City in England. Known for the music festivals that began there in the mid-18th century and achieved international renown in the 19th, the city has enjoyed a return to its 19th-century musical status in the 1980s and 90s, and notably with the opening of its widely admired Symphony Hall in 1991.
3. Benefit concerts and festivals.
MARGARET HANDFORD
In 1392 Birmingham merchants established the Gild of the Holy Cross, which appointed priests to sing at services at St Martin’s, the parish church, and an organist whom they housed by the church. The last organist appointed before the dissolution of the guild in 1547 was Sir William Bothe (Booth). The 1503–4 Churchwardens’ Accounts for Halesowen Parish in North Worcestershire mention an organ maker and repairer in Birmingham.
The population rose from 3000 to 15,000 during the 17th century. A second church, St Philip’s (now Birmingham Cathedral), was consecrated in 1715 and given a fine organ, built by Schwarbrick (replaced in 1929 by a Nicholson organ). The first organist there, Barnabas Gunn, was also organist at Gloucester Cathedral (1730–40) and finally at St Martin’s, Birmingham, the town having reinstalled an organ there in 1725. Later organists at St Martin’s were Joseph Harris (from 1787) and Thomas Munden, who in 1822, 1825 and 1828 presented occasional Sunday ‘selections of Sacred Music’ by Palestrina, Orlando Gibbons, Handel, William Boyce, William Crotch, Mozart, Beethoven and a Mozart pupil, Thomas Attwood. St Martin’s had fully choral services from the 1880s.
Michael Broome (1700–75) arrived at St Philip’s as Parish Clerk in about 1733. He trained the adult males of the choir (some were paid) and the children of the neighbouring Blue Coat School (established 1724), who sang the treble parts at St Philip’s. Broome also taught privately and was a member of the Musical and Amicable Society, which met at a coffee-house for practice and music-making. This society was vital to Birmingham’s musical development. Drawn at first mainly from the men of St Philip’s choir, it attracted other choristers and was large enough by 1762 to warrant its formal name and a constitution. Between 1733 and 1760, Broome published collections of metrical psalm tunes and simple anthems, which were distributed in the Midlands for the use of Anglican and Dissenting churches. James Kempson (b 1742) produced four similar collections between 1770 and 1780; also a member of the Musical and Amicable Society, he was clerk to St Bartholomew’s church, which was opened in 1749, subsidized by the iron-master John Jennens and his wife (relations of Charles Jennens, Handel’s librettist).
At the Moor Street Theatre, open by 1740, Barnabas Gunn promoted concerts. The Smallbrook Street Theatre was open from 1747, and the first purpose-built house, the King Street Theatre, opened in 1751 and closed in 1779. All three took a regular flow of London productions; not being licensed, they sold tickets for concerts with the drama presented free, supposedly, in the interval. This suited the scenes-with-music format of current theatre pieces: for example Molière’s Le médecin malgré lui, adapted by Henry Fielding in 1732, came to Birmingham in 1746 as The Mock Doctor, with music by Richard Jones and songs by Seedo and Henry Carey. Local musicians generally joined the visiting orchestra in the pit.
In 1774 the New Street Theatre (later the Theatre Royal) replaced the King Street Theatre. It was not licensed until 1807. Operatic concerts there, associated especially with Mrs Billington, Catalani (many visits, 1807–28) and John Braham, were vastly popular. Recently composed operas by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi were brought to Birmingham by visiting companies from about 1827 onwards, including those of Sims Reeves, Pyne and Harrison, the Drury Lane Theatre and some simply named ‘An Italian Company’ bringing well-known singers. The Theatre Royal had its own orchestra which, in the 1840s, was trained and directed by an excellent Birmingham musician, the violinist Alfred Mellon, soon lured away. From Mellon’s day until 1939 the town was visited regularly by all the major touring companies of the time. They played the Theatre Royal, the Grand Theatre in Corporation Street and the Prince of Wales Theatre in Broad Street, the last having excellent acoustics. At the old Repertory Theatre in Station Street, Barrie Jackson presented some opera in the 1920s, including Rutland Boughton’s The Immortal Hour (1922) and the premières of operas by Messager, Ethel Smyth and Bantock. These theatres have gone or, in the last case, found a new home; the Birmingham Hippodrome is now the principal opera and ballet venue, and a second home since 1968 to the Welsh National Opera company. They and the Birmingham Royal Ballet (from 1990) each present three two-week runs every season.
