Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain - by James Grande & Brian H Murray (Paperback)

About the Book

"The first collection to show the full range of ways in which the Bible was mediated through both popular and elite music in nineteenth-century Britain"--

Book Synopsis

This volume brings together new approaches to music history to reveal the interdependence of music and religion in nineteenth-century culture. As composers and performers drew inspiration from the Bible and new historical sciences called into question the historicity of Scripture, controversies raged over the performance, publication and censorship of old and new musical forms. From oratorio to opera, from parlour song to pantomime, and from hymn to broadside, nineteenth-century Britons continually encountered elements of the biblical past in song. Both elite and popular music came to play a significant role in the formation, regulation and contestation of religious and cultural identity and were used to address questions of class, nation and race, leading to the beginnings of ethnomusicology. This richly interdisciplinary volume brings together musicologists, historians, literary and art historians and theologians to reveal points of intersection between music, religion and cultural history.

Review Quotes

Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain is one of the most exciting and important collections in the field of 19th-century studies to come along in many a year. In response to this well-researched, path-breaking volume, everyone interested in the Victorians ought to sing out a hearty hallelujah.
Timothy Larsen, author of A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (2011)

Delving into the complex world of nineteenth-century culture, this captivating volume explores the dynamic relationship between music and religion. With meticulous scholarship, it traces how music both shaped and reflected the complex interplay of faith, identity, and society, resonating through time as a testament to the profound interconnection between art and spirituality.
Markus Rathey, Robert S. Tangeman Professor of Music History, Yale University, USA, and author of Bach in the World: Music, Society, and Representation in Bach's Cantatas (2022)

This illuminating investigation of 'sacred song as an expression of communal and confessional solidarity but also enthusiastic dissent' reveals the myriad relationships between scripture and song in the nineteenth century, ranging from street ballads to psalmody, and from concert-hall and drawing room to church and synagogue. If on one hand the volume emphasizes the presence of the Bible in vocal music-making of all genres, on the other it underlines the centrality of song in religious utterance. Voices raised in prayer, sorrow, anger and jubilation sound throughout this interdisciplinary collection of essays in a moving evocation of spiritual communication with the divine, be that devotion or interrogation. In this way, James Grande and Brian Murray and their impressive assembly of scholars afford us the means of 'hearing' nineteenth-century society and its diverse, complex encounters with religion in a new, powerfully resonant way.
Susan Rutherford, Honorary Professor in Music, University of Cambridge, UK

About the Author

James Grande is Senior Lecturer in eighteenth-century Literature at King's College London, UK. He is the author of William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England (2014) and co-editor of William Hazlitt: The Spirit of Controversy and Other Essays (2021) and Sound and Sense in British Romanticism (2023).

Brian H. Murray is Senior Lecturer in nineteenth-century literature at King's College London, UK. He is co-editor of Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form (2014), Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World (2017), and Chosen Peoples: The Bible, Race and Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century (2020).