A New Impetus to the Love of Music' : The Role of the Town Hall in Nineteenth-Century English Musical Culture (2024)

The Great British Music Hall: Its Importance to British Culture and ‘The Trivial’

Culture Unbound, 2013

By 1960, Britain’s once-thriving Music Hall industry was virtually dead. Theatres with their faded notions of Empire gave way to Cinema and the threat of Television. Where thousands once linked arms singing popular songs, watch acrobatics, see feats of strength, and listen to risqué jokes, now the echoes of those acts lay as whispers amongst the stalls’ threadbare seats. The Halls flourished in the 19th Century, but had their origins in the taverns of the 16th and 17th Centuries. Minstrels plied their trade egged on by drunken crowds. As time passed, the notoriety of the Music Hall acts and camaraderie produced grew. Entrepreneurial businessman tapped into this commerciality and had purpose-built status symbol theatres to provide a ‘home’ for acts and punters. With names like The Apollo giving gravitas approaching Olympian ideals, so the owners basked in wealth and glory. The Music Hall became the mass populist entertainment for the population. Every town had one, where everyone cou...

Music Hall and Modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture

2004

Music and Society in Eighteenth-Century Yorkshire

The British provinces enjoyed a vibrant musical culture in the eighteenth century. Music was a pleasurable leisure and communal activity pursued by many from across the social spectrum. The ‘urban renaissance’ (Peter Borsay) and ‘commercialisation of leisure’ (J. H. Plumb) meant recreational activities became readily available to the middle and professional classes in provincial towns and cities. One of the principal ways in which people experienced music was through domestic music-making. Its growing popularity went in hand with the vast quantity of music composed and published with amateurs in mind. By the second half of the eighteenth century, professional music-making was increasingly brought to provincial public venues such as assembly rooms, parish churches and theatres. This project explores this thriving context through the investigation of the musical interests, activities and networks of members of the provincial population in eighteenth-century Yorkshire. Through the examination of a range of newly identified primary sources, including contemporary diaries, personal correspondence, account books and autograph music manuscripts, a wealth of information is uncovered which enriches our understanding of social and musical life in the British provinces. Among the individuals examined include the amateur musicians Edward Finch (1663-1738), a clergyman at York Minster, and John Courtney (1734-1806), a gentleman who resided in Beverley. Edward Miller (1735-1807), a professional musician who worked in Doncaster, is presented as an example of how a provincial occupational musician was able to pursue a successful career. It will be demonstrated how listening to, composing and performing music was an important element of their individual identities, and, more widely, how music shaped contemporary provincial society and culture in the region.

The birth of the music business : public commercial concerts in London 1660-1750. Volume 2

PhD Thesis, 2013

Music Hall: Regulations and Behaviour in a British Cultural Institution

The music hall in late nineteenth-century Britain offers an example of a cultural institution in which legal measures, in-house regulations, and unscripted codes of behaviour all come into play. At times, the performers or audience were under coercion to act in a certain way, but at other times constraints on behaviour were more indirect, because the music hall created common understanding of what was acceptable or respectable. There is, however, a further complication to consider: sometimes insider notions of what is normative or appropriate come into conflict with outsider concerns about music-hall behaviour. These various pressures are examined in the context of rowdiness, drunkenness, obscenity, and prostitution, and conflicts that result when internal institutional notions of what is normative or appropriate come into conflict with external social anxieties. Keywords: Institutionalism, Music Hall, drink, sexual innuendo, prostitution.

Reproducing the Rage for Music: The differences found in concert performance between the late eighteenth-century and today

PhD Dissertation—Urbane Promenades and Party-Jangling Swains: Music and Social Performativity in London's Pleasure Gardens, 1660-1859 (University of Cincinnati, March 2024)

Pleasure gardens first came to prominence in early eighteenth-century London as venues where visitors from diverse social strata could promenade about the walks, enjoy entertainments, and see and be seen. In an issue of his Review of the State of the British Nation dated 25 June 1709, Daniel Defoe distinguishes seven social classes in England, including a group he describes as “the middle sort . . . who live the best, and consume the most . . . and with whom the general wealth of this nation is found.” Recognizing the potential to profit from the newfound wealth of the “middle sort” (and adjacent, similarly centralized socioeconomic groups), entrepreneurs marketed new leisure activities to them, including trips to London’s three chief pleasure gardens: Marybone (also spelled Marylebone), Ranelagh, and Vauxhall. Although garden refreshments were notoriously overpriced, the cost of admission was relatively modest, enabling even those from the poorer classes to attend at least occasionally. At the other end of the social spectrum, the attendance of royal family members enhanced the prestige of the gardens. Music presided over the pleasure garden experience, facilitating exchanges amongst the classes and providing unprecedented opportunities for social emulation: the process whereby the “middle sort” could imitate their social superiors, and could themselves be admired and imitated. This dissertation examines the complex function(s) of music, musicians, and performance in London’s three leading pleasure gardens—focusing primarily on their eighteenth-century heyday—and the intersections of these elements with the progression of capitalism and the commercialization of leisure. Through this examination, it reveals the pleasure gardens as apt stages for the social transgression, subversion, and emulation performed by garden visitors, and provides a more nuanced understanding of the role(s) that music, musical works, and musicians played in such performances. COMMITTEE: Stephen C. Meyer (advisor), Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Scott Linford, Christopher Segall, & Kristy Swift DEFENSE VIDEO: https://youtu.be/qPFrDnGvooU

“What Difference Does it Make?” Studying Urban Popular Music from Before the Generalization of the Gramophone: The Example of the First World War Repertoire

Popular Music Studies Today

MUSICAL ENTERTAINMENT IN NEWCASTLE, NSW, IN THE 1870S: AUDIENCE IDENTITY, POWER AND CULTURAL OWNERSHIP

'Blurred Boundaries: Class, Gender and National Identity in the Late-Victorian West-End Music Hall" (2016)