A Baroque opera was staged annually between 1959 and 1985 at the University of Birmingham, in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts (opened in 1939 with a seating capacity of 370); a Cherubini piece was given in 1991. Inspired by Anthony Lewis (holder of the Chair of Music, 1947–68), performances continued under his successor Ivor Keys, with eleven operas by Handel (many of them modern premières) and others by Alessandro Scarlatti, Rameau, Keiser and Lully, as well as Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Berlioz, Bizet and Bellini. Janet Baker, in the early stages of her career, appeared in 1964 and 1966 in Handel’s Ariodante and Orlando.
The City of Birmingham Touring Opera (CBTO) started in 1987, funded jointly by the city and the Arts Council. It uses young performers and plays suburban venues in Birmingham and elsewhere, aiming to reach a new audience for opera. In 1989 the company gave the première of Ravi Shankar’s Ganashyam and in 1997 performed Britten's three church parables at Aldeburgh with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Amateur grand opera companies, once popular, have declined in number since 1972, but amateur light opera companies have doubled their numbers to 40 in the same period.
In 1759 and 1760 the organist of St Martin’s, Richard Hobbs, presented three-day early-autumn oratorio festivals at the New Theatre, King Street, with 24 chorus singers, 40 instrumentalists and well-known solo singers. In 1762 an oratorio performance, including some Purcell and Handel and conducted by Hobbs, was given at St Bartholomew’s to celebrate the end of the Seven Years’ War. The peace, however, caused a slump in Birmingham’s trade; to assist those most stricken by unemployment, James Kempson organized a similar performance at St Bartholomew’s Christmas morning service in 1766, a collection being taken. Capel Bond from Coventry conducted an oratorio festival in 1767. The Musical and Amicable Society created an offshoot, the Chappell Society, to sing for charitable purposes. The St Bartholomew’s Christmas festival continued until 1838. Noting its success, and no doubt aware of Hobbs’s and Bond’s recent commercial festivals, Kempson suggested to the Hospital Trustees, whose building plans lacked funds, the idea of a three-day festival in aid of the General Hospital. Held between 7 and 9 September 1768, it ushered in Birmingham’s great era of Music Meetings (1768, 1778, 1780, 1784 and 1787), from 1790 called Musical Festivals. Their three-yearly pattern was established in 1784, with breaks in 1793 (a theatre fire) and between 1829 and 1834, while awaiting completion of the Town Hall. Profits passed to the Hospital Trustees rose from £300 (1768) to between £5000 and £6000 (1820–1900), declining thereafter.
Capel Bond was the first Music Meetings conductor. In his time, Handel oratorios monopolized the three morning performances at St Philip’s, with the Thursday morning Messiah early established as a tradition; the three evening Grand Miscellaneous Concerts afforded a contrast. Music by composers then living included an Abel symphony in 1780 and a Haydn overture and extracts from William Boyce’s Solomon in 1784. The magnetic Thomas Greatorex, well-connected socially and musically, followed Bond (conductor 1796–1829), with breaks in 1808 and 1811 when William Crotch and Samuel Wesley took charge. Programmes became more adventurous: music by Purcell, Boyce, Crotch, William Croft, William Shield and Samuel Arnold was included, and in 1805 the first part of Haydn’s Creation (1798) was given. From then on major works, including symphonies, by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were performed.
