Music Scholar Blogs

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…

‘Ladies Not Eligible’?: Female Church Organists in Nineteenth-Century England Part 1 On 8 April 1865 the Musical Standard carried an announcement by the vestry of Saint John Southwark inviting ‘application…

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 [UK] several years…

‘Place aux dames’? Women Organists in the First World War After carefully reviewing issues of the Musical Times 1901 to 1910, I was not satisfied with the numbers of women…

‘Place aux dames’? Women Organists in Edwardian England Writing about ‘Women at the Console’ in the Musical Opinion in 1954, Martin Hawkins noted the conspicuous absence at the beginning of…

Elizabeth Stirling (26 February 1819 - 25 March 1895) Many years ago when researching Samuel Wesley and the introduction of Bach’s organ music into England, I came across the name…