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Critical writing about music and music history in nineteenth-century Britain was permeated with metaphor and analogy. Music and Metaphor examines how over-arching theories of music history were affected by reference to various figurative linguistic templates adopted from other disciplines such as art, religion, politics and science.
List of contents
Contents: Introduction and background: Some preliminary points and definitions; The balance of Continental and English sources: Art; Religion; Science; General histories of music; Musicology through the arts: Music and painting: William Crotch; Music and architecture: Ruskin and one of his interpreters; Music as imitation: Jones, Goddard, Wylde and Garbett; Music as language and poetry: Turnpin, Banister, Prescott and Osbourne; Music images: MacFarren and Wallace; Musicology through religion: Music is God: Pugin and Formby; Music’s divine origin: Jebb and Young; Divinity in some general histories of music: Brown and Dickinson; Music and mysticism: Edwards and Newton; Musicology through science: Basic technical books and their definitions of science: Reeves, Brown and Cook; The principal evolutionary theorists: Spencer and Darwin; Writers on music influenced by evolution: Edmund Gurney, Joseph Goddard, C. Hubert H. Parry, William Wallace; Addendum: J. Alfred Johnstone and evolutionary anti-evolutionism; General histories of music: Musical imperialism in general and national histories; Primitive music as a mirror of the present: Rowbotham and Wallascheck; Issues concerning the balance of narrative and metaphor; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Bennett Zon
Summary
Critical writing about music and music history in nineteenth-century Britain was permeated with metaphor and analogy. Music and Metaphor examines how over-arching theories of music history were affected by reference to various figurative linguistic templates adopted from other disciplines such as art, religion, politics and science.
Additional text
’Twenty-first century British musicologists can be thankful to Bennett Zon for his account of their discipline in the 19th century...there is much here to enjoy, particularly for anyone with an interest in the history of ideas; and Zon is a useful guide to have through the writings of those thirty-plus individuals, familiar and unfamiliar, whose work is analysed here.’ The Musical Times '... can certainly be recommended as a reference source to anyone interested in 19th-century historiography.' International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music
