A Study in Music, Community and Identity in a late nineteenth-century Scottish town

Abstract

In recent years, a growing body of research has revealed music to be one of the most prominent features of nineteenth-century urban culture. Notable amongst this is the work of Simon Gunn, which has shown music to be a vital component of public culture amongst the Victorian middle classes in the English cities of Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester. Dave Russell’s social history of popular music in latenineteenth-century England has also demonstrated the diversity of musical activity which existed across different regions and localities.1 Still, there remains a reluctance to site local, regional and national studies within a wider pan-British context. The writing of such a history has also been retarded by a historiography, particularly influential in Scotland, which tends to examine culture from a national perspective and evaluate nineteenth-century urban centres on the basis of their economic and occupational structures.2 While this study aims to redress the lack of attention to the local contexts of music in nineteenthcentury Scotland, it also substantiates Ehrlich and Russell’s comment that more detailed examination of the experiences of Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish urban centres will enhance our understanding of the place of music in nineteenth-century British society as a whole. The article itself aims to show how the Scottish town of Dundee, which has been so widely portrayed in terms of its overwhelming dependence on coarse textile manufacture, also sought to nurture and sustain a vibrant musical life. It will suggest that a key reason nineteenth-century Dundee has not been perceived as an especially musical city is the perpetuation of a bi-polarized definition of culture, exemplified in the critiques of the Frankfurt School, which has privileged ‘high’ forms and denigrated the popular, commercialized ones. It was the latter to which the inhabitants of Dundee were particularly receptive.3 It will also demonstrate that in a period of rapid industrial expansion, social change and economic uncertainty, the unique properties of music made it one of