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.

Prichardian Influence and the Degenerationist Backlash Against Jones: The Harmonicon (from 1823) and the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review (from 1825)

The first issue of the Harmonicon includes “On the Chorusses of the Persian Dervishes. (From the German.),” an article gleaned from the writings of von Hussard, who held an administrative post in Persia. Interestingly, the author (or editor) of the article castigates Sir J. Malcolm for omitting reference to music in his history of Persia, as he says, “The specimens of Persian music that have hithertobeen given to the public, are too scanty to enable us to form a decisive opinion on the subject.” The article mainly comprises musical transcriptions, each similar to the modal-like harmonizations of Hindostannie Airs, with the author noting, by and by, that some of the keys “agree with those of the primitive ecclesiastical chants; others are strictly the same as those now in use.” This implicitly Prichardian methodology appears the following year in an extract from Bowdich, “On the Music of the Ashantees and Fantees,” extracted from his previously discussed Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, published originally in 1819. Bowdich, however, provides a more telling, and openly monogenist, glimpse of early nineteenth-century attitudes toward non-Western music than the somewhat opaque von Hussard. Indeed, as we have seen, his work is representative of the conflicted tone of Prichardian early travel literature: “The wild music of these people, the Fantees, is scarcely to be brought within the regular rules of harmony, yet their airs have a sweetness and animation beyond any barbarous compositions I ever heard.”