The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Paul Watt

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis Rosemary Golding (bio) The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis; pp. xiii + 553. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, $150.00, $149.99 ebook, £110.00. Recent years have seen a flurry of interest in the history of writing and thinking about music in the nineteenth century, including the histories of musicology, musical institutions, musical criticism, and music education. This is a welcome further development of the predominant focus on texts and documents within studies of music in nineteenth-century Britain, the speciality of editors Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century follows a broader trend over several decades to situate music in its cultural context, drawing fully on the rich archival and documentary material available. This volume is both a very welcome account of that recent work and a showcase of substantial original research covering an impressive range of topics. The handbook has become an important vehicle for research over the past decade, with significant publications in musicology and neighboring disciplines from Oxford, Cambridge, and Routledge. The handbook format is different in conception from an edited collection of essays, often leading to an uneven balance between comprehensive coverage and detailed study. The present handbook includes chapters ranging from new research to valuable summaries of existing literature, using both focused case studies and broader reviews. Contributions vary from summaries of developments in a range of geographical areas to focused studies of a single region, and from covering the whole nineteenth century to concentrating on a shorter time period, usually the end of the century. These differing approaches provide plenty of gems among the topics explored, but also lead to a less-comprehensive consideration of some themes than might be expected. The volume's introduction acknowledges the striking paucity of women scholars represented in its authorship. Women are also under-represented in the examples and case studies, a perennial problem in nineteenth-century history but one worth addressing [End Page 340] in key publications. The international spread of authors is laudable, but noticeably concentrated in the Global North. Scholars of the period urgently need to acknowledge the limitations of their research and the vast amount of the nineteenth-century world with which there is little or no scholarly engagement. There is no doubt that musicological scholarship will become richer with sustained and meaningful engagement with colleagues from South American, East Asian, and African nations, as well as from further recognition of the methodological and disciplinary histories that continue to shape our work. This volume goes some way toward that goal, but much remains to be done in connecting these ideas to present practices. Nevertheless it is cheering to see a wider range of scholarship coming into focus, drawing close links between intellectual, cultural, and musical history. Kevin C. Karnes's discussion of Saul M. Ginzburg and Pesach Marek's project on Russian-Jewish folk songs, for example, examines new meanings for historical writing. Another example is Allis's chapter on travel writing, which examines this newly expanded genre associated with the technological developments of the century. Simon McVeigh's chapter on the concert series links musical performance with key intellectual themes such as historiography and national identity. Throughout the volume, perspectives common in studies of Victorian music and its contexts are given a broader, more international framework that further enriches and enlivens the study of British music. Which chapters will be of particular interest to readers of Victorian Studies? Here the idiosyncrasies of the handbook format are apparent. Several chapters are particularly notable for their attention to Victorian Britain, offering both an overview of key themes and an introduction to the relevant literature, as well as detailed case studies. In part 1, "Texts and Practices," Allis's chapter on travel writing draws on a range of authors including Henry Inglis, Rudyard Kipling, and Charles Dickens; the majority of sources are English-language reports of travels and music in continental Europe...