"Chris Price's 'microhistory' of the Canterbury Catch Club in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is a tour de force. His skill and persistence in milking detail from the club's rich archive (and from the lithographic representation of its members that kick-started the study) has enabled him to add significantly to the scarce literature on the relationship between English music-making and English society two hundred years ago, and to the less scarce literature on club life, conviviality, class and masculinity in the same era. The book explores issues that range from membership and repertoires to social meanings, all the time relating them to the broader cultural and social history of the period. It does this in a text written with elegance, clarity and humour. It's a fine achievement and it deserves a wide readership."Professor Vic GatrellAuthor of The Hanging Tree, City of Laughter, and The First Bohemians"I have been privileged to watch this book in the making – and what a musical making it has been. Chris Price is perfectly placed to produce this brilliantly lit snapshot of bygone musical life."Professor David Owen NorrisPianist, Composer and Broadcaster"This fascinating book offers a fine example of the integration of fine-grained archival research with a broader contextualisation of musical activity in society. Starting from a single point – a lithograph of the Canterbury Catch Club from 1826 – Christopher Price moves effortlessly from detailed and sophisticated analysis to a broader narrative. At several points he returns to the print, each time revealing another layer of meaning. His source material is wide-ranging, including political cartoons, minute books, drawings, part-songs, local newspapers, diaries, and much else. Notable are the astonishingly rich Canterbury archives that provide the foundation for this study (the music alone survives in 70 volumes of vocal music and 200 instrumental part-books, and there are detailed concert records for a period of 12 years). Price’s book is also an object lesson in fine academic writing – accurate and lucid, but also engaging and enthralling. The Catch Club’s treatment of musicians is particularly interesting, with penalties imposed for drunkenness and unauthorised absence, but the wider question of ‘professional’ versus ‘amateur’ status is also explored – this topic has been looked at in a metropolitan context but less so in the provinces. Connections with music at Canterbury Cathedral are thoroughly explored, revealing the ‘thoroughly atrocious character’ Charles Blogg, almost a Don Giovanni of cathedral lay clerks, and his humane treatment by the church authorities. The importance of cathedral employment in the context of considerable poverty beyond the cathedral is sympathetically conveyed. His final remarks on the value of such simple, community-building, socially enjoyable activity, in the face of looming political and economic problems, are apposite and timely. This fine historical study should inspire further exploration of the sociable musicking of the nineteenth century."Dr George Kennaway Author of Playing the Cello, 1780–1930"Fortunately, the musical library of the Canterbury Catch Club survives in an archive, and that has allowed its wealth of vocal music and other material to be scrutinized over many years by Christopher Nicholas Turton Price. His research offers unique insight into a very English institution, its social make-up, its conviviality, its occasionally subversive character, and, not least, its repertoire. It is informatively illustrated and contains copious musical examples. Cambridge Scholars Press is to be applauded for allowing the inclusion, in an appendix, of over three dozen glees, madrigals and catches. This is now the most comprehensive study of its kind and will prove of immense value to musicologists and cultural historians."Derek B. ScottAuthor of The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour and Sounds of the Metropolis."The catch and glee play an important and still undervalued and misunderstood role in English musical history. Taking as his focal point an 1826 print of the Canterbury Catch Club members at a club meeting, Chris Price has produced an exhaustively researched and documented account of the club’s history that extends far beyond its own parameters to correct such neglect. This is an exceptionally valuable addition to the bibliography of English musical and social history in the 19th century." Brian Robins Author of Catch and Glee Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (2006)