British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought 1850-1950
- Submitting institution
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University of Durham
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 116263
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Boydell & Brewer
- ISBN
- 9781783272877
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The intention of this volume was to fill a major lacuna in the scholarship on British music in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. The specialisms of analysis and aesthetics (Horton), musical history and biography (Dibble) provided an appropriate combined editorial perspective in which to determine the seminal issues and major critics of the period, which coalesced to shape a tradition independent of those in Germany, France and Italy. Indeed, the introduction to the book, shared by Dibble and Horton (‘Trends in British Musical Thought, 1850-1950’), sought to define the prevalence and development of several seminal discourses such as a preference for empiricism (as opposed to Hegelian Idealism), utilitarian rationalism and social Darwinism (viewed through the prism of Herbert Spencer). Other significant discourses included nationalism and internationalism, ‘intellectualism’ and ‘anti-intellectualism’, the ‘common-sense’ aesthetics of Vaughan Williams and Howells in contradistinction to Schoenbergian dodecaphony, a critical methodology for musical biography (as espoused by Ernest Newman), taste and vulgarity. A further rationale and imperative of the book was to assess these central issues and figures and their legacy on critical perceptions in Britain in the present day. As part of this critical framework the two editors also contributed chapters of their own. Dibble’s chapter, in particular, focused on the writings of Ernest Walker whose critical world, with its conflation of evolutionary theory, British Idealism and intellectualism was profoundly influential for 50 years not only for a national style of musical criticism but also on the practical and empirical nature of musical education in schools, universities and conservatories.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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