*‘Music, Domesticity, and British Identity’ – Call for Articles (deadline
20 October 2023), Nineteenth-Century Music Review*



Dear all,



I am delighted to announce the call for articles for ‘Music, Domesticity,
and British Identity’, a special issue of *Nineteenth-Century Music Review *
<*https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nineteenth-century-music-review
<https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nineteenth-century-music-review>*>
(General Editor: Prof. Bennett Zon).



The call is available here:
<*https://musicdomesticbritain19.hcommons.org/sample-page/
<https://musicdomesticbritain19.hcommons.org/sample-page/>*>



A pdf version can be downloaded here:



<*https://www.academia.edu/106522521/Music_Domesticity_and_British_Identity_Call_for_Articles
<https://www.academia.edu/106522521/Music_Domesticity_and_British_Identity_Call_for_Articles>*
>



Nicholas Temperley’s (1989: 14) invitation to redress ‘the backwardness of
musical scholarship in opening up the Victorian age’ has elicited a wealth
of responses, many by twenty-first-century scholars whose ‘new’ musical
criticism enlivens our contextual appreciation of Victorian cultural and
intellectual history. Yet, much remains to be discovered about how music
and musicianship – invariably central to social practices and integral to
bourgeois discourses – informed and reacted to key aspects of daily life
during a century marked by modernisation and change. The core question that
this special issue addresses is: how did domestic music in Britain
intertwine with early-nineteenth-century civic occurrences or national
concerns to reflect and document British citizens’ experiences and
identities?



While a proliferation of print objects indicates the widespread consumption
of musical entertainment across Victorian social networks (Scott 1989:
45–59), much archival material pertaining to bourgeois music rooms and
parlours remains undiscovered (Brooks and Thormählen 2022: 1–35). Moreover,
few academic studies survey the nineteenth-century British musical salon
(Weliver 2017: 6–7; Bunzel and Loges 2019) or pinpoint the impact of these
gatherings within their extra-musical milieu (Weliver 2006: 28–29). As
Phyllis Weliver (2017: 5–6, 21–23) argues of Liberal salons, however,
musical expression and implementation in domestic spaces were largely
indivisible from the socio-political quotidian: performances could both
inspire communal action in the local or national arena and offer topical –
and sometimes influential – commentary within. Such cross-connections
evince a fruitful field of study.



Conversely, this issue intends to deal not just with parlour songs about
political figures, societies and government affairs, but the widest
possible domestic repertoire addressing contemporary agendas for multiple
audiences, such as: finance, education, defence and healthcare,
criminality, urbanisation and national identity. This special issue aims to
trace and analyse the songs and ballads through which individual families
and social groups engaged in the broader Victorian perception of key shifts
that were affecting national and public life – matters more typically
explored solely through studies of the press or public documents. In
addition to interrogating the role of parlour songs in British social
dialogue, it is also crucial for this call to track and explore domestic
links with public musical genres and practices – such as chamber
arrangements of symphonic music, or instrumental operatic transcriptions –
where this line of enquiry bears upon Victorian civic identity, social
aspiration or collective awareness. We seek articles that convey how
parlour music, in concurrence with other arts and pastimes, was a dynamic
interface between the private and public aspects of nineteenth-century
lifestyles.



We invite contributions that adopt an interdisciplinary approach to
canonical and/or non-canonical artefacts, and which navigate domestic music
as chronicler and catalyst of a mutable Victorian society within and beyond
the home (Appadurai 1986; Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000). Multitudinous
original intersections can be provoked by aligning music with the
literature (Allis 2012; Weliver and Ellis 2013), and/or the visual art
(Leppert 1993), consumed in well-to-do homes. Furthermore, new stylistic
trajectories and undocumented genres may now emerge from the material
culture of the drawing room. How do such intersections and discoveries
negotiate or renegotiate with the individual or collective identities of
composers, performers and audiences, then and now? Was domestic music
paramount for women or men; and, did repertoires traverse social strata?
How do standpoints from ‘mainstream’ or underrepresented religions,
sexualities, bodies or racial identities complicate this area of cultural
history? How far did entertainment styles appear to preserve, champion,
defy or critique larger-scale social currents? How did musical sounds
express the flux and/or continuity experienced in Britain by citizens and
visitors?



