About The Harmonicon

The Harmonicon

The Harmonicon was an influential monthly journal of music published in London from 1823 to 1833. Together with The Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, which ran from 1818 to 1828, it was one of the first long-running music periodicals in Great Britain, and later reference works on the musical press have praised the admirable standard of musical journalism it set. At a time when Britain had concert societies, opera seasons and a growing trade in printed music but no established tradition of sustained music criticism, The Harmonicon attempted to give the art a serious monthly literature of its own.

The journal was founded by William Ayrton in collaboration with the printer William Clowes, who owned the publication. Ayrton edited it and wrote many of its articles himself. Its eleven annual volumes mixed biography, essays, translated foreign writing, reviews of newly published music, detailed reports of concerts and opera, and a separate supplement of complete pieces of music supplied to subscribers with each issue. Although it ceased in 1833, its run is still consulted as a record of British musical life in the 1820s and early 1830s.

Origins and foundation

The Harmonicon began in January 1823. Its founder, William Ayrton (1777–1858), was already a prominent figure in British musical life when he launched it, and the journal grew directly out of the positions he held and the reviewing he had already done. The printer William Clowes was his collaborator in the venture and the owner of the publication, an arrangement that joined an experienced musical editor to a printing house capable of producing both letterpress and music.

The timing mattered. London's musical institutions were expanding: the Philharmonic Society had been founded in 1813, the Royal Academy of Music was newly established in the early 1820s, and Italian opera at the King's Theatre drew fashionable attention. What was missing was a periodical that treated concerts, compositions and musical scholarship as subjects for regular, informed discussion rather than occasional newspaper notice. The Harmonicon set out to fill that gap, and its prefatory address in the first number announced the mixture of essays, criticism, biography and miscellanies, together with printed music, that defined it throughout its run.

William Ayrton, founder and editor

Ayrton was a composer, writer and impresario. He was one of the founders of the Philharmonic Society in 1813 and later one of its directors, and he served more than once as musical director of the King's Theatre. In that capacity he had the distinction of introducing Mozart's Don Giovanni to an English audience in 1817, after travelling to the Continent in 1816 to engage singers for the Italian opera, and he also brought forward other Mozart operas and singers such as Giuditta Pasta. Disputes within the King's Theatre company twice forced him out of its direction, and from the early 1820s he concentrated increasingly on writing.

His critical credentials were long-standing. He was honorary music and literary critic of the Morning Chronicle from 1813 to 1826, and he later wrote for The Examiner from 1837 to 1851, reviewing the Concerts of Ancient Music and the Philharmonic Society for that paper. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Society of Antiquaries, and one of the original members of the Athenæum Club. A contemporary dictionary of music judged that the writing and criticism of The Harmonicon were much in advance of anything that had previously appeared in England, a verdict that reflects how much of the journal's character came from its editor.

The shape of a typical issue

Although the length of individual numbers varied from about fourteen to thirty pages, the format and contents of The Harmonicon were fairly regular. A typical issue began with a biographical memoir, and in the first two volumes these memoirs were accompanied by finely crafted lithographs, usually of the artist discussed in the biographical article. There followed a mixture of feature articles, polemical correspondence and articles in translation from foreign publications, and the remainder of each number was devoted to reviews.

That regularity was part of the journal's appeal and its usefulness. A subscriber knew the pattern: a life to begin with, essays and correspondence to argue over, and then a substantial body of reviewing that recorded what had been published and performed. Modern indexing of the journal by the Répertoire international de la presse musicale (RIPM) has preserved that structure in detail, which is one reason The Harmonicon remains workable evidence for historians of performance and publishing rather than merely a title in a catalogue.

Biography and feature articles

The biographical sketches of important musical figures were one of the journal's stated components from the start, covering composers and performers of the present as well as the past. Around them, the feature articles ranged widely. They included accounts of the music of different countries and cultures, essays on music theory, articles on acoustics and the physics of sound, discussions of music competitions, and reports on a wide variety of musical instruments and their manufacture.

Distinctly British subjects received frequent treatment. The journal covered the meetings of Welsh bards and minstrels — the eisteddfodau — the provincial music festivals that were a major feature of British musical life, and the regulations, reforms and student concerts of the Royal Academy of Music. In treating festivals, competitions and teaching institutions alongside theory and instrument-making, The Harmonicon presented music as a national activity with a working infrastructure, not only as a succession of London performances.

