The Musical Times

• 1. Introduction

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  The Musical Times first appeared in 1842 as a slim, eight-page leaflet tucked inside each issue was a piece of choral music. Choral society members subscribed not so much for the commentary as for those printed scores. Nobody in Britain that year could have guessed this modest sheet would outlast every rival and become the world's longest-running music periodical. It survived two world wars, the rise and fall of newsagents as distribution points, and repeated identity crises about what kind of publication it actually was. When it finally ceased in the winter of 2024, it had been in print for more than a century and a half. What drove it through that span, and who were the people who kept it going? Those are the questions worth following here.

• 2. Origins and Early Purpose

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  Joseph Mainzer created the magazine in 1842, naming it Mainzer's Musical Times and Singing Circular. His ambition was plainly practical: get affordable sheet music into the hands of ordinary singers. Just two years later, in 1844, Mainzer sold it to Alfred Novello, who had already founded The Musical World in 1836. Novello folded the new acquisition into his publishing house, Novello and Co., and began issuing it monthly. The full original title, The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, stayed in place until 1903. That name said everything about the readership Novello had in mind: not concert-hall connoisseurs but choral society members who needed practical material. Every issue contained a simple choral piece, alternating between sacred and secular selections. Members pooled their subscriptions specifically to receive those scores. The editor who shaped that vision most forcefully was the founding editor under Novello's ownership, J. Alfred Novello himself, who ran the magazine from 1844 to 1853 and again from 1856 to 1863. He championed accessible sacred music and aimed directly at improving singing standards in places of worship. He briefly handed control to his sister, Mary Cowden Clarke, who ran the journal from 1853 to 1856 and pulled it in a more literary direction by writing a long series of articles called 'Music among the Poets' and persuading her friend Leigh Hunt to contribute.

• 3. Building Critical Authority

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  Henry Charles Lunn, who took the editorial chair in 1863 and held it until 1887, was the person who began turning the periodical into something resembling a modern music magazine. He expanded the page count and built the publication's reputation as a credible critical voice. His particular specialism was coverage of provincial festivals, a beat that widened the journal's geographic reach beyond London. William Alexander Barrett, who edited from 1887 to 1891, brought additional credentials: he was also chief music critic of the Morning Post, and he was himself an organist and composer. Edgar Frederick Jacques guided the journal from 1892 to 1897, deepening its foothold in the organ world. The most colourful editorial personality of the Victorian decades arrived next. Frederick George Edwards, formally trained as an organist and serving at several major London metropolitan churches, took charge from 1897 to 1909. He wrote under the pen name 'Dotted Crotchet' and used that persona to produce what he called 'educationally suggestive interviews with musical celebrities'. He also poured energy into articles about cathedrals, churches, and educational institutions, building a reputation for reliable obituaries and careful biographical documentation that would serve the journal's authority for decades.

• 4. War, Endurance, and the Modern Era

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  William Gray McNaught took the editorial chair in 1909 and steered the journal through World War I until 1918. Even through those years, and through World War II that followed, the magazine never missed a month, a record that eventually secured its standing as the world's oldest continuously published periodical devoted to western classical music. Harvey Grace, who succeeded McNaught in 1918 and held the post until his death in 1944, presided over the journal's longest unbroken editorship. Writing under the pen name 'Feste', Grace nudged the publication toward contemporary music in a way his Victorian predecessors had never attempted. After Grace died, his predecessor's son, William McNaught, took the chair from 1944 to 1953, maintaining continuity through the postwar adjustment years. In 1947, Percy Scholes edited a two-volume compilation drawn from the magazine's first hundred years, an act of retrospective authority that underlined just how deep the archive had grown. A succession of editors in the mid-century, including Martin Cooper, Harold Rutland, Robin Hull, and Andrew Porter, pushed the journal toward more international perspectives and modern critical methods across the two decades from 1953 to 1967.

• 5. Stanley Sadie and the Peak Years

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  Stanley Sadie took the editorial helm in 1967 and stayed for twenty years until 1987, a span that many would mark as the journal's period of greatest international standing. Under his leadership the magazine grew into a globally respected academic publication, a transformation made more remarkable given that it had begun life as a practical songsheet for amateur choir members. By the 1990s, however, the journal was caught in a structural bind. It occupied an uncomfortable space between a general-interest music magazine available from newsagents and a specialist academic journal more suited to libraries and university reading rooms. Neither audience fully claimed it. Antony Bye assumed both ownership and editorship in 1992, inheriting that tension and working to resolve it. The decision to shift from monthly to quarterly publication came in 2004, and by that point the journal had also made its archive available online through JSTOR and RILM Abstracts of Music Literature Full Text. Its title had been shortened to simply The Musical Times from January 1904 onward, a streamlining that matched the direction the journal was taking more broadly. Bye announced his retirement in late 2024. The Winter 2024 edition carried a 'Special Announcement' stating that publication was ceasing 'for the foreseeable future', ending a run that had begun when Queen Victoria was two years into her reign.