Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T05:46:47.387Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Miscellany and Collegiality in the British Periodical Press: The Harmonicon (1823–1833)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2013

Erin Johnson-Hill
Erin Johnson-Hill*
Affiliation:
Yale University Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Harmonicon was, in its day, London's premiere music periodical, gaining a wide and loyal readership at home and abroad. Perhaps the most the distinctive feature of the journal was its deliberate imperative to raise what it considered to be the ‘lamentable’ level of musical knowledge held by the British reading public. The journal's editor, William Ayrton, was deeply concerned that there was a lack of a national school of music in his own country that could ever match that which his rival French and German critics called their own. In this light, I argue that the journal's appeal and economic success was due to a didactic philosophy of ‘collegiality’ and ‘miscellany’ – to borrow William Weber's terms – as a means of disseminating musical knowledge to the broadest readership possible. Through reviewing, critiquing and publishing a remarkably assorted array of national styles and genres of music, the Harmonicon attempted to create a very general type of musical knowledge in Britain in the early nineteenth century, one which looked necessarily beyond national borders in an effort to build up a shared knowledge of music. Data drawn from musical examples spanning all 11 years of the journal's print run is analysed, assessing in particular the high number of international composers featured in the journal. The many miscellaneous strands interwoven throughout the Harmonicon reflect a mode of thinking about music that was integral to a valiant effort to raise the status and awareness of music in early nineteenth-century British culture.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , December 2012 , pp. 255 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Many people have been instrumental in the formation of this article, which stemmed from my MPhil dissertation at Cambridge University (2008) under the supervision of Benjamin Walton, who first introduced me to the Harmonicon. Thanks also go to Alan Davison, William Weber, and Leanne Langley for their invaluable comments, conversations and support, and to Lydia Johnson for kindly reading through various drafts of this work. Thank you also to the members of the Yale Department of Music for their very thoughtful and provocative comments on this research as part of a work-in-progress series in October 2011.

References

1 Langley, Leanne, ‘The English Musical Journal in the Early Nineteenth Century’ (PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1983): 357Google Scholar

Kassler, Jamie Croy, The Science of Music in Britain, 1714–1830: A Catalogue of Writings, Lectures, and Inventions (New York: Garland, 1979): 1229Google Scholar

2 Harmonicon, 1 (1823): 1.

3 The Introduction states further: ‘Influenced by these considerations, and in order to fill up the chasm which appears to be left, this Journal is now offered to the Public. It will be continued monthly, and will generally contain six or seven entire pieces of music, one of which, at least, will be written purposely and exclusively for the work, by some really eminent composer, and the remainder will be selected from the best productions of the great masters; but such music as the taste of the passing day shall decidedly approve, will not be rejected, unless indeed it is more deficient in merit than, when sanctioned by the public voice, is likely to happen. The whole will be adapted to the voice, the piano-forte, the hand, or the organ, and will form a varied collection of novelty and excellence, calculated no less to gratify the accomplished amateur, than to furnish the student with the most perfect models by which correctness of taste, and a knowledge of the style and peculiarities of the different schools, may be attained’. Harmonicon, 1 (1823): 1.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Weber, William, ‘Canonicity and Collegiality: “Other” Composers, 1790–1850’, Common Knowledge, 14/1 (2008): 105CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 The Preface to the Harmonicon's first volume boasts, indeed, that the sheet music in the journal was not only unique and of high quality, but was also a great bargain: ‘There is something vulgar and forbidding in alluding, out of market, to prices: nevertheless it is a duty we owe, not only to ourselves, but to our subscribers, to mention, that the music alone contained in this work could not be purchased, in the ordinary way, for less than three times the sum that is paid for the two parts forming the First Volume of the HARMONICON’. Harmonicon, 1 (1823): iv.

