The music written for submission to the music degrees of English universities during the nineteenth century forms a significant body of works which, while important, present challenges for the historian, music analyst, and performer. Changes to the nature of music degrees, including the compositional exercises, during the nineteenth century received a mixed reception, which illustrates concerns over the separation of the ‘academic’ and ‘aesthetic’ elements of music, as well as deeper anxieties about the state and status of English music and composition. This paper examines in detail a small selection of exercises by William Crotch, F. A. G. Ouseley, and William Pole, considering the contextual and ontological problems raised by the works in light of the changing nature of music histories, narratives, and values.

Music was widely used within lunatic asylums in nineteenth-century England as part of the ‘moral management’ of patients via entertainment and occupation. The asylum at Ticehurst stood apart on account of its patient body, drawn from the upper classes of society. Documents relating to music at Ticehurst shed new light on the place of music within mental health treatment in the nineteenth century, and particularly on the perceived role of music in understanding the function of the brain in listening, emotions and the intellect. The main body of the article draws on the Ticehurst archives together with patient accounts of their musical experiences to investigate the ways in which music was used at the asylum. The final part takes as its focus an article published by the asylum’s manager and medical officer, Herbert Hayes Newington, in which the appreciation of music by patients comes under scrutiny.

Listening to music found a new context during the early nineteenth century, in the shape of large, closed institutions set up to house and treat the insane. In response to social reform as well as a growing problem of mental health, lunatic asylums for paupers were set up across Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Replacing the previous practices of restraint and containment, a system of ‘moral management’ dominated the new asylums. Patients’ lives were kept busy and ordered, with careful attention given to their employment, their diet and their recreational activities. Music played an important part in establishing the routine of the new institutions. Formal dances offered a social occasion and a controlled environment within which the two sexes could meet. Both dances and concerts were used as a reward for patient behaviour, encouraging the kind of self-control which was seen as crucial to recovery and rehabilitation. Musical events acted as a diversion from the grim realities of institutional life and played an important role in allowing patients to engage with religious observance. Musical experience could be active or passive; patients might engage by dancing or making music of their own, and their music might be symptomatic of illness or wellbeing. Using documents including formal records, patient notes and newspaper reports, it is possible to investigate some of the ways in which listening to music played a therapeutic role, and the place of musical experience in the lives of asylum patients.

When, in 1838, the University of Edinburgh received General John Reid's bequest founding a Chair of Music, members of the Senatus were baffled by their duty to establish a Professorship in a subject previously absent from university curricula, at an institution with no apparent call, or desire, for musical instruction. There was, furthermore, no obvious precedent for such a post elsewhere. Oxford and Cambridge's music professorships dated back to the seventeenth century, but both had been virtual sinecures since not long after their foundation. The institution of the Royal Academy of Music in the previous decade provided no model for a university subject, as it catered primarily for young ladies and aspiring professional performers, with no obviously ‘academic’ form of study. German universities included musical study but were primarily concerned with history in terms of stylistic development, with compositional ends in mind. The trustees appointed to manage the Reid bequest faced the daunting task of creating an entirely new academic subject, which needed to be divorced from current musical study and practice in order to render it suitable for the university environment.