{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.037321063394683024, 'fraction_numerical': 0.007157464212678937, 'mean_word_length': 5.212698412698413, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Sarah Collins, ed., Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). xiii + 254 pp. £75.00.

Music and Victorian Liberalism examines the role of music in nineteenth-century British liberalism, showing how music served as a vehicle for teaching, promoting and cultivating liberal ideals as well as a means for social control. Music, in many ways, offered a meaningful way to put liberal ideals into practice through education (including Tonic Sol-Fa), public concerts, print culture and so on. While Tonic-Sol Fa and aspects of education in Britain have been addressed in scholarship, liberalism and music has been largely unexplored until the past decade. As the first book-length study of this topic, these essays demonstrate how ‘music and its associated discourses helped to perform this struggle between liberal ideas and the realities of social living by serving variously as an avenue for selfcultivation, a technology of liberal power brokers, a mediator of social relations, and a tool for actualising a liberal mode of life’ (p. 12). This well-conceived collection of essays edited by Sarah Collins, which grew out of a symposium in London and a panel at an American Musicological Society meeting, consider Victorian liberalism broadly. Eleven chapters – including an introductory chapter on ‘Aesthetic Liberalism’ by Collins and an Afterword by Peter Mandler – cover a range of aspects of music within Victorian liberalism. The nine central essays are grouped into three sections, ‘Cultivation and/as Control’, ‘Dissent, Individualism and Agency’ and ‘Character and Emotion’, that aptly highlight significant intersections of music and liberalism. All chapters explore, to some degree, the tensions between ‘older, skeptical readings of liberal practices of self-rule’ and ‘the recent turn toward a more affirmative view of noncoercive practices that preserve individual agency’ (p. 5).