Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain

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This volume brings together new approaches to music history to reveal the interdependence of music and religion in nineteenth-century culture. As composers and performers drew inspiration from the Bible and new historical sciences called into question the historicity of Scripture, controversies raged over the performance, publication and censorship of old and new musical forms. From oratorio to opera, from parlour song to pantomime, and from hymn to broadside, nineteenth-century Britons continually encountered elements of the biblical past in song. Both elite and popular music came to play a significant role in the formation, regulation and contestation of religious and cultural identity and were used to address questions of class, nation and race, leading to the beginnings of ethnomusicology. This richly interdisciplinary volume brings together musicologists, historians, literary and art historians and theologians to reveal points of intersection between music, religion and cultural history.

Reviews

Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain is one of the most exciting and important collections in the field of 19th-century studies to come along in many a year. In response to this well-researched, path-breaking volume, everyone interested in the Victorians ought to sing out a hearty hallelujah. * Timothy Larsen, author of A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (2011) *
This illuminating investigation of sacred song as an expression of communal and confessional solidarity but also enthusiastic dissent reveals the myriad relationships between scripture and song in the nineteenth century, ranging from street ballads to psalmody, and from concert-hall and drawing room to church and synagogue. If on one hand the volume emphasizes the presence of the Bible in vocal music-making of all genres, on the other it underlines the centrality of song in religious utterance. Voices raised in prayer, sorrow, anger and jubilation sound throughout this interdisciplinary collection of essays in a moving evocation of spiritual communication with the divine, be that devotion or interrogation. In this way, James Grande and Brian Murray and their impressive assembly of scholars afford us the means of hearing nineteenth-century society and its diverse, complex encounters with religion in a new, powerfully resonant way. * Susan Rutherford, Honorary Professor in Music, University of Cambridge, UK *
Delving into the complex world of nineteenth-century culture, this captivating volume explores the dynamic relationship between music and religion. With meticulous scholarship, it traces how music both shaped and reflected the complex interplay of faith, identity, and society, resonating through time as a testament to the profound interconnection between art and spirituality. * Markus Rathey, Robert S. Tangeman Professor of Music History, Yale University, USA, and author of Bach in the World: Music, Society, and Representation in Bachs Cantatas (2022) *
Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain is a valuable contribution to the studies of music and religion in the long nineteenth century, bridging previously unacknowledged gaps between British world and empire, center and periphery. From hymnody and Jewish liturgical music to evolutionary science, the essays offer refreshing insights into sacred songs mediation of social, religious, cultural, institutional and even scientific contexts. * Eftychia Papanikolaou, Associate Professor of Musicology, Bowling Green State University, USA, and co-editor of Sacred and Secular Intersections in Music of the Long Nineteenth Century: Church, Stage, and Concert Hall *
Music and religion, a hot topic in many periods of conventional music history, is often ignored in nineteenth-century music studies. This fascinating book, written from an array of interdisciplinary perspectives, demonstrates what is lost, in particular how scripture and song resonated together in so many ways: within compositional and performative worlds, of course; but also and more surprisingly within the biographical, philosophical, architectural and anthropological contexts of nineteenth-century Britain. * Roger Parker, co-author of A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years *

Author Bio

James Grande is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at Kings College London, UK. He is the author of William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England (2014) and co-editor of William Hazlitt: The Spirit of Controversy and Other Essays (2021) and Sound and Sense in British Romanticism (2023). Brian Murray is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Kings College London, UK. He is co-editor of Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form (2014), Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World (2017), and Chosen Peoples: The Bible, Race and Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century (2020).