Country on the north-western periphery of Europe. Although its borders and some of its institutions have changed little in a millennium, England nevertheless finds its identity, cultural as much as political, subject to an ever-shifting network of contributing peoples and governances. Some consideration to the terms and relationships that define England within Britain are given here.
Geographically, England is the largest, southernmost part of Great Britain, itself the larger of the two main land masses constituting the British Isles. Wales and Scotland are the other units of Great Britain, together with certain offshore islands long incorporated, namely the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, both Crown dependencies of largely English culture, although they have their own laws, coins and assemblies. Politically, Britain – the United Kingdom, a democratic constitutional monarchy – has since 1922 included Ulster (Northern Ireland) and excluded Eire (southern Ireland), which became independent at that date; previously, the whole of Ireland was a possession of the British crown, colonial until political union in 1801. The kingdom of Scotland was politically independent of England until the Act of Union of 1707, though the two countries have shared a monarch from 1603. Wales was to all intents and purposes assimilated to England from 1485, though its language, unlike the other Celtic ones of Britain, retained official currency within the principality that it had become. To add to the historical complexity, England was effectively a colony of Normandy, governed by a French-speaking élite after William I's conquest of 1066, but by the time of his great-grandson Henry II, 100 years later, England and its monarch exercised control over the larger part of what is now France, though Henry was king only of England. Before the Norman Conquest, English identity must largely be a matter of Anglo-Saxon culture and language, imposed by invasion on earlier Celtic ones and modified in turn by a Danish admixture from later invasion. The paradox of English versus British identity is prominent in the figure of Arthur, a symbolic English national, yet historically a Celtic Briton fighting the Anglo-Saxons (as he appears in Purcell's semi-opera of 1691). Minus Ireland and Scotland, Britain comprised a group of Celtic tribes under Roman occupation for the first four centuries ce; they nevertheless joined as Britons in Boudicca's uprising of ce 61. English cultural identity dates arguably from around the time of Bede, possibly the first commentator to assume it. The English language developed from Anglo-Saxon but was not the vernacular of the governing classes until the 14th century. Now it is the foremost language of the world, but is spoken at home not just in noticeably different ways in the various traditional constituencies of Britain (including those of class and region) but by English citizens of increasing ethnic and cultural diversity.
England has always been the predominant entity within Britain, not least because its capital city, London (succeeding Winchester in the 12th to 13th centuries, although Westminster Abbey was already the coronation site before the Norman Conquest), has remained the capital of the United Kingdom and the hub of the overseas British Empire. From its Roman foundation in the 1st century ce, London has always been the largest city in Britain. By the end of the 17th century it was the largest in western Europe, subsequently the largest in the world until the early 20th. In the new millennium London is still a leading metropolis and one of the greatest cultural centres of the world. It has dominated England's musical life and thus England has dominated Britain's, although seldom, if ever, Europe's or the world's prior to late 20th-century pop culture.
STEPHEN BANFIELD (I), IAN RUSSELL (II)
England, §I: Art & commercial music
England, §I, 1: Art & commercial music: Contenance angloise
All the above factors have affected England's music, as have many others historically dependent upon them and perhaps a few external constants such as climate and geography. Thus musical terms of reference must be sought amid an interlocking and chronologically shifting set of identities at, above and below the level of England in structural and community terms. In a long-surviving monarchy linked for much of its history with a state church – a unique configuration in the present, though formerly paralleled up to a point in tsarist Russia – we should expect music to play a symbolic role as regalia, facilitating the country's corporate sentiment, trade, diplomacy, sense of history and so on. This role posits an inevitably hegemonic rather than ethnic or regional destiny for musical concepts of Britishness or Englishness other than the folk ones which it nonetheless embraces at critical moments. Yet just as the physical regalia have been melted down in the past, musical tokens are prone to remodelling over time and according to circumstances. Whether a populist national identity (that is, patriotic solidarity) can be assumed at all for Britain before the 18th century has been questioned, but ‘England’, already proudly peripheral, is a powerful construct in Shakespeare, who projects it back to the Middle Ages.
Music, as a performing art, is subject to institutional production, and musicology has not lacked accounts of how the nation's musical institutions (the Chapel Royal, for instance) function anatomically in the body politic. J.A. Westrup's ‘England’ article in The New Grove (A1980) and Caldwell's in MGG2 (A1995) both offer comprehensive chronicles, Apel's in The Harvard Dictionary of Music (A1944) a thoughtful pocket survey. Beyond this, the discipline's emphasis on composers and their styles has tended to play into the hands of 19th- and 20th-century nationalism in its search for an intrinsic Englishness, spurred by certain contemporary perceptions of difference dating from as far back as the Middle Ages, above all in the sphere supposed to be most international: the pre-Reformation church. Englishness of style must certainly be addressed in this article, but the musical representation of England or Britain cuts other ways as well. As for the question of English music or British music, it is easier to raise conundrums than propose a rule of thumb. Perhaps all one can suggest, tentatively and with massive exceptions, is that from the 18th century musical representation of England tends to pertain more to the private sphere, of Britain, and indeed London, than to the public.
As early as the 1440s, in Le champion des dames, the Burgundian court poet Martin le Franc recognized in the contemporary English music of John Dunstaple and his fellows (Leonel Power, for instance) a discrete style, influential on the continental masters Du Fay and Binchois, ‘characterized … by “sprightly consonance” and a number of specific technical features’ (Caldwell, A1991, pp.109–10). Two sweet-sounding ‘sighting’ (extempore) idioms, ‘English discant’ (two-part, contrary-motion counterpoint favouring the imperfect consonances, namely 3rds and 6ths) and faburden (parallel 6–3 homophony), contributed to this perception, as did ‘gymel’ when misunderstood abroad as improvised duetting in 3rds (it is, rather, an English divisi vocal scoring). Interacting with the more elaborate, cosmopolitan motet and chanson styles, they produced what Caldwell (ibid., 120) sees as the paradoxical mixture of ‘euphony … or, on the contrary, that relish for the harmonic clash of independently conceived lines’ – the latter perpetuated, one senses, in the ‘English cadence’ flat and sharp 7th simultaneities of Tallis, the spiced chromatic collisions of Purcell, and the sombre triadic false relations of Vaughan Williams, all running counter to the diatonic strain.
Ever since Dunstaple's period, commentators and sometimes composers have been tempted to treat the idea of a special kind of sonority or other inherent property as the philosopher's stone of Englishness in music, Dahlhaus's ‘immutable ethnomusical component’. Immutable it may not be, but the later Middle Ages and Reformation is as good a time as any on which to pin certain indigenous traits with causes and consequences before, in and beyond their era. Late Gothic sonority with its sense of space is one such trait, the cultivation of the English language and associated forms in songs, carols and anthems another. Both will be considered below.
England, §I, 1: Art & commercial music: Contenance angloise
The uniqueness, longevity (roughly 1350–1530) and magnificence of the final English phase of Gothic architecture, the Perpendicular style, with its featherweight use of stone in fan vaults and huge windows, has often prompted comparison with the music written for such buildings. Certainly, English church music in the greater part of the century before the Reformation of the 1530s and 40s developed a spatial magnificence and complexity in patent stylistic isolation from the continent. This was in both arts partly the economic result of royal and aristocratic patronage: William of Wykeham endowed both the chapel buildings and choral foundations of Winchester College (1382) and New College, Oxford (1379), Henry VI did the same for Eton College and King's College, Cambridge (both 1440–41). In all four establishments there were 16 boy choristers plus a smaller number of adult clerks. Choral as opposed to solo polyphonic singing in church thereby developed early and far in England and gave rise to the unprecedentedly wide pitch range (F to a''), large number of polyphonic parts – six or seven routinely, sometimes nine or even 13 – and quirky, flamboyant textures of the votive antiphons of the Eton Choirbook of the late 15th century, an outstanding source preserving a unique virtuoso repertory virtually single-handed and to this day residing in its original home.
This style peaked with Fayrfax, Taverner and Sheppard and enjoyed a brief final flowering during Mary Tudor's Catholic reign (1553–8) in the antiphons of William Mundy and Tallis (including Gaude gloriosa), but it can still be sensed in Byrd's late Latin publications and presumably gave rise, in a different context, to Tallis's famous 40-part motet, Spem in alium, perhaps even, in the 20th century, to the doggedly British ‘new complexity’ foreshadowed in Brian, Sorabji and van Dieren and latterly pursued by Smalley, Ferneyhough, Dillon and others (Dillon acknowledging the Tallis influence). Certainly, the idiom was isolated from Renaissance limpidity developing at the hands of Josquin, and in the Anglican Reformation continental church music could in any case enjoy no place; but it might be argued that the contrapuntal and textural transparency of the latter, when finally taken up in England with the Italian madrigal (Musica transalpina, 1588), leading to the indigenous madrigal school – the only one outside the genre's country of origin – of Weelkes, Wilbye, Ward and others up to 1625, furnishes an excellent example of the English endorsing an idiom late and then excelling at it. Works such as Ward's Out from the vale and Wilbye's Draw on, sweet night, the former with its six-note diatonic dissonance, combine supremely expressive humanism with something residual of Gothic extremity.
The Eton Choirbook is one of the last of a series of manuscripts of English liturgical music from whose chance survival whole works, biographies and repertories have had to be extrapolated. Earlier ones, in a diminishing perspective of period, knowledge and musical accessibility, include the Old Hall Manuscript (c1400), the Worcester Fragments (13th- and early 14th-century conductus), and the Winchester Troper (c1000, associated like the famous Winchester organ with the cantor Wulfstan and containing the earliest surviving collection of Western polyphony, in the form of two-part organa). Further manuscripts in collections abroad make it doubly difficult to judge the extent to which English sacred polyphony in the Middle Ages, taking its cue from the localized Sarum (Salisbury) rite, was sui generis, or conversely influential on the Continent. The development of the cyclic cantus firmus mass of which the ‘Caput’ Mass of around 1440, tangentially ascribed to Du Fay but almost certainly English, is tantalizing evidence, is a case in point, imitated as it was by Ockeghem who thereby ‘ensured the preservation of a certain Englishness in the mainstream of European music at a time when direct contact had failed’ (Caldwell, A1991, p.158) owing to the political ousting from France abroad and the Wars of the Roses at home. Regardless of this particular work's authorship, one might still say with Bukofzer (C(i)1950, p.223) that ‘the cyclic tenor Mass is the most influential achievement of the English school of Renaissance music’, and consider further whether it marks the origins of ‘symphonic’ unification in Western musical thinking, an ambition whose scope already seems exultant, though with different structural means, in the extraordinary span of continuous musical time (up to 20 minutes) commanded in such a ‘late Gothic’ work as Mundy's Vox patris caelestis.
England, §I, 1: Art & commercial music: Contenance angloise
The English may have liked to discant on 3rds and 6ths because they were ‘merry to the singer and to the hearer’ (quoted in Apel, A1944, p.241), but the ‘merrie England’ myth in music goes back a lot further than the 15th century, to Sumer is icumen in, the secular song (also with sacred words) preserved in a Reading Abbey manuscript probably of the later 13th. No matter that 6/8 is only one of its possible rhythmic interpretations; that, the minor-3rd cuckoo calls, major mode, affection for nature, rhetorical exuberance (‘sumer’ and ‘cumen’ on the upper tonic), oscillating harmony and drone bass make it the perfect English pastoral prototype, ‘slightly too good to be true’, as has been said of Grainger's Country Gardens as a folktune arrangement. Yet it is true, early date and all, and two more things about it bear consideration: its form and its melopoetics.
Sumer is icumen in is a rota, that is, a canon, in four parts. It is accompanied by a four-bar, two-part ostinato bass (pes), making six parts in all, otherwise unprecedented before the 15th century. Clever in its handling of all this (see HarrisonMMB, pp.141–4), it suggests an English love for music that turns around perpetually, whether with canon (or fugue), ostinato or refrain. Rondellus, the technique of canonic voice exchange common in English motets of the same period, is indeed how the pes of Sumer works. Often arrived at in the course of a canon, the onomatopoeic ‘burden’ is a feature of many of the recreational songs collected or composed by Thomas Ravenscroft – see Derry, ding, ding, dasson in Melismata (1611) – and is also implied in Shakespeare's Full fathom five. Purcell's catches, many of them obscene, and the gentleman's catch culture catered for by Playford and other publishers sees the impulse extended into the 17th and 18th centuries, as a tavern or club pursuit related to the rise of concert life. Into the 19th century runs the glee, still retaining something of its remote link with clerical or monastic hilarity in the parts for male alto (60 male altos sang in the first performance of Mendelssohn's Elijah in Birmingham in 1846, and they cannot all have been from cathedral choirs) and in its fugal tendencies, dutifully chronicled as late as 1872 in the famous description of a musical meeting of the Bursley Mutual Burial Club in Arnold Bennett's novel Clayhanger. Parallel to all this, vernacular fugue and refrain come together comparably in the carol, courtly song and even the anthem.
