Music publishing in the British Isles, 1750 - 1850
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Liverpool
Department Name: Sch of History
Abstract
The period between 1750 and 1850 witnessed an explosion in music publishing activity in the UK, as publishers exploited a growing market of amateur musicians and the development of new printing technologies. This project will investigate issues relating to the social, commercial and economic contexts of music publishing in Britain, using the British Library's printed music collection and related manuscript and archival sources as the basis for analysing the broader historical trends that shaped their content.
My primary aim will be to assess the changes in music printing practices in response to the emergence of the different socio-political groups consuming music in the British Isles between 1750 and 1850. I will be looking specifically at how publishers, composers and editors altered the musical and material aspects of scores when selling to new markets and will evaluate how these changes impacted the social contexts of musical performance, the processes of taste formation, and the development of shared notions of identity between elite and working-class communities.
Looking beyond the musical canon, I intend to focus on the middlebrow composers who dominated everyday musical culture. I will approach the mediating role of these composers by addressing the musical activities of mutual improvement societies and other institutions in British Industrial towns through the analysis and collection of information from subscription lists as well as library, concert society, and mutual improvement society records
As membership of cultural institutions was overwhelmingly male and domestic music practice was a predominantly female endeavour, I will also incorporate pedagogical scores and texts in an attempt to balance representations of gender in the study, as women were typically involved in music tutelage in the eighteenth-century household. I then intend to use the collected data to categorise printed scores into those consumed within different class and gender demographics with the aim of establishing how changes in compositional and editorial elements of scores reflected publishers' attitudes to their target groups.
My final aim is to assess the compositional and editorial alterations of Beethoven's published manuscripts between early upmarket editions of his work and those consumed by women and the working classes. I will use the vast quantity of his printed scores from this period to evaluate changes in publishing practice and to understand how they reflect the gendered and class-based assumptions of the publishing industry. To identify the musical connections between highbrow and middlebrow culture I will continue with a technical and stylistic analysis of Beethoven's works and the middlebrow music to reveal how revolutionary musicality filtered down into the musical mainstream.
Tracing musical engagement, musical practice and their socio-political implications over this period will require a wide comparative lens. What I hope to achieve through this studentship is a broader perspective of the musical practices of the period and to understand how the development of music publishing practices influenced, were influenced by, and interacted with the growing social complexities of their markets. More generally, I expect to reveal an enlightened middlebrow musical culture that reflected the revolutionary ideologies of the period and consolidate the historical significance of non-canonical musical cultures.
My primary aim will be to assess the changes in music printing practices in response to the emergence of the different socio-political groups consuming music in the British Isles between 1750 and 1850. I will be looking specifically at how publishers, composers and editors altered the musical and material aspects of scores when selling to new markets and will evaluate how these changes impacted the social contexts of musical performance, the processes of taste formation, and the development of shared notions of identity between elite and working-class communities.
Looking beyond the musical canon, I intend to focus on the middlebrow composers who dominated everyday musical culture. I will approach the mediating role of these composers by addressing the musical activities of mutual improvement societies and other institutions in British Industrial towns through the analysis and collection of information from subscription lists as well as library, concert society, and mutual improvement society records
As membership of cultural institutions was overwhelmingly male and domestic music practice was a predominantly female endeavour, I will also incorporate pedagogical scores and texts in an attempt to balance representations of gender in the study, as women were typically involved in music tutelage in the eighteenth-century household. I then intend to use the collected data to categorise printed scores into those consumed within different class and gender demographics with the aim of establishing how changes in compositional and editorial elements of scores reflected publishers' attitudes to their target groups.
My final aim is to assess the compositional and editorial alterations of Beethoven's published manuscripts between early upmarket editions of his work and those consumed by women and the working classes. I will use the vast quantity of his printed scores from this period to evaluate changes in publishing practice and to understand how they reflect the gendered and class-based assumptions of the publishing industry. To identify the musical connections between highbrow and middlebrow culture I will continue with a technical and stylistic analysis of Beethoven's works and the middlebrow music to reveal how revolutionary musicality filtered down into the musical mainstream.
Tracing musical engagement, musical practice and their socio-political implications over this period will require a wide comparative lens. What I hope to achieve through this studentship is a broader perspective of the musical practices of the period and to understand how the development of music publishing practices influenced, were influenced by, and interacted with the growing social complexities of their markets. More generally, I expect to reveal an enlightened middlebrow musical culture that reflected the revolutionary ideologies of the period and consolidate the historical significance of non-canonical musical cultures.
