Exhibitions Music and the British Empire

International exhibitions were among the most significant cultural phenomena of the late nineteenth century. These vast events aimed to illustrate through displays of physical objects the full spectrum of the world's achievements from industry and manufacturing to art and design. But exhibitions were not just visual spaces. Music was ever present as a fundamental part of these events' sonic landscape and integral to the visitor experience.<br/><br/>This book explores music at international exhibitions held in Australia India and the United Kingdom during the 1880s. At these exhibitions music was codified ordered and all-round 'exhibited' in manifold ways. Displays of physical instruments from the past and present were accompanied by performances intended to educate or to entertain while music was heard at exhibitors' stands in concert halls and in the pleasure gardens that surrounded the exhibition buildings. Music was depicted as a symbol of human artistic achievement or employed for commercial ends. At times it was presented in nationalist terms at others as a marker of universalism. This book argues by interrogating the multiple ways that music was used experienced and represented that exhibitions can demonstrate in microcosm many of the broader musical traditions purposes arguments and anxieties of the day. Its nine chapters focus on sociocultural themes covering issues of race class public education economics and entertainment in the context of music tracing these through the networks of communication that existed within the British Empire at the time.