This chapter examines the role of music in the reform culture of middle-class liberals such as Hugh Reginald Haweis and John Pyke Hullah. London's South Place Chapel and Melbourne's Australian Church, was both an eschewal of orthodoxy, dogma and creed replaced by openness and inclusiveness in outlook, and a vibrant musical culture. Music and Morals, as noted by Dave Russell, became 'the classic Victorian text on music and social reform'. Haweis is but one of many examples of individuals who combined progressive political and social tendencies with a strong interest in music and a belief in its power to shape human behaviour. It is well known that the nineteenth century saw profound shifts in religious belief brought about by what has been generally understood as the Victorian crisis of faith.

The balladeers and editors of George McClellan's campaign songster opined that not only did they represent, at least in part, McClellan's platform (and their estimation of his values), but also that they would resonate with potential voters. The capacity to make music could be seen as an index of popularity commensurate with voter endorsement. The pointed reference to the audience's expectations of instant gratification underscores the importance of music-making as a form of political discourse in action. Even a song that essentially offered a familiar anti-Tory critique of corruption, privilege and inequality, which might have been heard elsewhere in the Anglophone world in 1798 as easily as in 1882, was tinctured by a whiff of anti-Gallicanism.

Commemorative parades, such as those on Labour Day and May Day, were but one site of musical behaviour among many in the public sphere. This chapter examines the making of music that was unambiguously intended for the full gaze of public scrutiny. It also examines parades using Labour Day as the focus for a broader discussion of the sound of marching feet. The chapter considers the place of music in the formal political world of electioneering. Our point of entry into the public sphere of music-making by radicals and reformers is to rejoin the parade about to set off down Marshall Street under the burning sun in Cobar. The photograph of Cobar gives a sense of the structure of a parade and the role of music-making within it. Moreover, it is clear is that many bands across the Anglophone world donated their services to Labour Day parades.

Women from a range of social backgrounds were important participants in the Australian Church's social reform programmes, and the church was a strong and long-standing supporter of women's rights. This chapter examines the uses of music in the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), thereby taking account of the close interactions that occurred between its New Zealand branches and Maori women. It looks at some Christian missions in detail to consider the place of music and music-making in colonial engagements with the indigenous peoples of New Zealand, Canada and Australia. Missionaries were necessarily among the most peripatetic citizens of the Anglophone world and so gained first-hand experience of many indigenous cultures. British Columbia was a hive of missionary activity for much of the nineteenth century. Music was used, as seen in the Maori–Pakeha concerts and the Cooper–Selby concert, as a way of generating cross-cultural engagement and mediating cultural differences.

A key figure in establishing a “black musical idiom” and an American musical identity, pianist-composer Florence Price was groundbreaking in her efforts to create a compositional style that incorporated Black vernacular songs. This chapter focuses on her two fantasies in G minor (1933) and F♯ minor (1949) and Violin Concerto No. 2 (1952) in the context of Price’s cultural network and context, with specific attention given to her contemporary Clarence Cameron White (1880–1960) and to Minnie Cedargreen Jernberg (1888–1957), the dedicatee of Price’s second violin concerto.

Despite being a generation apart and thus unlikely to have ever met, both Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–c. 1654) and Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677), frequented, and were celebrated by, a close-knit network of Venetian poets, librettists, musicians, artists, collectors, and patrons closely linked to the infamous Accademia degli Incogniti. The Incogniti valued wit, improvisation, performance, and ribald humor, and were particularly fascinated with in the so-called “questione della donna,” which examined, often irreverently, the status of women in ancient and modern society. This chapter explores what can be gleaned about the interactions between artists, musicians, collectors and painters in little-studied years that Gentileschi spent in Venice (1626-1629?), such as the lawyer, letterato, and collector and Giacomo Pighetti, the writer Giovan Francesco Loredan, and the painter Alessandro Varorari, known as Il Padovanino. These connections, I propose, help elucidate the works Artemisia painted in these years, even if many of them are lost or unidentified.

Barbara Strozzi dedicated two of her music prints, Cantate, ariette, e duetti (Opus 2, 1651) and Sacri musicali affetti (Opus 5, 1655), to the Austrian Habsburgs, which raises questions about the nature of her relationship to the powerful imperial family. This essay places her prints into the context of the Habsburg courts and examines textual and paratextual elements of the prints to suggest reasons why she may have chosen to dedicate them to the Habsburgs. It argues that the dedications served different purposes but that both of them ultimately served as publicity for the composer herself, in that she used a connection to the Habsburgs to help shape her public image.

Early modern Venice and its lagoon had a complex religious landscape, with two bishops, nearly eighty parishes, fifty nunneries, thirty-six male monasteries, more than 300 confraternities, and four ospedali grandi, all performing religious services as often as eight times a day or just once a year. Venetians and visitors could attend masses, vespers, devotional services, displays of relics, and processions, following published calendars, often indicating when musical performances could be expected. Venetian printers issued a constant stream of religious and devotional texts and images, facilitating private worship in the home, and those with the means could also purchase religious paintings. While Roman Catholics naturally dominated the city, there were also members of other religions, including Greek Orthodox, Armenians, and Jews, and even some clandestine Protestants.

A certain mystique has evolved surrounding Barbara Strozzi and her compositions. The popularity of her work beyond the field of musicology and music history classrooms is evidenced by the many performances that occur worldwide, nearly every week. (Anyone who subscribes to Google Alerts can receive notifications of upcoming performances.) Her provocative music and persona have also inspired novelists: Russell Hoban featured her in his My Tango with Barbara Strozzi (2007) and she is also the protagonist of a new verse novel for young adults, The Star and the Siren, by Colby Cesar Smith.

Barbara Strozzi’s musically striking lament on the execution of French courtier and favorite of Louis XIII, Henri Cinq-Mars (1620–1642), Il lamento “(Sul Rodano severo”) (1651 & 1654) paints a musically and textually vivid picture of the young marquis’s demise and his monarch’s remorse. The narrative circulated in muted form in the official French press (Gazette de France) as well as in memoires and letters and in anecdotes and hearsay. Unofficial accounts of the conspiracy and its unraveling turned the two men executed into martyrs. This essay assembles various accounts in circulation and suggests connections between the erudite and literary libertines of France and those of Venice in order to provide context for this lament and the ways in which the anonymous poet (and perhaps Strozzi) might have understood the relationship between Louis XIII and the young and beautiful Cinq-Mars through the different circulations of news between France and Venice.

This article traces the career trajectories, publishing strategies, and intertwining networks of Barbara Strozzi and two of her Venetian contemporaries: the Jewish salonniére and poet Sara Copia Sulam (1592?–1641) and the forced nun and polemicist Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652). All three figures were connected to the influential Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti, a libertine circle of writers, critics, and opera librettists with interests including literature and music. Each woman pursued a career as a public intellectual in an early modern world that often chafed at women’s voices, and each broadcast their ideas by publishing on prominent presses. The experience of Copia Sulam, who was prominent as the Incogniti academy was beginning to coalesce and was forced from the public eye after meeting with a vicious backlash for her intellectual activities, could in the coming decades serve as a cautionary tale to Strozzi and Tarabotti, who had long and prolific careers that were nevertheless beset by controversy. Though the trajectories of these three women varied in significant ways, their shared literary networks and their use of the presses to craft a commanding public persona illuminate the editorial environment for women in seventeenth-century Venice.