The Domestic Music Market and Musical Circulation in Two Late-Georgian Binders’ Volumes from the North-East of England

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article introduces two late-Georgian binders’ volumes of printed vocal and keyboard sheet music held at Newcastle upon Tyne’s Literary and Philosophical Society. Both volumes display connections with the north-east of England, and, as we argue, were most likely compiled in the region in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the opening decades of the nineteenth. These volumes have not received scholarly attention, yet a close examination enables us to expand the scope of previous studies on musical circulation and the music trade, and to contribute new insights to the emerging national picture. They shed light on patterns of the acquisition, circulation, and consumption of music alongside mapping the nexus of print centres—in this case, London, Edinburgh, and Newcastle—on which consumers of domestic sheet music in the north-east of England might have drawn to access the latest musical materials. We begin by examining the physical, bibliographical, and musical features of the volumes to explore questions of dating, ownership, and their connections with the north-east of England, and go on to consider the routes through which the music they contain might have been obtained by music consumers in the region. Finally, we explore the contents of these volumes, setting them against the national picture of domestic music consumption, and consider their contents from the perspective of gendered modes of consumption, local politics and identity, and national polite music culture. In so doing, we elucidate how two domestic musicians in the north-east of England engaged with local and national musical culture in the composition of their personal music books and the fashioning of their social and musical identities.