The first chapter contextualizes Forster’s ‘rhythm’ in Aspects of the Novel within the contemporary currency of the term in evolutionary discourses on non-Western cultures, arguing that his conception of ‘rhythm’ as an aesthetics of fiction is preceded by his use of the term to interrogate the conditioning of epistemology in cross-cultural encounters. Analysing two articles on music Forster wrote in Egypt, a 1912 essay by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson about Anglo-India, as well as A Passage to India, it proposes that Forster was alert to the many problems of subjectivity, perspective, and language in delineating the racial other, and that his representations of rhythm in the novel suggest a significant, and previously unacknowledged, negotiation of the plurality of musical cultures. The chapter thus challenges the critical notion of rhythm as reflective purely of modernist fascination with form and intermediality. Complicating the long-held dichotomy of aesthetics and politics in modernist scholarship, it recovers the racial connotations of Forster’s ‘rhythm’ in Aspects, offering a new understanding of his aspiration for ‘expansion’ as a reconfiguration of the racial other.

This introduction to the volume provides overviews of theories of the sublime and musicology’s engagement with the sublime, before outlining the fresh perspective brought by this collection. The focus is on historically specific experiences of the sublime: although the centre of gravity is the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the well-known centres of intellectual debate on the sublime in Europe, a widened purview considers performers and audiences, as well as composers and works, as agents of power. The authors distinguish between the different aesthetics of production, representation and effect, while understanding these as often mutually reinforcing approaches. A significant cross-temporal finding to emerge from the collection is music’s strength in playing out the sublime as transfer, transport and transmission of power; this is allied to the persistent theme of destruction, deaths and endings. The density of this thematic complex in music is a keynote of the dialogue between the chapters. The volume opens up two avenues for further research, suggested by the adjective ‘sonorous’: a wider spectrum of sounds heard as sublime, and (especially for those outside musicology) a more multifaceted idea of music as a cultural practice that has porous boundaries with other sounding phenomena.

Musical historicism developed earlier in Britain than, it seems, elsewhere in Europe, with a variety of institutions, traditions and politicised practices from the 1720s onwards cultivating a spirit of enquiry into and appreciation of the past. Seemingly ubiquitous in mid-century musical life, Handel was key to these developments in many ways. Unsurprisingly then, contemporary assessments sought to situate him in an implicitly historicist narrative. In so doing, these assessments often turned to the language of the sublime to place this ‘Man-Mountain’ of a composer in the sweep of history. Indeed, the rhetoric of the sublime seemed to enable and condition the historicist assessment of Handel, entangling musical sublimity with historical greatness. It follows that those composers who came after Handel, particularly in genres where he was pre-eminent, would also aspire to sublimity in order to achieve greatness. Because of the link between historicism and sublimity, they often did this, as examples from William Hayes, Thomas Arne and Thomas Linley (junior) show, by citing and thereby historicising Handel himself.

This article traces benefit performances of English oratorios by Handel, his contemporaries, and his successors between 1732 and the 1770s, exploring how the performances contributed to the success and popularity of English oratorio, as well as to question their strategic employment by composers and theatre managers. The relationship between criticism of oratorio performances in the theatre and the success they achieved through charitable association, particularly as a result of the Foundling Hospital performance of Messiah in 1750, will also be explored, offering new insights into the development of the genre and the practical uses of benefit nights in the mid-eighteenth century.

This introduction provides an overview of Music and the Benefit Performance in Eighteenth-Century Britain, first by introducing the mechanics of musical benefits in the eighteenth century, followed by a literature review of prior research into the subject. We then offer a discussion of themes that emerge throughout the book, including networking and repertories, benefits beyond London, benefits and public image, the emergence of charity benefits, and finally, the role of the audience.