This special issue aims to afford a new understanding of how musical
domesticity was a puissant medium of association – whether mirror or foil –
with the following (and other) areas of early- to mid-nineteenth-century
public life:



·     Economics and the music business: including songs about business or
finance, ways in which the music trade (and businesses more generally)
advertised to domestic audiences, and developments in printing methods and
copyright legislation.

·     The law and criminality: songs portraying the newly established
police forces, notorious criminals, prisons, and music that championed or
challenged the British legal system.

·     Disability, healthcare, and hygiene: music and the experiences of
medical staff, patients and convalescents, whilst Victorian medicine and
treatments evolved.

·     Politics: including the depiction of political figures, parties, and
societies, and their impact in society.

·     Technological development, modernism and urbanisation: music and
responses to new municipalities, philosophies of ‘progress’, and inventions
including railways and steam-ships.

·     Transnationalism and localism: musico-cultural portrayals of foreign
identities and stylistic cosmopolitanisms enabled or encouraged by travel,
tourism, migration and new communications.

·     Cultural transfer between capital(s) and provinces, and between
England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; urban-rural or rural-urban cultural
transfers.

·     Education: songs about education and training, or didactic music,
associated with broader institutional shifts or methodological developments
in educational philosophies.



Timeline:

*Deadline for 300-word abstract submission – 20 October 2023.*

Please send your proposal, including your name, contact information, short
biography, and the title of the proposal, to: *[log in to unmask]
<[log in to unmask]>*. By 20 December 2023, authors will be
notified whether they should submit a full version of their article for
peer review.



Deadline for full article submission: 30 June 2024. Full drafts should be
between 8,000 and 12,000 words (excluding footnotes). These articles will
then go through the peer-review process outlined in the *Nineteenth-Century
Music Review *guidelines:
<*https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nineteenth-century-music-review/information/instructions-contributors
<https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nineteenth-century-music-review/information/instructions-contributors>*
>.



Deadline for final submission: the Guest Editor plans on submitting the
full set and framing piece to the General Editor by 31 January 2025.
Following the peer-review process, and approximately nine months after
approval for publication, articles will appear online on the FirstView
platform.



Should you have any further questions about this special issue of
*Nineteenth-Century
Music Review*, please contact the Guest Editor at *[log in to unmask]
<[log in to unmask]>*.



References:



Allis, Michael, *British Music and Literary Context: Artistic Connections
in the Long Nineteenth Century*. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012.



Appadurai, Arjun, ed., *The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural
Perspective*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.



Brooks, Jeanice, Matthew Stephens and Wiebke Thormählen, eds, *Sound
Heritage: Making Music Matter in Historic Houses*. London & New York, NY:
Routledge, 2022.



Bunzel, Anja and Natasha Loges, eds, *Musical Salon Culture in the Long
Nineteenth Century*. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2019.



Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt,*Practising New Historicism*.
Chicago, IL & London: University of Chicago Press, 2000.



Leppert, Richard, *The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the
History of the Body*. Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA & London: University of
California Press, 1993.



Scott, Derek, *The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room
and Parlour*. Milton Keynes & Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1989.



Temperley, Nicholas, ed., *The Lost Chord: Essays on Victorian Music*.
Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989.



Weliver, Phyllis, *The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840–1910: Class,
Culture and Nation*. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.



Weliver, Phyllis, *Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music,
Literature, Liberalism*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.



Weliver, Phyllis and Katherine Ellis, eds, *Words & Notes in the Long
Nineteenth Century*. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2013.



Weliver, Phyllis, Sophie Fuller, Christina Bashford, Ewan Jones, Alisa
Clapp-Itnyre, Michael Craske and Catherine Maxwell, eds, *Sounding
Victorian*. Online resource. *http://www.soundingvictorian.com
<http://www.soundingvictorian.com>*[accessed 21 August 2023].





*Dr Roger Hansford*

PhD, University of Southampton, 2014.

Independent Scholar.

*https://www.routledge.com/authors/i15993-roger-hansford#
<https://www.routledge.com/authors/i15993-roger-hansford#>*

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