Music and Academia in Victorian Britain

Rosemary Golding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317092612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica de la música

Until the nineteenth century, music occupied a marginal place in British universities. Degrees were awarded by Oxford and Cambridge, but students (and often professors) were not resident, and there were few formal lectures. It was not until a benefaction initiated the creation of a professorship of music at the University of Edinburgh, in the early nineteenth century, that the idea of music as a university discipline commanded serious consideration. The debates that ensued considered not only music's identity as art and science, but also the broader function of the university within education and society. Rosemary Golding traces the responses of some of the key players in musical and academic culture to the problems surrounding the establishment of music as an academic discipline. The focus is on four universities: Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge and London. The different institutional contexts, and the approaches taken to music in each university, showcase the various issues surrounding music's academic identity, as well as wider problems of status and professionalism. In examining the way music challenged conceptions of education and professional identity in the nineteenth century, the book also sheds light on the way the academic study of music continues to challenge modern approaches to music and university education.

Chapter 1 Music as Science: Edinburgh, 1837–1865

DOI: 10.4324/9781315596570-1

The University of Edinburgh was home to the first active Professor of Music during the modern period, due to the generous endowment of General John Reid. General Reid, a military man and keen amateur flautist, had made his fortune in land acquired in America during the eighteenth century. The Reid bequest was received by the University in 1838 and the first Professor was appointed in 1839. As such, it provides a remarkable case study of the efforts involved in ‘inventing’ music for the university environment. University officials sought various methods of appointing a Professor and defining the subject within the bounds set by the original statutes. The main theme of the debate was music’s academic identity, chiefly focussing on the ‘scientific’ aspects of music.

Among the Music Professorships existing and created throughout the nineteenth century, the Edinburgh Chair engendered most debate and ill feeling, especially with regard to its precise obligations and purpose. Senate members were baffled by a need to establish a Professorship in a subject previously absent from University curricula, at an institution with no apparent call, or desire, for musical instruction. At its conception endless arguments over expenditure and responsibility impeded its practical development, and later in the century both students and the public felt its potential was far from achieved. Responses to the post’s perceived demands varied from those intending to set up public classes in singing, to professional training in compositional method, to the most rigorous form of acoustical study. The early appointments represented the diverse interpretations of ‘music’ within this new context.

In 1838 the Reid endowment was worth the substantial sum of £73,590, of which £68,876 18s. 3d. was received by the University.¹ General Reid’s will of 1803 and a codicil added in 1806 give clear instructions for the legal arrangements of his endowment, the power of the Principal and Professors to appoint and dismiss the Professor of Music, and the provision of an annual memorial concert. However, it made scant reference to the exact terms of the Professorship to be established. The Committee charged with interpreting the will was wary of the Chair ‘degenerating into a mere sinecure’.² In order to ensure ‘a course of instruction fit to be adopted in a great University’, they would have to tread a fine line between ‘the danger of too mechanical a course on the one hand; or a mere history on the other, to be collected from Books’.³ A solely practical Professorship was immediately out of the question.

1 See Christopher D.S. Field, ‘Reid, John (1722?–1807)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23331 (accessed 13 January 2009). 2 MB, 23 June 1838, 6, 18. The committee was made up of interested professors from the Senate, the University’s main representative body comprising the Principal and Professors. This group became known as the Trustees. There was, in fact, one living ‘trustee’ (or executant) of Reid’s will still alive in 1838, a Mr Marjoribanks. Although he was consulted early on, he had little input into the development of the Chair’s role and duties. 3 Ibid., 18.

Reid’s endowment was for ‘a Professor of the Theory of Music’, music being defined more precisely in his will as ‘an art and science in which the Scots stand unrivalled by all the neighbouring nations in pastoral melody, and sweet combination of sounds’.⁴ This definition of music as a ‘theory’, and both an art and science, was at the crux of the Trustees’ problems. The only other clue to Reid’s intention was the provision that the Professorship and funds should ‘contribute to give stability, respectability and consequence’ to the University.⁵ Edinburgh’s academic heritage was based on empirical science and philosophy and the Edinburgh Trustees focussed on the scientific elements of music as those most suitable for the development of Reid’s intentions. Musical science was clarified as a ‘branch of liberal education’, a term intended to stress its non-vocational form and suggesting science in the most abstract of guises.⁶ Moreover, in order to justify a place for music in academia, the Trustees formed their conception of musical study around the ideas of scientific study already in place, specifically in the use of apparatus:

4 The Will of General Reid [EUL UA/Da 46.9], 12–13. A military man by profession, Reid had been an enthusiastic amateur flautist and composer. 5 Ibid., 14. 6 MB, 23 June 1838, 6.

It is a Science deeply founded in the principles of Physical Philosophy, to the illustration and study of which as becomes a University we have reason to believe that a very curious and rather expensive set of apparatus will be found necessary.⁷

7 Ibid. The terms physical and natural philosophy refer to the natural sciences.

Later debates on the expenses incurred by the Chair were founded on this need for apparatus and accommodation and came to symbolise the identity of music as an independent subject within the University. As such, the physical presence of music was important in contributing to its disciplinary identity.

In addition to confusion over the form musical study should take, the possible contribution of music to the ‘consequence’ of the University was also ‘little understood’ by the Edinburgh Trustees.⁸ The problem of creating a subject ‘as becomes a University’ persisted and was particularly pertinent to Edinburgh’s position at the forefront of medical and scientific education. Status was important at an institutional level and the Trustees were anxious that including music in the curriculum should not diminish the University’s standing. The variety of views and proposals expressed by applicants to the Professorships, and revisions to the Trustees’ own definitions, demonstrate the difficulty in defining academic music. At each of the early elections, the Trustees revised their requirements based on the successes and failures of the previous incumbents. They were determined to set music on a firm footing, but issues of class and status, the restrictions and expectations of University staff and students, the terms of the will, and the identity of music as profession and as study proved obstacles in their endeavour. As the only regularly active Musical Professors in Britain until the mid-1860s, the first four holders of the Chair therefore formed part of the trial-and-error process of defining a musical subject worthy of a university.

