married women).
Music, morals and social order
Nineteenth-century conservative values were several, every bit were their ideological functions (thrift set against extravagance, self-aid vs. dependence, hard work vs. idleness) only where art and entertainment were concerned, the cardinal value in asserting moral leadership was respectability. Information technology was something within the grasp of all, unlike the aristocratic values of lineage and 'proficient breeding'. Respectability allowed the suburbia to take a moral stand against certain aspects of working-class behaviour, particularly potable and immorality. The fight for respectability was i that religious organizations were eager to support. Nonconformism was a major force behind English choral music in the nineteenth century (see Raynor 93). Methodists, for instance, had introduced congregational singing in the previous century, and a want to encourage teaching and 'improvement' made them strongly committed to sacred choral music. London's Sacred Harmonic Society, founded in 1832, began equally a nonconformist organization. Of its 73 members in 1834, 36 were artisans and 27 shopkeepers, figures which reveal that it was dominated by the lower middle class (See Weber 167, table 21)
The rational and the recreational were linked together in the sightsinging motion, even if the singing was not from conventional musical notation. Joseph Mainzer, John Hullali and, concluding on the scene, John Cun veil each offered competing methods to the singing classes, the latter promoting the Tonic Sol-fa method devised by Sarah Glover, a teacher in Norwich. The London publishing business firm Novello, set up in 1811, took over the publication of Mainzer's Musical Times in 1844, past which time the firm specialized in producing cheap musical editions, especially of oratorios, the genre that dominated the choral scene. The lionized composer was Handel, and enormous triennial Handel Festivals, involving upwards to ii,000 performers solitary, took place from 1857 in a huge concert hall created inside the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, s-due east London (where it had been reconstructed the year later on the 1851 Great Exhibition).
The conviction behind Matthew Arnold's Culture and Chaos (1869) is that culture is needed to salvage society from anarchy. Culture for Arnold is not a broad term: he wastes no time on the music hall. The working form was thought to need 'rational amusement' such as choirs.37 It was not a cynical exercise in control: in their own lives the middle class were committed to self-comeback by going to concerts, buying canvas music and performing it at home. From the 1830s on, pianos were a proud characteristic of middle-class homes, and girls were expected to learn to play them.38 A belief in the moral power of music was an all-pervasive credo: 'Allow no one', admonished the great champion of the improving powers of music, the Reverend H.R. Haweis, 'say the moral furnishings of music are small or insignificant'.39 It was the activities that accompanied music, for case the close proximity of couples dancing the waltz, that raised suspicion of the unwholesome, non the music itself.
For the middle class, civilization was in itself instructive but beginning required that people be instructed in it; hence the didactic graphic symbol of attempts to encourage working-course 'appreciation' of music. The People's Concert Society, founded in 1878, was an amateur organization dedicated to making loftier-status music known among the London poor. The Society began Sunday concerts of sleeping room music in South Identify, Moorgate, in 1887. From the succeeding yr, access was gratis, or a voluntary contribution could be made, and attendance was skilful.40 Persuasion was used, but no coercion was needed to interest the working class in music; the all-pervasive ideology of respectability and improvement meant that music, instrumental as wed as song, could be found even on the timetable at Mechanics' Institutes, specially later 1830.41
The British Brass Ring Movement, in the second half of the century, was some other example of 'rational recreation', hence the willingness of factory owners to sponsor works bands. These bands had their roots in the industrial North, but the steel, ironworks and shipping companies of East London also had bands in the 1860s. Some of the difficulties and distractions facing London bands compared to bands further north have been discussed by Dave Russell (210-11). Huge almanac contests were held at the Crystal Palace during 1860-63. The first of these, a two-twenty-four hours issue with entrance prices of 2s 6d for the first and Is for the second day, attracted an audience of 29,000.43 The test pieces for the contests at the Crystal Palace placed an emphasis on high-status music: selections from Meyerbeer's grand operas were the favourite choices, every bit at the Belle Vue contests in Manchester that aforementioned decade.
In the 1850s, the sale of refreshments was permitted on Sundays in certain London parks to coincide with military band performances. It met with strong opposition from those who wished to guard Sunday's importance as a religious day and who feared, also, that the excitement of listening to band music would trigger ceremonious disturbance (see Mackemess 185-86). On the other hand, the right kind of music, in the right environs, was thought to human activity as 'a civilising influence to which the lower classes were particularly responsive45 It was meaningless, of class, if the entertainment was respectable but the venue non. Business organisation about prostitution in theatres and music halls grew in the second one-half of the century.46 Alcohol consumption was another threat to morals and respectability, and music was used as a medium of persuasion by fractional interests within the bourgeoisie, such as the London temperance groups that promoted songs portraying the destructive effects of drunkenness on the domicile and family (Scott 189).
The labouring poor may have been sung about and even felt to be understood in sure socially-concerned drawing-room ballads, but their lives often lay exterior the feel of those who sang the ballads. Antoinette Sterling, who so movingly sang 'Iii Fishers Went Sailing' (a setting of Charles Kingsley's poetry by John Huliah in 1857), confessed that not merely had she no feel of storms at sea, just 'had never fifty-fifty seen fishermen'46 Actual acquaintance with fishermen was undoubtedly unnecessary, since the subject position such ballads addressed was that of the urban eye class. So, besides, did the Savoy operas, which had their roots in the wholesome entertainments given past Mr and Mrs German Reed at their 'Gallery of Illustration' in Lower Regent Street. Middle-class prejudices are aired, though almost always in an ironic way as, for example, in Ko-Ko's Ust of 'society offenders' in The Mikado. Egalitarianism is satirized in The Gondoliers (1889), summed up in the lines: 'When every one is somebodee. Then no one'southward everyone'. The Gondoliers appeared at a fourth dimension of anti-monarchist sentiment, and the growth of socialist and republican ideas.
