Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Essays in Honour of Nicholas Temperley

Bennett Zon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317092377
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Temperley is the first book to focus upon aspects of performance in the broader context of nineteenth-century British musical culture. In four Parts, 'Musical Cultures', 'Societies', 'National Music' and 'Methods', this volume assesses the role music performance plays in articulating significant trends and currents of the cultural life of the period and includes articles on performance and individual instruments; orchestral and choral ensembles; church and synagogue music; music societies; cantatas; vocal albums; the middle-class salon, conducting; church music; and piano pedagogy. An introduction explores Temperley's vast contribution to musicology, highlighting his seminal importance in creating the field of nineteenth-century British music studies, and a bibliography provides an up-to-date list of his publications, including books and monographs, book chapters, journal articles, editions, reviews, critical editions, arrangements and compositions. Fittingly devoted to a significant element in Temperley's research, this book provides scholars of all nineteenth-century musical topics the opportunity to explore the richness of Britain's musical history.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Bennett Zon

Nineteenth-century Britain has long been affected by the criticism of being a Land Without Music. Dismantling that view has been the work of many musicians from its inception, but it was not until the period after the Second World War that a critically reasoned musicology overtook its more apologetic nineteenth-century counterpart. At the forefront of that post-war movement is one of Britain and America’s most profoundly gifted and influential musicologists, Nicholas Temperley, whose work has stimulated more than one generation of scholars to expose the richness and quality of Britain’s nineteenth-century musical past. If prejudice remains strong today, the post-war climate for nineteenth-century British music must have seemed especially hostile, not least in Britain’s leading universities. Nicholas’s choice of doctoral topic at Cambridge would have raised considerable consternation within the Faculty of Music: an Eton alumnus; holder of a diploma in piano from the Royal College of Music (1952); a double first in music from King’s College, Cambridge (1955); a Cambridge MusB (1956); and another diploma from the Royal College of Organists (1958) – yet seemingly determined to throw away his promising academic career on inconsequential music and its inconsequential culture: what could he possibly be thinking? ‘Instrumental Music in England, 1800–1850’ (1959) was the answer, and its arrival could not have been more significant. Not only did the thesis cover entirely new ground, providing future scholars with an enduring methodological template, but perhaps even more importantly, it broke the prejudicial cycle of the Land Without Music. Nicholas’s thesis was a breakthrough, both intellectually and symbolically.

Nicholas left Cambridge in 1959 for a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the USA, afterwards returning in 1961 to Cambridge as Assistant Lecturer in Music, and Fellow and Director of Studies in Music at Clare College, where he remained until 1966. His early career in Illinois and Cambridge was a period marked by virtuosic productivity, including a vast array of seminal publications alongside premier performances of nineteenth-century British music. As well as editing and performing Loder’s grand opera Raymond and Agnes, Nicholas found time to publish ten articles in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart; six reviews of both books and music, largely for the Musical Times; critical editions of music published by Stainer & Bell, Novello and Oxford University Press; and a host of articles in periodicals including English Church Music, the Journal of General Psychology, the Journal of Music Theory, Music and Letters, Music Review, the Musical Times, Opera, the Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association and Victorian Studies. What characterizes the work of this and all later periods is his determination to change musicological boundaries. He does this by expanding and deepening our knowledge of nineteenth-century British music, and then setting that knowledge within larger cultural contexts. Early topics are indicative, including four articles outlining the influence on English music of great (foreign) composers, notably Beethoven, Handel, Mozart and Mendelssohn.

If some at Cambridge felt perplexity at Nicholas’s choice of doctoral topic, or questioned the location of his post-doctoral fellowship, they must have been curious about his next career move. After six successful years in Cambridge, the quintessentially English Nicholas decided to return to the USA in 1966, first as Associate Professor at Yale and in the following year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he remains to this day as Emeritus Professor of Music. Clearly the University of Illinois provided a conducive atmosphere, and it was there that his career soared. Books, editions, chapters, articles, encyclopaedia entries, reviews, critical editions and compositions followed, bringing honours and prizes such as a fellowship and research grant of the National Endowment for the Humanities (respectively, 1975–76 and 1982–86), the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society for best book published in 1979, a visiting fellowship at Clare Hall, Cambridge and an honorary fellowship of the Guild of Church Musicians since 1990. Awards within the University of Illinois have also been abundant, rewarding a career that has seen him twice Chairman of the Musicology Division of the School of Music (1972–75 and 1992–96), Associate of the Institute of Advanced Studies and University Senior Scholar (1986–89), and from 1996, Emeritus Professor.

