School of Music Professor co-edits new Oxford Handbook

Professor Michael Allis, with co-editors Dr Paul Watt (Monash University) and Dr Sarah Collins (University of Western Australia), has just published The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century with Oxford University Press. 

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century continues the Leeds-Monash partnership. It includes contributions from scholars in America, Australia, Canada, France, Sweden and the UK, and focuses on forms of writing and thinking about music in the 19th century.

The book is divided into three parts:

(1) Texts and Practices (including history, analysis and biography).

(2) Networks and Institutions (such as concert series, collecting networks, and learned societies).

(3) Discourses, where 19th-century thought and its legacies in relation to music are discussed.

Professor Allis's contribution is a chapter on the role of music in 19th-century travel writing. As well as demonstrating the importance of travel writing in terms of documenting performing practice, portraying musical otherness, and offering competing views of national musicality, parallels with composers' own travelogues (e.g. Bantock, Berlioz, Offenbach) can be seen in musical compositions that mirror specific literary strategies.