A St Matthew Passion chorus given in Birmingham in 1837 evidently inspired a London performance of extracts from Bach’s Magnificat and B minor Mass only months later, the link being Lord Burghersh, founder of the Royal Academy of Music, a Birmingham Festival patron and director of the Concert of Ancient Music in London. William Knyvett, singer and conductor (1834–43), was followed as festival conductor by Ignaz Moscheles (1846), Michael Costa (1849–82), Hans Richter (1885–1909) and Henry Wood (1912). Costa consolidated the new system of a single conductor on a podium, controlling all and visible to every performer. Singers with European reputations were employed, among them Billington, Mara, Catalani, Malibran, Braham, Grisi, Mario, Novello, Reeves, Patti, Santley, Butt and Muriel Foster (esteemed by Elgar). Costa’s programmes naturally had an Italianate flavour, though he was generous to native composers. Richter introduced Palestrina, Wagner, Berlioz, Bruckner, Glazunov, Dvořák and a great deal of Brahms. In 1900 he dared to replace Messiah with Bach’s St Matthew Passion, but only for that year. He did succeed in presenting Bach’s Mass in B minor in 1903.
Joseph Moore directed festival affairs from 1799 to 1849. With a business in Birmingham’s die-sinking trade, Moore was the driving force behind the building of the Town Hall, Paradise Street (cap. 2323), in 1834, sorely needed for large public meetings as well as for the Triennial Musical Festivals and an increasing number of public concerts (see §4 below). Moore’s European researches enabled him to advise on the size and shape of the hall and its equipment, including the organ. The new venue encouraged ever more ambitious programmes and, with Moore’s influence, the commissioning of works, notably Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto in D minor (1837) and his Elijah (1846; fig.1), conducted by the composer. Arthur Sullivan, Max Bruch, Niels Gade, Saint-Saëns, Gounod, Hubert Parry, C.V. Stanford and Elgar were all commissioned to write for the Birmingham Music Festival and visited Birmingham personally. Of these works, only Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius (1900) is regularly performed. Sibelius’s Symphony no.4 in A minor op.63 and Skryabin’s Prometheus (Poem of Fire), both composed in 1911, were given performances at the 1912 festival.
High taxation bore heavily on the earned income of a large proportion of festival supporters; donations declined as costs rose, World War I finally putting an end to this illustrious period in Birmingham’s musical history.
From the mid-18th century, regular summer concerts were given at the Vauxhall Gardens at Duddeston, promoted by Barnabas Gunn, with music by Handel, Arne and others writing for Vauxhall Gardens in London, and also at the Apollo Gardens in Deritend, particularly associated with a singer, Holte Bridgman, and offering somewhat lighter fare. An oratorio benefit performance was given for Gunn and another composer, Musgrave Heighington, at the Moor Street Theatre in 1740. After his death Gunn’s widow, with his successor at St Philip’s, John Eversman, continued to present musical entertainments at the gardens. Eversman launched an annual subscription series of ten concerts at Mr Sawyer’s Rooms in the winters of 1759 to 1764. A Dilettanti Music Society promoted concerts from 1780. John Freeth (1730–1808), a local balladeer, wrote topical verses fitted to well-known tunes of the day, which made his coffee-house a mecca for businessmen. A collection of these was published as The Political Songster (Birmingham, 1790).
During the Musical Festival era, promoters sought to encourage concerts between festivals and to have a change from the choral repertory. The manufacturer Matthew Boulton supported Joseph Moore in the presentation of a series at Dee’s Hotel with music by Mozart and Beethoven. Theatres occasionally presented instrumental stars such as Paganini, as well as famous singers, and Dee’s Hotel was also used by touring ‘concert-parties’, as when Liszt visited in November 1840.
