ABSTRACT
The status of popular music changed with the development of the music market. Carl Dahlhaus has argued that nineteenth-century popular music is lowbrow, and better described as 'trivial music': 'Eighteenth-century divertimentos were also designed to entertain, but no one would wish to place them alongside a nineteenth-century Viennese coffeehouse pièce'. In 1860, a writer in Macmillan's Magazine identifies a 'higher class of music', referring to music of the Austro-German tradition, at that time beginning to be labelled 'classical music'. Raymond Williams commended music hall for presenting areas of experience that other genres neglected or despised. The popular style of music developed its own novel musical features. The subject position addressed in music-hall entertainment is that of the upper-working-class or lower-middle-class male. The editor of the Musical Times commented, 'it is surprising how those people will shout for war who have no intention of fighting themselves'.
