Sound Knowledge

Music and Science in London, 1789-1851

Davies James Q., Lockhart Ellen

What does it mean to hear scientifically? What does it mean to see musically? This volume uncovers a new side to the long nineteenth century in London, a hidden history in which virtuosic musical entertainment and scientific discovery intersected in remarkable ways".Sound Knowledge" examines how scientific truth was accrued by means of visual and aural experience, and, in turn, how musical knowledge was located in relation to empirical scientific practice. James Q. Davies and Ellen Lockhart gather work by leading scholars to explore a crucial sixty-year period, beginning with Charles Burney's ambitious "General History of Music", a four-volume study of music around the globe, and extending to the Great Exhibition of 1851, where musical instruments were assembled alongside the technologies of science and industry in the immense glass-encased collections of the Crystal Palace. Importantly, as the contributions show, both the power of science and the power of music relied on performance, spectacle, and experiment. Ultimately, this volume sets the stage for a new picture of modern disciplinarity, shining light on an era before the division of aural and visual knowledge.

About the Author

James Q. Davies is associate professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of "Romantic Anatomies of Performance".

Ellen Lockhart is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Toronto.

Reviews

"'Sound Knowledge' is admirably interdisciplinary, combining more traditional musicological perspectives with cultural studies, sound studies, and the history of science. The collection engages with a number of important issues – such as the period's sometimes bizarre clashes between aesthetic and scientific concerns, and the ways sight and sound were imbricated in the production of knowledge. This book will appeal to a number of different audiences, from Victorianists and musicologists to readers interested in arcane technologies and Anglophiles eager to learn more about London's rich musical and scientific life" – Melina Esse, University of Rochester

"This exhilarating volume illuminates London's centrality in the history of nineteenth-century music through an investigation of music's centrality in the history of nineteenth-century science. Davies, Lockhart, and their contributors offer compelling insights into the intersections of aural and visual realms, popular experiments and theatrical performances, and musical and scientific instruments in a way that both defamiliarizes the period while offering a novel account of how music was understood at the time" – Benjamin Walton, University of Cambridge

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