9 Weber, William, ‘Canonicity and Collegiality’, in The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar

10 Weber, Transformation of Musical Taste, 105–123Google Scholar

11 Pomeroy, Elizabeth W., The Elizabethan Miscellanies: Their Development and Conventions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973)Google Scholar

12 Weber, Transformation of Musical Taste, 40Google Scholar

13 Goehr, Lydia, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994): 102–109Google Scholar

14 Burchell, Jenny, ‘ “The First Talents of Europe”: British Music Printers and Publishers and Imported Instrumental Music in the Eighteenth Century’, in Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Susan Wollenberg and Simon McVeigh (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004): 93Google Scholar

15 Dickens, derided at the time for pandering to a lower-class reading public, was, incidentally, an acquaintance of Ayrton (the British Library has recently acquired their correspondence), since they worked in the same circle of publishers. Indeed, the advertisements that prefaced the serialized Pickwick Papers, which ran over 40,000 copies per issue, actually included several advertisements for Ayrton's later musical journals (such as the Musical Library) and for the concerts he organized. See the prefatory advertisements for Ayrton's Musical Library to the first three numbers of the Pickwick Papers, Yale Beinecke Rare Books Library, call no. Gimbel / Dickens D98 Set 2.

16 Langley, ‘English Musical Journal’, 6Google Scholar

Maurer, Shawn Lisa, Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998): 16Google Scholar

Shevelow, Kathryn, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London; New York: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar

17 Langley, Leanne, ‘The Life and Death of The Harmonicon: An Analysis’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 22 (1989): 137CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Vogan, William Hamilton, ‘ “A Rare Union of Literature with Music”: Selective Indices to the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review and the Harmonicon’ (Masters dissertation, University of Rochester, 1979)Google Scholar

Kitson, Richard, ‘James William Davison, Critic, Crank and Chronicler: A Re-evaluation’, Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies, vol. 1 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999): 304Google Scholar

Fellinger, Imogen, ‘Periodicals’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980): 230–233Google Scholar

19 Langley, ‘Life and Death’, 137Google Scholar

20 Langley, ‘English Musical Journal’, 194–281Google Scholar

21 Kassler, Science of Music, 1230Google Scholar

22 The QMMR had far longer articles on more scientific subjects, while the Harmonicon had shorter articles of more interest to the amateur. For example, a typical issue of the QMMR would begin with a lengthy article on vocal performance, usually entitled ‘Elements of Vocal Science’, whereas the Harmonicon would begin with a descriptive and more personal biography of a famous musician and then launch directly into vivid descriptions of London's concerts and musical amusements. The QMMR would save any mention of London's concerts until the very end of each volume. Vogan, ‘Rare Union’, 7–8.

23 Kassler, Science of Music, 1238Google Scholar

24 As Bacon was to declare at the outset of the QMMR's publication: ‘Music and musicians are almost entirely abandoned to the meagre, hasty, crude, and but too often partial and personal effusions of the journals of the day’. Bacon, QMMR, 1 (1818): 1. Although the Harmonicon was not yet in existence at this time, this more exclusionary attitude prevailed throughout the QMMR's run.

25 King, Janet Gromfine, ‘The Harmonicon: Reflection of a Musical Generation’ (Masters dissertation, University of Maryland, 1973)Google Scholar

26 Vogan, ‘Rare Union’, 5Google Scholar

27 Langley, ‘English Musical Journal’, 318Google Scholar

28 ‘Collegiality’, in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989, OED Online http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50043969 (Accessed 8 September 2009).

29 Wollenberg, Susan, ‘ “So Much Rational and Elegant Amusement, at an Expense Comparatively Inconsiderable”: The Holywell Concerts in the Eighteenth Century’, in Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Susan Wollenberg and Simon McVeigh (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004): 243Google Scholar

30 Clark, Peter, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Ellis, Markman, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004)Google Scholar

31 Rainbow, Bernarr, The Land Without Music: Musical Education in England 1800–1860 and its Continental Antecedents (London: Novello, 1967)Google Scholar

32 Irving, Howard, ‘Richard MacKenzie Bacon and the Royal Academy of Music’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 21/1 (1990): 79–90Google Scholar

Weber, William, ‘Miscellany vs. Homogeneity: Concert Programmes at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music in the 1880s’, in Music and British Culture, 1785–1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 299–320CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Weber, William, ‘Concerts at Four Conservatories in the 1880s: A Comparative Analysis’, in Musical Education in Europe (1770–1914): Compositional, Institutional and Political Challenges, vol. 2 (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005): 331–350Google Scholar