The carol is associated overwhelmingly with Christmas and good cheer, but its indigeneity is best defined formally, as a song (originally danced) with parallel verses framed and separated by a recurrent section (again best called a burden), different from the refrain that can occur in addition as the last line of each verse. The Agincourt Song about the 1415 battle against the French (Deo gracias, Anglia, MB, iv/8) follows this prescription but also includes a second burden. Do its patriotic sentiment and (partly) English text make it a popular song or its polyphony a courtly or clerical one? Simpler polyphonic ploys of rudimentary imitation and canon characterize the burdens of some later songs such as, respectively, Cornysh's Blow thi horne hunter and A robyn (MB, xviii/35, 49), and this is perhaps where the link with the early anthem may be perceived, if a refrain-like sense of release and solidarity is felt in the repeated B section of Richard Farrant's Lord, for thy tender mercy's sake and other short pieces (see Milsom, C(ii)1980–81). Something similar forms the essence of the 18th-century fuging tune, a procedure still enjoyed today by Nonconformist congregations singing Sagina or even Cwm Rhondda, while the circling burden form survives in various Christmas favourites (the waits' carol Past three o'clock), in Victorian hymns (All things bright and beautiful), and in any 17th-century country dance tune, such as the Playford one pressed into service for All things bright and beautiful, built for indefinite repetition until a midway fine. Given the ubiquity of the daily school assembly in 20th-century Britain, it is not surprising that traces of these forms and the intricate distinctions of burden and refrain should be felt even in pop songs, such as the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby, Can't buy me love and Help!.
The melopoetics of Sumer is icumen in also tell us something. They make the most of the propensity of Anglo-Saxon words to intensify the stress of rhyme with association of sense – ‘groweth’/‘bloweth’ ‘seed’/‘mead’, even ‘starteth’/‘farteth’ – and when the onomatopoeic dimension in which this association frequently resides (think of ‘sneeze’/‘wheeze’) is extended to melodic congruence, a very tight lyrical premise ensues, unifying sound and sense. Compare the melodic settings of the rhymes given above: each involves an identical or corresponding (5th-removed) note and/or a similar contour. Nor is Sumer is icumen in the start of such melopoetics, for they can be found in the very first English songs, three attributed to St Godric who died in 1170, as with the co-ordinates of ‘bur’/‘flur’, ‘delie min sinne’/‘bring me to winne’, and ‘mod’/‘God’ in Sainte Marie (HAM, 23a). Wagner, of course, exploited similar Anglo-Saxon properties of assonance and alliteration outside the English language in his Stabreim usage of the Ring, and we should have to take lyric devices back to the narrative ballad and epic of Beowulf and its period, and understand the structural role of harp (strictly lyre) accompaniment in minstrelsy, to uncover the roots of such art. The point is that it branched and flowered differently in English once the language lost its inflections and gained the flexibility of romance words, and to one later node, 18th-century nursery rhyme, must be added another, bourgeois comic opera, above all when the wit of Arthur Sullivan was added to that of W.S. Gilbert. Two of Gilbert and Sullivan's techniques, both cadential, need highlighting: the conflict of homely vernacular sense with lyrical or operatic decorum (as when Buttercup refers to ‘toffee’ and ‘coffee’ in a graceful waltz); and the use of dissociation between sound and sense – and normally incongruent grammar – through rhyme (‘one cheer more’/‘Pinafore’). These techniques were honed further by P.G. Wodehouse, possibly the first musical theatre lyricist to re-establish the practice of letting the tune be written before the words.
These melopoetics imply a simple equation between note and syllable, and one way to view the polar impulses of cultivated and vernacular expression in English music is in terms of melismatic or syllabic text-setting. It is the relationship between foreign opera and indigenous musical theatre in Purcell's and Handel's London. Later it is the florid rebellion of Britten in his song cycles, starting with On this Island (Auden, 1936), Tippett in his W.H. Hudson cantata Boyhood's End (1943) and both in their operas, against the syllabic ‘just note and accent’ of Finzi setting Hardy (Earth and Air and Rain, 1936) and of Parry, Butterworth, Gurney, Quilter, Warlock, Ireland and many others in the pseudo-vernacular lyrical markets of church, school and salon. Earlier it is composers' responses to the Reformation's demand for intelligibility superseding their Marian extravagance: Tallis's short anthem If ye love me, prompted by Archbishop Cranmer's 1544 dictum ‘for every syllable a note’, as opposed to his Gaude gloriosa.
England, §I: Art & commercial music
Perhaps more than the growing national identity, in the later 17th century and throughout the 18th it was the reciprocal factors of England’s growing mercantile power channelled (predominantly through London) and growing civilian freedoms that produced a national music, above all song. They did so through the twin commercial stimuli of publishing and the public venue (theatre, concert hall, assembly room and pleasure garden) and the opportunities for participation and instrument manufacture that complemented them.
(i) The public and metropolitan sphere.
(ii) The private and provincial sphere.
England, §I, 2: Art & commercial music: Orpheus britannicus
From this time almost to the present, folk culture, in addition to being seen as a series of unselfconscious and separate traditions within Britain, might also be viewed within a single more commercial one of ‘national song’ which embraced rather than separated the ‘four nations’ while acknowledging representatives of each. Thus was the world's first national anthem (God save the King – see Scholes, C(iii)1942) produced and popularized, as was Rule, Britannia, alongside English, Welsh, Irish and Scottish songs (Heart of oak, All through the night, The rose of Tralee, Loch Lomond and many others), all to be sung at hearths that were British.
Modern concepts of patriotism were certainly involved in this enterprise, which stretched back to tavern club songs such as Here's a health unto His Majesty on the one hand and, on the other, Lilliburlero, the ‘new Irish tune’ arranged or composed by Henry Purcell that ‘was highly instrumental in singing out a Bad Monarch [James II]’ in 1688 (quoted in Spink, C(ii)1992, p.6). Here and at the prompting of dramatic scenarios and song texts in works for the London stage, notably Dryden's King Arthur, mentioned earlier, Purcell took upon himself the transformation of the masque's symbolic glorification of court and state into an exercise in more populist myth-making (and see Aspden, B(i)1997, on the link between ballad narratives and English opera plots). It sings of Britain (Fairest isle), but the viewpoint is English, not least when Purcell uses a country-dance style ‘topic’ in Your hay it is mow'd and the pomp and circumstance of diatonic dissonance in Our natives not alone appear (see the subdominant major 7th at the final iteration of ‘sceptred subjects’). A handful of early 20th-century songs by composers of art music, notably Parry's Jerusalem (text by Blake), Holst's I vow to thee, my country and Elgar's Land of hope and glory, has now largely superseded the earlier national corpus, but the model is still ultimately Purcellian and still only ambiguously British as opposed to English.
Most song finds its way to the public's heart via media entertainment of one kind or another, and if the English have always been concerned with how their melody relates to sung words, its relation to spoken ones, and to spectacle and action, has been equally critical. This must be investigated, in view of the failure of English opera.
The first reason for that failure must be that, as an Italian art form arriving in London shortly before Handel and his former employer George I, both German, for the ruling classes there was no more obvious necessity for opera to be anglicized than there was for the king to learn English in a world in which most political business was conducted in French. Long thereafter, the aristocracy held to Italy as music's natural habitat. This explains why until the 1880s Wagner was performed at Covent Garden in Italian, and why, leaving aside the question of audibility, even today taste or snobbery decrees that the majority of seasoned English opera-goers prefer to savour its fare in the original language rather than submit to its rhetoric in their own.
Yet regardless of language, England might still have followed a lead and made dramma per musica its own. Some artists did try, but perhaps Handel was the wrong exemplar; instead, Steffani (working in Hanover) shows us what picturesque and vivid drama Georgian opera might have been capable of, had his contemporary Purcell not died young and had Steffani's own works been available as models to Purcell's brother Daniel, and to John Eccles, Gottfried Finger and John Weldon as they wrestled with Congreve's Judgment of Paris libretto for an English opera prize in 1700 – a circumstance itself revealing a national concern to keep up with the Joneses, or rather the Charpentiers and the Scarlattis. (Eccles later wrote Semele, an italianate opera in English, but it was not produced.) Handel's theatrical enterprise, forsaking Italian opera for English oratorio upon diminishing returns after about 1740, was as business speculation too financially precarious for a delicate fusion of tastes and traditions.
Perhaps, in any case, the English simply knew what they liked best (see Temperley, GroveO). Stevens says of the English late Middle Ages that music was ‘widely used in ceremony’ as regalia (strictly speaking, as its adjunct) but ‘occupied a markedly subordinate position’. He adds: ‘Music was there to draw attention to something worth seeing’ (B(ii)1961, pp.239–40). From the medieval tournament or royal progress through the Jacobean masque and London's theatrical heydays of the 17th and 18th centuries to the Andrew Lloyd Webber ‘megamusical’, this may be a prescription for the preferred role of dramatic music in England. Where music and the stage are concerned, from the community street theatre of the late medieval mystery plays onwards (of which complete cycles survive for York, Chester, Wakefield and probably Norwich), the English seem nearly always to have felt that there is a time to sing and a time to speak, a time to marvel and a time to partake, a time to aim high, a time to bend low. In the Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Pageant the comic shepherds, three-part musical improvisers to a man, wonder at the angels’ elaborate polyphony (‘Three breves to a long … /Was no crotchet wrong’) which they try to emulate. Angels sing, shepherds speak or croak faburden, just as in Shakespeare high characters speak blank verse, low ones tumbling prose, and in later musical theatre romantic ingénues warble their operetta soprano opposite male leads of comic parlando.
The class structure of Britain, that apparently ongoing sense of fitness, decorum and division in hierarchy, sometimes of ‘us’ and ‘them’ (see Cannadine, A1998), as well as of compromise between different interests, would seem to decree this. So too would the historical conditions of English drama. London's commercial theatre emerged early as a matter of financial speculation on the part of company managers endeavouring to control a prodigious pool of freelance acting, writing and musical talent and manipulate a broad and large public, including the monarch, by acquiring royal patents or avoiding the Lord Chamberlain's censorship, the latter not abolished until 1968. Although the details are confusing, in general the patent system operated by licensing two or three privileged theatres in any given season from 1663 until 1843, housed at various times as follows: Lincoln's Inn Fields (1656–1732), Dorset Garden (1671–1709), Drury Lane (1674), Covent Garden (1732–), Lyceum (1798–), and two Haymarket theatres, His/Her Majesty's/King’s (opening as Queen's, 1705–) and Theatre Royal (1720–). This had two consequences. First, spoken drama might be licensed at the one house, opera at the other (or the third), which highlighted opera's exoticism. Second, no other venue could without a special licence mount a straight play, or after 1737 any dramatic work, which had the effect of forcing music into the production first for entrepreneurial rather than aesthetic reasons and then as an interpolated masque or concert. Almost nowhere between the Judgment of Paris competition and John Reith's paternalistic broadcasting policy at the BBC in the 1920s and 30s do we see enlightened patronage incubating native aesthetic ambition for reasons of philosophical prestige; and one might propose further that the English have never sought an integrated philosophy of art but preferred to tolerate everything provided it keeps its place. It was only when Arthur Sullivan, the most successful theatre composer England had ever produced prior to Lloyd Webber, attempted to cross over to the ‘serious’ sphere with his opera Ivanhoe (1891) that he failed.
What flourished from the late 17th century in place of through-sung opera seria were oratorio (to be considered in the next section), the public concert, and music on the stage with speech and dance. Music houses, as coffee houses were soon to do, sprang up in London like taverns, or in them, during the Commonwealth, and John Banister began a public concert series in 1672. In the 1680s and 90s concert rooms were being specially built, and by 1748 they included the Holywell Music Room in Oxford, still surviving. The indoor concerts themselves were at first sometimes more like mixed-media variety acts, and vocal items interspersed in instrumental programmes were ubiquitous until 1850, finally quitting the scene still later, well into the 20th century. Nevertheless, these were habits of the time, not barbarisms of place, and the establishment of the Philharmonic Society in London in 1813 was a major advance in the presentation of orchestral music, preceded as it was by such signs of public health as Haydn's enthusiastic reception in 1791–5. And if, as the 19th century wore on, England had difficulty in staying ahead in a rapidly developing medium (stinted rehearsal time, remarked on by Wagner, has been an ongoing problem with English orchestras), such landmarks as the foundation of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester in 1858, the success of the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts (taken over by the BBC in 1927), the BBC itself, with its national and regional orchestras, and the presence, at the start of the 21st century, of five professional symphony orchestras in London offer a more positive picture, as does the building or refurbishment of major halls between the 1970s and 90s (Barbican, London; Symphony Hall, Birmingham; Bridgewater Hall, Manchester; Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool) to replace or supplement those of the Victorian civic movement.