For many years, regular Thursday morning organ recitals were given at the Town Hall. Thomas Munden (1834–7) and George Hollins (1837–41) were in practice, if not officially, the earliest Town Hall organists; their successors, James Stimpson (1842–86), C.W. Perkins (1888–1923), G.D. Cunningham (1924–48), George Thalben Ball (1948–83) and Thomas Trotter, were all officially appointed. In 1844, a ten-year series of popular, cheap-entry Monday evening concerts was initiated at the request of some factory employees, to be held at the Town Hall, with the organ, as both accompanying and solo instrument, the mainstay of the programmes (possibly the earliest ‘Monday Pops’ in the country). Louis Jullien brought his sensational Monster Promenade Concerts, often featuring Beethoven symphonies as well as lightweight items, to the Town Hall between 1844 and 1859. These enterprises were replaced between 1853 and 1916 by Harrison’s Celebrity Concerts, which brought every vocal and instrumental star of the day to Birmingham. The festival singers used the concerts for return visits, notably Adelina Patti, who appeared for Harrison in Birmingham 15 times. Among instrumentalists were Clara Schumann, Wilma Neruda (Lady Hallé), Joseph Joachim, the cellist Alfredo Piatti, Hans von Bülow, I.J. Paderewski, Eugène Ysaÿe and Wilhelm Backhaus. After 1873, the Hallé, London Symphony and Queen’s Hall orchestras were regular visitors. Held monthly during the winter season, most concerts were at the Town Hall and a small number at the Masonic Hall, New Street.
After 1916, Harold Holt’s International Celebrity Series brought Amelita Galli-Curci, Maria Jeritza, Rachmaninoff, Alfred Cortot, Fritz Kreisler and others, who performed to packed houses; but this was ended by World War II. The occasional Vincent Celebrity Concerts represented a brave later attempt, in the 1970s, but they foundered for lack of public funding and publicity. From 1920 the city orchestra began to fill the concert scene. From 1991, concert seasons were held in the new Symphony Hall, featuring world-famous orchestras and performers.
An increasing number of chamber concerts was promoted after 1850. The Birmingham Musical Union presented excellent local performers, some associated with the Midland Institute School of Music. Its work was carried on towards the end of the century by Charles Swinnerton Heap. The pianist Stephen Stratton and the clarinettist T.E. Pountney gave admirable programmes in the 1880s. The Drawing Room Concerts, held between 1898 and 1925 at the Grand Hotel by an ex-Concertgebouw violinist, Max Mossel, were the best supported and the most durable. Mossel promoted well-known musicians as well as young artists, among them Dorothy Silk, William Primrose and Gerald Moore. The Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA) Gallery in New Street was often the venue for chamber music. Oscar Pollack, a Birmingham Mail music critic, used it between 1904 and 1909 for soloists and small ensembles; Clarence Raybould’s Birmingham Chamber Concerts Society began there in 1914, its mainstay the Arthur Catterall Quartet; and a Mme Minadieu promoted excellent performers there from 1914 to 1920. Other performers were the pianist Wilfred Ridgeway, the violinist Herbert Downes and the cellist Johann Hock. From 1968 to 1978 there was a further series at the RBSA Gallery, promoting musicians from the Midlands.
The Midland Chamber Players Concerts Society gave concerts elsewhere in the city from 1966. The Birmingham Chamber Music Society was founded in 1952 by Wilfred Mellers, linked to Birmingham University; now independent, it continues to present international chamber ensembles of the highest quality. Since 1992, there has been an annual Early Music Festival, held in the autumn. This followed the smaller-scale St Alban’s Festival, started in 1984.
The main concert venues are the 2200-seat Symphony Hall, the Adrian Boult Hall (cap. 529) at the Conservatoire, two small theatres at the Birmingham and Midland Institute (cap. 290 and 118), the Town Hall and Birmingham Cathedral. The city-owned Birmingham Hippodrome receives large-scale opera and ballet, and the arena at the National Exhibition Centre and the National Indoor Arena are occasionally the scene of ‘spectaculars’ or celebrity appearances. The Alexandra and Repertory theatres have occasional musical productions. The Midland Arts Centre in Cannon Hill Park, supported by the city, has a dance centre in its Randle English wing, opened in 1987. Its activities, including performances by jazz, swing, wind and steel bands, strongly reflect the cultures brought into the city from the late 1950s onwards by people from the New Commonwealth.