Nicholas’s books remain pillars of musicological knowledge precisely because of his ability to discover and map musical terra incognita. The Music of the English Parish Church (1979), deservedly the recipient of the Kinkeldey award and now in its third edition (2006), transformed the way we conceptualize our understanding of Britain’s religious musical history, covering a vast chronology from the late middle ages to current times, and traversing profound cultural, theological and aesthetic changes. The Music of the English Parish Church not only illustrates vast breadth and depth, but defines Nicholas as a scholar for whom the music must undeniably come first. Another example is one of our most inestimably valuable resources on hymnody, The Hymn Tune Index: A Census of English-Language Hymn Tunes in Printed Sources from 1535 to 1820 (1998). The Hymn Tune Index is testimony not only to an encyclopaedic knowledge, but to incisive musicological vision as well. Edited volumes emphasize these same characteristics, often concentrating on the long nineteenth century in now key texts on the period, including The Romantic Age, 1800–1914 (1981), The Lost Chord (1989), William Sterndale Bennett: Lectures on Musical Life (with Yunchung Yang, 2006) and Music and the Wesleys (with Stephen Banfield, 2011). A recent monograph, Bound for America: Three British Composers (2003), reflects this concentration, mirroring Nicholas’s own career path by telling the story of three eighteenth- and nineteenth-century composers and their successful migration to America. While focusing on British music and English-language texts, Nicholas has also published widely on Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Schumann, Chopin and many American topics. Like Bound for America, these often highlight revealing intersections with British music and musical culture. An overview of some 25 chapters, 55 articles and hundreds of encyclopaedia entries confirms this trend, covering composers, performers, conductors, dance, dancing, education, publishing, song, singers, singing, opera, choral music, church music, liturgical music, oratorio, institutions, hymns, forms, tuning, temperament, genres, styles and instruments, to name but a fraction of the subjects they encompass.

Nicholas’s interests range well beyond those of academic research alone. He is unquestionably a practical musician as well, a pianist, harpsichordist and organist, editing and reviving the music of many historical genres and periods. Among his editions are compositions of Pinto, Samuel Wesley, Loder, Berlioz, Pierson, Croft, Sterndale Bennett, Crotch, Clementi, Cramer, Field, Giordani and Haydn, as well as many sets of collected works. Among substantial volumes are Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (1972); English Songs 1800–1860 (with Geoffrey Bush, Musica Britannica 43, 1977); The London Pianoforte School, 1766–1860 (20 vols, 1984–87); Tommaso Giordani, Three Quintets for Piano and Strings (1987); Haydn’s Creation (1988); and Eighteenth-Century Psalmody (with Sally Drage, Musica Britannica 85, 2007). These occupy only one part of an influential editorial vocation. Nicholas has also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (1978–80) and General Editor of the book series Oxford Studies in British Church Music (1986–2005), and has held positions on the boards of many publications, including 19th-Century Music, American Music, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Victorian Studies and musical editions such as the New Berlioz Edition and the Garland Symphony Project. These positions complement initiatives in helping found and musically steer new organizations, including the Midwest Victorian Studies Association (MVSA), the biennial conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (MNCB) and the North American British Music Studies Association (NABMSA). Nicholas played a key part in the formation of the MVSA in 1977, later becoming its president from 1982 to 1984. He was the first keynote speaker for MNCB, held at the University of Hull in 1997, and was first president of NABMSA (2005–08). NABMSA’s recently created Temperley Prize for student work is testimony not only to Nicholas’s centrality within the field, but to his encouragement and cultivation of upcoming talent.