33 Ellis, Katherine, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, 1834–80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar

34 Charles Thibault ‘of New York’ submitted a ‘Military Divertimento Composed for the Piano-Forte’ in Harmonicon, 5 (1827): 81–85Google Scholar

35 Langley, ‘English Musical Journal’, 55Google Scholar

36 Bonds, Mark Evan, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar

37 Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. B. Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)Google Scholar

38 Langley's extensive archival work in this area has made much of this information available for future use: see Langley, statistics in Table 2, ‘Life and Death’, 149; also see 151. Generally, around 70 percent of printed issues of the Harmonicon were sold.

39 Langley, ‘Life and Death’, 139Google Scholar

40 Ibid.

41 The Harmonicon was mainly sold at William Pinnock's ‘Music Warehouse’ (276 Strand, close to the City), and also by Samuel Leigh, the polite literature and travel guide specialist (18 Strand, nearer the West End), who agreed to subsidise a small portion of the magazine's cost. Langley, ‘Life and Death’, 139.

42 Smith, Harold, The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 1826–1846: A Social and Bibliographical Evaluation (London: Vine, 1974)Google Scholar

Rauch, Alan, Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2001)Google Scholar

43 Langley, ‘English Musical Journal’, 53Google Scholar

44 The study of miscellany in non-British music periodicals is beyond the scope of the present article, but note that in format the design of other foreign journals was not all that dissimilar. Consider France Musical, Le Ménestrel and the Revue at Gazette Musicale in France, and the German Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, to name but a few. However, direct comparisons would have to take into account a great deal of contextual information about musical criticism in France and Germany: this remains an open field of research.

45 Charles Lamb, The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, vol. 3 (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1978)Google Scholar

Langley, ‘English Musical Journal’, 314Google Scholar

46 Fétis and his contemporaries made no secret of their opinion that the state of music in Britain was entirely woeful; however, he was willing to engage with Ayrton in a heated exchange of correspondence, which was published in the Harmonicon in the years 1829–1830. Fétis's overarching claim was that England was so centred on the business and financial profits of the music industry, and that music was so undervalued and underfunded by the British government, that the country had no way to produce any musical talent. Ayrton's relatively mild replies suggest that, given his promulgation of ‘good taste’ and ‘appreciation of genius’ throughout the journal's run, he was happy with London musical life as it was.

47 Weber, Transformation of Musical Taste, 18Google Scholar

48 Weber, Transformation of Musical Taste, 16Google Scholar

49 King, ‘Harmonicon’, 13–14Google Scholar

50 Weber, William, ‘The Muddle of the Middle Classes’, 19th-Century Music, 3 (1979): 175–185Google Scholar

Brewer, John, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997): 167–169Google Scholar

Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957)Google Scholar

51 Zon, Bennett, Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007)Google Scholar

52 Harmonicon, 4 (1826): 129.

53 King, ‘Harmonicon’, 8Google Scholar

54 ‘Miscellaneous articles … are often billed as being of vital interest to the amateur, and assorted topics are not infrequently initiated by readers’. King, ‘Harmonicon’, 10.

55 This is even clear from the all-encompassing title of the journal: ‘The Harmonicon, A Journal of Music, Containing Essays, Criticisms, Biography, and Miscellaneous Correspondence’. [Emphasis added.] This was the full title of the literary part of the journal from 1823–1827; the title changed with the ‘New Series’ to ‘The Harmonicon … containing essays, criticisms, biography, foreign reports, & miscellaneous correspondence’.

56 Topham, Jonathan R., ‘John Limbird, Thomas Byerley, and the Production of Cheap Periodicals in the 1820s’, Book History, 8 (2005): 78Google Scholar

57 Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 169Google Scholar

58 Ellis, Music Criticism, 8Google Scholar

59 Weber, Transformation of Musical Taste, 2–5Google Scholar

60 Langley, ‘Life and Death’, 140Google Scholar

61 On the Harmonicon's financial struggles, see Langley, ‘Life and Death’, 138.

62 Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 394Google Scholar

63 Weber, Transformation of Musical Taste, 59Google Scholar

64 Indeed, the Harmonicon was initially conceived to be the unofficial publication of the Philharmonic Society – the play on words between Harmonicon and Philharmonic was a clue to this.

