This article examines the idea of ‘Critical Networks’ as a way of studying the relational structures that shaped music criticism in the long nineteenth century. We argue that the personal, institutional and international networks that supported the dissemination of critical ideas about music are worthy of study in themselves, as they can yield insights beyond prevailing methodologies that centre on individual cases.

Focusing on the institutional culture of music criticism means looking beyond the work of individual critics and the content or influence of their views, towards the structures that determined the authoritativeness of those views and the impact of these structures in shaping the operation of critical discourse on music at the time. Examining these networks and how they operated around particular periodicals, tracing transnational exchanges of both ideas and critics, and uncovering the various ideological alliances that were forged or contested within critical networks, can not only provide a thicker context for our understanding of historical ideas about music, but it can also challenge current views about the history of our discipline and the kinds of structures that condition our own ideas about music and music history.

This article examines the efforts of French musicologists to create a specialized journal at the turn of the twentieth century that would clearly associate music criticism and musicology. Using as case study a set of music journals, from La Revue d’histoire et de critique musicales to the Mercure musical and the Revue S.I.M. that followed, I establish the connections that brought together the nascent musicological milieu, the musical press and the artistic affinities among the principal actors in their attempt to create a new network of music critics guided by musicological exigencies. Jules Combarieu, Romain Rolland, Louis Laloy, Jean Marnold, Émile Vuillermoz and Jules Écorcheville are some of the musicologists engaged in this project between 1900 and 1914. But historical contingencies make this project a relative utopia, and requirements of the young musicology hardly meet that of a music criticism divided between disciplinary tradition and the necessity to support contemporary music. After the war, with the founding of a new Revue musicale, René Prunières, prudently, would not hire musicologists to develop a music criticism. Instead, he took up the characteristically Republican project of promoting musical culture, and thus responding to the interests of both the cultivated bourgeoisie and the musical, literary and artistic milieus through diffusion of music knowledge.

Published in 1903 and 1904 the Weekly Critical Review was a typical ‘little magazine’: it was produced on a shoestring with a small readership, with big editorial ambition. Its uniqueness lay in its claim to be a literary tribute to the entente cordiale (and it enjoyed the imprimatur of King Edward VII), but more importantly, it was a bilingual journal, which was rare at the time even for a little magazine. The Weekly Critical Review aimed to produce high-quality criticism and employed at least a dozen high-profile English and French writers and literary critics including Rémy de Gourmont (1858–1915), Arthur Symons (1865–1945) and H.G. Wells (1866–1946). It also published articles and musical news by four leading music critics: English critics Alfred Kalisch (1863–1933), Ernest Newman (1868–1959) and John F. Runciman (1866–1916) and the American James Huneker (1857–1921).

Why did these critics write for the Weekly Critical Review? What did the articles in the WCR reveal about Anglo-French relations, about the aspirations of the English and French music critics who wrote for it, and about the scholarly style of journalism it published – a style that was also characteristic of many other little magazines? And in what ways were those who wrote for it connected? As a case study, I examine the ways in which Ernest Newman’s literary and musical networks brought him into contact with the journal and examine the style of criticism he sought to promote.

When Charles Bannelier’s French translation of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen was published in 1877, it elicited discussions among French musicians and critics that can seem puzzling from our twenty-first century vantage point. The French were almost entirely ambivalent to the issue of descriptive versus non-programmatic music and were perfectly comfortable disregarding this seemingly central point of contention in Hanslick’s treatise. French critics focused instead on issues that seem tangential to the main thrust of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: German music education, the merits of philosophy versus philology, and so forth.

The French reception of Hanslick becomes less puzzling, however, when we consider the conceptual framework within which French musical discourse operated in the late nineteenth century. By 1877, musical aesthetics and criticism in France were an extension of broader trends in French intellectual culture, in which a materialist, realist view of the world vied with a metaphysical, idealist conception of the divine. Between these two ideological poles lay a rich spectrum of ideas that had profound ramifications for music and art criticism. The degree to which works of art could be understood as products of historical circumstances, for example, or whether art embodied ineffable meanings resisting explanation, were questions whose answers depended on one’s position along this realist–idealist spectrum.

In this article, I show how this tension between realism and idealism formed the conceptual framework for French critics’ readings of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. I survey writings by Théodule Ribot, Jules Combarieu, Camille Bellaigue and others to show how this network of texts, when placed alongside each other, was effectively a manifestation of the realist–idealist spectrum. By putting these writings in conversation with each other, this article brings to light the intellectual premises of French writings on music in the nineteenth century. Only by understanding these premises, I argue, can we make sense of the French reception of Hanslick.

At the time of his death in 1892, the paradigmatic American poet Walt Whitman was more widely celebrated in Britain than in his own country, having received the vocal support of the likes of Tennyson, William Michael Rossetti, John Addington Symonds, Swinburne (for a time) and Edward Carpenter. For these writers, Whitman’s political egalitarianism – expressed through notions of ‘manly love’ and comradeship – presented a powerful alternative to prevailing Victorian forms of political and social relations. Whitman also provided significant inspiration for British composers at the turn of the twentieth century, with settings by Holst, Delius, Grainger, Scott, Gurney, Bridge, Stanford, Wood, Vaughan Williams and others. Yet while Whitman’s transatlantic literary reception has come to be seen as a moment of crystallization in the formation of contemporary notions of homosexuality, his reception among British composers is viewed as having been highly circumscribed, focusing more on the democratic and mystical implications of Whitman’s poetry.

This article suggests a different account of Vaughan Williams’s reading of Whitman, and explores the implications of this reading for our broader understanding of the relationship between several notions of nationalism, masculinity and modernism. This examination aims to complicate, inter alia, the narrative of rupture associated with the transition to modernism, by demonstrating how the continuity of intellectual concerns across aesthetic, national, and sexual spheres has been obscured by strategies of displacement.

Recent critiques of organicism in music studies have assumed that such features as part–whole integration and end-oriented development are essential to comparisons between music and the organic realm. Yet if what is thought to constitute organicism varies with perspectives on organisms in general, then perhaps it is time to take a different view of organicism’s historical legacy. What if the problem is not with the impression that music presents a semblance of the organic, but with the models of the organism brought in to give content to that semblance? In light of novel accounts of organic life currently being formulated by both scientists and thinkers affiliated with post-humanism, I propose to imagine an organicism that dispenses with humanistic conceits and prompts creative reflection on the points of connection between music and organic processes. To that end, this essay first dismantles conventional notions of wholeness and development before going on to consider aspects of the Western musical tradition through the twin lenses of self-organization and the systems theory of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. In sum, the essay seeks to conserve affinities between music and the organic domain intuited by nineteenth-century listeners while transposing organicism into a register more in tune with contemporary scientific and philosophical thought. By adding new nodes to a critical network established over two centuries ago, this article argues that a post-humanist organicism challenges us to think afresh about what our bodies, our sociality, and our creativity share with non-human entities and ecologies.