Goldsmiths - University of London

Dr Leanne Langley BMus, PhD

Leanne Langley holds a BMus in music theory and composition (summa cum laude, Baylor University, Waco, Texas) and a PhD in music history and literature (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill).  While teaching in the London Programme of the University of Notre Dame in the mid-1980s, she began a parallel career in the Grove office of Macmillan Publishers, latterly as Senior Consulting Editor of the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (4 vols., 1992). She has served as Reviews Editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and external Advisory Editor for New Grove 2; taught modules in 18th- and 19th-century music and culture, including gender, for Southampton and Oxford Brookes universities; and held research or travel awards from the British Academy, the AHRB, the RMA, the Music & Letters Trust, the American Association of University Women and the American Musicological Society.

Leanne joined Goldsmiths in 1999 as a member of the AHRB-funded project ‘The Transformation of London Concert Life, 1880-1914’. She was appointed Visiting Fellow in October 2002. With Simon McVeigh and David Wright (Royal College of Music), she currently co-convenes ‘Music in Britain: A Social History Seminar’ at the Institute of Historical Research, London. She is also active as a freelance historical consultant and writing skills trainer for music postgraduates.

Academic qualifications

BMus, PhD

Research interests

Leanne’s research encompasses the development of British markets for music, 1750-1950, and their cultural meaning. She has published studies of English music critics and criticism, music printers and publishers, periodicals, music dictionaries, performers, common-reading and -listening audiences, the early Proms, British Berlioz reception, and Schubert performance history, besides giving papers on music’s intersections with urban identity, the entertainment industry, London town planning and transport, education, cultural politics and fine art.  Her co-edited essay collection with Christina Bashford, Music and British Culture, 1785-1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich (Oxford University Press, 2000), has been influential in the repositioning of 19th-century British studies in music academe.  She is now completing a book with Simon McVeigh on London concert life, 1880-1914, for Cambridge University Press.  Other projects include cross-disciplinary work on the early Philharmonic Society of London and on music in the career of John Singer Sargent.

Selected publications

Books
The English Musical Journal in the Early Nineteenth Century (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1983; Ann Arbor and London: University Microfilms International/ProQuest Dissertations, no. 8406923, 1984)

Music and British Culture, 1785-1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich, co-edited with Christina Bashford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Journal articles, book chapters
'Italian Opera and the English Press, 1836-56', Periodica Musica 6 (1988), 3-10

'The Life and Death of The Harmonicon: An Analysis', Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle 22 (1989), 137-63

'The Musical Press in Nineteenth-Century England', Music Library Association Notes 46 (1990), 583-92

'Music and Victorian England: A Tale of Two Myths', Revista de musicología 16 (1993), 1650-56

'Music', in Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, ed. J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 99-126

‘Sainsbury’s Dictionary,  the Royal Academy of Music, and the Rhetoric of Patriotism’, in Music and British Culture, 1785-1914, ed. Bashford and Langley (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 65-97

‘Roots of a Tradition: The First Dictionary of Music and Musicians’, in George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture, ed. Michael Musgrave (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 168-215

‘Agency and Change: Berlioz in Britain, 1870-1920’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association  132 (2007), 306-48

‘Building an Orchestra, Creating an Audience: Robert Newman and the Queen’s Hall Promenade Concerts, 1895-1926’, in The Proms: A New History, ed. Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 32-73

‘Reception and Beyond: New Thoughts on Schubert in 19th-Century England', The Schubertian no. 58 (January 2008), 8-16

‘Novello’s “Neue Zeitschrift”: 1883, Francis Hueffer and The Musical Review’, Brio 45 no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2008), 15-27   

Reviews in Times Literary Supplement, Musical Times, Music & Letters, Albion, Victorian Studies

Dictionary entries in Grove/Norton Handbook of Music Printing and Publishing, New Grove Dictionary of Opera,  Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776-1832,  New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 2nd edn, Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart 2nd edn,   Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism

For a full publications list, including some downloads and a section on conference papers – e.g. on Edward Holmes, Charles Burney, 19th-century British music scholarship, the Queen’s Hall (Langham Place), Henry Wood, late 19th-century regional concert networks, approaches to music historiography, music in John Nash’s Regent Street, Edgar Speyer and the Proms of 1902-14, and J. S. Sargent’s music portraiture: see http://www.leannelangley.co.uk.