Writing from abroad

A significant part of each issue came from beyond Britain. Many articles were translations from contemporary French, Italian and German publications, including Fétis's Revue musicale and the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. This mattered in a period when British readers had limited access to Continental musical debate: The Harmonicon acted as a conduit through which arguments about composers, performance and musical scholarship circulating in Paris, Leipzig and elsewhere reached London.

The same outward-looking habit shaped its news gathering. The regular "foreign musical report" was extensive, concentrating not only on major cities in Italy, Germany, France and Austria but also on smaller musical centres, with the report from Paris always comprehensive. Towards the end of the run there were frequent accounts of musical events in New York and other American cities as well. The reports, partly collated from foreign journals, covered theatrical productions, concert life, the itineraries of artists and impresarios, theatrical management and finances, new publications, newly invented instruments, and performances by child prodigies.

Reviews of published music

By far the journal's largest regular component was the "Review of music" that began the review portion of every issue. It dealt with published music and concentrated on works for voice, pianoforte, organ, guitar, harp and flute, as well as on method books and instruction manuals for those instruments. Reviews in this section frequently contained brief explanatory musical examples, so that a reader could see, and not only read about, the passages under discussion.

This reviewing served a practical market. Amateur music-making in the home depended on a constant supply of songs, piano pieces and arrangements, and teachers depended on method books. By assessing that output month by month, The Harmonicon spoke to performers and purchasers as well as to concert-goers, and its pages now form a guide to what the British music trade was actually issuing in the 1820s.

Concerts, opera and London musical life

During the concert season each issue provided detailed notices of the Philharmonic Society and the Concerts of Ancient Music, along with programme listings. Benefit concerts and the activities of a number of societies, associations and concert series were also covered, among the most prominent being the Madrigal Society, the Vocal Society, the Festival of the Sons of the Clergy, the British Concerts and the City Amateur Concerts.

Opera and theatre music were handled under the monthly rubric "the drama", which discussed lyric productions at the major theatres — Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the King's Theatre, the English Opera House and the Haymarket. The Oratorios, a series held at Covent Garden that presented mixed-genre concerts as well as oratorios, were also frequently reviewed. George Hogarth, the Scottish journalist and music writer, was a regular contributor to the journal, and the reviewing as a whole drew on writers close to the institutions they described: Ayrton himself had directed at the King's Theatre and helped to found the Philharmonic, the two worlds the journal reported most closely.

The music supplement

With each issue, subscribers received an independent music supplement consisting of six or seven complete pieces, frequently for voice, pianoforte, organ or harp. One piece in each supplement was by a contemporary "eminent composer", and the remainder were selected from the works of established masters. Many selections were written specifically for The Harmonicon, and some were also reviewed in the journal itself; several compositions in the supplements were by women composers.

The supplement changed what a subscription bought. Readers did not simply learn about music; they received a monthly instalment of music to play and sing, amounting over eleven years to a substantial domestic library. When the journal was reprinted in the twentieth century, each year's material was divided into two parts for exactly this reason: the texts in one part, and the music supplements — originally sent out with the monthly issues — in the other.

Later issues and the end in 1833

An announcement at the end of the fifth volume, in 1827, promised a "new and improved series", lighter and more popular in character. In the event, apart from reducing the size of the foreign musical report, the contents of the later issues did not alter significantly. The one new regular addition was a monthly feature of "extracts from the diary of a dilettante", a compilation of diverse thoughts, quotations and anecdotes on contemporary musical topics.

Attribution in the journal is a known difficulty: very few contributions were signed. Three pseudonyms recur sporadically — "Clio", "Fayolle" and "Veritas" — and these have not been identified, while sets of asterisks were occasionally used as a special signature. The Harmonicon ceased publication in 1833 after eleven volumes. Ayrton went on to edit The Sacred Minstrelsy in 1834 and the Musical Library from 1834 onwards, an affordable collection of vocal and instrumental music extending to eight volumes, carrying the supplement idea of his journal into a new form.

Legacy

The Harmonicon is remembered as one of the two first long-running music periodicals in Britain, and the standard it set — biography, scholarship, translated debate, systematic reviewing of both publications and performances, and printed music for subscribers — became the template against which later British music journals were measured. Because its concert notices, programme listings and foreign reports were regular rather than occasional, historians use it to reconstruct seasons, repertoires and careers in a decade that would otherwise be documented mainly by scattered newspaper notices.

The complete run survives in library holdings and in digital form through the HathiTrust archive, and the RIPM's indexed edition, introduced by Diana Snigurowicz, made its contents systematically searchable for scholars. A journal that was written largely by one busy editor, working with a printer-owner, thus ended up as one of the fullest surviving records of how Britain listened to, argued about and bought music in the 1820s.