A type of unaccompanied partsong, typically for male voices though often including female voices, which flourished in England from about 1750 until World War I. The word is derived from the Old English gleo, meaning ‘mirth’ or ‘entertainment’. The term ‘glee’ first appeared in songbooks of the later 17th century, applied to short songs harmonized for vocal ensemble and often intended to be accompanied by instruments. It was not until the mid-18th century that the glee proper developed as a sizable, through-composed partsong, designed to be sung without instrumental support, with some sections of its words set contrapuntally.
The main inspiration behind the 18th-century glee was the English madrigal of 1590–1630, which was being rediscovered and performed at the time by bodies such as the Academy of Ancient Music (founded in 1710) and the Madrigal Society (founded in 1741). To a generation whose experience of partsong was largely limited to obscene catches, the flowing lines, sensuous textures and poetic seriousness of the Elizabethan and Jacobean madrigal came as a revelation and a challenge.
The Noblemen and Gentlemen’s Catch Club in London gave glees enormous encouragement from 1763 onwards by offering munificent prizes for new partsongs (in four categories: serious glee, light glee, catch and canon). Samuel Webbe (i), who emerged during the 1770s as England’s most profound and versatile glee composer, won 17 Catch Club prizes for his work; J.W. Callcott’s career as a composer was launched when he won three of the Club’s prizes simultaneously in 1785. Another prizewinner was the Earl of Mornington, whose Here in cool grott was judged the best light glee in 1779. Many prizewinning glees became popular favourites for several generations.
The glee borrowed many characteristics from the earlier madrigal: a tendency to divide the text into small sections and to give each one a different emotional colouring, irrespective of the poem’s metrical structure; the inclusion of short homophonic passages where one or more voices temporarily drop out of the ensemble to give a semichorus effect; imitative counterpoint and close canon; and unexpected changes of metre from duple to triple time or vice versa. On the other hand, it also had contemporary characteristics: detailed dynamics, including sf and fp markings; multi-sectional forms derived from Baroque and galant instrumental music; chromatic harmony; and subject matter that reached beyond romantic love, hunting, fairies and the progress of the seasons to such topics as income tax (Webbe’s My pocket’s low and taxes high, c1800), the adventures of a merchant ship in a storm (his When winds breathe soft, c1775), and the religion of a London businessman (Callcott’s O snatch me swift, 1790).
The most popular vocal groupings for glees in the late 18th century were ATB, TTB and ATTB, with the alto parts sung by male falsettists; increasingly, however, composers wrote for SATB and SSATB groupings, requiring women to sing the soprano parts and reflecting a general social acceptance of women into choral clubs and singing groups. Between 1795 and 1815 there was a temporary fashion for glees with instrumental accompaniment; but this passed, and glees went forward into the 19th century confirmed as an unaccompanied form.
The later history of the glee is well documented but incompletely researched. The genre spread to lower social groups during the 19th century, helped by the formation of large choral societies, the proliferation of trained choirs in parish churches and the efforts of educationists to make the lower classes fluent in staff and Tonic Sol-fa notation. By 1870 the publication of glees was a highly lucrative business, in which Novello & Co. of London tried, but failed, to corner the market. Leading composers of glees in the 19th century (also well known for their church music) were William Beale, William Horsley, R.L. Pearsall, J.L. Hatton, Joseph Barnby and John Stainer; many more were written by composers whose names are now forgotten. In about 1885 Baptie drew up a list of nearly 23,000 partsongs published in Britain since 1750 (in GB-Lbl M.R.Ref.3.a; see Johnson, 1979), and reckoned that as many again had been composed but had not reached print.
After 1880 composers tended to avoid the word ‘glee’ and to use the term Partsong instead. The real end of the tradition came, however, with World War I. In about 1920 a new type of English partsong emerged, selfconsciously based on medieval and Renaissance models and modal harmony, and the glee went permanently out of fashion.
A reassessment of the glee is long overdue. Its 160-year history includes a great deal of inept, hastily written and commercial work, but the genre deserves to be judged on its finest achievements, which give a touching picture of the inward, private side of the English psyche at a time when England’s main energies were turned outwards towards Empire.
MGG1(J. Westrup [contains a list of 18th- and 19th-century pubns])
W.A. Barrett: English Glees and Part-Songs (London, 1886)
D. Baptie: Sketches of the English Glee Composers (London, 1896)
Viscount Gladstone: The Story of the Noblemen and Gentlemen’s Catch Club (London, 1930)
P.M. Young: The Madrigal in the Romantic Era, American Choral Review, xix/4 (1977)
P. Hillier: disc notes, The Romantic Englishman, Meridian E77002 (1978)
D. Johnson: ‘ The 18th-Century Glee’, MT, cxx (1979), 200–02
R. Doveton: disc notes, When winds breathe soft, Decca DSLO 33 (1979)
D. Johnson, ed.: Preface to Ten Georgian Glees for Four Voices (London, 1981)
P. Hillier, ed.: Preface to 300 Years of English Partsongs: Glees, Rounds, Catches, Partsongs, 1600–1900 (London, 1983)
D. Johnson, ed.: Preface to The Scholars’ Book of Glees (London, 1985)
DAVID JOHNSON