A Score of Change: Twenty Years of Critical Musicology and Victorian Literature

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, the impact of critical musicology (or new musicology) has given rise to fresh areas of exploration (e.g., performance practices, reception histories, affect, listening) and new methods and sites of investigation, including Victorian novels and poems. Influenced by cultural criticism, critical musicologists study musical practices as interactive with a wide range of human activities and beliefs. Simultaneously, literary scholars and historians have played a prominent early role in promoting the study of music in 19th-century Britain and in establishing its aims and methods. To these researchers and to contextually minded musicologists, it was obvious that music embodied and expressed ideological and political meanings, and that fictional, non-fictional, and verse works elucidated and helped to construct these perceptions. Music and Victorian literature is thus a truly interdisciplinary field because it speaks to individuals whose home training is in either literature or music, while also influencing scholars in a range of other disciplines including social and cultural history, art history, women's studies, gender studies, and queer studies.Introducing the field of music and Victorian literature to a literary audience therefore means first tracing developments in the discipline of music and then highlighting a major disciplinary difference (composer intentionality versus the death of the author). Outlining the latter will, I hope, suggest opportunities for critical musicologists as well as for people interested specifically in word-music connections. In particular, the issue of subjectivity is ripe for further development as can be seen by work on 19th-century poetry and music that is a part of new lyric studies. The final sections of the article outline the latter, indicate the interdisciplinary beginnings of the study of music in 19th-century Britain, provide a list of resources, and map out other recent trends and possible future directions in scholarship on music and Victorian literature.Throughout the whole of the first act we remained in our position -the Count, absorbed by the orchestra and the stage, never casting so much as a chance glance at us. Not a note of Donizetti's delicious music was lost on him.[…] When the people near him applauded the close of an air (as an English audience in such circumstances always will applaud), without the least consideration for the orchestral movement which immediately followed it, he looked round at them with an expression of compassionate remonstrance, and held up one hand with a gesture of polite entreaty. At the more refined passages of the singing, at the more delicate phases [sic] of the music, which passes unapplauded by others, his fat hands, […] softly patted each other, in token of the cultivated appreciation of a musical man. At such times, his oily murmur of approval, ''Bravo! Bra-a-a-a!'' hummed through the silence, like the purring of a great cat. His immediate neighbours on either side -hearty, ruddy-faced people from the country, ...

Victorian gothic soundscapes

“…The twentieth century remains a flashpoint for sound studies; however, sound studies readers published over the past fifteen years feature investigations of sonic identities across diverse geographical and temporal planes . From state‐of‐the‐field articles like Phyllis Weliver's () A Score of Change: Twenty Years of Critical Musicology and Victorian Literature and Anna Peak's () The Condition of Music in Victorian Scholarship to more focused accounts of sound in Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Victorian scholars are gradually becoming more invested in discovering how literature absorbed auditory culture . Yet much of this work has focused on music rather than addressing Victorian soundscapes as dynamic and complex systems, and studies of the Victorian gothic soundscape remain scare.…”