The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780190616922)

Rarely studied in their own right, writings about music are often viewed as merely supplemental to understanding music itself. Yet in the nineteenth century, scholarly interest in music flourished in fields as disparate as philosophy and natural science, dramatically shifting the relationship between music and the academy. An exciting and much-needed new volume, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century draws deserved attention to the people and institutions of this period who worked to produce these writings. Editors Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis, along with an international slate of contributors, discuss music's fascinating and unexpected interactions with debates about evolution, the scientific method, psychology, exoticism, gender, and the divide between high and low culture. Part I of the handbook establishes the historical context for the intellectual world of the period, including the significant genres and disciplines of its music literature, while Part II focuses on the century's institutions and networks - from journalists to monasteries - that circulated ideas about music throughout the world. Finally, Part III assesses how the music research of the period reverberates in the present, connecting studies in aestheticism, cosmopolitanism, and intertextuality to their nineteenth-century origins. The Handbook challenges Western music history's traditionally sole focus on musical work by treating writings about music as valuable cultural artifacts in themselves. Engaging and comprehensive, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century brings together a wealth of new interdisciplinary research into this critical area of study.

Author: Paul Watt
ISBN-10: 019061692X
ISBN-13: 9780190616922
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 08/18/2020
Pages: 568
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 2.45lbs
Size: 9.80h x 7.00w x 1.50d

About the Author
Paul Watt is Associate Professor of Musicology at Monash University, Melbourne. He has published widely on the musical, cultural, intellectual, and religious history of the nineteenth century in journals such as Music & Letters, Musicology Australia, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, the RMA Research Chronicle, and the Yale Journal of Music & Religion. He is the author of Ernest Newman: A Critical Biography (2017) and The Regulation and Reform of Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century England (2018). He is a contributor to The Oxford Handbook of Opera (2014), The Cambridge History of Music Criticism (2019), The Cambridge History of Atheism (2020), and The Routledge Handbook of Street Culture (2020).

Sarah Collins is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Western Australia. She is the author of Lateness and Modernism: Untimely Ideas about Music, Literature and Politics in Interwar Britain (2019), and The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott (2013), as well as the editor of Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject (2019). Her work has appeared in journals including the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Twentieth-Century Music, Music & Letters, and Musical Quarterly.

Michael Allis is Professor of Musicology at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Parry's Creative Process (2003) and British Music and Literary Context: Artistic Connections in the Long Nineteenth Century (2012), and has edited the music criticisms of Aldous Huxley (2013) and selected letters of Granville Bantock (2017) - which won the 2018 C.B. Oldman Award. He has published widely on music/literature connections and British music of the nineteenth and early twentieth century (Bantock, Bax, Elgar, Holbrooke, Parry, Stanford, Warlock), and is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Victorian Culture.