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  3. Music in Britain, 1600-2000

This series provides a forum for the best new work in the field of British music studies, placing music from the early seventeenth to the late twentieth centuries in its social, cultural, and historical contexts. Its approach is deliberately inclusive, covering immigrants and emigrants as well as native musicians, and explores Britain's musical links both within and beyond Europe. The series celebrates the vitality and diversity of music-making across Britain in whatever form it took and wherever it was found, exploring its aesthetic dimensions alongside its meaning for contemporaries, its place in the global market, and its use in the promotion of political and social agendas.

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19 results in Music in Britain, 1600-2000

Music in Edwardian London
  • Simon McVeigh
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    09 May 2024
    Print publication:
    21 May 2024
  • Traversing London's musical culture, this book boldly illuminates the emergence of Edwardian London as a beacon of musical innovation.

The Life and Music of Elizabeth Maconchy

The Advancement of Music in Enlightenment England
  • Benjamin Cooke and the Academy of Ancient Music
  • Tim Eggington
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 February 2023
    Print publication:
    16 October 2014
  • Casts new and valuable light on English musical history and on Enlightenment culture more generally.

Opera and Politics in Queen Anne's Britain, 1705-1714
  • Thomas McGeary
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    12 January 2023
    Print publication:
    26 July 2022
  • Explores the political meanings that Italian opera - its composers, agents and institutions - had for audiences in eighteenth-century Britain.

John Gunn
  • Musician Scholar in Enlightenment Britain
  • George Kennaway
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    07 October 2022
    Print publication:
    19 November 2021
  • Examines the life and work of Scottish cellist and antiquarian John Gunn (1766-1824) through newly discovered sources.

British Music, Musicians and Institutions, c. 1630-1800
  • Essays in Honour of Harry Diack Johnstone
  • Edited by Peter Lynan, Julian Rushton
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    06 October 2022
    Print publication:
    21 January 2022
  • Building upon the developing picture of the importance of British music, musicians and institutions during the eighteenth century, this book investigates the themes of composition, performance (amateur and professional) and music-printing, within the wider context of social, religious and secular institutions.

Exhibitions, Music and the British Empire
  • Sarah Kirby
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    26 May 2022
    Print publication:
    25 February 2022
  • Combining approaches from reception studies and historical musicology, this book demonstrates how the representation of music at exhibitions drew the press and public into debates about music's role in society.

Musicians of Bath and Beyond: Edward Loder (1809-1865) and his Family
  • Edited by Nicholas Temperley
  • With contributions by Liz Cooper , David Chandler , Andrew Clarke , Julja Szuster , Stephen Banfield , Therese Ellsworth , David J. Golby , Valerie Langfield , Andrew Lamb , Alison Mero , Paul Rodmell and Matthew Spring
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    04 June 2021
    Print publication:
    18 February 2016
  • Musicians of Bath and Beyond: Edward Loder (1809-1865) and his Family illuminates three areas that have recently attracted much interest: the musical profession, music in the British provincesand colonies, and English Romantic opera. The Loder family was pre-eminent in Bath's musical world in the early nineteenth century. John David Loder (1788-1846) led the theatre orchestra there from1807, and later the Philharmonic orchestra and Ancient Concerts in London; he also wrote the leading instruction manual on violin playing and taught violin at the Royal Academy of Music. His son Edward James (1809-65) was a brilliant but underrated composer of opera, songs, and piano music. George Loder (1816-68) was a well-known flautist and conductor who made a name in New York and eventuallysettled in Adelaide, where he conducted the Australian premieres of Les Huguenots, Faust, and other important operas. Kate Fanny Loder (1825-1904) became a successful pianist and teacher in early Victorian London, and she is only now getting her due as a composer.
    This book takes advantage of new and often surprising biographical research on the Loder family as a whole and its four main figures. It uses them to illustrate several aspects of music history: the position of professional musicians in Victorian society; music in the provinces, especially Bath and Manchester;the Victorian opera libretto; orchestra direction; violin teaching; travelling musicians in the US and Australasia; opera singers and companies; and media responses to English opera. The concludingsection is an intense analysis and reassessment of Edward Loder's music, with special emphasis on his greatest work, the opera Raymond and Agnes.

    NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY is Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a leading authority on Victorian music.

    CONTRIBUTORS: Stephen Banfield, David Chandler, Andrew Clarke, Liz Cooper,Therese Ellsworth, David J. Golby, Andrew Lamb, Valerie Langfield, Alison Mero, Paul Rodmell, Matthew Spring, Julja Szuster, Nicholas Temperley

The Lives of George Frideric Handel
  • David Hunter
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    02 June 2021
    Print publication:
    19 November 2015
  • To evaluate the familiar, even over-familiar, story of Handel's life could be seen as a quixotic endeavour. How can there be anything new to say? This book seeks to distinguish fact from fiction, notonly to produce a new biography but also to explore the concepts of biography and dissemination by using Handel's life and lives as a case study. By examining the images of Handel to be found in biographies and music histories - the genius, the religious profound, the master of musical styles, the distiller into music of English sentiment, the glorifier of the Hanoverians, the hymner of the middleclass, the independent, the prodigious, the generous, the sexless, the successful, the wealthy, the bankrupt, the pious, the crude, the heroic, the devious, the battler of ill-fortune, the moral exemplar - and by adding new factual information, David Hunter shows how events are manipulated into stories and tropes. One such trope has been employed to portray numerous persons as Handel's enemies regardless of whether Handel considered them as such. Picking apart the writing of Handel's biographers and other reporters, Hunter exposes the narrative underpinnings - the lies, confusions, presumptions, and conclusions, whether direct and inferred or assumed - to show how Handel's 'lives' in biographies and histories have moulded our understanding of the musician, the man and the icon.

