Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Grande, James

Titel

London Songs, Glamorgan Hymns: Iolo Morganwg and the Music of Dissent

Ist Teil von

• Studies in romanticism, 2019-12, Vol.58 (4), p.481-503

Ort / Verlag

Boston: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• While the Church of England banned congregational hymn-singing-as opposed to the chanting of psalms or the choral performance of hymns and sacred music-until 1820, dissenters and Methodists celebrated singing as an affective expression of faith and community.4 By the late eighteenth century, congregational singing had assumed an important role for the many and various Protestant groups united by little more than their shared refusal to conform to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. " Hymn-singing played a prominent role within the "psychopathology of enthusiasm," drawing believers together in a heightened emotional state: a symptom-their detractors claimed-of disturbed minds and bodies.5 It was not only their Anglican critics, however, who agonized over the status of music in dissenting culture. "9 In contrast to earlier, more hostile accounts-most notoriously E. P. Thompson's vivid descriptions of the "Chiliasm of despair," the "psychic processes of counter-revolution," and "the box-like, blackening chapels . . . like great traps for the human psyche"10-Anderson emphasizes the "potential pleasures of the psychological release from the burdens of cognitive isolation that are part of these hymns. Fugitive Songs I0İ0 Morganwg is a figure who exemplifies many aspects of the broad history of music and dissent outlined above, but also complicates it in revealing ways, from his perspective as a figure marginalized even within the community of London Welsh, to his status as a trailblazer of Welsh Unitarianism whose class status differed markedly from more polite, middleclass, and metropolitan forms of Unitarianism.