From Travel Literature to Academic Writing: Anthropology in the Musical Press from the 1830s to the 1930s

Abstract

Non-Western music appears relatively often in the nineteenth-century musical press. Early nineteenth-century citations derive principally from travel literature, in both English and translation, reflecting the frequently Prichardian and degenerationist landscape of that genre. While these ideologies are embraced in the Harmonicon and the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review in the early years of the nineteenth century, the Musical World, in contrast, encapsulates the often conflicted ideological complexities of mid-century as it begins to question the merits of comparative anthropology. The Musical Times sees academic writing achieve hegemony over travel literature, and with it the development of evolutionary paradigms critiqued in reviews of Richard Wallaschek’s work. By the 1890s, writing in the Proceedings of the Musical Association embeds these paradigms in the academic literature of musicology, and develops them into concepts of universalism.