Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain

James Grande, Brian H. Murray, James Grande, Brian H. Murray

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781501376375
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501376382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria religiosa

This volume brings together new approaches to music history to reveal the interdependence of music and religion in nineteenth-century culture. As composers and performers drew inspiration from the Bible and new historical sciences called into question the historicity of Scripture, controversies raged over the performance, publication and censorship of old and new musical forms. From oratorio to opera, from parlour song to pantomime, and from hymn to broadside, nineteenth-century Britons continually encountered elements of the biblical past in song. Both elite and popular music came to play a significant role in the formation, regulation and contestation of religious and cultural identity and were used to address questions of class, nation and race, leading to the beginnings of ethnomusicology. This richly interdisciplinary volume brings together musicologists, historians, literary and art historians and theologians to reveal points of intersection between music, religion and cultural history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Ballad and the Bible
• 3 The Movements of the Old Hundredth Psalm Tune
• 4 ‘The Son of God goes forth to war’: The Imperial Martyr’s Hymnbook
• 5 The Song of Zion in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Sacred Choral Music, Emancipation and Modernity in Jewish Liturgy
• 6 A Temperament of ‘ideal cast, lofty tone, sacrificial flame and haughty purity’: Jenny Lind’s Faith and Her Career
• 7 Urban Hymns: The Sacred Harmonic Society and Exeter Hall
• 8 Singing, Playing, Seeing: Scripture and the Multi-Sensorial Gothic Revival in Late Victorian Church Interiors
• 9 Secularizing the Sacred, Sanctifying the Commercial: Tonic Sol-fa and the Professionalization of Evangelical Hymnody
• 10 Antisemitism and Hebrew Music in Carl Engel’s The Music of the Most Ancient Nations (1864)
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright