Media, Knowledge, and Oratorio Culture in Britain, 1840–1900

Abstract

In nineteenth-century Britain, musical progress was often imagined in terms of “the diffusion of musical knowledge;” music was in a constant process of emancipation from the confines of elite culture into the lives of people of all classes. What was at stake in such narratives? On what material basis did they rest? In this dissertation, I explore the media, objects, events, and ideas behind “musical knowledge,” and scrutinize the certainties expressed in these visions of constant progress. I focus on what I call “oratorio culture,” that is, the network of festivals, choral societies, singing classes, scores and works associated with the genre of oratorio. The breadth of this culture, its appeal across classes, made it a central reference point for ideas of the diffusion of musical knowledge from the 1840s onwards, at a time when new technologies and media, including cheap print, railways, telegraphy and photography, were increasingly coopted to liberal ideas of knowledge and progress. This study is organized in three chapters that focus on separate but adjacent manifestations of this “diffusion of musical knowledge.” In the first chapter, I examine the arrival of cheap scores on the British market from the late 1840s onwards, through the pioneering publications of the firm of Novello. Novello’s cheap oratorio vocal scores spurred fantasies and anxieties about the ubiquity of musical texts, and they were appropriated by the public for what seems to have been a quite new and surprising use, as listening tools to be read during performances. In my second chapter I examine the media imprint of the Handel Festivals regularly held at the Crystal Palace from 1857 onwards. These festivals, which gathered up to 4,000 musicians for three days of Handel performances, were celebrated as feats of both musical coordination and of mass mediatization: print journalism, telegraphy, photography, and even (in 1888) sound recording were all celebrated as means of distributing the festivals’ effects. A single figure, George Grove, is the focus of my final chapter. I place his work in the dispersal of musical information—through analytical program notes and his Dictionary of Music and Musicians—alongside his research into modern-day Palestine as a source of information for Bible-readers. From three different angles, these chapters all explore the material and ideological bases of major transformations in how the nineteenth-century British public listened to, read about, and conceptualized music.