65 On Ayrton's biography, see John Warrack, ‘Ayrton, William (1777–1858)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com (Accessed 17 June 2010), and Leanne Langley, ‘Ayrton, William’, Grove Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com (Accessed August 20, 2009).

66 William Ayrton, Harmonicon (1823)Google Scholar

Kassler, Science of Music, 1229Google Scholar

67 As Langley contends, Ayrton was ‘in philosophical doubt about anyone's ability to make really good things cheap. For him the thought of a mass reading audience was inevitably associated with the lowering of literary standards, which, if allowed to impinge on The Harmonicon, would affect literary ones as well. Like the controversial Reform Bill then before Parliament, this development in the bookselling industry threatened a blow to the economic establishment that might in turn erode the entire social fabric of the nation; from Ayrton's point of view it was another sign of the changing times and ought to be resisted’. Langley, ‘Life and Death’, 153.

68 Langley, ‘Life and Death’, 153Google Scholar

69 Irving, Howard, Ancients and Moderns: William Crotch and the Development of Classical Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999): 146Google Scholar

70 Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 537–538Google Scholar

71 Kassler, The Science of Music in Britain, 1229Google Scholar

72 King, ‘Harmonicon’, 5Google Scholar

73 ‘He was never known as an executant musician or serious composer’. Langley, ‘Ayrton, William’, Grove Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com (Accessed August 20, 2009).

74 Langley, ‘Life and Death’, 139Google Scholar

75 Willets, Pamela, ‘The Ayrton Papers: Music in London, 1786–1858’, British Library Journal, 6 (1980): 7–23Google Scholar

King, ‘Harmonicon’, 82–113Google Scholar

76 As Vogan notes, ‘Ayrton's involvement in the professional music world (King's Theatre, etc.) made him more aware of the responsibilities and problems of performers. This is reflected in his journal, for there are many references to salaries, contractual commitments and working conditions that do not appear’ in contemporary periodicals. Vogan, ‘Rare Union’, 6.

77 Langley, ‘English Musical Journal’, 341Google Scholar

78 Ibid.

79 Harmonicon, 6 (1828): 4.

80 Levine, Philippa, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England 1838–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar

Bossche, Chris R. Vanden, ‘Class Discourse and Popular Agency in “Bleak House” ’, Victorian Studies, 47 (2004): 7–31Google Scholar

81 Harmonicon, 6 (1828): 35.

82 Langley, ‘English Musical Journal’, 394Google Scholar

Davies, James, ‘A Musical Souvenir: London in 1829’ (PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 2005): 196–204Google Scholar

83 Langley, ‘English Musical Journal’, 9Google Scholar

84 Perhaps to distance institutions such as the Philharmonic Society from other musical activities in London, Ayrton provided a clearer format to the Philharmonic reviews and, as a general rule, engaged in fewer digressions within them.

85 Langley, ‘English Musical Journal’, 318Google Scholar

86 See the section ‘Biographical Memoirs’ in the Table of Contents in each volume of the Harmonicon for a list of these names.

87 These included interesting features such as tales of music in Africa by a ‘Traveller’ and letters from anonymous correspondence recounting ‘A Day with Beethoven.’ See Harmonicon 2 (1834): 10–11.

88 As well as covering concert life and musical news in the main European centres, the ‘Foreign Musical Report’ also had frequent notes on concert life in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.

89 On the ‘vibrations of a tuning fork’, see Harmonicon, 1 (1823): 137; on music in Africa, see Harmonicon, 2 (1824): 195; Harmonicon, 3 (1825): 51–54; and Harmonicon, 4 (1826): 93-94; for the ‘utility of music for sailors’, see Harmonicon, 11 (1833): 171; and for the ‘mode of communication of musical sounds to deaf persons’, see Harmonicon, 1 (1823): 139.

