Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies. Vol. 2 - Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Sacred music; opera and oratorio; reception history; contemporary performance and analysis; the intersection of music and poetry; and music iconography: these are the areas explored in this volume derived from papers given at the second Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain conference, held at the University of Durham in 1999. They represent leading work which continues to discover and rediscover all aspects of musical life in nineteenth-century Britain. - - The volume opens with an in-depth examination of the Concert Life in Nineteenth-Century London Database and its progress in the last two years. - - Church music topics feature large - a fitting tribute to Durham's extraordinary ecclesiastical heritage. John Harper, Christopher Turner, Barra Boydell, Sally Drage, Brian Crosby and David Knight contribute a series of articles exploring the music practices of monasteries, convents, cathedrals, abbeys and the performance of psalmody in churches. - - Aspects of opera and oratorio, especially in relation to concepts of national identity, are covered in essays by Duncan Barker, Walter Clark and Jean Marie Hoover. The perception of the musical work and its relationship to performance is also dealt with, and forms the subject of articles by Robert Bledsoe, Sue Cole, Therese Ellsworth and Dorothy De Val. - - The concert programme and its influence upon performance receives treatment by Catherine Dale, who surveys the increasingly analytical content of nineteenth-century programme notes, whilst Jeremy Dibble and Peter Horton utilize modern analytical techniques to investigate British orchestral variations and the music of Samuel Wesley. - - The volume ends with an examination of the relationship between music and poetry with essays by Christopher Wilson and Michael Allis, and an iconographical study centring on the British Aesthetic Movement by Suzanne Fagence Cooper. -