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This book is the first scholarly biography of Madeleine Dring (1923–1977). Using diaries, letters, and extensive archival research, the narrative examines her career and explores her music. The story of Dring’s life begins with her formal training at the Royal College of Music, first in the Junior Department and then as a full-time student, a period that also covers her personal experience of events both leading up to and during the early years of World War II. Her career is traced in detail through radio and television shows and West End revues, all productions for which she wrote music, as well as her work as an actor. Dring’s most important contemporaries are briefly discussed in relation to her life, including her teachers at the Royal College of Music, professional connections such as Felicity Gray and Laurier Lister, and her husband Roger Lord. Her musical compositions are surveyed, from the earliest works she wrote as a student to the art songs she wrote in her last years, along with various popular numbers for revues and numerous piano pieces for beginning piano students as well as those suitable for the concert hall. Each chapter singles out one or more of these works for detailed description and analysis, with attention to the qualities that characterize her distinctive musical style.

In eighteenth-century England, “variety” became a prized aesthetic in musical culture. Not only was variety—of counterpoint, harmony, melody, and orchestration—expected for good composition, but it also manifested in cultural mediums such as songbook anthologies, pasticcio operas, and public concerts. I call this trend of producing music through the collection, assemblage, and juxtaposition of various smaller pieces “musical miscellany”; like a jigsaw puzzle, the urge to construct a whole out of smaller, different parts reflected a growing desire to appeal to a quickly diversifying England. This book explores the phenomenon of musical miscellany in early eighteenth-century England both in performance culture and as an aesthetic. Musical miscellany, in its many forms, juxtaposed foreign and homegrown musical practices and styles in order to stimulate discourse surrounding English musical culture during a time of cosmopolitan transformation as the eighteenth century unfolded.

Printed Musical Propaganda in Early Modern England exposes a relationship between music and propaganda that crossed generations and genres, revealing how consistently music, in theory and practice, was used as propaganda in a variety of printed genres that included or discussed music from the English Civil Wars through the reign of William and Mary. These bawdy broadside ballads, pamphlets paid for by Parliament, sermons advertising the Church of England’s love of music, catch-all music collections, music treatises addressed to monarchs, and masque and opera texts, when connected in a contextual mosaic, reveal a new picture of not just individual propaganda pieces, but multi-work propaganda campaigns with contributions that cross social boundaries. Musicians, Royalists, Parliamentarians, government officials, propagandists, clergymen, academics, and music printers worked together setting musical traps to catch the hearts and minds of their audiences and readers. Printed Musical Propaganda proves that the influential power of music was not merely an academic matter for the early modern English, but rather a practical benefit that many sought to exploit for their own gain.