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.
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Contributors 1. Introduction James Grande, King's College London, UK, and Brian H. Murray, King's College London, UK 2. The Ballad and the Bible Oskar Cox Jensen, Newcastle University, UK 3. The Movements of the Old Hundredth Psalm Tune Jonathan Hicks, University of Aberdeen, UK 4. ‘The Son of God goes forth to war’: The Imperial Martyr’s Hymnbook Brian H. Murray, King’s College London, UK 5. The Song of Zion in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Sacred Choral Music, Emancipation and Modernity in Jewish Liturgy Rachel Adelstein, Congregation Beth El-Keser Israel, New Haven, CT, USA 6. A Temperament of ‘ideal cast, lofty tone, sacrificial flame and haughty purity’: Jenny Lind’s Faith and Her Career Matildie Wium, University of the Free State, South Africa 7. Urban Hymns: The Sacred Harmonic Society and Exeter Hall James Grande, King’s College London, UK 8. Singing, Playing, Seeing: Scripture and the Multi-Sensorial Gothic Revival in Late Victorian Church Interiors Ayla Lepine, St. James' Church, Piccadilly, London, UK 9. Secularising the Sacred, Sanctifying the Commercial: Tonic Sol-fa and the Professionalisation of Evangelical Hymnody Erin Johnson-Williams, University of Southampton, UK 10. Antisemitism and Hebrew Music in Carl Engel’s Music of the Most Ancient Nations (1864) Bennett Zon, Durham University, UK Bibliography Index
James Grande is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at King’s College London, UK. He is the author of William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England (2014) and co-editor of William Hazlitt: The Spirit of Controversy and Other Essays (2021) and Sound and Sense in British Romanticism (2023). Brian Murray is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at King’s College London, UK. He is co-editor of Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form (2014), Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World (2017), and Chosen Peoples: The Bible, Race and Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century (2020).
Reviews for Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain is one of the most exciting and important collections in the field of 19th-century studies to come along in many a year. In response to this well-researched, path-breaking volume, everyone interested in the Victorians ought to sing out a hearty hallelujah. * Timothy Larsen, author of A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (2011) *
