If you think that making snarky comments under the protection of a pseudonym came with the internet, you’d be wrong. The public forums for musical discussion were more slow-moving then, but the letters pages of the Musical World and the Musical Standard in the nineteenth century were full of correspondents sniping away under pen names such as A Looker-On, A Clergyman, Manuals, Oboe, An Organist*. (Can’t help feeling that modern aliases are a bit more imaginative.)
I am sure no readers of this blog would stoop so low, so here’s a listing of forums which may be of interest.
*Information from Judith Barger’s book, Elizabeth Stirling and the Musical Life of Female Organists in Nineteenth Century England. Needless to say, some of the sniping was at Lady Organists.
