Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 77-06(E), Section: A.

Adviser: James Hepokoski.

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Late-Victorian London witnessed an unprecedented change in the culture of British musical education that was influenced by class, race, and sociologies of imperial surveillance. From the time of the introduction of elite models of music pedagogy into South Kensington in the 1880s with the foundation of the Royal College of Music (and its later role in the creation of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music), a panopticon-like systematization of musical examinations emerged as a means of hegemonic graded and controlled prestige. Meanwhile, the histories of musical education in nineteenth-century Britain that emerged from the South Kensington circle often deliberately overwrote the history of working-class and evangelizing systems of musical teaching---specifically, the history of singing schools based on the method of tonic sol-fa notation, which had greater success in numbers throughout lower-class Britain and the British colonies than the ABRSM. Through case studies of the exportation of contrasting systems of music education in South Africa and Canada, I argue that music education reached a "crisis of legitimation" in the 1890s, under the banner of imperial accreditation, which imposed ideologies of identity and meaning onto methods of local and imperial music-making. A poignant culmination of this movement is the link between missionary singing schools, formalized musical examinations, the complex idealization of the Victorian child, and the musical disciplining of model British soldiers leading up to the first Boer War.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the issues of examining culture in Victorian society. Chapter 2 then examines the tonic sol-fa movement of working-class singing as a parallel movement to elite educational institutions. Chapter 3 departs to the British Empire, tracing the first examiner for the ABRSM, Franklin Taylor, and his journey in 1894 to South Africa, contemporaneous to the travels to Europe of black tonic sol-fa composer John Knox Bokwe. Chapter 4 adopts the structure of an examination to probe several strands of the public examination of music in 1890s Britain. Finally, Chapter 5 delves into working-class London schools to look at the rise of musical drills in the militarized physical training of a new musical generation at the turn of the century.