Lectures by leading Victorian conductor and composer reveal much about musical life at the time.

This monograph investigates the promotion and consumption of high musical culture among leisured society in Victorian London, by focusing on the activities of the concert manager John Ella and his Musical Union.

An examination of the work and music of the Royalist composer William Lawes.

New research throws light on the history of the viol after Purcell, including its revival in the late eighteenth century through Charles Frederick Abel.

This collection provides an in-depth look at musical criticism between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century.

The Renaissance composer and organist Thomas Morley (c.1557-1602) is best known as a leading member of the English Madrigal School, but he also built a significant business as a music publisher. This book looks at Morley's pioneering contribution to music publishing in England, inspired by an established music printing culture in continental Europe. A student of William Byrd, Morley had a conventional education and early career as a cathedral musician both in Norwich and at St Paul's cathedral. Morley lived amongst the traders, artisans and gentry of England's major cities at a time when a market for recreational music was beginning to emerge. His entrepreneurial drive combined with an astute assessment of his market resulted in a successful and influential publishing business. The turning point came with a visit to the Low Countries in 1591, which gave him the opportunity to see a thriving music print publication business at first hand. Contemporary records provide a detailed picture of the processes involved in early modern music publishing and enable the construction of a financial model of Morley's business. Morley died too young to reap the full rewards of his enterprise, but his success inspired the publication by his contemporaries of a significant corpus of readily available recreational music for the public. Critical to Morley's success was his identification of the sort of music, notably the Italianate lighter style of madrigal, that would appeal to amateur musicians. Surviving copies of the original prints show that this music continued to be used for several generations: new editions in modern notation started to appear from the mid eighteenth century onwards, suggesting that Morley truly had the measure of the market for recreational music. Thomas Morley: Elizabethan Music Publisher will be of particular interest to scholars and students of renaissance music, as well as the history of music publishing and print. Tessa Murray is an honorary research fellow at the University of Birmingham.

Despite several recent monographs, editions and recordings devoted to the reassessment of British music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, some negative perceptions still remain - particularly a sense that British composers in this period somehow lacked literary credentials. ‘British Music and Literary Context’ counters this perception by showing that these composers displayed a real confidence and assurance in refiguring literary texts in their music. The book explores how literary context might offer modern audiences and listeners a 'way in' to appreciate specific works that have traditionally been viewed as problematic. Each chapter of this interdisciplinary study juxtaposes a British composer with a particular literary counterpart or genre. Chapter one focuses upon the artistic collaboration between Hubert Parry and Robert Bridges; chapter two explores how Charles Villiers Stanford consistently returned to Tennyson's texts throughout his compositional career; chapters three and four suggest how an orchestral drama by Granville Bantock might represent a close reading of a poem by Robert Browning, and how structure and imagery in a novel by Edward Bulwer Lytton might inform a reading of Edward Elgar's Piano Quintet Op.84. The final chapter offers parallels between narrative strategies in Victorian travel literature (including works by Charles Dickens and George Gissing) and the nature of musical events in Elgar's concert overture ‘In the South’ Op.50. Issues highlighted in the book include the vexed relationship between words and music, the refiguring of literary narratives as musical structures, and the ways in which musical settings or representations of literary texts might be seen as critical 'readings' of those texts. Anyone interested in nineteenth century British music, literature and Victorian studies will find this book most stimulating. Michael Allis is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Music, University of Leeds.

A survey of the huge importance of Thomas Tallis, the `Father of Church Music', on Victorian musical life. A survey of the huge importance of Thomas Tallis, the `Father of Church Music', on Victorian musical life. This book examines in detail the reception of two works that lie at the stylistic extremes of his output: 'Spem in alium', revived in the 1830s, though generally not greatly admired, and the 'Responses', which were very popular. In Victorian England, Tallis was ever-present: in performances of his music, in accounts of his biography, and through his representation in physical monuments. Known in the nineteenth century as the 'Father of English Church Music', Tallis occupies a central position in the history of the music of the Anglican Church. Dr SUE COLE is a research associate at the Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne.