Content area

Abstract

The aims of the Strand Musical Magazine were largely practical in nature: articles and advertisements provided information about concerts, festivals, and other events on the Victorian music calendar. Yet, as this essay argues, it also (perhaps unwittingly) participated in key nineteenth-century aesthetic and scientific debates about music's ties to the human body. In several of the short stories published in the Strand Musical Magazine, characters cry, throb, convulse, quiver, and sweat while playing or hearing music. These corporeal events correspond with emerging acoustical and physiological science that understood music in terms of sound waves and bodily vibrations. The Strand Musical Magazine conceived of music not as an intangible, transcendent phenomenon but as a material force rooted in the science of sound.

Details

Title
"Vibrating through all its breadth": Musical Fiction and Materialist Aesthetics in the Strand Musical Magazine
Publication title
Volume
51
Issue
1
Pages
1-17
Publication year
2018
Publication date
Spring 2018
Publisher
Research Society for Victorian Periodicals
Place of publication
Baltimore
Country of publication
Canada
Publication subject
ISSN
07094698
e-ISSN
1712526X
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
Document type
Journal Article
ProQuest document ID
2159263905
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/vibrating-through-all-breadth-musical-fiction/docview/2159263905/se-2?accountid=208611
Copyright
Copyright Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Spring 2018
Last updated
2023-12-05
Database
2 databases
  • ProQuest One Academic
  • ProQuest One Academic