Gatekeeping, Advocacy, Reflection: Overlapping Voices in Nineteenth-Century British Music Criticism

A basic tool for investigating nineteenth-century British journalism, including music criticism, has long been The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, issued in 1976. Among the 50,000 entries of its updated series 2 (2003) are more than 200 music titles. Most of those originated in London and had brief lives. They touch every conceivable topic from church music to Wagner, madrigals to music hall, string technique to theories of history. Add the several thousand literary magazines, art and theatre papers, and daily and weekly newspapers that carried essays, review articles and other music-evaluative discussion, and the bulk of British music criticism grows exponentially. This is before one absorbs Waterloo’s prediction that its final list, series 5, is expected to reach 125,000 entries. Nineteenth-century periodical publishing took place on a prodigious scale, more than a hundred times greater than that of book production, and music was far from trivial in the content of thousands of titles: the very presence of music discussion helped to sell many of them. The old cliché about a few backward critics controlling taste in this environment is as unlikely as it is naive. The reasons are less to do with number and range of titles, however, or even the over-stressed visibility of a few critics whose identities are clear – that is, those who kept long attachments to one or two prominent journals in a largely anonymous, freelance context and who left vivid memoirs or had literary careers beyond music. That kind of celebrity has encouraged repeated secondary reference to the same few writers, often owing to ease of access and the entertainment value in their barbed judgements, maybe ‘wrong’ in