Ancient and Modern

William Crotch and the Development of Classical Music

Howard Irving

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138314146
• eBook ISBN: 9780429853692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published 1999, Howard Irving details Croch's lecturing career and examines the influences of figures such a Charles Burney and Sir Joshua Reynolds on his approach to the ancient-modern debate. Irving also makes available for the first time in a modern edition Crotch's 1818 lecture series. These texts help to fill a gap in our knowledge of the development of musical classics, as they span a period of years that were crucial to the history of canon formation.

PART ONE
Ancients and Moderns

Introduction

In a lecture series first read at the Surrey Institution in 1818, Oxford University's Heather Professor of music William Crotch surveys British musical life over the preceding four decades. Crotch describes a period of great change from the concert world he had entered as a celebrated child prodigy in the final quarter of the eighteenth century. During the eventful 40 years surrounding the turn of the century, trained musicians are said to have displaced connoisseurs as the accepted arbiters of musical taste and the rightful leaders of musical institutions. Audiences, at the same time, learned to display a new reverence both for musicians and their creative efforts. Crotch notes that by the second decade of the nineteenth century concerts were often attended with a respectful attention that might have been found in Crotch's youth only at the elite Concert of Ancient Music. Unlike the Ancient Concert, however, the programmes of groups such as the newly formed Philharmonic Society are cited for their mixture of old and recent music, a tendency Crotch welcomes. Indeed, Crotch acknowledges the appearance of a new kind of contemporary musical masterpiece that combines the best qualities of ancient and modern music. The excellence of this new musical species is susceptible to analysis by skilled critics and requires no validation by the Ancient Concert's well-known formula limiting programmes to music at least 20 years old.

These changes took place in Crotch's scenario against the background of a great conflict of musical ideologies that pitted advocates of ancient and modern music in a bitter struggle for dominance. The initial result of the ancient-modern quarrel was a deep division in British concert life and an extended period of musical decline. Earlier advocates of ancient music might have charged the decline of British music to the introduction of a decadent 'modern style', but Crotch - who had become the de facto spokesman for the ancient-music community - contends instead that the ancient-modern dispute itself caused a musical depression. Public taste was compromised by the blindness of both factions to the genuine merits of the other style and by the fact that concerts were restricted to a single musical species. The ancient-modern quarrel is said to have been resolved shortly before Crotch's 1818 lectures by the belated introduction of certain music by Mozart that offered a synthesis of the two approaches. The model for this synthesis is a work whose London premiere the previous year had done much to encourage a change in Crotch's thinking about the modern style and its partisans, Mozart's Don Giovanni.

The evolutionary process by which the new system of institutions and values Crotch describes in his 1818 lecture series came into being is the subject of this study. Part Two of the present volume makes available the text of Crotch's 1818 lecture series for the first time in a modern edition. Part One introduces these lectures by examining Crotch's lecturing career, by exploring certain issues facing the professional critic at a vital juncture in the history of music criticism and, most importantly, by examining the ancient-modern quarrel that Crotch treats as the most compelling feature of musical life around the turn of the century.

As other lectures by Crotch clarify, the quarrel described above is part of a much more extensive conflict that began in the seventeenth century and continued in some form even after an early nineteenth-century rapprochement between the contending parties.¹ On the surface, the central issue of the debate was the contrast of harmony and melody. This is often expressed by writers on the ancient side, such as Christopher Simpson in 1674, by the comparison of music that is 'most excellent, for Art and Contrivance' with a more generally pleasing but inferior variety of 'light and airy Musick'.² A number of other issues were closely bound up with the melody-harmony debate, however: should music be regarded as a mere gratification of the sense of hearing or can it somehow be an intellectual art form, comparable in significance to poetry or painting? This question is central, in turn, to the matter of whether music can have the intellectual substance necessary for it to achieve classical status and thereby avoid the continual cycle of celebrity and obsolescence that is the fate of lesser arts. The melody-harmony debate was also enlisted in an argument over whether music has a moral purpose or effect and whether this effect is a function of its form or its content.

