Enchanted Music, Enchanted Modernity: Theosophy, Maud MacCarthy, and John Foulds

Recent scholarship, especially the works of Gauri Viswanathan, Alex Owen, and Joy Dixon, has established the wide-ranging influence and importance of the Theosophical Society to early twentieth-century European and American culture. Only preliminary work has been done, however, to explore the intersection of Theosophical thought and music at that same time. Recent scholarship in religious and communication studies offers a starting point for the exploration of the place of music in the cosmology and practices of the Theosophical Society and how the Theosophical experiments in music of British musicians Maud MacCarthy and John Foulds, coupled with the former's claim to occult power through the medium of music, was fundamentally at odds with an institution becoming ever more dogmatic in the light of a fractured and turbulent history. John Foulds' April-England provides an exemplar of enchanted modernity in music.