Light Music in Britain since 1870: A Survey

Geoffrey Self

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781859283370
• eBook ISBN: 9781351560160
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In many ways the history of British light music knits together the social and economic history of the country with that of its general musical heritage. Numerous 'serious' composers from Elgar to Britten composed light music, and the genre adapted itself to incorporate the changing fashions heralded by the rise and fall of music hall, the drawing room ballad, ragtime, jazz and the revue. From the 1950s the recording and broadcasting industries provided a new home for light music as an accompaniment to radio programmes and films. Geoffrey Self deftly handles a wealth of information to illustrate the immense role that light music has played in British culture over the last 130 years. His insightful assessments of the best and the most shameful examples of the genre help to pinpoint its enduring qualities; qualities which enable it to maintain a presence in the face of today's domination by commercial popular music.

CHAPTER ONE

Roots and Reasons

When Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck was first given in London, one respected critic described its effect on him as like losing a pint of blood. Wozzeck is clearly not light music. It is disturbing, disquieting and carries a powerful electric charge. It is a major serious work.

Light music, in contrast, should divert rather than disturb; entertain rather than disquiet. If it does not, it fails in its purpose. It may have other functions which do not necessarily require concentrated listening. We might dance to it, eat to it or even buy to it. If we are stacked in a phone system, we may be regaled with it while we wait.

In all these functions, the music is catering to a real need, even if a created need. In contrast, the need for Beethoven, Wagner or Berg is not as readily apparent. Here, it was rather a question of a need on the part of the artist himself to create.

While it has shared the same language with serious music, light music has emphasized those aspects of that language which are immediately attractive. Of these, tune is clearly the most important. The catchiness and then the memorability of tunes is an elusive subject, worthy of a separate study in itself. Some composers – Schubert, Gershwin, Tschaikowsky or Kern, for example – have shown an apparently inexhaustible flair for such memorability. But this musical quality is not necessarily the preserve of the musically trained. A dip into any collection of folksongs – and especially British folk-songs – will yield many instantly memorable tunes to which no authorship can be ascribed.

If we were to leave it as just a question of tune, we would have no distinguishing marks between light music and popular music. The former must obviously aspire to popularity with some, otherwise it will not meet the criterion of need. But it will have qualities of craftsmanship not necessarily to be found in mere popular music. To a degree, it will have the same mastery of harmony, counterpoint and orchestration to be found in more weighty work.

But not too much counterpoint. The American bandleader Artie Shaw observed on the subject of fugue:

As the instruments come in one by one so the audience goes out one by one.

With a few exceptions, the great masters all wrote their share of light music, to which they brought the same technical resource to be found in their more serious work. Handel, writing for a stately progress up the Thames or for a great celebration with fireworks, used somewhat less counterpoint than he would have thought fitting for a sacred subject; Bach, on the other hand, had few such scruples. The kind of aria he deemed suitable for his rare ventures into secular cantata (such as the Peasant Cantata) would as easily fit into the Magnificat, given a suitable text. Certainly in his Masses and confronted by dreary dogma, Haydn would happily intone the text on one note while giving free rein to his invention, letting his orchestra romp through what is indisputably light music.

Kapellmeisters such as Bach or Haydn would have enjoyed a little more economic security than a composer/impresario such as Handel. Certainly, composers emerging in the first flush of nineteenth-century Romanticism found such positions increasingly rare to come by – if indeed they ever wanted them in the first place. As composers became emancipated from employers, money became a problem, and was therefore a factor in the gradual separation of light music from what, for want of a better description, we must call serious music. But the former had to feed the latter. Beethoven cannot much have enjoyed arranging quantities of Scottish, Irish and Welsh airs for voice and piano trio at the behest of George Thomson, the Edinburgh publisher, but the work paid well and doubtless made possible the last piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis. Elgar said that each time he wrote an oratorio, his family would starve for a year. An exaggeration, probably, but the fact remains that had he not sold his Salut d’Amour outright, neither he nor they might have felt the chronic insecurity that afflicted him.

