The foregoing chapters have charted in chronological sequence the debate in England during the nineteenth century and immediately after about the development of music. This chapter examines themes and issues that permeated or emerged during that debate, taking into account the contributions of recent scholarship.

Music in the ‘Age of Materialism’

Behind the arguments that raged about the music of Wagner and about programme music lay a deeper concern about the advance of materialism. Contemporaries often described the nineteenth century disparagingly as the ‘Age of Materialism’. The word ‘materialism’ had a number of connotations, the most obvious being a scale of values in which money and possessions ranked highest. Materialism in this sense, which rendered people indifferent to the claims of ‘higher things’, was a moral choice and a constant target of censure by advocates of music. But materialism was also a philosophical doctrine – one with a very long pedigree, but in its nineteenth-century form traceable to the philosophy of Descartes and the mechanics of Newton. The issue bequeathed by Descartes was that of the relationship of mind and matter: were they distinct, in which case how could they interact? Or was one in some way reducible to the other? It is easy to see that if music – frequently referred to as the ‘divine art’ – was to lay claim to spiritual status, then it had an investment in the primacy, or at least the equal reality, of mind: materialism was inimical to it.

At first, the battle of music against materialism was conducted with weapons that were purely rhetorical and relied for their efficacy on appeals to moral or religious sentiment. For example, in 1847 Howard Glover, a composer who was also music critic of the Morning Post, claimed that music was not