The Use of Newspapers as a Source for Musicological Research: A Case Study of Dublin Musical Life 1840–44 Catherine Ferris Thesis submitted to National University of Ireland, Maynooth for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Music National University of Ireland, Maynooth Maynooth Co. Kildare April 2011 Head of Department: Professor Fiona M. Palmer Supervisor: Professor Barra Boydell Contents Acknowledgements i Abbreviations ii List of Tables iii Part I Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Methodology 11 Thesis Overview 14 Editorial Decisions 16 The Class Context 17 Chapter 2: The Use of Newspapers for Musicological Research 19 Newspaper Characteristics 24 Newspaper Access and Formats 26 Considerations in the Use of Newspapers for Musicological Research 28 Newspaper Bias 29 The Audience: Literacy, Circulation and Reading Rooms 32 History of the Press 37 Freeman’s Journal 40 Evening Packet 49 Saunders’s News-Letter 58 Comparative Bias 65 Single Newspaper Study 71 Chapter 3: Case Study: Dublin Music Societies, 1840–1844 74 Hibernian Catch Club 75 Anacreontic Society 90 Philharmonic Society 110 Antient Concerts Society 130 University Choral Society 151 University Church Music Society 172 Societa Armonica 176 Dublin Sacred Harmonic Society 179 Dublin Harmonic Society 182 Metropolitan Choral Society 184 Amateur Harmonic Society 198 Tradesmen’s Harmonic Society 201 Dublin Concordant Society 205 Orpheus Society 207 Case Study Conclusion 211 Chapter 4: Conclusion 215 Part II Register of Musical Data on the Music Societies in the Freeman’s Journal, the Evening Packet and the Saunders’s News-Letter, 1840–1844 222 Bibliography 463 Abstract 505 Acknowledgements Foremost, I am indebted to my supervisor Professor Barra Boydell for his inestimable guidance, support and encouragement throughout my studies. I am grateful to successive heads of the music department at National University of Ireland Maynooth, Professor Gerard Gillen and Professor Fiona Palmer, for their unwavering institutional support and to Dr Kerry Houston and Ann Wrigley in the Dublin Institute of Technology for facilitating my progress. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of the library staff of the National Library of Ireland, DIT and NUIM. Special thanks are due to Dr Ita Beausang, whose years of support and encouragement have fuelled my research; Dr Paul Rodmell for providing me with access to his research notes; and Dr Maria McHale whose patience, clarity and perspective were invaluable during the final stages of this PhD. Personally, I would like to thank my friends and extended family for understanding and supporting my absences during the past four years. In particular, I owe thanks to my mother for yet more ‘roses’, and my husband Tony, without whom this PhD could not have been written. i Abbreviations ANHI A New History of Ireland DEM Dublin Evening Mail EMIR Encyclopedia of Music in Ireland EP Evening Packet FJ Freeman’s Journal GM Gentleman’s Magazine And Historical Chronicle GMO Grove Music Online – Oxford Music Online Grove 1 Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. George Grove, 4 vols (London: Macmillan and Co., R/1900) Grove 2 Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musician’s, 2nd edn, ed. Fuller Maitland, 5 vols (London: Macmillan and Co., 1908) Grove 3 Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 3rd edn, ed. H.C. Colles, 5 vols (London: Macmillan and Co., R/1929) Grove 4 Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 4th edn, ed. H.C. Colles, 5 vols (London: Macmillan and Co., 1940) Grove 5 Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th edn, ed. H.C. Colles, 9 vols (London: Macmillan and Co., 1954) IMS Irish Musical Studies IRL-Dcla Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street IRL-Dn National Library of Ireland IRL-Dtc Trinity College Dublin Library IT Irish Times MW Musical World OCM Oxford Companion to Music – Oxford Music Online ODM Oxford Dictionary of Music – Oxford Music Online Oxford DNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography NGroveD The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 20 vols (London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980) SN Saunders’s News-Letter ii List of Tables Table 1 Officers of the Hibernian Catch Club, 1840–1844 80 Table 2 Hibernian Catch Club dinner ‘visitors’, 1840 and 1841 83 Table 3 Anacreontic Society President and Vice-Presidents, 1840–1844 94 Table 4 Anacreontic Society members, dinner 1842 95 Table 5 Committee members and officers of the Philharmonic Society during the period studied, their positions, dates of involvement, and their involvement with other music societies during the nineteenth century (from the Dublin Directories) and within wider musical life 1840–1844 (from the newspapers) 113 Table 6 Notable engaged artists at the Philharmonic Society’s concerts 122 Table 7 Antient Concert Society committee members from foundation to the end of the period under scrutiny (1834–1844), their positions, dates of involvement, and their involvement with other music societies during the nineteenth century (from the Dublin Directories) and within wider musical life 1840–1844 (from the newspapers) 139 Table 8 Antient Concerts Society concert audience members, December 1841 and their involvement in musical life during the period 1840–1844 141 Table 9 Antient Concerts Society performers, 1844 146 Table 10 Attendees at the University Choral Society’s concerts between April 1840 and June 1841 159 Table 11 Examples of song volumes entitled ‘Orpheus’ 207 Table 12 Comparison of songs performed at the Orpheus Society concert on 12 June 1844 with the Antient Concerts Society’s extant set of Orpheus, a Collection of Glees of the Most Admired German Composers 209 iii Chapter One: Introduction The time has surely come to look again at England in the nineteenth century: not backwards, pathologically, but from the inside, putting ourselves in the shoes of contemporary observers and participants who bought, read, wrote for, and exchanged ideas in, the English musical press – specialized journals devoted to the subject, as well as music columns within general magazines and newspapers. For the scholar, the appeal of this material lies in its immediacy and detail, in the possible revelation of a fact or opinion not recorded elsewhere. At the same time, the sheer number and bulk of sources to be consulted is oppressive; their varying quality and their diffuseness, anonymity, and potential unreliability all defy scholarly use. Taking this challenge seriously is essential, however, since casual or impulsive searching is unlikely to produce a new synthesis of cultural ideas or an informed view of music in a complex period.1 Twenty-one years ago Leanne Langley published this powerful statement on the musicological treatment of the nineteenth-century English music press, but such scholarly focus on the same subject in Ireland has to this point not received similar attention. Primary source materials are notoriously limited for research into the musical life of nineteenth-century Ireland, and this imposes a dependence on newspapers for information. Despite this, no comprehensive examination has been conducted into the musical identities of these newspapers, the bias which influenced their output, or the manner in which they could or should be utilised for musicological research. Newspapers are generally used as ‘calendars, as windows or mirrors of society […] to extract at random data to corroborate evidence from some other source’.2 Three primarily newspaper-based calendars of musical activity have been compiled to this point in Ireland: Brian Boydell’s A Dublin Musical Calendar 1700–1760 (1988) and the theses volumes of Derek Collins, ‘Chronology of Concerts 1792 to 1814’ (2001), and Susan O’Regan, ‘Calendar of Cork Concerts 18 Dec 1754–1 Jan 1841’ (2008).3 However, newspapers are not just calendars, but are complex, biased sources which must be used with caution. While these calendars state caveats regarding the biased 1 Leanne Langley, ‘The Musical Press in Nineteenth-Century England’, Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association, 46.3 (1990), p. 583 2 Rosamond McGuinness, ‘How to Read a Newspaper’, Revue de Musicologie, 84e.2e (1998), p. 290 3 Brian Boydell, A Dublin Musical Calendar 1700–1760 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1988); Derek Collins, ‘Concert Life in Dublin In The Age Of Revolution’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Queen’s University of Belfast, 2001), II; Susan O’Regan, ‘Public Concerts in the Musical Life of Cork 1754– 1840’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, CIT Cork School of Music, 2008), II 1 nature of newspapers, no attempt has been made to ascertain the style and focus of these newspapers, to quantify the effect of bias, or to set the parameters within which their output should be utilised because of these factors. Despite the title of his article ‘The Musical Press in Nineteenth-century Ireland’ (2007), Michael Murphy specifically avoided an attempt at presenting ‘a systematic guide to [such] sources’, choosing instead to focus on the ‘music criticism’ of a select number of historical moments and topics throughout the century.4 It is not, therefore, intended as a definitive guide to newspapers during the period and should not be used as such. Contrastingly, as can be seen from the opening quotation, the use of newspapers for musicological research in London has long been investigated, especially through the research of Rosamond McGuinness and Simon McVeigh. In 1977 Rosamond McGuinness began to compile the Register of Musical Data in London Newspapers, 1660–1800 and it was her article ‘How to Read