Ballad opera is a convenient if inaccurate shorthand for a number of associated and interconnected genres: English comic opera, burlesque, pasticcio, pantomime and eventually, by the end of the 19th century, musical comedy, variety and music hall. What they have in common are a number of features that tell us much about England and the English: popular or hit tunes, sung by singing actors and star actresses in vernacular English; spoken portions of drama, sharing their satirical or sentimental wit with the homely qualities of the music; a metropolitan theatre or pleasure garden base, as show or extracted numbers (the rus in urbe populist model of Vauxhall and Ranelagh extending to other cities, notably Bath where the Linleys were active, and eventually to seaside resorts); the trappings of opera (lavish instrumentation, melodrama, alluring singing) without its foreign totality; management by commercially aware dramatists and impresarios; interdisciplinary collaboration, with script, dancing, comic routine or spectacle as important as music; the sceptical mockery of pretension, be it heroic opera, the English (or foreign) character, current fashions or politics, or myth; and, arising from all these, no fixed place in the canon of concert and operatic monoliths, to which they have continued to lose out.
England, §I, 2: Art & commercial music: Orpheus britannicus
For all the precocious growth of the public sphere of music in late 17th- and 18th-century England, in tavern concert, pleasure garden, oratorio and musical theatre, there was a counter-thrust of what went on behind closed doors – and perhaps there still is, to judge from the resonance of Finnegan's ‘hidden musicians’ thesis (C(v)1989) about music-making in modern Milton Keynes. In England there has long been a challenge set between the private love and practice of music and the public display of it for gain, a distinction between amateur and professional, sometimes between metropolis and country, more to the indigenous taste (as with the nation's gentlemanly sporting traditions) than implications of lower and higher standards. At the point of triumph of the foreign virtuoso, particularly on the violin, from the 1660s onwards in Charles II's Restoration court and capital, Roger North lamented the summary dispatch of the country gentleman's viol consort, ‘which’, he wrote around 1695, ‘would seem a strange sort of music now, being an interwoven hum-drum, compared with the brisk battuta derived from the French and Italian’. The old way was good because music, thereby ‘kept in an easy temperate air, practicable to moderate and imperfect hands, who for the most part are more earnest upon it than the most adept … might be retained … in diverting noble families in a generous way of country living’, rather than make them rush to London for the season to hear the latest overseas sensation (Wilson, C(iii)1959, pp.11–12). Yet the country and the city have continued to fight it out for the soul of English music, and for all London's domination, the land is small enough that musicians, rather like the 18th-century dancing master John Weaver, a man of international importance who not only began but concluded his career in Shrewsbury, have been able to commute and retreat. Tomkins, Byrd, Weelkes and many others held provincial cathedral appointments in addition to Chapel Royal ones and must have written much of their music in the country. Samuel Sebastian Wesley, perhaps England's most original 19th-century composer before Elgar, was born and trained in London but never held a mature appointment there. Elgar himself lived mostly around Malvern, Britten in Aldeburgh, while Peter Maxwell Davies has settled on Hoy in the Orkneys, although Vaughan Williams, paradoxically for one of idyllic reputation, started and ended his creative life a Londoner, moving to Surrey in between only because of his first wife's health. However, something other than ease of access must have impelled the earlier provincial dwellers, for English roads were notoriously bad until the late 18th century. And more recently Eric Coates, appropriately enough for the composer of metropolitan light classics such as Knightsbridge, Oxford St and Covent Garden, claimed that ideas came to him best in London, away from his Sussex cottage.
If the later 17th century witnessed the wholesale commercialization of music in England, to the benefit of the public sphere, by the end of the 18th the unprecedented level of consumption of music in the home was once again transforming musical exchange and meaning into something much more private. London harpsichord and then pianoforte manufacture, itself an increasingly industrial feat, was in symbiosis with a body of keyboard composers, many of them immigrants, and with an equally industrial publishing trade, second only to that of Paris at the beginning of the 19th century. Hence John Broadwood and his mass production (400 pianos a year around 1800 as opposed to an average of 40 by the Viennese makers); Clementi and Cramer resident in London, not just as musicians but as entrepreneurs (both founded publishing houses); the London Piano School; and the Victorian parlour ballad, where the domestic instrument, bourgeois sentimentalizing, theatre hit and academic respectability met in the person of Sir Henry R. Bishop and his Home, Sweet Home (from a melodrama with songs, Clari, 1823). Bishop, the first professional musician to be knighted in England and professor of music at Oxford University (not that that meant much) had been a commercial theatre composer, and he could still fuse popular and cultivated tastes through the lingua franca of Italian bel canto.
But in the first decades of the 19th century, no sooner was Napoleon defeated than German romantic seriousness, already embraced on another front in the relations between Beethoven and the Philharmonic Society and about to bring Weber to Covent Garden and Mendelssohn to Abbotsford, Windsor Castle and Birmingham as well as London, realigned English musical self-acceptance as complacency and undermined it. So too, paradoxically, did the very romanticism of the national enterprise in song in so far as the repertory not only continued to co-opt the folk identity of the Celtic fringes (Ireland, Scotland, Wales) through the literary work of Percy, Macpherson, Burns, Moore and many others, but elevated it to such an extent that it left the English centre empty until it too was found an identity by Cecil Sharp.
Musical xenophilia, while hardly extending to the French or to revolutionaries such as Wagner, was one source of the perception of a Land ohne Musik. A second must have been the lack of two developed traditions, regional courts with opera and orchestra, and organ music with pedals (and that in a country with a Protestant state church), either of which would preclude a native Bach, an increasingly beloved figure in England perhaps partly for that reason. The weight of literature was a third: Balfe or Macfarren could not hope to match the rich texture of Dickens, itself inherited all the way from Shakespeare, whose Falstaff not even Vaughan Williams and Holst in the 20th century managed to capture in opera (although Dyson, with their stylistic help, caught something of Chaucer's national characterizations in his massive cantata The Canterbury Pilgrims of 1931). But the fourth and most fatal symptom was philistinism, that sense of keeping music in its place already alluded to. Matthew Arnold and other intellectual giants recognized this as the price paid for Victorian industrial prosperity. The kind of music that flourished most spectacularly in 19th-century England was accordingly music relating to the home and to the people's entertainment: the commercial song on the one hand, increasingly channelled, for wit or sentimentality, through blackface minstrelsy (hence increasingly transatlantic), and, on the other, any utilitarian vehicle for ensembles such as brass bands or amateur choirs, where the status of the performers or performance mattered more than that of the music. Oratorio as a national expression of musical sublimity was an exception, to be considered below.
England, §I: Art & commercial music
It was said by the 19th-century historian John Seeley that Britain acquired its empire simply in a fit of absence of mind: an exaggeration, no doubt, but if partly true, reason enough why the role of music in the representation of the British Empire was strangely insignificant or, more serious and more likely, has not been researched, perhaps because the terms of reference for musical greatness need suspending where such a phenomenon is concerned (however, see Leppert, C(iii)1987, and Woodfield, C(ii)1995, on India).
(i) Music and the British Empire.
England, §I, 3: Art & commercial music: Absence of mind
We have only unconnected glimpses of the musical territory of Empire. Here are six, from the state, the military, the church, education, the media, and merchandise. Robbins (A1998, p.219) states that in British India ‘the pomp and ceremony surrounding a Viceroy was a sight to behold’. Was it also a sound to hear? It certainly was in Hong Kong at its return to China in 1997. As in peace, so in war. Linda Colley (C(iii)1992, p.325) stresses the importance of music to Britain during the Napoleonic wars, at a time when we forget ‘how limited a range of sound was normally available to the mass of people … so [that] when recruiting parties brought their wind instruments, drums and cymbals into small villages, the effect was immediate and powerful’. As for the representation of Protestant Englishness in church music, the English hymn – although again it is also British, with major contributions from Scotland and Wales – built up over three or four centuries, has permeated the anglophone world. So have attendant ecclesiastical products, procedures and performing practices, by no means only in worship. Specific traditions of organ building and playing developed in the wake of Henry Willis's showpiece instrument at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (which went to Winchester Cathedral). The late 20th-century touring and recording success of ensembles such as the Tallis Scholars (and many others before them, plus cathedral choirs) and extreme popularity of Rutter's choral music in America and Australasia (as well as in Britain) posit a specific vocal timbre and harmonic style as pre-ordainedly English (and lucrative).
Our fourth snapshot: the British Empire exported both its competitive music festival movement and its examination system. The former would appear to be still much in evidence in Africa; the latter not only survives but flourishes uniquely, even bizarrely, in ex-Empire territories as the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music continues to send examiners to the tropics. Capping all these examples, at least from a millennial perspective, is the continuing importance of the BBC and its music broadcasts, two types especially: the World Service on the radio and the televising of major state events. England exposed 750 million viewers from 74 countries to the sounds issuing from St Paul's Cathedral at the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana in 1981, and still larger numbers were witness to the cultural statement boldly made at the latter's funeral in Westminster Abbey 16 years later when Verdi and Tavener shared the musical liturgy with Elton John. In an age of instant global communication it is tempting but probably unwise to dismiss such single events as ephemeral.
Finally, the two-way transatlantic migration of anglophone popular song, mentioned earlier, is seldom seen, but probably should be, as a major artistic consequence of trade in the British Empire, long after the colonies’ independence. The Broadway-West End axis of popular musical theatre in the 19th and 20th centuries is ample demonstration of the commercial scope of music under such conditions. Lord Lloyd Webber and Sir Cameron Mackintosh, heirs to the enterprise, are among the richest men in Britain.
England, §I, 3: Art & commercial music: Absence of mind
The ironic fate of Sullivan's success, mentioned earlier, might point to Victorian laissez-faire hypocrisy: censuring people for the very choices they thrust upon them. At the turn of the 20th century, as Parry observed with abhorrence in his Oxford lectures, many an upper-class Philharmonic Society subscriber delighted in the vulgarity of the music hall. Equally, it might betoken no urgent need to define the relationship between theory and practice, between profession and hobby, between official and unofficial musical activity. In this London's artistic profusion has certainly had its effect. 20th-century composers such as Lutyens, Frankel and Arnold supplemented or earned their living by writing scores for the nearby film studios, which unlike their North American counterparts they could do without a 3000-mile migration. Far more than in mainland Europe and North America, scholars move between worlds for which they are qualified and worlds into which a meritocracy or the old school tie or the moment of opportunity invites them: the academy, broadcasting, journalism and even performance. Similarly, orchestral players and classically trained singers double as session musicians, a London tradition stretching back, one might argue, to the choristers of St Paul's, the Chapel Royal and St George's Chapel, Windsor, whose secondary capacities were as actors and viol players on the Elizabethan stage, the consort song arising as an associated genre.
With the choirboys this multiple function was clearly part of an integrated education (and economic asset), not unlike the Italian ospedali in marketing the cultural by-products of a state resource or obligation, in that case of charity. English charity later produced a spectacular example of cultural display – what better medium for this than music and children's voices? – in Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital in London, which received its royal charter in 1739 and attracted the patronage of Hogarth and Handel (who repeatedly performed Messiah there), while other London charity schools, which had long provided parish church choirs, paraded their young pupils to the annual joint service, concerning which Berlioz in the 19th century was as touched by the sound of their singing in St Paul’s Cathedral as William Blake had been in the 18th by the sight of their procession. However, like the children of Christ's Hospital (founded 1553), Coram's beneficiaries were being trained in music but not to be musicians: to see music as handmaid to charity rather than as an honourable profession has been an English predisposition, indeed an extension of the benefit concert system in the case of the Three Choirs Festival (founded in about 1715) and one or two others. So has the tendency to use music as a passport to personal success – in the 20th-century choir school or university scholarship audition, where it functions like sport, or in the 19th-century female marriage bid, where it was effectively part of the dowry – rather than as the meaningful or gainful substance of that success. Again it appears that there is no integrated philosophy of art, or only a utilitarian one.
