The ‘idea of absolute music’ proposed by Carl Dahlhaus has encouraged a view of German Romantic music aesthetics as preoccupied with instrumental music, and more interested in lofty metaphysics than emotion. Yet writers such as Novalis and Hoffmann saw the ‘Absolute’ precisely in emotional terms, and argued that its presentation was the task of a new, socially accessible genre of national opera. This would draw its subjects from the popular mythological and ‘romantic’ realm of fairy tale and fantasy, while ‘pure’ music – instrumental and church genres – was imagined in the sensational contemporary terms of the gothic. When instrumental genres were eventually revaluated above opera, it was because they were held to embody another popular trait valued by Hoffmann – humour. Strongly promoted by German critics in the 1830s, humour and the ‘humoristic’ posited the exploitation of emotional contrast as the highest aim of instrumental music after Beethoven.

The final chapter summarizes the significance of the findings presented in the book and indicates future directions of research. Far from being an obscure aspect of the Neapolitan musical milieu, instrumental music formed a vital element in the artistic culture of the capital. It was used as a tool to display power in the rapid shifting of regimes occurred at the turn of the eighteenth century, and became the expression of the social and professional opportunities open to musicians. The circulation of music and musicians attested the fertile exchanges with other European centers and put Neapolitan music culture along the main political and economic routes. The cultivation of instrumental music in Naples was not interrupted with the creation of an independent kingdom in 1734. If King Charles of Bourbon gave to the opera a new venue with the construction of the San Carlo theater, instrumental music was still performed in the private salons of the aristocracy. The importance of these findings lies in their contribution in delineating neglected paths of research, pointing at common mechanisms of formation, practice, and patronage of instrumental music. Yet aspects such as concert life and venues, and the development of the concerto in Naples with its specific mechanisms of promotion, remain largely unexplored areas.

This chapter considers the work of a series of twentieth-century Welsh composers, including Daniel Jones, Grace Williams, William Mathias, Alun Hoddinott, Karl Jenkins and Rhian Samuel. It draws on their compositions and their writings about music to interrogate the question of whether musical qualities or characteristics that might be identified as distinctively Welsh can be discerned in their output. It explores the influence of Welsh landscapes, history and concepts, such as the notion of hiraeth (longing), on the ways in which they have drawn on or sought to reflect their homeland in their compositions. It reveals that while many of these composers were uneasy about identifying a distinctively Welsh school of composition, some level of engagement with their nationality or sense of Welshness was a common trait, albeit manifested in different ways. Several common themes emerge, including the importance of a sense of place and ideas about the past.

The Stone-Campbell Movement combined the evangelical revivals of the American frontier, the Enlightenment philosophy of John Locke, Thomas Reid, and Francis Bacon, and the democratic ideals of the United States. The “restoration plea” of early Stone-Campbell leaders emphasized four interrelated themes: restoration, unity, missions, and eschatology. Early leaders believed that the restoration of the teachings, practices, and terminology of the New Testament church would lead to visible unity in an increasingly divided Christianity, which in turn would aid global missions and usher in the millennium. They thought restoring the New Testament church would promote greater faithfulness to God and individual freedom of conscience, as Christians would be united around the teachings, practices, and terminology of Scripture alone, not those promoted by later teachers or found in creeds of human origin. Today the movement represents the ongoing desire in American Protestantism for a Bible-based, mission-oriented, non-denominational Christianity.

Developing the thesis elaborated in the latter part of Chapter 4, I contend that the demise of the ballad-singer was primarily due to a shift in mainstream taste and musical potential, as the masses developed both the appetite for, and access to, a wide range of more sophisticated music. By 1864, when this book ends, the ballad-singer was almost entirely absent from the debate around the Street Music Act championed by Michael Thomas Bass MP, indicating the irrelevance of the ballad-singer to the contemporary street scene. This argument, predicated upon technological change, literacy, economics, and class consciousness, is essentially optimistic, running counter to the rhetoric of decline and nostalgia found in nineteenth-century elite writing on the subject. I contend that the primarily musical transformation by which melodic song became subordinated within a new and totalising conception of music, was itself symptomatic of the great historical forces of reform, education, improvement, and enfranchisement that were at work in Victorian London.