The subject position addressed in music hall entertainment Is that of London's up per-working-grade or lower-eye-course male. Peter Bailey has described the sensibilities of the music hall every bit 'more petty bourgeois than proletarian' (Bailey xviii). The performers themselves were of a mixed class background: of the lions comiques in London, for example, George Leybourne had been a mechanic and the Great MacDermott (G.H. Farrell) a bricklayer, simply the Great Vance (Alfred Stephens) was formerly a solicitor's clerk. The toff or 'cracking' grapheme of the 1860s appealed to socially-aspiring lower-middle-class males in the audience. Leybourne, the most acclaimed of the swells, was given a contract in 1868, at the height of his success with the song 'Champagne Charlie', which fabricated it a status that he continued his slap-up persona both on and off stage.50 Bailey has discussed the presence of 'would-be swells' among the lower center course from the 1830s to the 1860s, showing that there was 'interesting cultural stock to exploit and play off' (55). The swell, nevertheless, is doubly coded: he might inscribe admiration for wealth and status, but he subverts bourgeois values in jubilant excess and idleness ('A noise all nighttime, in bed all day and swimming in Champagne', as Charlie puts it).
Another appealing fantasy was the 'bulldog spirit' found in Mac-Dermott'south 'War Song' of 1877 (when the Russo-Turkish war threatened British interests in the East). The chorus 'We don't desire to fight, but by jingo if we do' coined a new give-and-take for aggressive nationalism. The editor of the Musical Times commented, 'it is surprising how diose people will shout for war who have no intention of fighting themselves'.52 It illustrates that the relationship of song to society is not one of directly reflection. Another, more striking, example is the morbid but popular minstrel song 'The Empty Cradle' (Harry Kennedy, 1880) which went quickly out of favour when baby mortality rose.53
London'south socially-mixed music halls were in the center, and the working-class halls in the suburbs. The halls were diligently policed, exemplifying Gramsci's contention that if hegemony fails coercion is ready to accept its place.54 The music hall audience of whatever mix, however, dedicated its values and behaviour when the law was used in a repressive manner, turning up in large numbers at the halls, at police force courts and licensing sessions, and writing letters and petitions (Kift 183). Censorship was a blunt weapon when deployed against some performers. There is no dubiety, for example, that it was the style Marie Lloyd performed that had such an impact on her audition - the lack of corporeal subject area seen in the gestures, winks and knowing smiles that she used to lend suggestiveness to obviously 'innocent' music hall songs, like 'What's That For, Eli?' (Lytton/Le Brunn, 1892).
London's urban ballads were another repository of oppositional elements. 'The New Poor Law', a song almost the workhouse that followed that law's passing in 1834 chooses, ironically, the tune of 'Dwelling house, Sweet, Home!'56 In some other of these ballads, 'Married at Terminal' (1840), Queen Victoria is represented equally having very 'united nations-Victorian' sexual interests (120-21). These urban ballads, however, were not for a community market; because of London's size and the want to sell widely there was no personalizing of events equally in, for instance, the songs written by Tommy Armstrong for his Durham coal-mining customs When Armstrong sang 'The Trimdon Grange Explosion' in the local Mechanics' Hall in 1882, he could refer to Mrs Burnett and her dead sons Joseph, George and James, every bit characters his listeners actually knew.58 The carol presses survived longer than is ordinarily assumed; indeed, there were still four in operation in London in the 1870s, though the market was certainly failing by then." Urban ballads relied on existing well-known tunes: the striking women of 1888 from Bryant and May'south match factory sang a parody of 'John Brownish's Body' on their marches through the West End.threescore The next twelvemonth, during the London dock strike, Jim Connell wrote 'The Red Flag' (originally to the Scottish tune 'The White Cockade').
Arnold's polarization of civilisation and anarchy indicates the important function civilization (that is, high culture) was thought to play as an instrument of social gild in the nineteenth century. Loftier culture demands discipline, while the low tin can provoke indiscipline and disorder. Where low entertainment is concerned, an audience may shout, stamp, applaud or hiss at will, only a strict reception code operates for high fine art: you practise not talk; y'all do not turn upwards tardily; you do not hum forth; y'all do not eat, etc.61 John Kassan, in a study of manners in nineteenth-century America, speaks of 'disciplined spectatorship' as the required code of behaviour following the refuse of communal working-course pursuits62 Disciplined spectatorship was certainly not to be found, for case, in London's 'Penny Gaffs', which were often shops turned into temporary theatres holding effectually 200 for singing and dancing. At i penny admission they were cheaper than the threepence needed for a gallery seat at the music hall. Mayhew describes with disgust the entertainment on offering and the behaviour of the audience in a gaff he visited.63Nonetheless, though information technology proved difficult to impose social gild in the gaffs, attempts were fabricated to command the audition's behaviour in music halls.64 The internet consequence of the campaigns of 'moral guardians' and of social theorists like Arnold was that it became received wisdom at the end of the nineteenth century for loftier-minded critics to relate rowdy behaviour to there beingness ane kind of civilization that was elevating and another, a civilization of the masses, that was degrading.
Since this article is function of a special edition of this periodical, I will add a few words in closing almost the changing human relationship of musicology to urban history. In the past two decades many musicologists, myself included, grew increasingly concerned by the neglect of the social significance of music: for case, the office of social factors in affecting our response to music, and of cultural context in determining the legitimacy of performance styles. Consequently, my writing is informed by arguments that musical practices, values and meanings relate to particular historical and political contexts. My efforts may be seen equally a contribution to a new theoretical model for musicology that is ready to engage with, rather dian marginalize, questions of cultural space and place.
Final modified 28 February 2017
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