There are many examples of composers who laced their major work with light offerings. Sibelius interspersed the pantheon of symphonies with such well-crafted trifles as Suite Mignonne and Valse Triste; Brahms, who revered the work of the waltz-king Johann Strauss, wrote his own set of waltzes (Opus 39) and, of course, indulged himself with the Hungarian Dances. Even the uncompromising Delius compromised at the start of his career, permitting the publication in Florida of the polka Zum Carnival, which he would, no doubt, have preferred to have stayed there.

The writing of light music, within our necessarily limited arena, was from the beginning of the nineteenth century widespread if not universal among those composers whose principal expression was through the symphony or symphonic poem. But, as Constant Lambert pointed out, composers as diverse as Mozart and Chabrier had shown that:

seriousness is not the same as solemnity, that profundity is not dependent on length, and that wit is not always the same as buffoonery, and that frivolity and beauty are not necessarily enemies.¹

If a more serious attitude to music was taken anywhere, it was doubtless in the Austro-German domain. There was a moral force and philosophic power to the music of Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, Wagner and Mahler. Their work was (and is) seen as profound, and as such it dominated not only their own musical scene but also that of Britain. This country 's own creative profundity in the nineteenth century seemed to favour poetry, painting and literature rather than music. This may have been just chance; but the lack of opportunities for a musical education and for a real musical career did not offer much encouragement.

Successive studies of early to mid-nineteenth-century British music have found little but mediocrity in it, before the arrival of Stanford and Parry, and then the ‘Second English Renaissance’ figures. And indeed, in the absence of any equal to such major continental figures as those mentioned above, we may well have to accept that one factor that cannot be overlooked is a sheer lack of creative genius among our early Victorian composers.

And yet the trickle of recordings now beginning to appear, of long-forgotten yet rewarding works by, for example, George Macfarren (1813–1887), Hugo Pierson (1815–1878) and others, suggests that such a condemnation may be far too wholesale.

The continental composers were purposive; even their lighter music had weight and was anything but inconsequential. Their work achieved in Britain something akin to the same acceptance as had been enjoyed by the great classic figures of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven before them. If some of their music presented difficulties of understanding, there was as an alternative the less demanding manifestation of German Romanticism: Mendelssohn.

With court patronage to reinforce his command of the moral heights and his own awesome fluency both as performer and as composer, Mendelssohn wielded enormous influence. His Elijah and Hymn of Praise came near to rivalling Messiah in popularity. But his was just the highest profile of a succession of continental composers who visited these islands, perceiving the growing wealth of an emerging middle class faced with a virtual famine of good quality indigenous music. Handel, in the vanguard, had settled here. Haydn’s two visits were financially profitable to him, and artistically so to us. Leopold Mozart had seen the possibilities for his prodigy-son. Weber saw them for himself a few decades later, writing Oberon for us. Beethoven never came, but his cordial relationship with the Philharmonic Society was instrumental in the completion of the Ninth Symphony. Liszt toured the country revealing undreamed-of possibilities of keyboard virtuosity. Chopin came too. (Where did they find adequate instruments on which to play?) Wagner, escaping from Riga and his creditors, found refuge here and returned years later, first to conduct the Philharmonic Society and then to raise money for Bayreuth. Bruckner came to play the organ of the newly built Royal Albert Hall, and Tschaikowsky to receive a Cambridge degree. Dvorak conducted at the Crystal Palace and at the Three Choirs Festival.

Naturally, it was expected that all these masters would present their own music. But purely performing musicians flocked here too: Michael Costa, Louis Jullien, Joseph Joachim, Charles Hallé, August Manns, and later Ignaz Paderewski and Hans Richter. At the lower end of the market, there were the ubiquitous German bands as well as bands of other nationalities – although some of the members of these were often British musicians in disguise.