90 Harmonicon, 1 (1823): iv.

91 George Hogarth, letter in Harmonicon, 8 (1830): 97Google Scholar

92 Langley, ‘English Musical Journal’, 336–337Google Scholar

93 Harmonicon, 1 (1823): 56.

94 ‘Sometimes the vocal compositions here are all Italian. This is complained of, and, straightaway, Messieurs the Directors rush into the other extreme, giving nothing but German. Are they not aware that variety is the soul of a good selection, and that it is very possible to supply eight concerts with an abundance of that desirable quality, from the best works of the best composers?’ [Emphasis added.] Harmonicon, 9 (1831): 70.

95 Burchell, Jenny, Polite or Commercial Concerts? Concert Management and Orchestral Repertoire in Edinburgh, Bath, Oxford, Manchester, and Newcastle, 1730–1799 (New York; London: Garland, 1996)Google Scholar

96 Ehrlich, Cyril, First Philharmonic: A History of the Royal Philharmonic Society (Oxford: Clarendon; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar

97 Harmonicon, 9 (1831): 153.

98 Ibid.

99 King, ‘Harmonicon’, 9Google Scholar

100 Kassler, Science of Music, 1228Google Scholar

101 Shamgar, Beth, ‘Perceptions of Stylistic Change: A Study of the Reviews of New Music in the Harmonicon (1823–1833)’, Current Musicology, 42 (1986): 20–31Google Scholar

Bar-Shany, Michael, ‘Beethoven in the Eyes of the Harmonicon (1823–1833), The Reviews of the Philharmonic Society Concerts’, The Beethoven Journal, 16 (2001): 12–19Google Scholar

Rice, Alexander, ‘On the Clarionet from the Harmonicon’, Clarinet, 11 (1984): 34–35Google Scholar

102 King, ‘Harmonicon’, 12Google Scholar

103 Note that in the Harmonicon's unsuccessful successor, the Musical Library, the literary portion of the journal was directly related to discussion of that issue's sheet music. These descriptions sometimes appeared in the Harmonicon, particularly in the later issues, but the direct relation between the two parts of the journal did not exist to the extent it did in the Musical Library. Perhaps this even more extreme pandering to the amateur in the successor to the Harmonicon was not, after all, the way to make sales, as Ayrton was to discover.

104 ‘Although composers of European origin who were resident in Britain unquestionably had the tastes of their immediate audiences in mind, and had no particular interest in leaving the country, many of them clearly remained essentially cosmopolitan in outlook’. Burchell, ‘British Music Printers and Publishers’, 107.

105 Burchell, ‘British Music Printers and Publishers’, 110Google Scholar

106 King, ‘Harmonicon’, 46Google Scholar

107 Harmonicon, 8 (1830): 51.

108 King, ‘Harmonicon’, 19Google Scholar

109 King, ‘Harmonicon’, 30Google Scholar

110 As King maintains, ‘Pure modern virtuosity is indicted throughout The Harmonicon. Frequent cases are cited where it interferes with the form of a piece’, and where ‘brilliant passages … lack musical substance’.

111 Kassler, Michael, The English Bach Awakening: Knowledge of J.S. Bach and his Music in England, 1750–1830 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004)Google Scholar

112 See Harmonicon, 4 (1826): 146–7.

113 Langley, ‘English Musical Journal’, 70Google Scholar

114 On Ayrton's compositional skills see Warrack, ‘Ayrton, William’, http://www.oxforddnb.com (Accessed 17 June 2010).

115 Thompson, T.P., ‘Musical Periodicals: Harmonicon-Giulianiad’, Westminster Review, 18 (1833): 471–472Google Scholar

116 Langley, ‘Life and Death’, 154–163Google Scholar

117 McFarlane, Meredith and McVeigh, Simon, ‘The String Quartet in London Concert Life, 1769–1799’, in Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Susan Wollenberg and Simon McVeigh (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004): 161Google Scholar

Mahaim, Ivan and Levin, Evi, ‘The First Complete Beethoven Quartet Cycles, 1845–1851: Historical Notes on the London Quartett Society’, The Musical Quarterly, 80 (1996): 500–524Google Scholar

118 Weber, Transformation of Musical Taste, 235Google Scholar

119 Weber, Transformation of Musical Taste, 243Google Scholar

120 Ibid., 238.