The first Festival orchestra consisted of some 25 virtuoso players, with the usual tripartite direction from principal violin, keyboard and chorus-master. The great cellists James Cervetto, John Crosdill and Robert Lindley, the clarinettists T.L. Willman and the Mahons and the oboists Parke, Erskine and Griesbach were leading players. Thomas Pinto (1768), Wilhelm Cramer (1778–1802) and his son Franz Cramer (1805–43) were distinguished principal violinists, with Weichsel, Mori and Loder leading the evening performances during the 1840s. By 1814, players numbered 82; in 1834 there were 151, contributed by the Concert of Ancient Music, the Vocal Concerts, the Philharmonic Society and the Italian Opera. Each presumably played its own repertory, given the different pitches still used for different musical genres. When Michael Costa became Festival Conductor in 1849 Prosper Sainton led the orchestra, while during Richter’s tenure the Hallé Orchestra supplied the leader and most of the players.
William Stockley, appointed Birmingham Festival Choral Society conductor in 1855, was determined to establish a permanent orchestra to match the renowned Choral Society. At some financial risk to himself, he gave three orchestral concerts a year between 1873 and 1897, building a repertory of some 35 symphonies, 27 concertos and various suites and overtures. Elgar played in the first violins from 1882 to 1889 and had three early works performed at Stockley’s concerts. The orchestra made an occasional Festival appearance. From 1897 to 1899 Stockley’s efforts were continued by Rowland Winn, admired by Richter. Winn’s enterprise was, however, eclipsed by George Halford’s symphony orchestra, which presented ten concerts a season between 1897 and 1906. In spite of programmes that encompassed all the Beethoven symphonies and some Bruckner, Richard Strauss and Rachmaninoff, this series also ran into financial difficulties and was reduced to four concerts a season from 1907 to 1909.
The gap left by the curtailing of Halford’s concerts was filled from 1906 to 1920 by an assortment of ten orchestras consisting of local or visiting players. The newly formed Birmingham SO gave popular Saturday night concerts between 1907 and 1918 conducted by Richter, Wood, Landon Ronald and Halford. At Granville Bantock’s initiative, the Birmingham Philharmonic was set up in 1910, using some Birmingham SO players. Ronald also presented annual promenade concerts in late spring at the Theatre Royal, and Beecham brought the Hallé in the 1916–17 season. Beecham’s New Birmingham SO followed in 1917–18, with Beecham, Wood and Ronald conducting. The Midland Concert Promoters Association, established in 1916, drew all these strands together. Its leading light was the current Lord Mayor, Neville Chamberlain, keen to establish an orchestra funded by the city. In 1920 the City of Birmingham Orchestra (CBO) came into existence. 40 of its 75 players came from an orchestra recently established by T. Appleby Matthews, which had already played 40 Sunday evening concerts in each of two seasons from 1918 to 1920 at the Scala Theatre and the new Futurist Cinema. The orchestra thus launched was the country’s first municipally funded symphony orchestra, its initial civic grant £1250.
Matthews was its first conductor. His laudable ambitions outran the budget; he was replaced in 1924 by Adrian Boult, who oversaw an expansion of activities, with more out-of-town engagements, school concerts and broadcasts. Boult’s replacement when he left for London in 1930 was the equally gifted Leslie Heward, with whom the orchestra made nine recordings. Heward’s early death (1943) from tuberculosis at the age of 46 and the wartime blackouts and bombing made progress difficult. The popular George Weldon (conductor 1943–51) nonetheless recruited players of a consistently high standard, and in 1944 the seasonal engagement of players ceased with the city's annual grant. At his request the orchestra became the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) in 1948. The financial situation was bad, and the committee, perhaps thinking that a new conductor would generate interest, appointed Rudolf Schwarz and dismissed Weldon in 1951. Neither Schwarz nor his successor Andrzej Panufnik (conductor from 1957), in spite of their gifts, brought the necessary commitment to the building of an orchestra. Hugo Rignold’s qualities as an orchestral trainer, however, were exactly what were required; with his appointment in 1960 signs of potential began to emerge. There were foreign tours and some recordings. Rignold’s successor from 1969, Louis Frémaux, brought flair and panache which enhanced the orchestra’s growing reputation, increased Birmingham audiences and brought more outside work, including a Prom appearance after a long gap.
