This volume positions music as a charged site of cultural struggle, promoted concurrently as a transcendent corrective to social ills and as a subversive cause of those ills. Alisa Clapp-Itnyre examines Victorian constructions of music to advance patriotism, Christianity, culture and domestic harmony, and suggests that often these goals were undermined by political tensions in song texts or immoral sensuality in the spectacle of live music-making.