ABSTRACT
Two things in particular are striking about Victorian historiographic practice: its opportunistic (ab)use of 'history' for an agenda of the present, and its awareness of the possibilities for reading discursive changes as evidence of cultural process. For the early nineteenth-century middle-class reformers the offensive taint of secularity was figured as an attribute of either lower- or upper-class musical culture. Labelling a hymn-tune style ornamental in early Victorian England at the same time marked it as classed and gendered, in a twofold inscription that drew hymn-tune criticism into the complex process of middle-class self-definition. William Crotch's basic argument, then, was this: the rebuke of present-day (church) music's secularisation/decay was its ornamentalness. The chapter refers to the dandy, a figure of no small importance to Victorian tune criticism. The 'problem' of the 'Dandy-Sublime' was its collusion with an ethics of performance as display, and part of that dilemma can be ascribed to the prevalence of improvisation in early nineteenth-century hymning.
