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Miscellany and Collegiality in the British Periodical Press: The Harmonicon (1823–1833)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2013

Erin Johnson-Hill
Erin Johnson-Hill*
Affiliation:
Yale University Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The Harmonicon was, in its day, London's premiere music periodical, gaining a wide and loyal readership at home and abroad. Perhaps the most the distinctive feature of the journal was its deliberate imperative to raise what it considered to be the ‘lamentable’ level of musical knowledge held by the British reading public. The journal's editor, William Ayrton, was deeply concerned that there was a lack of a national school of music in his own country that could ever match that which his rival French and German critics called their own. In this light, I argue that the journal's appeal and economic success was due to a didactic philosophy of ‘collegiality’ and ‘miscellany’ – to borrow William Weber's terms – as a means of disseminating musical knowledge to the broadest readership possible. Through reviewing, critiquing and publishing a remarkably assorted array of national styles and genres of music, the Harmonicon attempted to create a very general type of musical knowledge in Britain in the early nineteenth century, one which looked necessarily beyond national borders in an effort to build up a shared knowledge of music. Data drawn from musical examples spanning all 11 years of the journal's print run is analysed, assessing in particular the high number of international composers featured in the journal. The many miscellaneous strands interwoven throughout the Harmonicon reflect a mode of thinking about music that was integral to a valiant effort to raise the status and awareness of music in early nineteenth-century British culture.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , December 2012 , pp. 255 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

Many people have been instrumental in the formation of this article, which stemmed from my MPhil dissertation at Cambridge University (2008) under the supervision of Benjamin Walton, who first introduced me to the Harmonicon. Thanks also go to Alan Davison, William Weber, and Leanne Langley for their invaluable comments, conversations and support, and to Lydia Johnson for kindly reading through various drafts of this work. Thank you also to the members of the Yale Department of Music for their very thoughtful and provocative comments on this research as part of a work-in-progress series in October 2011.

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3 The Introduction states further: ‘Influenced by these considerations, and in order to fill up the chasm which appears to be left, this Journal is now offered to the Public. It will be continued monthly, and will generally contain six or seven entire pieces of music, one of which, at least, will be written purposely and exclusively for the work, by some really eminent composer, and the remainder will be selected from the best productions of the great masters; but such music as the taste of the passing day shall decidedly approve, will not be rejected, unless indeed it is more deficient in merit than, when sanctioned by the public voice, is likely to happen. The whole will be adapted to the voice, the piano-forte, the hand, or the organ, and will form a varied collection of novelty and excellence, calculated no less to gratify the accomplished amateur, than to furnish the student with the most perfect models by which correctness of taste, and a knowledge of the style and peculiarities of the different schools, may be attained’. Harmonicon, 1 (1823): 1.

4 Ibid.

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88 As well as covering concert life and musical news in the main European centres, the ‘Foreign Musical Report’ also had frequent notes on concert life in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.

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