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Abstract
After centuries in which music history has been routinely parcelled according to genre and/or national schools, the idea of “urban music,” of music in and of the city, has suddenly become a compelling category. The sense of escape, of liberation from previous, constraining terms of reference, whether from ideologies of “the music itself,” or from contentious divisions between “popular” and “serious,” or from vague sounding-articulations of the nation-state, might seem immediately obvious. Also beckoning are renewed conceptions of what could broadly be called “music and nature”: the manner in which music can define itself vis-à-vis the material world in which it exists. However, amid such celebrations it may occasionally be salutary to pause for reflection. What constraints are brought into being by the embrace of this new category of “the urban”? In particular, does the presence of a definable material space—as opposed, say, to the imagined community of the nation-state—have its own challenges and commitments? The present reflection addresses these issues with reference to a particular time and space: the case of London at a moment (the 1830s) when it liked to consider itself the pre-eminent “world city.”
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