In general, education has had a habit of training the English person for everything and nothing, comprehensive if conservative in its techniques but undirected in its aims. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge, in particular, continue to nurture brilliant pioneers in fields other than the one studied, not least because, despite their heavily musical culture, it was not possible to take a residential undergraduate music degree in most English universities until after World War II. Many a famous medical practitioner has played quartets in private with top professionals, just as many an early music performer or music critic read English or History at college. Yet only in England did the award of music degrees from the 16th century onwards provide ‘an opportunity for the reconciliation of Boethius's supposedly incompatible three kinds of musician, performer, composer and academic, and of musica speculativa and musica practica’, producing composers and works (such as Fayrfax and his Missa ‘O quam glorifica’) both practicable and hermetically learned (Bray, C(ii)1995, pp.20–21)
England, §I, 3: Art & commercial music: Absence of mind
Wagner visited London in 1855 to conduct the Philharmonic Society, and hearing the Sacred Harmonic Society perform a Handel oratorio at Exeter Hall, wrote: ‘It was here that I came to understand the true spirit of English musical culture, which is bound up with the spirit of English Protestantism. This accounts for the fact that an oratorio attracts the public far more than an opera … an evening spent in listening to an oratorio may be regarded as a sort of service … Every one in the audience holds a Händel piano score in the same way as one holds a prayer-book in church’ – an aperçu glossed by Linda Colley, who says of the audience: ‘what many of them were worshipping was Great Britain, and indirectly themselves … An extraordinarily large number of Britons seem to have believed that, under God, they were peculiarly free and peculiarly prosperous’ (op. cit., p.34). Most of Handel's oratorios are about the Israelites of the Old Testament, the Chosen People struggling to subdue their enemies, sure in the belief of their utter righteousness and quick to condemn any of their own kind who transgress. Handel commemorations, particularly that of 1784 in Westminster Abbey, reinforced the message by enlarging the scale of performance to huge choirs (Wagner refers to 700 voices), and Mendelssohn fuelled the tradition once again from Germany with Elijah.
With Georgian confidence or Victorian pride, 18th- and 19th-century Britons could unquestioningly apply such moral representations to themselves, at least until their consciences were pricked by George Bernard Shaw, who found ‘the prostitution of Mendelssohn's great genius to this lust for threatening and vengeance, doom and wrath … the most painful incident in the art-history of the century’ (The World, 25 June 1890). When the most original music in mid 19th-century Britain is in the form of cantata-anthems by S.S. Wesley such as Ascribe unto the Lord, with its graphic dispatch of the heathen and lyrical sonata-finale resolution to the text ‘The Lord hath been mindful of us’, Shaw's point is well taken. By 1900, however, the oratorio tradition was a dead weight around the necks of English composers. The sheer number of choral societies and festivals, especially in the northern industrial towns and cathedral cities, meant that there was still money in it for them, via commissions or sheet music sales, but Elgar's contribution, heavily Wagnerian, is indicative: a maverick Roman Catholic masterpiece (The Dream of Gerontius, 1900) followed by an uncompleted epic trilogy on early Christianity (The Apostles, 1903, and The Kingdom, 1906; no Last Judgment), all for the Birmingham Triennial Festival. Britain as a declining industrial power could not be sure how to perpetuate this tradition of mass cultural expression. Its growth had supposedly kept idle hands out of the pub in insurrectionary times and occupied them instead with the self-improvement of sight-singing (pioneered by Sarah Glover, John Hullah and Joseph Curwen in various Sol-fa systems around the time of the Chartists), much as with the brass bands and amateur operatic theatres attached to (and paid for by) factory concerns, those of Black Dyke Mills, Grimethorpe Colliery, Cadbury at Bournville, John Lewis in London and many others surviving into the late 20th century or beyond. But its decline shows in the fracturing of the later choral repertory into isolated monuments (Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, Britten's War Requiem; Tavener and Tippett), and perhaps also in the demise of English comic opera after Edward German, himself an uneasy and eventually silent successor to Sullivan.
One smaller form of mass musical expression has seemingly never deserted England, at least to the extent that it is still a Protestant country in name and deed if not in faith: hymn-singing. Several overlapping traditions make up the Protestant legacy. The 150 Old Testament psalms were translated into metrical English at the Reformation, in the standard long, common and short metres, to be sung in the home and by congregations in church. The Sternhold and Hopkins Whole Book of Psalms after this fashion dates from 1562, with myriad later editions. Until the 18th century ‘the old way of singing’, still found in the USA and the Hebrides and consisting of slow improvised heterophony line by line following a leader's rendition, perpetuated these unaccompanied tunes.
Meanwhile four-part accompanied versions of the metrical psalms began to appear early and found their way into later hymnbooks, and non-metrical four-part harmonizations of English psalm texts with ‘gathering notes’ became the Anglican chant tradition of cathedral and parish church, choral or congregational and still in use. Psalmody presented the psalms and other sacred verse texts as composed partsongs or accompanied tunes for use by the parish ‘gallery’ choir and accompanying instruments (not necessarily organ), themselves a development of the late 17th century lasting through to the 19th until stamped out by the Oxford movement with its ritualistic agendas (including a chancel choir and organ). At the same time the congregational hymn developed: metrical texts composed to supplement the psalms (for instance with New Testament content) which they eventually overtook, particularly with the writers Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley. Books such as Chetham's Psalmody (1718) had huge and long-lasting currency well into the 19th century, but with Hymns Ancient and Modern of 1861 the basis of the modern hymnbook, gathering up hymns and metrical psalms into a cumulative compendium, was established. Much of the foregoing applies to the nonconformist denominations as well as the Church of England (some of it, indeed, to the British Sephardim), and to the USA. What has been the effect of hymn-singing on English music? It would seem to privilege a sense of the harmonic moment or epigram, short-term emotion, rhetoric or closure with decorum yet feeling, above all with consistency; to make these prized sometimes above dialectical range and span; to enshrine the archaic or the familiar, both in word and note (or chord); to stimulate mass chanting (not least at football matches, from Abide with me to various rude contrafacta of cherished ditties).
England, §I, 3: Art & commercial music: Absence of mind
The English contribution to music, especially within the Empire, has often been sustained by men (all too occasionally women), not all of them British, operating from London as committed and influential entrepreneurs, but not necessarily star composers or performers. This is one reason why the history of music in England is not easily written in terms of its great compositions, although cause and effect might be reversed to explain their rise to the top.
Names could be multiplied. The foremost makers of English musical culture would certainly include Sir George Grove, founder of this dictionary. He built lighthouses, railway stations and bridges; pivoted his career on the secretaryship of the Crystal Palace (home of the Great Exhibition); worked for a major publisher, Macmillan, on two ground-breaking encyclopedias (the other involving Palestinian archeology) and as editor of their monthly; pioneered practical musicology, from the writing of programme notes to the discovery of Schubert manuscripts; and headed the RCM, offering a role model for the non-executant musical administrator too often spurned since. Two expatriate Italians, Michael Costa and Vincent Novello, represent very different types. Within 20 years of settling in England, by the mid-19th century, Costa, the embodiment of consolidated Victorian power, was conductor of the nation's four most prestigious music-making institutions: the Royal Italian Opera (and then its Covent Garden offshoot), the Philharmonic Society, the Birmingham Festival and the Sacred Harmonic Society. He represented an immaculate if conservative cosmopolitan professionalism, Jewish of culture though not of religion, on which nationalism later turned its back. Novello, peaking a decade or two earlier, was Catholic, connected with intellectual radicals (Leigh Hunt, Shelley and their circle), and head of a family dynasty. His son Alfred founded the publishing house, acme of mass cultural expansion, and The Musical Times (1844), the longest-running music periodical in the world; his daughter, the singer Clara Novello, steered an unlikely course between the performance of English oratorio and the liberation of Italy. He himself edited, published and, as embassy chapel organist, performed Mozart, Purcell and other neglected sacred repertories. All three Novellos retired to Italy.
An earlier contrast seems in order, between two more publishers. John Playford, in the preface to his Musical Companion of 1673, raised a complaint still familiar more than three centuries later when he asked his English readers whether, since ‘we have at this day as able Professors of Musick of our own Nation, as any Foreigners … we [were] not generally too apt to disesteem the Labours & Parts of our own (though otherwise elaborate & Ingenuous) Country-men’. He encouraged his countrymen by publishing almost anything English that amateurs (in the strict sense of the word) might want to play, sing, dance and study: psalmody, lesson books and repertory for various instruments, and in The Dancing Master, the largest single repository of ballad tunes that has come down to us from that time. Ian Spink (C(ii)1992, p.20) thought that ‘perhaps the musical well-being of the country in the second half of the century owed more to him than to any other person’. Thomas Morley, on the other hand, had invested his country's musical consumption precisely in overseas (Italian) stock when he masterminded the madrigal movement in the 1590s. Organist of St Paul's Cathedral, Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, pupil of Byrd, arranger of many Italian works in his own compositions, neighbour, probably acquaintance, of Shakespeare who made the setting of It was a lover and his lass still today all too evocative of schooldays, and government spy who escaped with his life on his knees before the representative of those he may have betrayed, he inherited his teacher's music printing monopoly and put together The Triumphs of Oriana (1601) by engaging the goodwill of his 23 musical compatriots who contributed, not to mention Queen Elizabeth, who was its dedicatee and subject. Music printing in England had been mostly limited to psalters before Morley stimulated tokens of luxurious as well as pious leisure. He also wrote and published the first English manual of composition, his witty and direct Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke of 1597 whose opening conversation gave rise to the myth of a nation of literate music lovers so satirically re-inscribed in the year following the second Elizabeth's coronation by Kingsley Amis in chapter four of Lucky Jim.
England, §I: Art & commercial music
Purcell's achievement reminds us that the long quest for an English opera tradition after his death has been largely for a national – British – opera in the vernacular rather than an opera for England alone; yet the fact that those who came closest to fulfilling the quest in both the 19th and 20th centuries were in some sense outsiders to the dominant English culture suggests that the inhibition may have been one of specifically upper-class English male reserve rather than British moral temperament as such. Balfe (The Bohemian Girl, 1843), Wallace (Maritana, 1845) and Stanford (Shamus O'Brien, 1896) were Irish, MacCunn (Jeanie Deans, 1894) Scottish. Smyth (The Wreckers, 1904) was (upper-class) female, feminist and lesbian, Boughton (The Immortal Hour, 1914) working-class communist. Britten (Peter Grimes, 1945) and Tippett (The Midsummer Marriage, 1952) were gay.
On the other hand, representations of Englishness as well as Britishness may be found in several of these composers' operas – the pub, the nation of shopkeepers, small-town gossip and hypocrisy, the refulgence of sunlit woodlands, and the Queen in her park at Richmond are as English as faery magic, free-church moral intransigence and sympathy for the underdog are British. Nevertheless, one senses that England may never close the gap between genius and national culture through opera. The English-language and regional opera companies such as the ENO, WNO, Opera North and Glyndebourne are a major 20th-century success story (Covent Garden a more troubled national icon), but they are not associated with a secure indigenous repertory beyond Britten and Tippett, and Britten came too late to match Puccini.
20th-century consolidation has been in other areas. Admittedly these include opera singing and conducting (Norman Bailey, New Zealand-born Donald McIntyre, Gwyneth Jones, Rita Hunter, Reginald Goodall among the Wagnerians), but only as one facet of a postwar supremacy in performance (Jacqueline Du Pré, Janet Baker and Simon Rattle being perhaps its most striking examples) partly explicable as the fruit of educational opportunity under the new welfare state, most of the above coming from modest middle-class backgrounds rather than privileged traditions. The National Youth Orchestra (founded 1947) and various summer schools (such as Canford) still showcase this model, although with more financial investment from ambitious parents as subsidy has fallen away.
The training infrastructure, above all at the London and Manchester (and Glasgow) conservatories, was itself a return on national investment from the later 19th century onwards, however modest by Paris or Berlin standards. The RCM, another development traceable to the Great Exhibition (as part of Henry Cole's South Kensington project), opened in 1883. After Grove, its second director was Parry, its composition professor Stanford, through whose irascible hands passed almost all the ‘English musical renaissance’ composers – Vaughan Williams, Holst, Bliss, Bridge, Howells, Ireland, Moeran, Goossens, Clarke and countless more. In opposition to their teacher's cosmopolitanism, compounded of Verdi, Brahms and Saint-Saëns, they belatedly secured a romantic nationalism of idiom, largely by a Franco-Russian style alliance underneath the folky and Tudor trappings. But the relationship with Germany remained a problem, for without an operatic culture (Stanford called in vain for national subsidy) the South Kensington college, German by precedent, had to be a proving-ground for the Teutonic genres of song and symphony. Song for a while succeeded rather better than symphony (see §I, 1, above), and although by the end of the 20th century it looked as though Vaughan Williams's nine symphonies might have achieved their canonic aims (with three recorded cycles by foreigners in addition to the British ones), it remained something of a relief to discover Elgar, with the ‘Enigma’ variations of 1899, flourishing in provincial soil without the foreign compost of a college musical education. That he wrote in a largely Germanic idiom and was immediately taken up by Hans Richter helped: he could compete on international, not little-England terms. This in turn entitled him to say ‘I write the folk songs of this country’, meaning that the only great English composer would be one with the confidence to define, not the diplomacy to mediate, Englishness (the reviled message of his Birmingham professorial lectures of 1905–6). World War I truncated international acceptance on these terms, as it did for Delius, and neither composer had the stomach for modernism, whereas Vaughan Williams did, although it took 40 posthumous years to notice it. But by the end of the century, in a surprise cultural windfall, it was given to Elgar to offer art-music lovers what in their heart of hearts they most wanted: a new Romantic symphony, accessible without being phoney: his Third, commissioned by the BBC in 1932, fragmentarily sketched at his death and ‘elaborated’ – triumphantly completed – by (modernist) musicologist and composer, Anthony Payne.
