The icon of the machine in early nineteenth-century Britain was subject to a number of contemporary critiques. Thomas Carlyle cautions in Spirit of the Times (1829): “not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also.”  This kind of reactionary criticism gave rise to caricatures by William Heath and Thomas McLean (et al.) about “the march of intellect” that was upending society and ending what Carlyle cherished as “the old natural methods.”

Pedagogy and the life of the mind were centrally implicated within this critique (“we have machines for education: Lancastrian machines; Hamiltonian machines; monitors, maps and emblems”), and this paper asks to what extent education in music composition was implicated also. In a broad sense, it interrogates the emerging science of phrenology and its relation to materialism and music. A number of journal articles appeared on the topic of music and phrenology, bolstered by the establishment, in 1823, of the London Phrenological Society, and, in 1838, its sister organization, the British Phrenological Association.  Major publications by figures such as George Combe (Essays on Phrenology [1819]; Elements of Phrenology [1824]; Constitution of Man [1828]) and Robert Chambers (Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation [1844]) place the creative imagination, music and the “natural” life of the mind into a fraught discourse of music and materialism.

The cost of a material mind was a perceived loss of contact with the “gifts of nature … the dynamical nature of man … the mystic depths of man’s soul” (Carlyle), but reactionary criticism did not have the last word. The concept of machine was also invested with magical potential to transform matter, to generate energy, and can be understood as a new ideal type of mechanism, one associated with “the metamorphoses of the fantastic” (Tresch 2012).  With particular reference to amateur musicians and the popular appeal of phrenological ‘exercise,’ and of devices such as Johann Bernhard Logier’s ‘chiroplast,’ I shall examine these conflicting ideals and anxieties over mechanism, as paradigm and rallying cry, in the context of music pedagogy during the second quarter of the century.

David Trippett is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Bristol. After completing his Ph.D. at Harvard, he became a Research Fellow in Class I at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and was later appointed University Lecturer for several years at the University of Cambridge. He moved to Bristol in 2013.

Free (a Valente Lecture)