‘The king is dead, long live the king!’ Thus Henry B. Wheatley described the opening of yet another international exhibition in London. ‘No sooner’, he wrote in 1885, were the doors of one exhibition closed, than ‘preparations were made for the reopening of these doors’; just as the exhibits of one show were removed, those of the next were installed. Wheatley referred only to London, which held four exhibitions in quick succession throughout the 1880s, but his observations could be applied to exhibitions in many parts of the British Empire. During this decade, there was barely a year without an international exhibition, in continuation of a fairly recent tradition that had begun with the Great Exhibition in 1851. Arguably some of the most significant cultural phenomena of the nineteenth century, international exhibitions used comparative and competitive displays to reflect – their organisers claimed – the totality of human endeavour, from industry and manufacturing, to art and design. Moreover, they influenced the social, cultural, economic, and political lives of the cities that hosted them. Usually six months long and held in enormous purpose-built edifices packed full of objects, exhibitions were a massive and literal manifestation of the Victorian obsession with collecting, ordering, and classifying the world. But exhibitions were not just a physical and visual display; sound, and particularly music, was integral to their experience.

This book interrogates the role of music at international exhibitions in the British Empire throughout the 1880s. At these events, music was codified, ordered, and all-round ‘exhibited’ in multiple and changing ways. Sometimes it was represented through physical objects, sometimes through performance. It was used to fulfil the educational remit of the exhibitions, as a rarefied symbol of the highest human achievements in art, and its ‘enlightening’ qualities employed to edify the public both morally and culturally. At other times, it was engaged for commercial ends, as a tool for instrument manufacturers to advertise their wares, or as a commodified entertainment that could draw a paying crowd. Music was used as a vehicle for nationalist sentiments, or invoked as a marker of universalism. It could represent local talents, or appear so foreign that it challenged the very idea of what music was.