Charles Edward McGuire. Music and Victorian Philanthropy: The Tonic Sol-fa Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780521449687. Price: US$93.00/£53.00

Charles McGuire has written an incredibly thorough and meticulously researched book on the Tonic Sol-Fa Movement to enrich our understanding of Victorian musical culture. Music and Victorian Philanthropy, as the preface makes clear, is neither a history of Tonic-Sol Fa nor a study of Tonic-Sol Fa as a pedagogical method (xvi); instead, McGuire focuses on the proponents of Tonic-Sol Fa, John and Spencer Curwen, and the various philanthropies they supported through their musical system. McGuire thus spends a chapter each on these various causes: temperance, missionary work, and the suffrage movement. His appendix divulges the depth of primary research he conducted in order to find many of his resources. Not only are the Curwens’ letters and business documents now missing, but the two main periodicals of the nineteenth century which they published to promote Tonic Sol-Fa, the Reporter (1853- 1888) and the Musical Herald (1889-1920), have only incomplete coverage scattered across four major libraries, including the British Library and the New York Public Library, and a microfilm series. Still, McGuire is able to mine the existing issues for much of his evidence about John and Spencer Curwen’s differing and evolving philanthropic approaches. John Curwen, a Congregational minister, established the Tonic Sol-fa Association in 1851and began publishing the Reporter, the first of several periodicals dedicated to the promotion of Tonic Sol-fa, in 1853. A system of sight-singing which would bring music to the masses, Tonic Sol-fa became, to John Curwen, a means by which his Dissenting principles of social reform were focused in order to solve social ills. Upon his death, his son Spencer Curwen took over the business. As a trained musician, Spencer Curwen used his influence to expand the reputation of Tonic Sol-fa beyond philanthropic institutions for the working classes into the middle-class realm of classical music, aligning the movement with major composers of the day and transcribing classical music into Tonic Sol-fa editions to rival staff-notation scores. Attempting to raise the working-class singers to this higher standard of music, his philanthropic approach differed from his father’s, a distinction that McGuire links to the changes in the larger world of social reform: “Thus Victorian charity moved from a paternalistic model based on volunteerism and self-improvement in John Curwen’s time to a collectivist model with greater attention to the root causes of poverty… in the age of Spencer Curwen” (42). The second chapter systematically analyzes the links between temperance and Tonic Sol-fa, “the most closely associated philanthropic movements of the era” (69). McGuire suggests three ways in which Tonic Sol-fa singing aided the temperance movement: as a means of moral influence and improvement, as a distraction away from the lure of alcohol, and as an incentive to attend Temperance meetings that featured collective singing. Yet, temperance movements did not embrace Tonic Sol-fa with as much fervor as Tonic Sol-fa embraced temperance, and when temperance fell with the failure of the 1895 Reform Bill, Tonic Sol-fa fell too. Ironically, then, the Curwens could not have picked a worse reform to sponsor. McGuire’s third chapter focuses on missionary work of the century, with mission organizations like the London Missionary Society (LMS) embracing Tonic Sol-fa’s power to create joyful—and tractable—converts (114). McGuire suggests that both Curwens’ decision to support missions only in part (favoring Protestant Dissenting mission groups, particularly the LMS’s work in Madagascar) and only half-heartedly was “perhaps their biggest mistake” because missionaries truly embraced the power of music in their conversion endeavors (121). Calling for more work in this area, McGuire reminds us of the ways in which missionary music wiped out indigenous music even though the positive effects …