It was another example of empirical crossover between theory and practice, a labour of love gaining its reward through some security of tradition and perhaps plain honesty, achieved with a tact belying its daring. Payne spoke throughout in Elgar's language while magically signalling the vista of years down to his own time at the end of the finale.
For good or ill, the so-called English gentleman amateur has always been willing to have a go, where in more modernized, professionalized societies he will have hit barriers and boundaries. There was a naive enthusiasm at work on the country estates of Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton and Abraham Darby that secured the industrial revolution. Science and art were sister pursuits, not rival gods, to them in the 18th century, as they were to William Morris at the end of the 19th when he attempted to reclaim artisan pride for manufacture. If one believes that by then C.P. Snow's ‘two cultures’ (mutually incomprehensible art and science) were afflicting English intellectual life, it is worth noting how broad a range of topic and expertise informed the early meetings and membership of the Musical Association (it became Royal under Edmund Fellowes's presidency in 1944), founded in 1874 very much in the interdisciplinary spirit of South Kensington, perhaps also with faint reverberations of the Royal Society (1660) and Royal Society of Arts (1754). A ‘new musicology’ programme had arisen through absence of mind, and certain elements of it survived to enrich 20th-century English culture, however uncompetitively in the short term. Morris and his guild socialism directly inspired Arnold Dolmetsch, father of the early music revival which has been one of that culture's greatest dividends. To this day anthropology watches over the enterprise in the Horniman Museum in south London, home of the Adam Carse musical instrument collection. A.J. Ellis, part model for Shaw's Professor Higgins, was a philologist whose researches into the history of pitch and temperament allied early music with acoustics. Something of the quaint English inventor attached to his kind, enough to rub off on the early recording and broadcasting industries. With the foundation of the Gramophone Company (HMV) in 1898, the recording industry, though driven by the USA, soon led the world from a British base. The broadcasting industry is still, nearly a century later, a source of national affection where the BBC is concerned, which, although it no longer has the complete monopoly it enjoyed until the 1980s, still receives TV licence fees. The two technologies, together with music and book publishing, enlisted a procession of 20th-century British taste-makers as producers and speakers: Fred Gaisberg, Landon Ronald, Percy Pitt, Percy A. Scholes, Hubert J. Foss, Walter Legge, Walford Davies, Antony Hopkins.
Their tradition was paternalistic, but the fracturing of tastes, markets, choices, generations and values in Britain after World War II, arguably a delayed tidal wave already implicit in 19th-century musical commerce, swept away the soothing (male) tones of cultural assurance. Art music, shamed by the ‘two cultures’, became virtual science, epitomized by William Glock's modernist reforms as BBC controller of music from 1959. Recorded popular music, now an industry rapidly overtaking all other entertainment media except film and perhaps musical theatre (both dominated by the USA), at least until the advent of the Internet, developed at the hands of a new – or was it an old? – kind of English musician, conservatory-trained but demotic, such as George Martin, who moulded the Beatles; here the art school ethos of the 1950s, its ally jazz, was doubtless influential. Light music, a curious token of bustling urban Englishness much promoted by the BBC, often from resort pavilions, in its first three or four decades (Sidney Torch, working with the BBC Concert Orchestra, and Eric Coates its leading exponents), swiftly withered, although signs of revival appeared in the 1990s.
England, §I: Art & commercial music
Music in Britain probably enjoyed higher international standing at the beginning of the 21st century than it had for several hundred years. London, as one of the three or four major financial centres in the world, looks set to continue to host the arts, particularly the performing arts, just as it did in Handel's day when already the British monetary system was far in advance of the French. Today, the record companies' catalogues bear as much witness to that national male trait, encyclopedic enthusiasm, as does this dictionary; in broadcasting the BBC remains uniquely authoritative and influential; early music culture represents an unequalled nexus (still thanks partly to the traditions of the Anglican Church, apt to take too little credit); pop music, from Merseybeat to the boy (and girl) bands, continues to ride the 20th-century tide of anglophone hegemony; and a century of renaissance has at last produced marketable composers such as Britten, Tippett and Vaughan Williams – even if Nadia Boulanger had never heard of Delius.
But composers no longer command English musical identity: they connect backwards (Peter Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle with their Taverner and Gawain operas, for example) but rarely sideways. Even if for a brief hippy moment in the late 1960s it seemed as though Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King and Tavener's The Whale would achieve lateral fusion (much was made of Tavener's association with the Beatles), neither ‘holy minimalism’ nor whatever the modernist tradition now stands for has authorized an English crossover sound bearing anything like the imprimatur that Gershwin, Bernstein and then minimalism achieved in the USA (Nyman's film successes notwithstanding). Turnage and Weir speak only to a minority even within the élite, Blur's Parklife speaks to yesterday's young, Asian and West Indian musics speak on the whole of the originating race rather than the absorbing nationality. If there ever was an over-arching yet unforced English expression in music – the pleasure garden songs of the early 18th century might be the best place to look for it – no-one expects or even dares want such aural symbols now, although the situation may well change in the wake of Scottish and Welsh devolution.
Pevsner (A1956) believed that Englishness in artistic expression was, if elusive, a set of qualities and characteristics that reflected, by deliberation or unconsciously on the part of the artist, something unique in the English condition, which he defined by geography rather than statehood. Locating it was a tricky business, he admitted, given what he saw as the basic equation: that there is a spirit of the age, and there are national propensities, and art is contingent upon how the two interact. The interaction might be beneficial or detrimental, or might produce nothing at all; but when it did give positive results, their Englishness would be something inherent, definable, natural, honest and true.
One might now detect that at the start of the 20th century a good deal of shared sensibility and myth were at work in English music, ideologically propelled. The oft-remarked English preference, from Wilbye to Parry, for ‘clean’ diatonic dissonance over ‘dirty’ chromaticism could be heard (the British never really took to Tristan – as opposed to Meistersinger – just as a call for Britten to turn serial in the 1930s went unheeded), as could, in triple time, a predisposition towards a stately sarabande residue over the urgency of the waltz. On the mythic level, the image of the Chosen People, of which perhaps every nation needs a version, held sway, based on premises such as the size of Empire, the early parliament and early centralization, the national wealth created by Elizabethan piracy, the industrial vanguard, the Protestant and 1688 Settlements, the lack of a 19th-century political revolution, and so on. It correlated then with a rather particular image in music, that of the pilgrim or spiritual traveller, easily identified in the works of Elgar, Stanford, Dyson, Holst and above all Vaughan Williams. The accumulated musical hermeneutics of ‘matching’ features common to certain works of these composers could be expounded. So could the idea they represent, in a non-musical web of meaning and association which involved such things as Chaucer and the wayfaring spirit, Bunyan or Langland (or even J.B. Priestley) and the moral conscience, a national topography encoded with a sense of direction (older, harder rocks and tribes to the north-west, younger and softer peoples and landscapes to the south-east, continental Europe further south-east still), muted emotionality induced by a primly kaleidoscopic climate, a seafaring missionary destiny, a common law involving public rights of way, and a political constitution of no fixed address, that is, unwritten. Today the historical and geographical facts remain, but further conditions and consequent characteristics, some suggested in the course of this article, may or may not be felt: Protestantism; the mindset of insularity; principle, dominance or superiority assumed or negotiated rather than declared. Intercutting with these propensities across many centuries, the images of town and country, professional and amateur, élite and vernacular, theoretical and practical, new and old, monolithic and cellular, extrovert and introvert, central and peripheral have somehow played a unique national part, one polarity generally dominating the other at first glance although rarely at second. Whether they will continue to play it time will tell.
See also Bath; Birmingham; Bournemouth; Bradford; Bristol; Cambridge; Chester; Durham; Ely; Gloucester; Halifax (i); Harrogate; Leeds; Liverpool; London; Manchester; Newcastle upon Tyne; Norwich; Nottingham; Oxford; Salisbury; Sheffield; Stoke-on-Trent; Winchester; Worcester; and York.
England, §I: Art & commercial music
A General reference. B Genres (i) Dramatic music (ii) Church music (iii) Vocal music (iv) Instruments and instrumental music. C Period studies: (i) Middle Ages (ii) Tudor and Stuart (iii) Restoration and early Georgian (iv) Late Georgian and Victorian (v) Modern.
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P. Brett: ‘Toeing the Line: to what Extent was Britten part of the British Pastoral Establishment?’, MT, cxxxvii/Sept (1996), 7–13
H. Carpenter: The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the Third Programme and Radio 3 (London, 1996)
A. Blake: The Land Without Music: Music, Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Manchester, 1997)
T. Mäkelä, ed.: Music and Nationalism in 20th-Century Great Britain and Finland (Hamburg, 1997)
M. Prictor: ‘To Catch the World: Percy Scholes and the Musical Appreciation Movement 1918–39’, Context, no.15–16 (1998), 61–71
J. Doctor: The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936 (Cambridge, 1999)
A. Mitchell: A Chronicle of First Musical Performances Broadcast in the United Kingdom, 1923–1996 (Aldershot, forthcoming)
6. Gender, children, ethnicity.
England, §II: Traditional music
Precise definitions of the terms ‘traditional’ and ‘folk’ are the source of much controversy among scholars, collectors and participants of English folk/traditional music, with some participants even rejecting the usefulness of such terms. In this article they are used interchangeably, considering the oral vernacular musical tradition as process (contexts and performers through time) rather than as ‘texts’ in isolation. But music that is popular in small-scale or group contexts with a primary motivation of social transaction is distinguished from music popular in large-scale of mass contexts with commercial interests as a prime aim.
This article adopts a different perspective from that of much of 20th-century folksong scholarship, which has been highly influenced by collector and scholar Cecil J. Sharp. In English Folk Song: Some Conclusions (1907), Sharp argued that oral transmission was a defining element of folksong and propounded a post-Darwinian theory for its evolution based on concepts of continuity, selection and variation. This led to a preoccupation with identifying songs that fulfilled such criteria; these were of rural and communal origin, and were untainted by popular music. It also led to concentration by scholars on the modal characteristics of folk melodies.
English folk music has co-existed with popular ‘mass’ music at least since the 17th century (when classic ballads, such as James Harris (The Daemon Lover), attributed to the broadside writer Laurence Price, became part of the traditional repertory), with each fuelling the other at different times (see Ballad, §I, 1–6). Manuscript and printed copies of songs and tunes have continued to underpin oral tradition to this day. For example, the renowned Copper family from Rottingdean in Sussex has used one book of song texts for their performances for several generations; Arthur Howard, a South Pennine shepherd, had envelopes crammed with chapbook songsters and songsheets dating back over a hundred years; and among Northumbrian pipers there has been a long tradition of musical literacy in which tunes have been passed on or exchanged in manuscript or printed form as well as by aural memory.
In this brief survey of traditional music in England, a map is sketched out of vernacular musical traditions both from synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The oral musical tradition is shown to be processual in that songs and music whose texts or tunes retain resonance and meaning for the singer, instrumentalist and community, are recreated by individuals within that community. Cultural identity – evident in text, tonality, style, meaning, function and context, as well as in the construction and composition of repertory – is illustrated. In line with recent research, application of fixed and timeless definitions to a dynamic cultural process will be avoided, the differing interpretations of scholars and collectors of the past and present outlined, and perceptions of participants of the tradition itself included. Folk or traditional music rarely exists independently of song and dance and therefore this discussion includes those aspects.
England, §II: Traditional music
The contemporary vitality of folk music, performed in traditional contexts as well as in a network of folk clubs, festivals and sessions, owes its existence to the ‘revival’ that occurred in two distinct phases during the 20th century. The first had its origins in the 19th century when a small number of privileged middle-class enthusiasts with antiquarian and musical interests, intrigued by the singing culture of artisan and labouring groups in rural southern England, selectively notated (text and tune) certain examples of their tradition. In the 1820s and 30s, Davies Gilbert and William Sandys both published collections of Christmas carols from Cornwall, several of which were in oral circulation. In 1843 John Broadwood published the first folksong collection, Old English Songs as Now Sung by the Peasantry of the Weald of Surrey and Sussex, but the main activity dates from around 1890 when collections by Lucy Broadwood, Frank Kidson and Sabine Baring-Gould were all published, paving the way to the founding of the Folk Song Society in 1898. The most notable folksong collector in the decade before World War I was Cecil Sharp.
Generally song transcriptions were published in the same format as classical song – in vocal scores with piano accompaniment, arranged for and to be performed by trained singers. The erotic lyrics of the original were bowdlerized or toned down to avoid giving offence to the polite, predominantly middle-class society for whom the collections were intended.
