ABSTRACT
English music criticism remained largely defensive towards national music. Yet there were a few radical, iconoclastic voices among the watchmen who were prepared to challenge orthodoxy and posit a different Renaissance from the one dominated by the London academies and the ancient universities. The English Musical Renaissance was largely achieved without the support of either the royal court or the political class, by whom 'neither music nor musicians were taken seriously'. The national press experienced an unprecedented transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century. The press in 1914 remained the most important medium for the transmission of ideas just as it had been in 1850. The period 1850–1914 marked the high noon of music journalism in the press. In this period a unique series of developments came together in the English Musical Renaissance, shifts which dimensionally increased the impact of music critics and the importance of music criticism.
