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distant); an influx of professionals; territorial behaviour to reinforce social status; and collective interests dependent on forums, networks and allegiances. If we are to view the gentry not just as a construct of the historian but as an active social impulse, then music, as a cultural practice or even a commodity in fifteenth-century England, is an undeniably attractive area for study. As an index of
Music played a major role in the life of a global ideological phenomenon like the British Empire. This book demonstrates that music has to be recognised as one of the central characteristics of the cultural imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It begins with an account of the imperial music of Sir Edward Elgar and Sir Arthur Sullivan and the establishing of an imperial musical idiom. The book discusses the music composed for or utilized by official occasions: coronations, jubilees, exhibitions, tattoos, Armistice Day and Empire Day. Community singing was also introduced at the Aldershot Military Tattoo in 1927, sponsored by the Daily Express. The book examines the imperial content of a range of musical forms: operetta and ballet, films, music hall songs, ballads, hymns and marches. In one of the scenes depicting ballet, Indian dancing girls are ordered to reveal the riches of the land and the Ballet of Jewels. There were two staples of song in the second half of the nineteenth century: the drawing-room ballad and the music-hall song. Sir Henry Coward was Britain's leading chorus-master, and his 1911 musical world tour with Sheffield choir was the high point of his career. The book concludes with a discussion of practitioners of imperial music: the divas Emma Albani, Nellie Melba and Clara Butt, and the baritone Peter Dawson.
be almost killed by Neapolitan sharpshooters on the hills outside Capua or to witness the peace celebrations with Victor Emmanuel. 1 But it is not through this ill-timed adventure with the Garibaldians that Haweis achieved his enduring fame, but rather through the publication in 1871 of his enormously popular book, Music and Morals , which by 1903 had reached its twentieth edition. 2 Haweis, the son
The national anthem and Rule, Britannia Any consideration of official music must begin with the national anthem. It was an indispensable part of all official occasions for which music was specially provided: coronations, jubilees, royal weddings and funerals; the great exhibitions; the annual celebrations of Empire Day and Armistice Day. The national anthem has a
6 Music and opera in Brussels, 1700–1850: a tale of two cities koen buyens S ites of leisure hold the promise of enjoyment and satisfaction, appealing to the individual as consumer. At the same time they represent places where the citizen is able to perceive and assert himself as a self-confident and active member of a political community. Therefore the history of leisure is closely related to the rise of the public sphere and, more specifically, to changes in the cultural forms and flows that shaped the content of that sphere. This relationship is evident in