In the melodies of the songs, the collectors sought an inspiration for indigenous composition that would help create a national idiom to counter the German domination of art music in the 19th century. Thus Ralph Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger and George Butterworth, aware of the example of Bela Bartók in Hungary, were all actively involved in folksong collecting which became a resource for their composing. Others, such as Gustav Holst, while not caught up in the actual quest, nonetheless made use of the collections of their contemporaries.
In the decade before World War I, Sharp noted down and transcribed thousands of songs, tunes and dances, took a leading role in the Folk Song Society, founded the English Folk Dance Society, kept folksong in the public eye through articles and letters to the press, organized displays, gave lectures and directed dance festivals, in addition to undertaking fieldwork in the Appalachian Mountains, USA, and publishing his seminal book. He was instrumental in introducing folksong into the curriculum of state schools, which he saw as a process of ‘giving back’ the culture to its rightful owners. He was the most zealous and missionary of the collectors, believing that folk music had the power to purge and purify English popular culture of the commercial influences of music hall and Tin Pan Alley.
For the folksong collectors it was the beauty of the melodies that was the first priority, rather than the texts or performance styles of the singers from whom the songs had been notated. Two collectors were exceptions in this respect: Percy Grainger, because he valued the performance of a song and went to great lengths to capture it on phonograph recordings, transcribing it all in great detail; and Alfred Williams, who devoted his energies to representing the repertory of a singing tradition in its entirety, albeit as text only.
The legacy of this first phase of the revival included the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), founded in 1932, a number of published collections, the inclusion of folkdances and reworked folksongs in the school curriculum, and a repertory of English romantic art music based on folk melodies. The academic Journal of the Folk Song Society was founded, which became the Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society in 1932, and from 1965 to date the Folk Music Journal, and a library based on Cecil Sharp's own library (since 1958 the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library), both of which were (and are) organized by the EFDSS.
Between the two world wars there was a complacency based on the mistaken belief that the cultural salvage operation had been successful, that all the material worth finding had been collected, and even that folksinging had died out. Only the Irish composer E.J. Moeran, based in East Anglia, and the Harvard scholar James Madison Carpenter undertook any sustained fieldwork. The full significance of Carpenter's work, recording traditional songs, music, dances, drama and customs from many parts of Britain and Ireland, has still to be recognized and assessed.
After World War II and the ensuing period of austerity, there grew a national desire to celebrate British culture and tradition. This manifested itself in 1951 as the Festival of Britain, significantly the centenary of the Great Exhibition. Implicit in this display of national pride was the desire to secure those aspects of the heritage that might otherwise have been lost had the outcome of the war been different. Thus the impetus to research English folksong repertory was reborn.
Partly because of its technical expertise and the potential of the material for programme making, the BBC undertook to coordinate the fieldwork. Expertise for the project, referred to as the BBC Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme, was drawn from EFDSS personnel, namely Peter Kennedy and Seamus Ennis, who jointly headed the project, supported by a number of experts for different recording expeditions, such as the American collector Alan Lomax, Hamish Henderson in Scotland and Sean O'Boyle in Ireland. Hundreds of recordings (now in the BBC Sound Archives) were made. When broadcast, particularly those in the radio series As I Roved Out, questions were raised about the validity of the treatment given to the songs by Cecil Sharp and his fellow collectors, and this led to a movement to perform the songs in a more ‘authentic’ manner.
The two most influential figures of the post-war revival in folksong performance were writer and journalist A.L. Lloyd and playwright and songwriter Ewan MacColl. Both came from a background of left-wing socialism and radical Marxism, which championed the culture of working people in contrast to the middle-class élite. While accepting uncritically Sharp's evolutionary ideas about folksong, they constantly strove to reunite folksong and folksinger in the eyes of the public and their many followers. The narrative mastery of Harry Cox, a farm labourer from Norfolk, the infectious humour of Sam Larner, a Norfolk fisherman, the partsinging of the Copper family from Sussex, the subtle ornamentation of the gypsy singer, Tom Willett, along with Scots and Irish singers, were all held up as exemplars of tradition or ‘song carriers’ as MacColl dubbed them.
In the early years of this second phase of revival, young folk club singers, influenced by the skiffle craze, looked initially to American material. By the early 1960s, however, their focus had shifted to indigenous English material. This interest was served by record releases of traditional singers by Topic Records, especially The Folk Songs of Britain series of ten LPs. There was a hunger for appropriate material to build up repertories. Enthusiasts sought out scholarly ballad collections such as that by the American professor Bertrand Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. At this time, folk clubs came into being and folk festivals were first conceived. (Folkdance festivals had been organized since before World War I.)
In 1967, fresh insights into the subject were provided by A.L. Lloyd in his Folk Song in England, which was influenced by Eastern European ethnomusicology, particularly the Romanian Constantin Brailoiu, as well as the English social history movement, pioneered by such scholars as A.L. Morton and E.P. Thompson. Although subsequent scholarship in the field of folk music has served to refute or emphasize aspects of Lloyd's work, it remains the most comprehensive account.
England, §II: Traditional music
England, §II, 3: Traditional music: Songs
Types of songs favoured by contemporary traditional singers may be analysed from a historical perspective in terms of different layers of cultural accretion or assimilation. Such groupings of songs fall into loose genres in terms of their subject and textual themes.
The oldest group of songs in oral tradition, many of which have been classified by Francis James Child in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, predate 1750 and most are narratives of an indeterminate age. Examples include The Outlandish Knight (Child 4), The Twa Sisters (Child 10), and Edward (Child 13). There are also a few sacred items, such as the Christmas carol All you that Are to Mirth Inclined and the cumulative song The Twelve Apostles. In some cases since the 16th century these songs were printed on contemporary ballad sheets or black-letter broadsides, so called because the printers used Gothic typeface.
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the type of songs classified by Cecil Sharp as ‘folksongs’ (as opposed to ballads) entered tradition. The largest group comprises narrative songs with tragic, amatory, historic and comic themes often based on an encounter (e.g. The Death of Bill Brown, The Sucking Pig, Van Dieman's Land, The Dark-Eyed Sailor, The Bold Grenadier and Bold General Wolfe). A small number are lyrical (non-narrative) in character (e.g. I Wish, I Wish, Seeds of Love, Adieu my Lovely Nancy). Some are convivial and associated with drinking (e.g. Jones's Ale, The Barley Mow); others relare to a specific occupation (e.g. Jim the Carter's Lad, The Herring's Head, The Old Weaver's Lament, The Collier's Rant). Recreation and sport feature in a further group of songs, particularly those connected with hunting (e.g. Old Towler, The Horn of the Hunter, A Fine Hunting Day). Worksongs are not common in England, with the important exception of sea shanties. These were used on sailing ships for specific functions, such as weighing or casting anchor – a windlass shanty (e.g. Sally Brown) – or hoisting the sails – a halyard shanty (e.g. Blood Red Roses).
In this same period a number of celebratory and dramatic customs, particularly perambulatory and house-visiting, became popular, and songs associated with them are often found among groups of singers in different localities. Examples include May, Wassail and harvest songs, as well as those associated with traditional drama, such as The Derby Tup, and street or field games, such as the Haxey Hood from Lincolnshire.
The Christmas carolling traditions of many villages, particularly in Yorkshire, Derbyshire and the West Country, date from this period and are typical of the village music performed by church choirs and bands, both Anglican and nonconformist, at this time. The form of the music is more complex than the songs referred to above; the singing is usually in parts with a fuging section and, in a number of cases, instrumental accompaniment. Such music, forced out of the churches by the religious establishment, as epitomized by the Oxford Movement (as well as by Evangelicals), during the 19th century, was nurtured by families and informal groups in pubs and as part of Christmas house-visiting customs. In the context of revival, this music has been termed West Gallery Music or the Gallery Tradition in recognition of the physical location of the choir and band within the church.
From the second half of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries, it is possible to identify four overlapping influences of traditional song – minstrel songs, parlour ballads, evangelical hymns and music-hall songs. A number of blackface minstrel troupes from the USA visited Britain from 1841 onwards, most notably the Christy Minstrels, and a number of their songs were taken into the repertory of traditional singers. These included sentimental and nostalgic items such as Kitty Wells, The Blind Boy, Poor Old Joe, the songs of Stephen Foster and zany songs in the Jump Jim Crow style, such as Old Johnny Bowker.
Among the most numerous songs recorded in the repertories of traditional singers since 1970 have been parlour ballads, so much a feature of entertainment in the Victorian and Edwardian household. These too are notable for their sentimentality, especially their preoccupation with bereavement or loss, often through the device of a dream or vision (e.g. Break the News to Mother, The Miner's Dream of Home, When you and I Were Young, Maggie). A few evangelical hymns from the 1870s (e.g. Shall we Gather at the River) are commonly found in traditional singing contexts, particularly from the collections made popular by American colleagues Ira D. Sankey and D.L. Moody. The Old Rugged Cross and Bread of Heaven (Cwm Rhondda) are also hymns that are commonly encountered.
Most songs taken by traditional singers from the British music hall were comic or risqué (e.g. The Fellow Who Played the Trombone, Down the Road, The Parson and the Clerk). By the late 1920s, many households had acquired a gramophone, and comic material learnt from this source directly or via the radio became part of the traditional repertory (e.g. Down in the Fields Where the Buttercups All Grow, The Old Sow or Susanna's a Funnical Man). Currently records, tapes and CDs are the most likely sources for new material (e.g. country and western favourites Old Shep and The Blackboard of my Heart), though often the recordings favoured by traditional singers are reworkings of older material (e.g. The Sunshine of your Smile, Nobody's Child).
Regional songs in which dialect is consciously employed (e.g. Ilkla Moor b'a Tat, Rawtenstall Annual Fair, Cushie Butterfield, Any Old Iron) owe their origins in part to the popularity of regional music hall, most notably in the north-east of England, and elsewhere including Yorkshire, Lancashire and the ‘Cockney’ East End of London. It is common for such songs to take the form of satires of stereotypical country people (e.g. Gossip John, The Fly Be on the Turmut) and ironically it is often people from the targeted communities who most value such songs.
Singers relish such self-reflexive humour and often include a number of parodies in their repertory, some of which are locally created. Often the song that is parodied is one that is held in high esteem in the community, such as Grandfather's Clock or The Irish Emigrant, and both original and parody sit comfortably side by side. Common examples in the repertories of traditional singers include The Egg, which makes fun of respected songs (e.g. The Minstrel Boy, Excelsior) and The Tattooed Lady, which completes a risqué topological tour at the expense of a popular song from 1901, My Home in Tennessee.
Another instance of creativity within the traditional model is the local satirical or gossip song that lists members of the community together with scurrilous comment or choice anecdote; an example of this form from Sheffield is Fulwood Farmers and Neighbours. In certain regions, songs of a more literary character, created by local poets or songwriters, have been recorded in tradition. Barbary Bell by Robert Anderson of Carlisle and Friezland Ale by Ammon Wrigley of Saddleworth are examples of this type, both being written in their respective vernacular dialects. Songs of or about a particular region, as well as favourite Irish songs, are also consciously appropriated by singers outside the specific milieu. Thus The Galway Shawl is sung by Shropshire singer Fred Jordan, and The Song of the Swale (from the Yorkshire Dales) features in the repertory of a number of Sheffield singers.
England, §II, 3: Traditional music: Songs
In its broadest sense, the folklorist's understanding of ‘text’, as expounded by Jeff Todd Titon, includes all that is humanly constructed in the communication of a folk event, such as singing a song, telling a tale or performing a dance. With regard to a song, it would include background to learning, singer's comments and occasions for singing the song, as well as relations with audience or listener, and the song itself. In its narrowest sense, ‘text’ simply refers to the written representation of the song in words and musical transcription – necessarily a transformation, an objectification and a reduction.
Older songs, including ballads, are stanzaic and usually have a four-line isometric structure with a simple rhyme scheme (usually ABAB, AABB, or ABCB), each line organized into alternate lines of four and three feet (ballad or common metre). Long metre (four lines of four feet) is also prevalent. Some songs contain refrain lines; others have a more formal chorus section, notably the monumental chorus of the later parlour ballads. Such items demonstrate a more complex and varied structure.
The poetry of folksong is distinguished by its use of stock phrases and epithets, idioms and figurative language, repetition and formulae. Many texts show clear signs of being oral poetry, as evidenced by the use of incremental repetition, but this is not a universal characteristic of traditional verse. Much textual analysis has been undertaken in the light of narrative themes, character function, oral-formulaic theory and structuralism. Such approaches have been most effective when they have been informed by the relevant knowledge of English social history and not divorced from the significance of the musical frame. Meaning itself is relative to the singer, the audience and the occasion; the song helps us to understand the attitudes, assumptions and ideology of the performer. The enduring popularity of key songs such as The Farmer's Boy, McCaffery, or The Highwayman Outwitted cannot be adequately explained in terms of immediate social or aesthetic relevance.
