Dr Erin Johnson-Williams erin.g.johnson-williams@durham.ac.uk
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Miscellany and Collegiality in the British Periodical Press: The Harmonicon (1823–1833)
Johnson-Hill, Erin
Authors
Abstract
The Harmonicon was, in its day, London's premiere music periodical, gaining a wide and loyal readership at home and abroad. Perhaps the most the distinctive feature of the journal was its deliberate imperative to raise what it considered to be the ‘lamentable’ level of musical knowledge held by the British reading public. The journal's editor, William Ayrton, was deeply concerned that there was a lack of a national school of music in his own country that could ever match that which his rival French and German critics called their own. In this light, I argue that the journal's appeal and economic success was due to a didactic philosophy of ‘collegiality’ and ‘miscellany’ – to borrow William Weber's terms – as a means of disseminating musical knowledge to the broadest readership possible. Through reviewing, critiquing and publishing a remarkably assorted array of national styles and genres of music, the Harmonicon attempted to create a very general type of musical knowledge in Britain in the early nineteenth century, one which looked necessarily beyond national borders in an effort to build up a shared knowledge of music. Data drawn from musical examples spanning all 11 years of the journal's print run is analysed, assessing in particular the high number of international composers featured in the journal. The many miscellaneous strands interwoven throughout the Harmonicon reflect a mode of thinking about music that was integral to a valiant effort to raise the status and awareness of music in early nineteenth-century British culture.
Citation
Johnson-Hill, E. (2013). Miscellany and Collegiality in the British Periodical Press: The Harmonicon (1823–1833). Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 9(2), 255-293. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1479409812000304
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Online Publication Date | Jan 8, 2013 |
Publication Date | Jan 8, 2013 |
Deposit Date | Apr 3, 2018 |
Publicly Available Date | Apr 6, 2018 |
Journal | Nineteenth-Century Music Review |
Print ISSN | 1479-4098 |
Electronic ISSN | 2044-8414 |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 9 |
Issue | 2 |
Pages | 255-293 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1017/s1479409812000304 |
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Copyright Statement
This article has been published in a revised form in Nineteenth-century music review https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479409812000304. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works. © Cambridge University Press 2012.
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