8 Ibid.

An anonymous article in the June 1818 edition of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine provides a starting point for gauging the level of musical activity in Scotland in the years between Reid’s death in 1807 and the foundation of the Music Professorship in 1838. On the general state of music, the author wrote that it had only recently become the ‘subject of great or general interest in Scotland’, although ‘there is hardly any nation which possesses more sensibility to music, or among whom a greater variety of beautiful national melodies is to be found’.⁹ This commentator may have been referring to commercial concerts, with the music as the main draw; as Jenny Burchell notes in her study of eighteenth-century concerts, Edinburgh had a thriving musical heritage but ‘[f]ew commercial concerts took place in Edinburgh until the end of the eighteenth century’.¹⁰ The serious-minded Edinburgh Musical Society, formally founded in 1728, was the main supporter of private concerts during the eighteenth century. Its rules forbade female membership and stated that a ‘reasonable degree of musical competence was the first requirement for membership’.¹¹ As Burchell points out, the regular contact between Scottish and continental universities, especially institutions in the Low Countries, affected attitudes and boosted musical life: ‘For Scottish students at Leiden or Utrecht, the ability to play an instrument to a reasonable standard was an essential social accomplishment, and on their return they would certainly provide the impetus for preserving an active performing society.’¹²

9 Anon. ‘On the State of Music in Scotland’ in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. III no. 15 (June 1818), 265. 10 Jenny Burchell, Polite or Commercial Concerts? Concert Management and Orchestral Repertoire in Edinburgh, Bath, Oxford, Manchester, and Newcastle, 1730–1799 (New York and London: Garland, 1996), 31. 11 Ibid., 33. 12 Ibid., 34.

By the 1830s, music and its related studies had become standard features of the many courses on offer in the city’s educational establishments. One advertisement tells us that a Mr Russell gave regular courses of lectures on natural philosophy, which included acoustics and music among the applied subjects,¹³ while the Edinburgh Ladies’ Institution offered theory of music and pianoforte classes as well as a class for sacred music ‘to improve the psalmody of our country’.¹⁴ Musical associations and institutions followed, and by 1840 the Edinburgh Choral Society, Edinburgh Professional Society of Musicians and Edinburgh Harmonists’ Society were among those that contributed to the city’s musical life by hosting concerts and lectures. In 1841, an awareness of Scottish musical talent led one contributor to The Scotsman to ask, ‘Why should not an academy of music be formed for the purpose of bringing out of obscurity talent that might otherwise be lost …?’¹⁵

13 See, for example, The Scotsman, 9 November 1836, 3 and 10 May 1837, 3. 14 Ibid., 25 February 1837, 1. 15 Ibid., 10 November 1841, 3.

Although Edinburgh appears to have had a flourishing musical life by the end of the 1830s, this did not ease the task facing the Reid Trustees. In addition to the problem of defining a musical subject, the Music Professor was to face competition from other calls on the bequest. Reid had determined that funds not applied to the Music Professorship should be spent on the general educational needs of the University and Library, and the University’s Professors were keen that maximum expenditure should come to their own subjects. Some of the funds were already earmarked to offset a debt occasioned by legal expenses in the 1820s.¹⁶ The substantial sum of £2,700 had already been spent on the natural history collection, as well as other debts incurred on the security of the bequest. It was also arranged that a fund be set up to provide pensions for retiring Professors. From the 1847 accounts set out below, it is clear that the expenses set aside for other projects far outweighed expenditure on music in the University:¹⁷ These other demands on the Reid fund meant that music had to conform to University expectations, and in the most efficient manner possible. Edinburgh’s Music Professors of the nineteenth century were thus called upon to defend their subject, not only on the grounds of academic integrity, but also in terms of financial expenditure.

16 MB, 19 December 1839, 36–8. 17 The list of grants for 1847 is given in SMB, 18 November 1847.

Salary to Mr Donaldson	£300
Concert	£200
General Library	£400
Theological Library	£100
Retiring allowance	£750
Encouragement of Graduates in Arts	£200
Anatomical Museum	£200
Natural Philosophy 2nd Instalment	£130

Defining the Professorship: 1838–1844

Music at Edinburgh was constructed as a ‘science’ in order to conform to contemporary educational aims and practices. It was further required to fit in with existing academic subjects without compromising the rights of established Professors. Based on the continental professorial model of teaching, the Professors drew their salaries from both central University funds and student fees for individual classes, so the introduction of a new discipline could disrupt the balance between s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Series Preface
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: ‘What Shall We Do With Music?’
• 1 Music as Science: Edinburgh, 1837–1865
• 2 Questions of Profession and Status: Oxford
• 3 Vocational and Academic Musical Study: Cambridge
• 4 Towards a Scheme for ‘Music(ology)’? Edinburgh, 1865–1914
• 5 Universities and Conservatoires: London
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Candidates for the Edinburgh Professorship
• Appendix 2: Lectures Recorded at Oxford, 1857–1899
• Appendix 3: Set Works for the B.Mus. at Oxford, 1871–1900
• Appendix 4: Set Works at Cambridge, 1878–1900
• Appendix 5: Music Education Provision in London, 1889
• Appendix 6: Set Works for the B.Mus. at London, 1881–1904
• Appendix 7: Student Numbers by Subject and Gender in Edinburgh, 1889–1905
• Select Bibliography
• Index