English traditional song based on the stanza is sung to a musical cycle or tune that is repeated. This cycle may be subject to variation by the singer to suit the text or as a mark of individual creativity. Common time (4/4) is most often found, along with 2/4, 6/8 and 3/4, but metres such as 5/4 are not unknown.
The melodies of most contemporary English traditional songs are in the major scale. The obsession of the early collectors with the small minority of tunes that were not in the major led to theories of modal survival, with links to medieval ecclesiastical practice. Such postulations, which were intended to imbue folk melodies with the patina of age, have been dismissed as being at best unhelpful. It is true that examples of tunes have been notated in the Aeolian, Dorian and Mixolydian modes, though rarely in the Phrygian and the Lydian. However, where a melody has been recorded in a particular mode, it is not always clear cut, nor is it always consistently employed within the same tune. In fact, such neat classifications may have been wishful thinking on the part of the transcribers.
An analysis of examples of recorded singing, such as that which Percy Grainger undertook, reveals a rather different picture. In the first place the unaccompanied nature of much English traditional singing, free from the expectations of harmonic accompaniment, demonstrates a scale that lacks the precision of the classical well-tempered model, particularly at the intervals of 3rd, 6th and 7th. Moreover, some song melodies are based on a scale in which not all the intervals of the diatonic scale are present; a common example is a hexatonic scale lacking the 7th interval. In a few cases, particularly in children's songs, there is not even a clear indication of the tonic.
Resemblances between the melodies of different songs have been explained as membership of tune families. For the purpose of comparison, tune contours have been abstracted to help identify such similarities. Other approaches have looked at the significance of the frequency of certain intervals in the scale and to the range of the tune to establish comparative data. The more recent concept of a musical matrix, an underlying codified pattern, as expressed by Peter Van Der Merwe (1989), together with his identification of a ‘parlour mode’ (and a ‘blues mode’) provide a new insight into this aspect.
Although unaccompanied singing has been the most common form of traditional singing that has been recorded during the past century and a half, this does not presuppose that it had always been the case. Unaccompanied singing, as Vic Gammon (1981) has suggested, may be a recent phenomenon caused by social fragmentation and economic circumstances. The evidence for this claim lies in the wide popularity of church and military-style bands in the early 19th century. Certainly harmony or partsinging is a well-established characteristic of English singing tradition, albeit neglected by collectors, and features in the tradition of the Copper family of Sussex as well as in the carolling traditions of the West Country and south Pennines. The influences here combine the late 18th century music of the parish church with the contemporaneous glee style, so popular in English taverns and inns.
Fieldwork in the last 30 years has documented a number of examples of accompanied singing, mainly to the piano, but also to the electric organ or accordion (diatonic and chromatic). Most of these are essentially in convivial and boisterous settings such as that recorded at suppers of the Holme Valley Beagles Hunt, which meets near Holmfirth in Yorkshire.
England, §II, 3: Traditional music: Songs
An unaccompanied song, as performed by singers such as Joseph Taylor, Harry Cox, Phil Tanner, Frank Hinchliffe and Phoebe Smith demonstrates its own musical conventions, distinct from those of art music. The melody is varied and subtly embellished; the tempo and metre are changed to suit, and irregularities are incorporated effortlessly. Whether such variations are the result of artistic expression, awkward line lengths, forgotten or mis-heard elements is a moot point. Most probably it is a combination of all these factors. The extent of this creativity and variation in singing has been disguised by published folksong collections in which the editors often ‘rebuild’ or ‘correct’ so-called ‘incomplete’ or irregular texts (sometimes from broadside sources), or alternatively choose for publication only those examples that they judge to be ‘complete’. Clearly an obligation is felt by editors to include songs deemed to be ‘worthy’ of performance.
Styles adopted by English traditional singers range from the highly introverted to the declamatory. In the former, the singer avoids eye contact or closes his or her eyes and shows no recognition of an audience. He or she betrays no emotion in facial expression and uses no gestures, often preferring to sit rather than stand. The song is delivered in an understated and undramatic rendition. In an extroverted declamatory rendition, the singer usually stands, eye contact is made and the song is dramatized by gestures, facial expression and vocal intonation. Elements of both styles may be evident in the same singer on different occasions or in different songs.
Ornamentation used by traditional singers varies but may include passing notes and slides (glissando), with occasional upper mordents, appoggiaturas, tremolo or vibrato. Most decoration is of an anticipatory kind, such as a slide into a note or a vocal scoop from a 3rd below. Some singers, such as Gordon Hall of Horsham in Sussex, emphasize the end of a phrase by a drop from the tonic to a 4th below. Vibrato and tremolo are used in moderation, often to accent the climax or endpoint of a phrase. A number of singers who make use of vibrato to a much wider extent, as well as other techniques associated with crooning, have been recorded among communities influenced by Irish or Scottish singers, particularly among travellers and in urban communities.
Strict tempo is adhered to by some singers, whereas others use a much freer approach by truncating or elongating the measure, or recasting it, as appropriate. Compound time may become simple; duple, triple and quadruple times may be interchanged. Often these changes take place in the pause between phrases or at the caesura (mid-line), though they are frequently woven into the fabric of the song; for example, truncation can give the song a sense of urgency. Renditions of rhythmic complexity are not exceptional, but are rarely obvious except to the trained listener or transcriber. Such effects, which include rubato, are largely performed unconsciously by the singer, whose focus is the narrative.
The vocal quality of traditional singers is not of primary concern to participants in the tradition; other factors such as the ability to memorize a song are considered far more crucial. Understandably there is an unevenness in vocal quality; voices are not trained. Judged by the external yardstick of art music, a few singers have fine voices whereas most have less remarkable voices and rely on other attributes for successful performance, such as timing and force of personality. Accurate pitching is also a quality that is much admired. Most singers perform with an open throat, slight nasalization and often towards the upper end of their range. Moreover, some exhibit a slightly rising pitch through the course of a song. Non-standard English or dialect usages are often evident in songs to a greater or lesser degree, but this depends on the singer and from where he or she originates.
England, §II: Traditional music
While there is ample evidence that English traditional instrumentalists performed the music of popular songs, either for listening to or for audiences to sing with, their primary function was, and is, to accompany dance. There are three main forms of dance – the predominantly single-sex ceremonial display dancing (e.g. morris and sword dancing), mixed social dancing or country dancing, and solo stepdancing. Each has its own space: street, shopping centre, park or public open space for display dancing; community or school hall for social dancing; and public house or private party for stepdancing.
Unlike traditional singing, which is fairly ubiquitous, there are large parts of England where, outside of the folk revival, traditional music-making is scarcely in evidence, whereas in others, such as the North-East, it is flourishing. The music has been researched and studied much less than song. Cecil Sharp showed an avid interest in conducting fieldwork into ceremonial dance, but he did not devote the same energy to social dance.
Just as with song, English traditional or ‘country’ music can best be understood as the accretion and assimilation of popular English dance music over the past two centuries or more and its remaking and reworking into the vernacular tradition of different regions, much of it being used to accompany dancing of one sort or another. Perhaps the oldest group of tunes are jigs (6/8 and occasionally 9/8) and hornpipes (4/4), although the 18th-century form of the hornpipe was predominantly in 3/2 or 6/4 or a mixture of the two. Waltzes in 3/4 were introduced into fashionable society from 1812, while polkas in 2/4 and schottisches in 4/4 date from 1844 and 1848 respectively. All three forms subsequently became absorbed into the instrumental folk music tradition. Reels of the ‘Scottish’ type were not unknown and examples are commonly found in 19th-century fiddler's tune books.
Church bands of the 18th and early 19th centuries used music manuscript books, many of which have survived. Often at one end would be their sacred repertory of fuging-tunes, metrical psalms, anthems and such like, especially Christmas carols; at the other would be their secular music for country dancing, jigs, hornpipes and marches. The marches in duple and triple time became popular in the repertory with the development of the militia bands during the Napoleonic Wars and the subsequent emergence of the brass band in the 1840s.
The instruments of the church or village band, before the reforms of 1820–60, included a selection of what might be available, what was affordable and what could be made locally – strings (violin and cello), woodwind (tin whistle, flageolet, flute – transverse though rarely duct – clarinet, oboe, serpent and bassoon), keyed brass instruments (key bugle, ophicleide), and even some percussion (mainly drums). The manuscripts show quite clearly that their dance music was often played in parts, certainly treble and bass. The decline of English country music-making is ascribed to the rejection by the established (and nonconformist) church of the bands and mixed choirs, and their replacement by organs and surpliced choirs (boys) between 1820 and 1860. In the sacred context of Christmas carolling, such village bands continued to exist well into the 20th century in the West Country and South Yorkshire, and such a string band from Green Moor in South Yorkshire (1st and 2nd violin, viola and cello, in a septet) was recorded playing their carol repertory in 1994.
The duct flute in the form of the three-holed pipe played in conjunction with a small drum or tabor (‘whittle and dub’) has been used for dance music since the 16th century or earlier, most notably for the morris dance of the South Midlands. Other six-holed forms of pipe developed in the 19th century include the ubiquitous tin whistle. The fiddle was adopted as the main instrument for English vernacular music-making from the 18th century. From 1850 onwards its popularity was challenged by such free-reed instruments as the concertina, both anglo (diatonic) and English (chromatic), the diatonic accordion (or melodeon) and the chromatic accordion (including after 1900 the piano accordion), as well as the mouth organ. Although the English concertina was developed in England by Charles Wheatstone between 1829 and 1841, it was the much cheaper anglo from Germany as well as German and Italian diatonic accordions that proved more popular with traditional musicians.
Other instruments that have featured in vernacular music-making in southern England are the dulcimer (particularly widespread in East Anglia), the banjo as a result of the influence of the blackface minstrel troupes, the mandolin (introduced by Italian street musicians) and the piano, used to provide a vamping accompaniment for other instruments (bass note plus chord, like the left side of the accordion). Percussion instruments that have been recorded include bones, spoons, tambourine, triangle, military drum, as well as the modern drum kit, since the early 20th century.
Although there are a few tantalizing references to the bagpipes in central and southern England, notably in church carvings, the sole surviving form is the bellows-blown Northumbrian smallpipes of the North-East, which date from the 18th century and have been the subject of revivals in the 19th and 20th centuries. The instrument has become emblematic of its region and a special organization (the Northumbrian Pipers' Society) was formed in 1928 to foster its development. This society organizes annual competitions which have led to a high degree of virtuosity and uniformity of style. The form that demonstrates this virtuosity most clearly has developed from the regime of competitions and equates to the theme (air) and variations, commonly a feature of art music since the early Renaissance period. The repertory of the Northumbrian pipers is distinctively regional with a strong Scottish influence, as evidenced by the popularity of reels, alongside hornpipes, jigs, polkas, waltzes and slow airs. There remains a strong tradition of composition among members of the society (as well as a second body, the Alnwick Pipers’ Society) with a regular programme of publications. Two very talented pipers who have influenced the recent course of the tradition and commanded respect among their peers are Billy Pigg and Joe Hutton. Until the mid-19th century other forms of bellows-blown bagpipes or ‘Union’ pipes of a lower pitch were played in the North-East and the Scottish Borders, variously referred to as Border, Lowland or ‘Cold Wind’ pipes, and these too have been the subject of a revival since the 1970s.
The role in English vernacular music of the formally organized and constituted brass band, which developed from the militia band in the early to mid-19th century, should not be overlooked, particularly in the context of ceremonial dance, custom and parades. Such diverse events as processional morris dancing in north-west England and Derbyshire, May celebrations in Cornwall, the parades of Friendly Societies and other village fraternities, as well as the celebration of village wakes in northern England, have depended on the support of the local brass band during the past century or more and many still do. These groups have also been responsible for a high level of instrumental teaching and musical literacy in many rural and industrial communities. A measure of the centrality of such groups is the spawning of parodic or comic bands and their contemporary manifestation, the carnival (or kazoo) bands of marching groups of young girls (majorettes).
The form of English traditional dance music is regular and is usually made up of eight- or four-bar phrases combined in prescribed forms to make 16-, 32- or 48-bar cycles (AB, AAB, ABB, AABB etc.). The tonality of the music is predominantly major, though a number of distinctive minor tunes have been recorded. The tempo is fairly strict, though arguably slower, more accented and articulated than Irish or Scottish traditional music. Recordings of English traditional musicians such as William Kimber (concertina), Stephen Baldwin (fiddle), Scan Tester (concertina), Bob Cann (melodeon), Billy Bennington (dulcimer), Fred Whiting (fiddle), Oscar Woods (melodeon; see fig.18 below), Dolly Curtis (melodeon), Will Atkinson (mouth organ) and Willie Taylor (fiddle) demonstrate the importance of such features as anacrusis, scotch snap and syncopation in giving the music emphasis and bounce.