For the aspiring young British composer, learning his craft was beset with problems. Some who later achieved distinction, such as William Stemdale Bennett and George Macfarren, studied at the Royal Academy of Music, founded in 1822 and for fifty years the only conservatory of music in London. But to many others, it seemed natural and right that they should learn their trade on the continent, neither in France nor Italy but in Germany. For, as the foregoing has hopefully shown, Germany was the perceived fountainhead of all musical wisdom.

Sullivan, Cyril Scott, Roger Quilter, Ethel Smyth and Fritz (later Frederick) Delius all studied in Germany. Stanford, in periods of leave-of-absence from Cambridge, went there too. Elgar would have if he could, but financial hardship precluded such a course for him. Among the performers, Walter Bache went over to study with Liszt and Mathilde Verne with Clara Schumann, while the young Adrian Boult went to Leipzig where Nikisch admitted him to his rehearsals. Where is was impracticable to study in Germany, some adopted German-sounding names, until the First World War made this imprudent. Henry Wood settled for trying to look like Nikisch, as his early photographs show.

The Germans appeared to hold the secret of greatness in music, and the British, with varying degrees of success, aspired to emulate them. The horizon was scanned for He-That-Should-Come. Sir George Grove thought he had perceived him in the young Arthur Sullivan. August Jaeger (himself from Dusseldorf) was nearer the mark in his advocacy of Elgar.

The specifically Austro-German hurdle of the symphony was leapt at by many; usually but once, if only because it was required as an academic exercise. But cantatas poured out in profusion – many from obscure cathedral organists and most destined for oblivion. ‘Grand’ opera lured some of the most distinguished figures – among them Stanford, Delius, Smyth, Sullivan and, later, Holbrooke – despite the fact that, if staged at all, their operas were likely to be roughly handled by touring companies, some of which were of appallingly low standard. But then, they had their eyes set on continental rather than home production. For there was in Britain still a vociferous minority who ‘identified opera with idolatry and likened theatrical pleasures to deadly nightshade’²

The figure of Sullivan conveniently demonstrates both the aspirations of a mid-nineteenth-century British composer and the uncomfortable realities of the true nature of his ability. Sullivan was really an entertainer, albeit one of genius. But from his Queen downwards, those who thought they knew best were continually urging him to lift his eyes to the hills of oratorio. They did him no service.

It is Sullivan, too, who equally conveniently suggests 1870 as a date for the start of a study of British light music. Specific dates for topics are notoriously misleading but 1870-with-blurred-edges is near enough to the start of the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership; to the beginnings of the coming renaissance of British music generally; to the emergence of the new teaching establishments; and to the vast expansion then beginning in the sheer quantity of music provision, as musicians and publishers struggled to meet the demands of domestic households, choirs, bands, festivals, spas and seaside piers.

The extent of that expansion is revealed in the statistics.³ In 1871, a census showed 19,000 musicians and music masters; by 1911, it was 47,000. In 1856 there had been six brass band festivals; by 1896 there were over 240. In 1840, pianos were still a rare luxury. By 1910, there was one for every 10-20 of the population.

Once a demand is apparent, musicians are no slower than other trades or professions to satisfy it. The demand was satisfied but, in the process, the divergence already apparent between serious music and light music became ever more marked. Eventually, at one extreme would be such men as Eric Coates and Albert Ketèlbey aiming only to please their public; at the other would be Elisabeth Lutyens and Humphrey Searle, choosing uncompromisingly to ignore the tastes of the common herd. Many others would prefer to be in-between, writing their masterpieces, but catering to the public when they perceived a chance. One at least – Granville Bantock – somewhat shamefacedly hid under a pseudonym his efforts for the music-hall star Marie Lloyd. And while Lutyens’ work continues to baffle all but the academics, it was found to be eminently suitable as background music for horror films.

* * *

Had there been no Industrial Revolution, the ensuing musical revolution would hardly have taken the course it did. The centralization of machines into factories led directly to migration from rural areas to towns, which then expanded with unprecedented rapidity. It was the conglomeration of people in towns and cities that turned music into a social activity, facilitating the growth of bands, orchestras and choirs.