The militancy of some players in the 1970s led to a seating dispute in 1978, which precipitated Frémaux’ decision to leave. In any case, he was unhappy with the uneven acoustics and spartan conditions of the 160-year-old Town Hall, and had called in vain, as had many others, for a new concert hall. He departed before the expiry of his contract; the two-year interregnum was filled by distinguished visiting conductors, notably Erich Schmid, who was then invited to be principal guest conductor from 1979–82.
In 1980 the young Simon Rattle was appointed principal conductor. His rigorous selection of players, and sectional rehearsals under a charismatic musician of the highest quality with a long-term commitment to the orchestra, made the city orchestra surpass in international fame the Birmingham Musical Festivals of the 19th century. Since 1991, Symphony Hall has provided a worthy home (cap. 2200; fig.2) which, in its turn, has required from the orchestra even higher standards of playing. The CBSO's new headquarters, housing a rehearsal and concert room (cap. 300) and offices, opened in 1998. In the same year Sakari Oramo succeeded Rattle as principal conductor.
Throughout its history, in spite of the periodic need to resort to the popular, the orchestra has presented new and recent works. Vaughan Williams conducted his own seven-year-old London Symphony in 1920, and Sibelius his Symphony no.3 (1907) in 1921. The John Feeney Charitable Trust has commissioned some 35 works, given first performances by the CBSO since 1955, including Tippett’s Piano Concerto (1956) and Thomas Adès's Asyla (1997). Mark-Anthony Turnage (1991–5) and Judith Weir (1995–) have worked with the orchestra as composers-in-residence. The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (established 1987), consisting of CBSO players, promotes and performs new music. In 1989 it combined with Birmingham Jazz to launch an enterprise known as The Series. In addition, the CBSO provides string players for the Birmingham Ensemble, a small string orchestra. Led by the CBSO leader, Peter Thomas, it gives concerts mainly of Baroque and Romantic repertory.
Birmingham youth orchestras are the Midland Youth Orchestra (established 1956), the Birmingham Schools SO (established 1964) and the Academy of St Philip’s (established 1976). The Birmingham PO (established 1941), with 80 players, gives some dozen concerts annually in the Midlands.
The chorus of 45 for the Music Meeting of 1768 consisted of the men of the Chappell Society and women choralists from Lancashire. By 1808 there was a Choral Society of the Town, which in 1811 was evidently designated the Birmingham Oratorio Choral Society, its director Samuel Buggins himself a singer. By 1814 there were 120 singers, including some from other towns. The organist and director, Thomas Munden, prepared the local singers from 1820 to 1840; there was a chorus of 184 voices at the 1834 festival in the new Town Hall, Birmingham providing 114 of them. Munden was succeeded by the Town Hall’s first official organist, James Stimpson, who trained them from 1843 to 1849. In 1840 local choirs had formed the Birmingham Musical Institute, directed by a St Philip’s organist, Henry Simms, which gave three concerts a year between festivals. They ceased after a quarrel with Munden’s Oratorio Choral Society; the Birmingham Festival Choral Society (established 1843) replaced both bodies. William Stockley’s appointment as its conductor in 1855 began a phase of regular concerts every year, the number of singers rising from 70 in 1855 to 200 in 1859. By 1861, the chorus had little need for outside help; The Times called them ‘champion choralists of England’. In 1879, Saint-Saëns praised them in the French press. Stockley was succeeded in 1895 by Swinnerton Heap, whose first-class musicianship was lost to the choir by his early death in 1900. His role was taken over by George Robertson Sinclair, organist of Hereford Cathedral and friend of Elgar. The Festival Choral Society survived the 1916 demise of the festivals themselves, being conducted by Beecham, Wood and Boult between 1918 and 1930. After some difficult years, the appointment in 1969 of Jeremy Patterson resulted in a rise in the number of singers. Since 1975 the society has given the premières of 13 works, of which nine were commissioned by the society.