    DAVID HUNTER is Music Librarian at the University of Texas at Austin.

George Smart and Nineteenth-Century London Concert Life
  • John Carnelley
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 May 2021
    Print publication:
    19 November 2015
  • Sir George Thomas Smart (1776-1867) was a significant musical animateur of the early nineteenth century, who earned his living primarily as a conductor but was also significant as an organist, composer and recorder of events. Smart established successful and pioneering London concert series, was a prime mover in the setting up of the Philharmonic Society and the Royal Academy of Music, and taught many of the leading singers of the day, being well versed in the Handelian concert tradition. He also conducted the opera at the Covent Garden Theatre and introduced significant new works to the public - he was most notably an early champion of the music of Beethoven. His journeys to Europe, and his contacts with the leading European musical figures of the day (including Weber, Meyerbeer, Spohr, and Mendelssohn), were crucial to the direction music was to take in nineteenth-century Britain.This detailed account of Smart's life and career presents him within the context of the vibrant concert life of London and wider European musical culture. It is the first full length, critical study of this influential musical figure.

    John Carnelley is Deputy Director of Music and Head of Academic Music, Dulwich College, London. He holds a PhD in Historical Musicology from the University of London (Goldsmiths College) and has previously published research on the eighteenth-century organ manuscripts of John Reading, held in the Dulwich College Archive.

Organ-building in Georgian and Victorian England
  • The work of Gray & Davison, 1772–1890
  • Nicholas Thistlethwaite
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    09 April 2021
    Print publication:
    19 February 2021
  • The London firm of Gray (later Gray & Davison) was one of Britain's leading organ-makers between the 1790s and the 1880s.

Music in North-East England, 1500–1800

The Symphonic Poem in Britain, 1850–1950
  • Edited by Michael Allis, Paul Watt
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    23 October 2020
    Print publication:
    17 July 2020
  • The Symphonic Poem in Britain 1850–1950 aims to raise the status of the genre generally and in Britain specifically, by reaffirming British composers' confidence in dealing with literary texts.

Before the Baton
  • Musical Direction and Conducting in Stuart and Georgian Britain
  • Peter Holman
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    11 September 2020
    Print publication:
    20 March 2020
  • How was large-scale music directed or conducted in Britain before baton conducting took hold in the 1830s?

With Mornefull Musique: Funeral Elegies in Early Modern England

Music in the West Country

Music for St Cecilia's Day: From Purcell to Handel
  • Volume 22
  • Bryan White
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    13 April 2019
    Print publication:
    15 February 2019
  • In 1683 English court musicians and the Musical Society of London joined forces to celebrate St Cecilia's Day (22 November) with a feast and the performance of specially composed music. The most prominent composers and poets of the age wrote for these occasions, including Henry Purcell, John Blow, John Dryden and William Congreve.

Ernest Newman
  • A Critical Biography
  • Paul Watt
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    30 August 2017
    Print publication:
    30 August 2017
  • Ernest Newman (1868-1959) left an indelible mark on British musical criticism in a career spanning more than seventy years. His magisterial Life of Richard Wagner, published in four volumes between 1933 and 1946, is regarded as his crowning achievement, but Newman wrote many other influential books and essays on a variety of subjects ranging from early music to Schoenberg. In this book, the geneses of Newman's major publications are examined in the context of prevailing intellectual trends in history, criticism and biography. Newman's career as a writer is traced across a wide range of subjects including English and French literature, evolutionary theory and biographical method, and French, German and Russian music. Underpinning many of these works is Newman's preoccupation with rationalism and historical method. By examining particular sets of writings such as composer-biographies and essays from leading newspapers such as the Manchester Guardian and the Sunday Times, this book illustrates the ways in which Newman's work was grounded in late nineteenth-century intellectual paradigms that made him a unique and at times controversial figure. PAUL WATT is Senior Lecturer in Musicology in the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music at Monash University.

Conductors in Britain, 1870-1914
  • Wielding the Baton at the Height of Empire
  • Fiona M. Palmer
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    29 July 2017
    Print publication:
    17 March 2017
  • Drawing on many archival findings, this book considers the emerging function and status of orchestral conductors in Britain, and the nature of the opportunities available to them, from the late Victorian era until the outbreak of World War I. It does so by examining and comparing the profiles and impact of eight men whose work supplied the needs of a variety of institutions across the period but whose significant contributions were overshadowed by the emergence of virtuoso interpreters. The conducting activities of Julius Benedict, William Cusins, Joseph Barnby, Arthur Sullivan, Frederic Cowen, Alexander Mackenzie, Dan Godfrey and Landon Ronald provide a lens through which the evolution of conducting as a profession is traced. At the British Empire's height their work was shaped by and enriched the cultural life of the nation. During a period of intense activity and development, their portfolios of engagements and working patterns shed light on the infrastructures within the music business. By focusing on the fortunes and agency of conductors resident within the marketplace, this book deepens our understanding of the internal networks, influences and priorities within musical lifein Britain in the late nineteenth century.

    FIONA M. PALMER is Professor of Music at Maynooth University-National University of Ireland Maynooth.