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Miscellany and Collegiality in the British Periodical Press: The Harmonicon (1823–1833)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2013
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.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012
Footnotes
Many people have been instrumental in the formation of this article, which stemmed from my MPhil dissertation at Cambridge University (2008) under the supervision of Benjamin Walton, who first introduced me to the Harmonicon. Thanks also go to Alan Davison, William Weber, and Leanne Langley for their invaluable comments, conversations and support, and to Lydia Johnson for kindly reading through various drafts of this work. Thank you also to the members of the Yale Department of Music for their very thoughtful and provocative comments on this research as part of a work-in-progress series in October 2011.
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