The Midland Music Society gave popular oratorio concerts, with low ticket prices, from 1889 to 1940. A dozen or more other choirs were active in Birmingham between 1882 and World War II, and the large suburbs also formed choirs in the period 1905–10. The Birmingham Choral Union (established 1887) is still active, as is the City of Birmingham Choir (established 1921), which usually gives its concerts with the CBSO. The CBSO Chorus itself was established in 1973; now the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus, it has a reputation worthy of its orchestral parent. Trained by Simon Halsey, it was joined by the CBSO Youth Chorus in 1994, and the City of Birmingham Young Voices in 1998.
The Birmingham Bach Club, started in 1925, was replaced in 1947 by the Birmingham Bach Society, still active. Other choirs are the Birmingham Singers (1937), the Canoldir Male Voice Choir (1966), the Birmingham Hospitals Choir, the Birmingham Youth Choir and, for older pupils, the Birmingham Chorale, the last two organized by the city’s Music Education Service. The successful women's gospel choir, Black Voices, started in Birmingham in 1988. The chamber choir Ex Cathedra, about 40 strong, has a growing national reputation.
Private teaching was offered by Michael Broome, Jeremiah Clarke and others in the 18th century, and they may well have had earlier predecessors in the Gild organists. A musical magazine was announced in 1783, planned as a species of music dictionary, delivered in monthly instalments.
‘Music and Singing’ were introduced into all the King Edward VI Foundation Elementary Schools from 1851, and into the syllabus of the Board Schools set up in 1870. There was a large Tonic Sol-fa Festival in Birmingham in 1859, and the Sunday Schools Choral Union, active between 1865 and 1878, was drawn from a dozen Anglican churches. One of Granville Bantock’s initiatives was the biennial Musical Competition Festival (1912–32). Elementary schools sent thousands of entrants to compete in solo singing, choral and folkdancing classes.
A move towards advanced education in music was made in 1859 when the Birmingham and Midland Institute offered classes in singing and later in most instruments. This became the Midland Institute School of Music in 1886. By 1900 the school was attracting outstanding teachers, among them Swinnerton Heap and Max Mossel, and producing noted musicians, including the Wagnerian tenor Walter Hyde. In 1900 Bantock became its principal, and two years later, Elgar its Honorary Visitor. Staff members included Ernest Newman and Rutland Boughton; among students were Julius Harrison and Clarence Raybould. Separately constituted as the Birmingham School of Music in 1949, it was still part of the Birmingham and Midland Institute until 1965 when city rebuilding forced the Institute into a building too small to accommodate the school. Under the aegis of the City Education Department from 1965, the school moved to purpose-built premises in 1973, becoming part of what is now the University of Central England. It was renamed Birmingham Conservatoire in 1989.
In 1905 a Chair of Music was established at the University of Birmingham, Elgar its first holder. He resigned in 1908, Bantock taking his place and building up a respected department. A demanding balance between the academic and the practical was established by Ivor Keys between 1968 and 1986, enhancing the department’s reputation. One or two academics at the University and the Conservatoire are active composers.
Private teaching still provides a vital foundation for music education, supported by the Birmingham Centre of the Incorporated Society of Musicians and the Birmingham Competitive Music Festival (established 1937). School music teachers’ courses and public lectures on music are provided by the College of Education (now part of the University of Central England) and the Birmingham University School of Continuing Studies. In addition to the usual provisions of school music syllabuses, gifted pupils can also have instrumental and orchestral training through the city Music Education Service. The CBSO's education department has links of various kinds, often through individual players, with city schools. Since September 1994 the Conservatoire has had a Junior Department.
As the nerve-centre of the Midland region, Birmingham had BBC radio studios from the earliest days, broadcasting soloists and the City of Birmingham Orchestra. After the BBC started its own studio orchestra, membership of both orchestras was barred, but in the 1930s the BBC ensemble was small, leaving the field to the CBO. The popular BBC Midland Light Orchestra was formed after World War II, working from studios in Islington Row, Broad Street and Carpenter Road, Edgbaston. In the 1960s, chamber concerts were started; they have become a regular series, free and open to the public, relayed from Pebble Mill, the television and radio studio complex opened in 1971.
