A pioneering work which delves into and reveals the links between music, moral instruction and social reform. This book discusses the role of music in programmes of personal improvement and social reform in nineteenth-century Britain. The pursuit of morality through music was designed not just to improve personal and communal character but to affect social change and transformation. The book examines the musical education of children, women and men through a variety of literature published for various educational settings including mechanics' institutes. It also considers the role of music in narratives of social programs and community-building projects that sought to promote utility, well-being and freedom from the strictures of Christianity as the dominant moral and cultural force. The first book to connect the threads between music, moral instruction and social reform across the educational life cycle in nineteenth-century Britain, it shows how these threads are found in unlikely places, such as games, manners books, economics treatises and short stories. It deftly illustrates the links between everyday life, popular culture and discourses of morality and social reform of the period.

Looks at choruses not only as a source of music, but as organizations that come together for aesthetic, social, political, and religious purposes. This volume discusses groups, including an East African chorus; groups from 19th century England, Germany, and America; early twentieth-century Russian Menonites; Soviet workers' clubs; and more.

First published in 1998, this book focuses on the once celebrated but now neglected musical journalism of Henry Forthergill Chorley. For nearly forty years he effectively used his acerbic pen and idiosyncratic critical judgments to celebrate the works of Rossini, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Gounod and Sullivan, and to scorn those of Schumann , Verdi and Wagner. This book also discusses his friendships with literary figures such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Felicia Hemans, as well as his ongoing efforts to establish himself as a novelist as well as a journalist.