The creation over a very short time in the early and middle years of the nineteenth century of a network of railways not only allowed the movement of groups such as choirs and bands from one town to another, but also led to the growth of seaside resorts. With regard to music itself, it might be argued that, without the growth of cheap railway travel, the Folk-Music movement, which was such a feature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would never have taken place. Vaughan Williams and Holst might trudge from village to village in their song-collection forays; others would prefer the train as it snaked its way through deepest Dorset or Suffolk. The railways themselves often built a hotel at the terminus of their lines, around which in due course a resort would grow. Those who didn’t come to stay could come as day-trippers, and were even celebrated in music; Frank Musgrave’s Excursion Train Galop (mid-1840s) is an example. Both resort and spa needed entertainment. The bandstand in the park, the winter gardens, pavilions and piers – all needed music.

By the mid-1860s, many towns already had assembly rooms; now the new choral societies needed something better. Rooms especially designed for them began to appear, with raked seating for the singers and an organ for their accompaniment. The new industrial towns often combined in one building a town hall and a room suitable for a concert hall.

In the last quarter of the century, there was a boom in theatre building, both in London and the provinces. These theatres in turn generated a demand for musical entr’actes and incidental music. The combination of music and drama meant grand opera, but it could also mean the more approachable operetta and thus downmarket to musical comedy. The more popular bits of these could go lower still, as acceptable items on a music-hall bill-of-fare.

It had been a hazard of theatrical life that theatres burned down with monotonous regularity. D’Oyly Carte used electric lighting for the first time in his new Savoy Theatre, considerably reducing the fire risk. Other theatres soon followed.

The burgeoning middle classes had aspirations of both education and culture; they were enjoying, too, a little more leisure time than had their forebears. Their homes, cluttered to modem eyes, bear witness to their diligent devotion to crafts, to collecting, to curiosity – and to music. The piano became not only a prized object but a symbol of status. German ones were perceived as the best, but a thriving British piano industry could built on the knowledge that Beethoven had thought highly of Broadwood’s instruments.

Orchestral concerts, supported by individual subscription, had a much longer history, pre-dating Haydn’s two epoch-making London series in the last years of the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth, the dignified face of orchestral music was represented by the Philharmonic Society. In the north, the nouveaux riches textile manufacturers attempted to match London concert life with an orchestra of their own. Charles Hallé in Manchester created the orchestra which still bears his name today. When he died, Sir Frederick Cowen took over, but it was unthinkable to the management that anyone but a German should ultimately succeed Hallé – Hans Richter first, then Michael Balling. One Briton, though, saw no reason why his son should not conduct as well as, or better than, the Germans. Sir Joseph Beecham, the St Helens pharmaceutical manufacturer, promoted the early career of his son Thomas, to the delectation of generations of music-lovers thereafter.

Orchestral music could also display a popular face. Henry Wood’s Promenade Concerts (founded in 1895) have proved to be enduring, yet they were but the latest in a history of such concerts, encompassing such figures as Louis Jullien and Michael Balfe. Jullien, indeed, maintained that it was his promenade concerts that educated the London public in musical taste. For his ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Roots and Reasons
• 2 Sullivan and the Dilemma
• 3 Down into the Market-Place: Sullivan’s Followers
• 4 Music-Hall Songs: a Social Mirror
• 5 Theatre Music
• 6 Balladry
• 7 Instrumental Music (1): the Founding Generation
• 8 Patriotism and War (1): 1914–1918
• 9 The 1920s
• 10 Instrumental Music (2): the Second Wave
• 11 Piano Music
• 12 Sweet Singing in the Choir
• 13 The 1930s
• 14 Instrumental Music (3): the Post-World War 1 Generation
• 15 Patriotism and War (2): 1938–1945
• 16 The Post-War Years: 1945–1960
• 17 The 1960s to the Present Day
• Bibliography
• Societies and Relevant Organizations
• General Index
• Index of Music, Films and Literature Mentioned in the Text