FiskeETM
Grove5 (C. Edmunds)
W. Dugdale: The Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated (London, 1656/R)
Programmes of Birmingham Music Meetings and Festivals, 1768–1912, and of concert series, 1845–1951 (GB-Bp)
W. Hutton: An History of Birmingham (Birmingham, 1780, 6/1835)
J.A. Langford: A Century of Birmingham Life (1741–1841) (London, 1868, 2/1870–71)
J.A. Langford: Modern Birmingham and its Institutions (1841–1871) (London, 1873–7)
E. Edwards: ‘Some Account of the Origin of the Musical Festivals and of James Kempson, the Originator’, Birmingham Institutions (Birmingham, 1882)
A. Deakin: A History of the Birmingham Festival Choral Society (Birmingham, 1897)
J.T. Bunce: Birmingham Sixty Years Ago [compiled from notes written for the Birmingham Weekly Post, 1899, based on personal recollections]
W. Poutney: A History of the Festivals (MS, 1899, Bp)
F.E. Bache: Letters on orchestral music in Birmingham (1856), in C. Bache: Brother Musicians (London, 1901), 108
J.H. Muirhead: Birmingham Institutions (Birmingham, 1911)
W.C. Stockley: Fifty Years of Music in Birmingham from 1850 to 1900 (Birmingham,1913)
C.E. Pearce: Sims Reeves: Fifty Years of Music in England (London, 1924/R)
H. Snow: ‘The Organs of Birmingham Cathedral’, The Organ, ix (1929–30), 137–43
D.M. Powell: Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation (London, 1937,3/1949)
J. Stone: ‘Music in Birmingham: a Concise History – Five Centuries’,HMYB, ii–iii (1945–6), 100–09
P.A. Scholes: The Mirror of Music, 1844–1944 (London, 1947–70)
R.E. Waterhouse: The Birmingham and Midland Institute (Birmingham, 1954)
W.B. Stephens, ed.: A History of the County of Warwick, vii : The City of Birmingham (London, 1964/R) [pubn of Victoria County History]
N. Fortune: ‘Birmingham’, MT, cvii (1966), 795 only
H. Pleasants: The Great Singers: from the Dawn of Opera to Our Own Time (London, 1967/R)
P.M. Young, ed.: A Future for English Music, and other Lectures, by Edward Elgar (London, 1968) [Birmingham U. lectures of 1905–6]
B. King-Smith: 1920–1970: the First 50 Years: a History of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (Birmingham, 1970)
B. Pritchard and D.J. Reid: ‘Some Festival Programmes of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, iv: Birmingham’, RMARC, no.8 (1970), 1–33
R. Fiske: English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1973, 2/1986)
A. Cross: ‘Birmingham’, MT, cxv (1974), 771 only
R. Palmer: A Ballad History of England from 1588 to the Present Day (London, 1979)
N. Temperley: The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge, 1979)
J.N. Moore: Edward Elgar: a Creative Life (Oxford, 1984)
D. Brock: The Birmingham School of Music: its First Century (Birmingham,1986)
L.E. Davis and R.A. Huttenback: Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: the Political Economy of British Imperialism 1860–1912 (Oxford, 1986)
M. MacDonald, ed.: British Music, i: Havergal Brian on Music (London, 1986) [articles from various music journals]
N. Kenyon: Simon Rattle: the Making of a Conductor (London, 1987)
M.B. Rowlands: The West Midlands from AD 1000: a Regional History of England (London, 1987)
V.J. Price: Birmingham Theatres, Concert and Music Halls 1740–1988 (Studley, Warwicks., 1988)
J.N. Moore: Edward Elgar: the Windflower Letters: Correspondence with Alice Caroline Stuart Wortley and her Family (Oxford, 1989)
M. Handford: Sounds Unlikely: Six Hundred Years of Music in Birmingham (Birmingham, 1992)
B. King-Smith: Crescendo! 75 Years of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (London, 1995)