A type of comic round for male voices, popular in England from the late 16th century until about 1800. The earliest known catches are those in an English manuscript of 1580 (GB-Ckc 1). Morley gave brief instructions on how to compose them in his Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night includes a scene where the catch Hold thy peace is sung by three members of the cast. Catches first appeared in print in three collections published in London by Thomas Ravenscroft, Pammelia (1609), Deuteromelia (1609) and Melismata (1611); an important later collection is John Hilton’s Catch that Catch Can (1652; seefig.1).
The essential characteristic of the genre is its humour: catches were a celebration of irresponsible male leisure time, spent out of reach of the demands of women and children. Their words are usually on such subjects as drink, tobacco, music, different trades and their shortcomings, poor service in taverns and, especially, sex in its most ridiculous and least mentionable forms, the bodily functions of women being described with schoolboyish gusto. Occasionally the mixed blessings of fatherhood are also discussed (for example in Atterbury’s Hot Cross Buns, 1777).
Catches were mainly written for three or four voices, exceptionally for as many as eight or ten. They were designed to work well even if sung badly, and were not intended to have a formal audience; any listeners eavesdropping on performances would have been invited to join in. The social class of the men who sang them is not entirely clear. If, as seems likely, catches began as an amusement for the moneyed and privileged, they must have spread to lower social groups during the reign of James I.
By the mid-18th century, singing groups meeting informally in taverns were increasingly being constituted as formal clubs. Catch clubs sprang up all over England (and also in some parts of Scotland and Ireland) with the aim of revitalizing a genre that some saw as having gone stale. Thomas Warren, secretary of the distinguished Noblemen and Gentlemen’s Catch Club in London, described catches in 1763 as an ‘entertaining species of music, now almost buried in oblivion’. In the event, however, the catch clubs did more to foster and promote glees (see Glee): changing social manners in the 1780s ensured the decline of the catch, turning its heartiness into an embarrassment, its unbuttoned intimacy into an insult to politeness. William Jackson, who was the organist of Exeter Cathedral in the 1790s, defined catches as ‘three parts obscenity to one part music’. Attempts were made to rewrite their words in a more genteel style (for example, Purcell’s catch beginning ‘Once, twice, thrice, I Julia try’d, / The scornful puss as oft deny’d’ appeared in Rimbault’s Rounds, Catches and Canons of England in 1860 altered to ‘One, two, three, our number’s right / To sing our song tonight’), but despite such efforts only a small handful of catches have survived in the choral repertory since 1800.
Many catches have great musical merit, but it is hard to see how they could be revived in the present day: they require male voices, and do not have the same effect if sung by female or mixed choirs; they have large vocal ranges (often an octave and a 6th) and were designed for baritones who could take top notes in falsetto, a skill now lost by both professionals and amateurs; and their words are completely at odds with current attitudes to sexual openness. Nevertheless, editions by R. Cass-Beggs (The Penguin Book of Rounds, 1982) and P. Hillier (The Catch Book, 1987) represent brave attempts to publish a substantial collection of unexpurgated catches.
The origin of the term ‘catch’ is obscure. It may have some connection with the 14th- and 15th-century Italian ‘caccia’, though the two types of song are quite different (except that a few catches are, like cacce, on the subject of hunting). Another theory, widely believed by English musicians even if it is untrue historically, is that the term refers to the technique, characteristic of catches, of arranging the words so that new meanings are thrown up by the juxtaposition of the different lines when they are sung simultaneously. For example, in Cranford’s Here dwells a pretty mayd (1652) the phrase ‘her whole estate is seventeen pence a yeare’ in line 2 takes on a new meaning once line 3 adds in front of it ‘you may kisse’. The words thus ‘catch’ at each other in passing, or they may have ‘a catch’ in them. This word-setting technique has other expressive possibilities besides those of sexual innuendo, and is still used from time to time by composers of modern English rounds.
Day-MurrieESB
Grove6(J. Westrup)
MGG1(‘Glee’; J. Westrup [incl. list of 18th- and 19th-century pubns of catches and glees])
E.F. Rimbault: The Rounds, Catches and Canons of England (London, 1860)
Viscount Gladstone: The Story of the Noblemen and Gentlemen’s Catch Club (London, 1930)
J. Vlasto: ‘An Elizabethan Anthology of Rounds’, MQ, xl (1954), 222–34
S. Sadie: ‘Concert Life in 18th-Century England’, PRMA, lxxxv (1958–9), 17–30
D. Johnson: ‘Rounds’, MT, cxxiv (1983), 39–40
Viscount Gladstone, G. Boas and H. Christopherson: Noblemen and Gentlemen's Catch Club: Three Essays towards its History (London, 1996)
DAVID JOHNSON