Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject, edited by Sarah Collins

Abstract

Reviewed by: Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject ed. by Sarah Collins Emma Sutton (bio) Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject, edited by Sarah Collins; pp. xiii + 254. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, $99.99, $80.00 ebook. From videos of George Floyd's murder to tweets of political leaders wearing or eschewing masks to photographs of statues being tumbled, many of the events for which 2020 will be remembered are impressed on our collective memories through visual images. None of us can doubt visual media's capacity to galvanize shared actions, sentiment, and a sense of community, as well as—all too often—division, intolerance, and hatred. Amid urgent global concerns, music may seem incidental or irrelevant to politics. But from protest songs performed at Black Lives Matter gatherings to online outpourings of anguish about the cancelation of live concerts and risks associated with choral singing, it is clear that music plays a vital part in contemporary ideas about community and the responsibilities of our shared social and individual lives. These examples have their own distinctive contexts, but they also bring into focus how our contemporary assumptions about the value and roles of music are profoundly indebted to Victorian ideas. Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject thus has an acute topical resonance. The eleven essays in Sarah Collins's handsomely produced collection explore the significance of music to Victorian ideas about selfhood (often via self-cultivation) and community. Rightly noting that musical metaphors frequently underpin philosophical and literary liberal writing about "moral sentiment" and "sympathetic social relations," the volume also argues that our own understandings of Victorian liberalism have [End Page 137] overlooked the role of aesthetic experience in it (1). As Collins observes, this may partly be because liberal thinkers from Jeremy Bentham to John Stuart Mill were dismissive of music; despite being an accomplished keyboard extemporizer, Mill famously termed musical performance "unproductive labour" (qtd. in Collins 1). But Collins invites us to reconsider the apparent precedence of production and pragmatism over pleasure and beauty in this quotation and in liberal discourse more widely. A running concern of the volume is music's role in the relationship between individualism and control in liberal writing about music and in musical practice, a relationship often organized along class lines. At the heart of the opening section are questions about whom music was for, where and when it was accessed, and what was heard. Erin Johnson-Williams's chapter on music and physical exercise in working-class schools examines musical pedagogy to unpack some of the limitations of liberalism's emphasis on self-development. Describing the mass-choreographed action songs, physical drills, and displays widely used to provide physical education following the 1870 Education Act, she rightly notes their inextricability from militarism and colonialism. She emphasizes, too, the differences between "complex listening" instilled in middle-class children who were taught musical notation and the contrasting emphasis on P. E. for the children taught only drilling and Tonic Sol-fa (19). Such concerns are picked up in a chapter on music education and choral singing in pauper schools, asylums, and prisons. The physical and mental health benefits of music-making were emphasized, as was its potential to support the development of speech, hearing, and literacy. But music's role in reforming initiatives in institutions typically was framed in the language of utility and trod a narrow line between self-development and control: as Rosemary Golding pithily notes, "Conformity was the route to freedom" (66). Simon McVeigh's chapter on the "Sunday music question" further teases out tensions between individualism and state control: the push (inspired by the Great Exhibition) to make music accessible to workers through Sunday performances was closely linked to non-conformism and tolerance of religious observance; later in the century, it became entwined with aestheticism's valorizing of individualism (40). Yet it was also closely linked to the state's role in determining public good given its interdependence with the development of public parks, promoted as ideal venues for performances that promised physical and spiritual health. A greater sense of music's potential to foster dissent is apparent in two...