Some of the critical writing upon which the present study is based treats the aesthetic issues of the ancient-modern quarrel in a distinctly ideological context. The issue of progress is the most obvious ideological dividing line between the two sides, but this is not the only issue or even, in many cases, the most important one. The ancient faction crusades for musical classics, but its preference for form over content also leads it to promote self-referential musical values that can be appreciated at their highest levels only by specialists and connoisseurs. The ancient side, accordingly, tends to be viewed by moderns as exclusive and authoritarian in addition to reactionary. Moderns almost invariably endorse a view that progress in the arts is possible if not inevitable and desirable but, in addition, tend to view musical complication as an impediment to clear communication and to stress instead the content that music has the power to convey or express as an approachable musical quality that can have positive social effects even on the uninitiated.

Different aspects of this long controversy have been investigated in some detail.³ This is especially true of the seventeenth century origins of the concept of ancient music as that notion developed in its natural birthplace of sacred music.⁴ Similarly, the intellectual background for the first recorded exchanges between the two factions, which took place in the seventeenth century, before either side regularly employed the words 'ancient' and 'modern' in this context, have been explored.⁵ Still other scholars have examined a related ancient-modern quarrel from the late seventeenth century waged by parties that did identify themselves as ancients and moderns. Although the words 'ancient' and 'modern' did not have the same meaning then that they did later, the famous international ancient-modern quarrel of the seventeenth century concerned - to the limited extent that music was involved - the same issues of form versus content that persisted as a central issue of music criticism a century later.⁶

Two aspects of the ancient-modern debate have received substantially less attention. First, while an ideology of ancient music has been described in careful detail,⁷ the ideology of the moderns and in particular the moderns of the later eighteenth century has scarcely been delineated beyond a basic advocacy of some form of the notion of progress.⁸ Closely related is the fact that too little attention has been focused on the ancient-modern debate as it applies to concert music in particular and to the time period, stretching into the nineteenth century, that Crotch discusses. When the quarrel surfaces in recent scholarship there is a tendency to interpret it as a purely eighteenth-century phenomenon and as a simple case of reactionaries struggling with progressives.⁹ This approach overlooks the complex and sometimes self-contradictory web of related issues that tend to accompany contemporary writing on the subject.

There are good reasons for giving the late eighteenth-century phase of the quarrel special attention. First, the several late eighteenth-century writers whose critical ideas are examined here knew each other and especially when they could do so anonymously - responded in print to each other's ideas. There is, therefore, much more of the effect of a dialogue or exchange in their writing than is usually true in British music criticism. Their critical writing also appears at an important point in the development of music criticism itself. British music criticism, as Charles Burney explained in 1789, had only come into being a half-century before Crotch began lecturing.¹⁰ By the early nineteenth century this new critical discipline was only beginning to develop the self-awareness to look back on its brief history and assess its future prospects. As many have noted, the middle of the eighteenth century marks the birth of this new branch of criticism with a shift in writing about music from a pastime of literary men mainly interested in the mythical music of the ancient Greeks to a field led by professional musicians with more practical interests.¹¹ But after an initial burst of activity that produced Charles Avison's Essay on Musical Expression (2nd edn, London, 1753) and Charles Burney's General History of Music (1776-89), critical writing on music seemed to fall into neglect. A perception of neglect, in fact, was part of the rationale offered for the introduction in the year after Crotch's 1818 lecture series of the first successful British musical periodical in which criticism was regularly featured, The Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review (QMMR).¹²

The most important reason for giving Crotch's account of an ancient-modern quarrel a hearing is that it bears on the question of the origins and development of the notion of classical music and of a canon of respected master works. Others - in particular William Weber - have identified the British ancient-music community as the source both for a canon of widely accepted, frequently performed secular masterpieces and for the social rituals, institutions and aesthetic values that make up the notion of classical music. Research into both canon formation and the development of classical music has been limited by the arbitrary boundary marked by the end of the eighteenth century, however. Many of the processes that helped form later notions of classical music had only been set into motion at the eighteenth century's end and therefore need to be followed into the early years of the new century.

Crotch's interpretation of the events of his time does not always mesh comfortably with certain other evidence of contemporary London concert life. This is most noticea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Part One: Ancients and Moderns
• Part Two: Crotch's 1818 Lectures
• Bibliography
• Index