Music Scholar Blogs

Tales of Sound and Seduction: Organists in Nineteenth-Century British Novels Part 2 Unlike its sister keyboard instrument the piano, the organ has not been the focus of research on music…

Tales of Sound and Seduction: Organists in Nineteenth-Century British Novels Part 1 Unlike its sister keyboard instrument the piano, the organ has not been the focus of research on music…

Organ Benches and Bicycle Seats: Pedalists in Victorian England Part 2 Bicycle Seats As the nineteenth century progressed, English women benefited from increasingly liberal social attitudes about their education, physical…

Organ Benches and Bicycle Seats: Pedalists in Victorian England Part 1 Organ Benches In a 1927 retrospective account of organs and organists, Charles Pearce, then Vice President of the Royal…

Women Organists in Victorian Fiction Part 2 Women had been serving as organists in England’s churches – though not in its cathedrals and royal and collegiate chapels – since the…

Women Organists in Victorian Fiction Part 1 The image of music in fiction, especially involving women musicians, offers a rich area of discourse for scholars of Victorian literature. Mary Burgan,…

Playing Upon Versus Playing With the Organ: The Reception of the Organ Recital in Victorian England Part 2 Elizabeth Stirling certainly was not the only organist to play at the…

Playing Upon Versus Playing With the Organ: The Reception of the Organ Recital in Victorian England Part 1 I invite you to put yourselves in the shoes of a nineteenth-century…

Women Organists in Victorian England: What Did They Wear? After I had presented a paper about women organists in nineteenth-century England at an organ conference in Oxford, England several years…

‘Ladies Not Eligible’?: Female Church Organists in Nineteenth-Century England Part 2 In my previous blog (8 Sep 2019) I explored the ‘lady organist issue’, perpetuated in nineteenth-century British newspapers and…