The summer issue of Journal of Victorian Culture includes an important roundtable on Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Music that exemplifies the interdisciplinary strengths of JVC. Our music collection boasts work in art history, literary history, musicology and music history. Music as an aspect of Victorian culture has been less celebrated, and certainly less fully researched, than the so-called ‘sister arts’ of poetry and painting. Essays by Michael Allis, George Kennaway, Elizabeth Helsinger and Marte Stinis in issue 27:2 find new ways
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“Preferring Death to the Embrace of a Strange Dancing Woman”: Jewish Dancers in Victorian Ballrooms
Dancing was perhaps the most universal and popular mixed-sex leisure pursuit in the nineteenth century. Yet dance was not purely a recreational activity. Ballroom etiquette demanded adherence to the rules of fashionable society, including precise rules for comportment, conversation, and choosing a dance partner. For upwardly mobile Jewish dancers, balls presented additional challenges. First of all, mixed-sex dancing was forbidden according to traditional Jewish law, which regarded men and women dancing together as a gateway to sexual impropriety. And while
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The Virtuosa is the Villain: How Hulu’s ‘Only Murders in the Building’ Rehearses Victorian Ideas About Female Musicians
Alert: this piece contains spoilers for Hulu’s 2021 show Only Murders in the Building. Scroll down to read! I should have known it was the bassoonist. As a scholar of classical music and gender and a clarinetist myself, I can’t believe it took me until the second-to-last episode of Hulu’s 2021 murder mystery/comedy series Only Murders in the Building (OMITB) to realize that the serial killer at the core
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Venerating Verses and Disrespectful Ditties: Informal Music Inspired by Queen Victoria
Over the course of her record breaking six-decade reign, Queen Victoria was the subject of numerous formal and informal musical compositions alike. While most formal music was reverential in nature and sought to praise the monarch, by and large the informal music that Victoria inspired among the lower classes tended to contain derogatory or mocking depictions of the queen. However, there were a small number of compositions that celebrated Victoria’s personal and political successes. Still, most of these were informal
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Kitty Lord’s Padded ‘Symmetricals’
This final post (see Parts One and Two) was inspired by a pair of pale pink knitted tights worn by the music hall singer Kitty Lord (1881-1972) in the early 1900s. Part of a collection of Lord’s costumes held at the Museum of London, these ‘symmetricals’ were carefully padded with wool to ensure that her thighs and calves looked suitably shapely and voluptuous [Figure 1]. As these padded symmetricals reveal, and this post will discuss, in late nineteenth century Burlesque
Read moreShannon Draucker, ‘The Queen Goes to the Opera’
Shannon Draucker is a PhD Candidate in English at Boston University. Her dissertation project, Sounding Bodies: Music and Physiology in Victorian Narrative, explores literary responses to emerging scientific understandings of the physics and physiology of sound during the Victorian period. Her project shows how new discoveries of the embodied nature of music and sound inform scenes in which authors grant their characters desires, pleasures, identities, and relationships otherwise unavailable to them. At Boston University, she teaches English and Writing courses
Read moreAnn Gagné, Making Sense of Senses in Victorian Studies: The MVSA 2015 Conference
Ann Gagné is College Instructor at Seneca College in Toronto, Canada. Her current research explores how touch and ethics relate to education as well as the spatial framing of learning in the nineteenth century which is an extension of themes found in her doctoral dissertation. She is very active on Twitter @AnnGagne and also writes a blog that relates to teaching and pedagogical strategies at www.allthingspedagogical.blogspot.ca Sensory studies has really expanded in the past few years which is great
Read moreAnna Maria Barry, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic – Celebrating 175 Years of the Original Liverpool Sound
This year marks the 175th anniversary of the Liverpool Philharmonic: the UK’s oldest surviving professional symphony orchestra. The occasion has been marked with a major new exhibition in Liverpool, which I was recently able to visit during a research trip to the city. The exhibition traces the story of the Liverpool Philharmonic from its Victorian roots through to the present day. Documents on display give a fascinating insight into the world of nineteenth-century entertainment and celebrity culture. The exhibition is
Read moreCorrina Connor ‘Die Fledermaus lands in Victorian London’
Corrina Connor is in the first year of her PhD research, which focusses on the performance of masculinities and nationality in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. She is a student at OBERTO, the opera research unit at Oxford Brookes University, where she is supervised by Dr Alexandra Wilson. Originally from New Zealand, Corrina studied performance and music history and Victoria University of Wellington, before completing an MPhil in Musicology and Performance at Oxford University where she researched the sacred music of Pelham
Read moreTeaching Cultural History Through National Song
By Karen E. McAulay, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland This post suggests a collaboration between teaching faculty and specialist subject librarians by teaching book and cultural history in the context of national song and fiddle tune-books. I’ve noticed, when giving undergraduate lectures on Scottish music history, that students are more engaged when encouraged to perform the music being talked about; to participate in discussion; or examine historic sources at first hand. I decided to experiment with the idea of a template
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