Music of morris dancing is distinguished in some traditions by the incorporation of markedly slower augmented passages, usually at half speed, to enable the dancers to perform more intricate and energetic stepping such as high or cross capers. The characteristic lift and drive of morris dance music from the South Midlands or stepdance music from East Anglia or the West Country would seem to relate to the favoured instruments chosen by traditional musicians. This can be heard in the attacking short bowing of the fiddle player (such as William ‘Jingy’ Wells of Bampton) or the push and pull (blow and suck) of the anglo-concertina, melodeon and mouth-organ player.
Although the revival of morris dancing dates from before World War I under the guidance of Cecil Sharp and the newly formed English Folk Dance Society (founded in 1911, hereafter EFDS), as well as Mary Neal's Esperance Movement, and was later to be given independent status as the Morris Ring (founded in 1934), it was the post-World War II folksong revival that provided the major impetus for the proliferation of morris dance clubs in the 1960s and 70s. Such organizations, most of which continue to function, provide a high profile for English traditional music-making. Their aim was to revive and promote ‘authentic’ English morris dances, primarily from the South Midlands, as well as the morris dancing of the North-West, which is characteristically performed in clogs.
Favoured instruments to accompany the dance followed the pattern of traditional teams and include diatonic accordion known as melodeon (pitched in G and D), chromatic accordion, concertina (both anglo- and English), fiddle, and pipe and tabor. Some contemporary groups combine more traditional instruments with woodwind (clarinet and saxophone), guitar or mandola, percussion and brass instruments, which in the North-West have long formed the traditional accompaniment.
The development of folk or country dancing (also termed ‘social’ or ‘community’ dancing) and its accompanying music followed a similar pattern to the morris dance revival. It should be noted, however, that Cecil Sharp and the EFDS had promoted the fashionable 17th/18th-century ‘country dance’ of polite society in preference to contemporary manifestations. This form is sometimes referred to as ‘Playford’ after John Playford, who from 1651 published such dances and their music in instruction manuals. Folkdance, revived before World War I, subsequently nurtured by the EFDS and the EFDSS, was given impetus in the late 1930s by the American Square Dance craze. This flourished after World War II through the 1950s to the early 60s, when it was the enthusiasm of folksong revival that created conditions for the rapid expansion of the movement.
The new groups of musicians who played English traditional dance music distinguished themselves from the more formal folkdance bands, who were EFDSS-influenced, by calling themselves ‘barn dance’ or ‘ceilidh’ bands and by operating as semi-professionals. Their music had a great deal more lift and accentuation. The aim was to make such dancing more accessible to the general public or non-specialist with the use of a dance caller to provide figure-by-figure instructions. Such groups, in the contemporary context, generally feature two to six musicians and play a combination of traditional instruments alongside instruments drawn from Celtic and European folk music tradition, such as bagpipes, flutes and hurdy-gurdies, as well as modern electronic instruments, including electric guitars, keyboards and synthesizers.
The post-World War II morris dance and folkdance revivals generated in turn, in the mid-1970s, a more specialist movement devoted to the music itself, rather than as a vehicle for dance. The ‘country music’ revival, as it became known, was heavily influenced by the traditional music-making of East Anglia and southern England, as performed in pubs, often for solo stepdancing. Here a new emphasis was placed on popular song tunes, waltzes, polkas, schottisches and driving stepdance tunes in 4/4. Musicians banded together to promote such music and formal professional groups emerged, who performed on the concert stage and were featured in numerous commercial recordings.
England, §II: Traditional music
Traditional music does not exist on the printed page but in the performances of individual singers or instrumentalists, in the contexts of family gatherings, singsongs in public houses, meetings of social clubs and other social groupings. It is usually informal and predominantly amateur in character. Virtuosity is the exception: a singer is congratulated for singing ‘a good song’ rather than for being a good singer. Participation is the norm. In England, the traditional singer does not rehearse in the classical sense, but may choose to run through songs in private to ensure that the text has been memorized. Nor is there any system of formal teaching. In most traditional singing contexts, any member of the group may contribute a song. Thus the distinction between the roles of singer and listener is blurred, transitory or non-existent.
Among traditional singers, there is an unwritten code of behaviour bound up with the social dynamics of the milieux in which they perform. This manifests itself particularly in the respect shown to senior members of the group, particularly with regard to the ownership of songs or tunes. Hence a singer will not perform an older singer's song in that person's presence until he or she is no longer an active participant in that context or has died. Certain songs are, then, treated as inherited property and remain firmly associated in the mind of the performer with the singer from whom the song was learnt. It is common for a singer to acknowledge this fact in the introduction to the song.
In traditional contexts, the ‘session’ or ‘tune-up’ is often led by a respected singer or musician whose role is to ensure continuity by ‘striking up’ songs and encouraging others to take a turn. This is essentially an informal role without monetary reward. Unaccompanied singing is often dependent on the leader's ability to pitch songs to suit the company. The term ‘striking up’ derives from the action of striking a tuning-fork and by corollary such a person may be referred to as ‘the striker’ in some parts of the country.
One contemporary context that is distinguished by the high level of commitment demonstrated by its supporters, by their strong sense of conviction and shared ideology is usually referred to as the world of the folk revival.
Performance of folksongs and folk music are positively encouraged by the existence in most towns and larger communities of a folk club. These usually meet in hired rooms in public houses in the evening on a weekly or regular basis. The organizers of some of these clubs and their associates group together to stage annual folk festivals. A network of clubs spans the country and a calendar of festivals runs throughout the year. In addition, informal gatherings called ‘sessions’ or ‘tune-ups’ take place in the bars of public houses.
In folk clubs, semi-professional or professional guest performers share the evening's entertainment with organizers (‘residents’) and ‘floor singers’ (members or visiting performers who have come to sing or play in an unpaid capacity, though they may receive free admission). The programme is usually coordinated by an MC, who may also be an organizer and performer. Many clubs devote regular meetings exclusively to floor singers.
Most folk club singers learn new songs from other folk club performers or from their commercial recordings. It is less likely that they will learn a new song from a published folksong collection or that they will take the opportunity to learn directly from a traditional performer. There are, nevertheless, a small number of singers, including professional musicians, who carefully research their source material and pride themselves on its integrity.
Because the institution of the folk club exists as the result of a conscious revival or re-creation, the repertory is a mélange of folksongs performed in a traditional or contemporary idiom alongside newly composed material. Thus there may be differences between the musical traditions of an area and the music of the local folk club. This is not only apparent in terms of repertory but also in singing style, musical accompaniment and group dynamics.
A traditional singer is more likely to perform unaccompanied (or to a piano or electric organ) a song learnt in his or her locality from an older member or the community, in a style that relates closely to the singer's speaking voice, among a group of which he or she is a member. When a folk club performer chooses to sing a traditional song, it is usually to a guitar (or other string instrument, such as a mandolin, banjo, cittern, bouzouki or mandola) or free-reed accompaniment (concertina or melodeon), a song that is exotic (i.e. from another part of England or the English-speaking world), and to an audience consisting partly of strangers. Moreover, some folk club singers consciously adopt an accent that is distinct from his or her speaking voice (e.g. a Londoner adopting a West Country accent). Their voice production affects a nasalized quality by the deliberate technique of singing with a ‘closed throat’ (constricting the throat to prevent the passage of air through the nasal passages). The folk club singer's performance has been rehearsed and arranged; it is introduced, listened to in silence and applauded. The traditional singer performs with a measure of spontaneity; others do not necessarily listen in reverential silence but may join in and sing; the end of the song is not automatic signal for applause.
The atmosphere and repertory of a folk club varies with the philosophy and personality of the organizer(s), the nature of the singers available locally and the choice of guest singer. There is often an in-built tension in the type of material performed, which could range from the rural, conservative, romantic and idealistic material of the 19th century (classic ‘folksong’ as defined by Cecil Sharp) – a song eulogizing the triumphs of foxhunting or the heroics of a highwayman or pirate – to urban, radical, politically aware, contemporary, environmentally and socially conscious material – for example a song about the destruction to the environment caused by opencast mining or the cruelty of a husband who batters his wife.
‘Sessions’ take place in the bars (public space) of public houses, and anyone who has an appropriate instrument in the correct pitch – fiddle, accordion, melodeon, concertina, guitar, banjo, mandolin, tin whistle, flute, bagpipes (Northumbrian or Irish), percussion (spoons, bones, tambourine, bodhran, triangle) etc. – and the appropriate level of skill and appreciation of ‘sound ideal’ may participate. Composition of sessions and the acceptable ‘sound ideal’ vary according to regional location. In an east Suffolk ‘tune-up’, songs and instrumental melodies (with a preference for hornpipes and waltzes) are exchanged in equal measure, while in other areas music predominates and the full gamut of melodic forms is in evidence (hornpipes, jigs, reels, polkas, marches and waltzes), including those from the Irish as well as English tradition. Similarly, in east Suffolk ‘tune-ups’, a ‘master of ceremonies’ calls for ‘lovely order’ to ensure silence during songs or solo instrumentals, while during the communal playing of music, people feel free to chat and socialize.
Festivals incorporate folk club and session formats alongside concerts, folkdances, ceilidhs (used in England to describe an event during which dances may be interspersed with other performances, such as songs or dance demonstrations; also used to describe a style of dancing); workshops (for learning dances, songs or instruments) and street displays, such as those by costumed folkdance groups, notably morris dancers. Some actively encourage traditional performers to participate, which leads to a limited cross-fertilization of repertories. However, few English folk festivals reflect the musical traditions of the region in which they are located, preferring to feature traditional singers or instrumentalists from outside the locality, especially from Scotland or Ireland.
Performers and supporters of folk music at clubs, sessions and festivals – members of the ‘folk scene’ – are participants in a form of subculture that has contacts in North America, Europe and Australasia. It has also become allied with the emergent popular music of developing nations and their constituent ethnic groups. In England, such music is categorized as ‘roots’ or ‘world’ music. It is an indication of the compartmentalization of popular culture that instrumental music or song from the ‘folk world’ has been equally distanced both from Western art music and mainstream popular music, although it did enjoy a period of cross-fertilization with the latter during the ‘Folk-rock’ years of the early 1970s (e.g. Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Mr Fox).
England, §II: Traditional music
Women have played and play an important role in traditional singing, though their contribution as performers of traditional instrumental music has been almost non-existent. The reasons for this paradox are bound up in the expectations of the domestic role of working-class women in English society since the Reformation. Performing a multiplicity of domestic tasks as well as childrearing may reasonably allow for singing, especially when such tasks are tedious, repetitive or part of a routine; however, the leisure time necessary to perfect the playing of an instrument was not available in most households, nor was the independence available to visit pubs or other venues where music-making might feature.
Several of Cecil Sharp's most important singers from Somerset were women, such as Mrs Overd of Langport and Louie Hooper and Lucy White of Hambridge. Vaughan Williams noted (and recorded) songs from another prodigious female singer, Mrs Verrall of Horsham in Sussex. In the last 40 years several important female traditional singers have been recorded including Cecilia Costello, Phoebe Smith and Louie Fuller, as well as some talented revival singers. Whereas the preferred social context of singing for men for most of the 20th century has been the public house, women have generally performed their songs in the privacy of the home among family, friends and neighbours, the most intimate occasion being the singing of lullabies to infants in arms. Changing social attitudes have enabled women to play a far more active part in traditional music-making, dance and singing than had previously been possible, though the necessity for part-time and full-time labour and the consequent demands this has made on women must be viewed as a negative factor.
While it is true that women play a crucial role in the transmission of family songs and nursery rhymes to their children, most of the song culture that children acquire is part of play and is learnt from their peers in the school playground or in the street. Such songs provide the rhythm, framework or rules of games. They are used, largely by girls, for actions, counting, clapping games, skipping and games in a line, ring or teams. Some parody popular songs or delight in scatological or sexual humour. They form part of a code of behaviour that exists to delineate the pre-adolescent from the adult world. The task of charting out this largely hidden culture has been undertaken by a number of scholars, most notably Peter and Iona Opie.
There has been little research into the musical traditions of minority ethnic groups with the exception of the singing traditions of gypsy or other travelling people. In many ways, these groups share the same singing traditions as the settled community, though exhibiting a more conservative approach to repertory and a more extravagant style of singing. In some cases, English gypsy singers establish ownership of their songs by building into the lyrics cant phrases or terms. Moreover, their manner of delivery is often more intense and drawn out, demonstrating Irish or Scots influences. Recent extensive research has been undertaken into the musical traditions of the Irish community in London (as well as some recording in Liverpool) and into the Asian communities in Bradford and Birmingham.
See also Vaughan Williams Memorial Library; National Sound Archive; and Topic.
England, §II: Traditional music
and other resources
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