Cambridge Scholars Publishing The Canterbury Catch Club 1826: Music in the Frame

In 1825, an enterprising Canterbury newsagent by the name of Henry Ward raised a subscription to commission a lasting tribute to his beloved musical society. The result was a fine lithograph showing 100 gentlemen in assured poses, carefully placed in surroundings eloquently freighted with classical allusion, cultural literacy, deep-rooted patriotism, and strictly masculine politics. That image is the subject of this book. With insights gleaned from a unique collection of music, papers, and artefacts in the archives of the city and the cathedral, this study considers not only the accomplished performance of bourgeois status which is clearly visible in the print, but other characteristics of the Club which are either less pictorially privileged or entirely omitted. Deploying iconographical, cultural, and musicological analysis, the book discusses this curiously contradictory slice of British social history in which the respectable apparently coexisted happily with the libertine. What emerges is an unusually clear view of the production, performance and consumption of music in a provincial city at a fascinating time: a period when cultural activity was a strategic assertion of socio-political identity. Review "Taking as his focal point an 1826 print of the Canterbury Catch Club members at a club meeting, Chris Price has produced an exhaustively researched and documented account of the club's history that extends far beyond its own parameters. This is an exceptionally important addition to the bibliography of English musical and social history in the 19th century." Brian Robins - author of Catch and Glee Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (2006) "Chris Price's 'microhistory' of the Canterbury Catch Club in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is a tour de force. His skill and persistence in milking detail from the club's rich archive (and from the lithographic representation of its members that kick-started the study) has enabled him to add significantly to the scarce literature on the relationship between English music-making and English society two hundred years ago, and to the less scarce literature on club life, conviviality, class and masculinity in the same era. The book explores issues that range from membership and repertoires to social meanings, all the time relating them to the broader cultural and social history of the period. It does this in a text written with elegance, clarity and humour. It's a fine achievement and it deserves a wide readership." Professor Vic Gatrell - Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge "I have been privileged to watch this book in the making - and what a musical making it has been. Chris Price is perfectly placed to produce this brilliantly lit snapshot of bygone musical life." David Owen Norris - Pianist, Composer, and Broadcaster "Price's research offers unique insight into a very English institution, its social make-up, its conviviality, its occasionally subversive character, and, not least, its repertoire. This is now the most comprehensive study of its kind and will prove of immense value to musicologists and cultural historians." Derek B. Scott, author of The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour and Sounds of the Metropolis. "This fascinating book offers a fine example of the integration of fine-grained archival research with a broader contextualisation of musical activity in society. Price's book is an object lesson in fine academic writing - accurate and lucid, but also engaging and enthralling." Dr George Kennaway - University of Leeds --Various About the Author Chris Price is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Music and Performing Arts at Canterbury Christ Church University and a Tenor Lay Clerk in the choir of Canterbury Cathedral. His academic interests centre upon the archive bequeathed to the city in 1905 by the Canterbury Catch Club comprising music, other writt