Articulate Sounds

Overview & Synopsis

Articulate Sounds uncovers the complex relationship between music, literature, and religious dissent in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. While collective song was central to Dissenting identities and culture, James Grande shows how many aspects of music were viewed with suspicion or even hostility by Nonconformist writers. Throughout the Romantic period, Dissenters debated questions of musical meaning and the connections between music and the written word, as well as the vaunted power of music over the emotions and changing ideas about listening, lyric, sound, and voice. Individual chapters focus on a range of canonical and less well-known authors, including Blake, Godwin, Iolo Morganwg, Amelia Opie, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt. This book follows their careers across Britain but is grounded in the ‘world city’ of Romantic London, revealing a history of cosmopolitan cultural exchange. Tracing the Dissenting response to a rich variety of musical forms, from opera to oratorio, and from the symphony to popular ballads and hymns, Articulate Sounds demonstrates how Dissenters’ deep ambivalence towards music shaped the literary culture of Romanticism. The neglected history of music and Dissent offers a new understanding of both the evolution of Protestant Nonconformity and the contested place of music in nineteenth-century Britain.