Description

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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.

About the Author

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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 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).