Member of the editorial board for the open-access journal that publishes intellectually-stimulating new research across the humanities on the long nineteenth century (1789-1914).

This thesis explores relationships between music produced around 1800 for domestic consumption and the fictional genre of romance – a genre of fantastic atmospheres, settings and characters, quest plots with dramatic events, and a sense of antiquity and desire that represents remoteness and addresses the cultural periphery.  What this fiction says about music offers a new view of romanticism in British print culture, making this thesis serve as counterhistory to studies of nineteenth-century European operatic and orchestral canons and their links with later fiction.

            I survey the use of music in romance novels by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg in the period 1790-1830, interrogating the ways that music served to create mood and atmosphere, enlivened social scenes and contributed to plot developments.  I explore the connections between musical scenes in romance fiction and the domestic song literature – short accompanied songs, both sacred and secular, by composers such as Thomas Attwood, John Wall Callcott, Matthew Cooke, John Baptist Cramer, John Barnett, François Hippolyte Barthélemon, Charles Dibdin, William Hawes, Thomas Moore, John Parry, William Reeve, Reginald Spofforth, and Sir John Stevenson.

            My intersectional reading revolves around a series of imaginative figures – including the minstrel, fairies, ghosts, witches, and other supernatural figures, and Christians engaged both in virtue and vice – the identities of which remained generally consistent as influence passed between the art forms.  While authors quoted song lyrics and included musical descriptions and characters, their novels recorded and modelled the performance of songs by the middle and upper classes, influencing the work of composers and the actions of contemporary performers who read romance fiction.

            My thesis shows how the intersection of romances with vocal music recorded a society on the cusp of modernisation, with a printing industry emerging to serve people’s growing appetites for entertainment amidst their changing views of religion and the occult.  No mere diversion, fiction was integral to musical culture and together both art forms reveal key intellectual currents that circulated in the early nineteenth-century British home.

Chopin’s four Ballades of 1836-43 were the first through-composed, single-movement piano pieces to carry the title ‘Ballade’; they were a genre of novelty and individuality. But their origins in recognised musical techniques of the nineteenth-century and earlier are clearly evident. The title ‘Ballade’ recalls the poetic ballads – a narrative literary genre – such as by Adam Mickiewicz who, like Chopin, was a Polish expatriate living in Paris during the 1830s.  Some scholars have explained the Ballades as settings of narrative poems, or nationalistic evocations of plots from Polish history or folklore. But musical influences from the programmatic piano pieces, operatic ballades, and the classical sonatas Chopin knew must also be considered. 

            The analysis of Chopin’s piano Ballades as sonata structures may be problematic because, although each consists of two themes that are exposed and undergo some aspects of development and/or recapitulation, classical expectations of these functions are rarely fulfilled in them. Yet many works contemporary with Chopin’s Ballades – including his own other large-scale pieces – reworked the sonata form, an aspect of composition known as the “renovation”, “dissolution” or “deformation” of this form. 

            Chopin’s manipulations of sonata form’s structural “norms” have an expressive effect within the context of Romantic aesthetics, helping to impart the sense of narrativity evoked by the title ‘Ballade’. Recent theories of narrativity explain how a modern listener’s interpretation enhances Chopin’s narrative intentions in the Ballades, obviating the need for any piece to illustrate a specific literary plot or programme in order to narrate. The continuity and variety within the thematic development, modulations, motivic derivation, and the use of musical topics as a sequence of expressive states, creates a musical emulation of a narrative discourse. In this way the Ballades, despite their structural differences, have generic coherence because of their musical narrativity.