H-Music: Reviews

Ryan Shaffer. Music, Youth and International Links in Post‐War British Fascism: The Transformation of Extremism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 2017. x + 351pp. £89.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-319-59667-9.

The cultural history of interwar forms of fascism in Britain have been extensively scrutinized by the likes of Richard Thurlow, Thomas Linehan and Julie Gottlieb in recent years, while the equally marginalized groups that grew after the Second World War have been far less well studied. In a welcome revision to this trend, Ryan Shaffer's Music, Youth and International Links in Post‐War British Fascism o

Elizabeth L. Wollman. A Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. 292 pp. $94.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-47251-338-0; $29.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-47251-325-0.

Given the number of books written about musical theatre in the last few decades, from overviews to studies of one specific show, at first it may seem there is no need for yet another book on American musical theatre. Indeed, in the introduction to her new book, Elizabeth Wollman acknowledges that her monograph serves as a “companion” (as its very title implies), meant to “complement, not compete with, the

Paul Watt, Derek B. Scott and Patrick Spedding, eds. Cheap Print and Popular Song in the Nineteenth Century: A Cultural History of the Songster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xiv + 250 pp. £75 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-15991-4.

The origins of this essay collection lie in the publication of Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period, a four-volume work that made more widely available a large repository of popular songbooks, often known as 'songsters', that had originally been published in the 1830s and 1840s, many of which had associations with the song-and-supper clubs of late regency

Joanna Bullivant. Alan Bush, Modern Music, and the Cold War: The Cultural Left in Britain and the Communist Bloc. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 287 pp. £75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-03336-8.

The Winter Journey stands chronologically and thematically at the centre of Joanna Bullivant's book. It was written at a moment in history when Bush hoped that after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Britain and the United States might still work with the Soviet Union to build international peace. In Britain itself, under a newly elected Labour government, the formation of bodies such as the Arts

Shawn VanCour. Making Radio: Early Radio Production and the Rise of Modern Sound Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. ix + 240 pp. $74.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19049-711-8.

Radio studies are having somewhat of a resurgence in printed scholarship. From case studies of early radio dramas to the role of podcasting in modern life, most recent examinations of radio examine specific works and the cultural role that radio (in its various forms) plays in American life in the twentieth century. But, for the most part, existing published studies of early radio do not focus on the technical

Phyllis Weliver. Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon: Music, Literature, Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xviii + 305 pp. £75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-18480-0.

Phyllis Weliver is a truly interdisciplinary scholar, who has deftly brought together musicology and literary studies, as well as other disciplines, to provide fascinating new understandings of Victorian society and culture. Her earlier publications include Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–1900 (Aldershot, 2000) and The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840–1910: Class, Culture and Nation

Eric Saylor. English Pastoral Music: From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900–1955. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. xi + 245 pp. $45.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-252-04109-9.

For many, the phrase “English pastoralism” evokes a very particular sound world. Hushed, muted strings undulate in lightly dissonant, modally inflected pan-diatonicism. An oboe or an English horn solo emerges in something like, but not quite, a folk song. We imagine rolling, verdant hills over which one would happily tramp clad in tweed. It is so unbearably, stereotypically English as to seem a parody of itself. The sound is

Julia Sneeringer. Rock’n’Roll in Germany: Hamburg From Burlesque to the Beatles, 1956–69. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. xi + 280 pp. £85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-35003-438-9.

For historians and other experts working on popular culture, the history of pop culture in Germany seems to be a bad joke. In the 1960s, however, a small Anglophile island in Germany called Hamburg had already begun to encourage music and lifestyle journalists to visit a country mainly known for its classical music, an art form primarily linked at the time to the tastes of the Western upper classes. The British magazine

Jacomien Prins and Maude Vanhaelen, eds. Sing Aloud Harmonious Spheres: Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony. London: Routledge, 2018. xii + 294 pp. £110.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-13806-346-4.

The music of the spheres, first described by Plato, had an enormous influence on the history of science, arts, literature, and philosophy. Leo Spitzer devoted his magisterial "Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony" (1944) to this exalted theme, which has been addressed by numerous articles and chapters but no single collection of essays—until this volume. Of the thirteen essays, five treat