Amid this sea of productivity there are certain focal points, and without a doubt nineteenth-century British music is one of the most significant. From his doctoral thesis to Music and the Wesleys, Nicholas has been prosecuting a campaign against ignorance and prejudice, subtly reconfiguring the way we think about nineteenth-century British musical history by unsettling certitudes with compellingly argued ideas. The Music of the English Parish Church, The Romantic Age, The Lost Chord, The Hymn Tune Index, William Sterndale Bennett, Music and the Wesleys: these and many of Nicholas’s articles are unassumingly subversive. As such, this monumental corpus of research in this area, collectively and individually, in both form and content, systematically dismantles the notion of a Land Without Music. By exposing the musical treasure trove of nineteenth-century British culture, and locating it within the context of canonic works and ideas, Nicholas redefines the parameters of the field, pushing the boundaries of musicology through far-reaching, transformative thought. In one of his most influential articles, ‘Xenophilia in British Musical History’ (1999), he calls the Land Without Music not only an old chestnut, but ‘the [Nicholas’s italics] topic for any introduction to the area of nineteenth-century music’.1 Taking the Land Without Music head on, Nicholas goes one step further, dismantling previous models and substituting something entirely new and astonishingly convincing.

In his foreword to the first volume of Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies (1999) Nicholas suggests that the prejudice is not yet dead. But there can be few people who have tried so hard to kill it. Generally speaking, he credits its demise to broad changes in musicology, opening up the nineteenth century and playing down the importance of individual composers in cultural history. In fact, it is due in a large part to his work that the Land Without Music has begun to loosen its fearsome grip. Viewing the prejudice more positively – as a kind of musicological preservative – Nicholas admits that the Land Without Music ‘long guarded the musical life of nineteenth-century Britain against aggressive snooping, and kept it intact for the present generation.’2 That heartening optimism characterizes the generosity of the man and his musicology. Some 50 years or so after he submitted his doctoral thesis that same generosity still comes through. Nicholas has been and remains a centrepiece of nineteenth-century British music studies, intensely active in all its interests. He has created and developed the field, and it is for that reason that we honour him with this volume. We who have benefited from his work all owe him an immense debt of gratitude.

The current set of chapters represents one aspect of Nicholas’s love of nineteenth-century British music. As Leanne Langley suggests in her chapter, changes in attitude towards the study of performance culture have from the 1980s helped scholars contextualize Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian music. Yet until the current volume there has been no one source bringing together scholarship about these periods. This volume aims to redress this problem at the same time as honouring Nicholas Temperley. It is divided into four parts, covering musical cultures, societies, national music and methods.

The first part, ‘Musical Cultures’ examines the performance culture surrounding certain key aspects of musical life and experience, including the violin, orchestra, synagogue and home. Christina Bashford’s chapter explores the ‘perfect craze for playing the fiddle’, involving middle-class women, state-school children and working men, as well as new institutions to certify and categorize their attainment and specialist magazines to serve them. Through micro-histories of The Strad, the Violin Times and their editors Bashford demonstrates symbiotic relationships between magazines and the nascent exam boards, showing that the violin press did far more than simply reflect a newly developing string culture: it actually animated and shaped it, creating communities of amateur and professional string players, underpinning the infrastructure of the late Victorian violin world. Leanne Langley’s chapter covers the marked explosion in turn-of-the-century London orchestral culture, offering a constructive view of how the struggle to create viable audiences for serious orchestral music went hand in hand with building professional ensembles – without state or civic subsidy – and how, in turn, more and better listening opportunities stimulated young English composers, including Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Langley shows how, in particular, London orchestras associated with Henry Wood and Thomas Beecham drew on continental practices and models, from ‘French pitch’ and the entire Lamoureux and Colonne orchestras of Paris to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.

Susan Wollenberg’s chapter traces the career paths pursued by musicians in the Jewish community, with particular reference to Charles Garland Verrinder (1839–1904). A church musician, pupil of George Elvey and Oxford graduate in music, he was appointed organist of a London synagogue – an option unavailable, and unimaginable, to earlier generations of British musicians. Given that the introduction of the organ into synagogue worship generated considerable controversy at this time, Verrinder played a key role during a turning-point in Anglo-Jewish history. His post at the West London Synagogue (established 1840) was interwoven with the history and development of that institution over a 40-year period. Like music of the synagogue, music for the nineteenth-century middle-class home aligns itself with one of the fundamental Victorian values – the pleasure of ‘improvement’. Derek Scott’s chapter explains how the possession of this improving or edifying quality allowed music to be described, in a favourite Victorian phrase, as ‘rational amusement’. He examines a range of relevant issues, from the songs and piano pieces that were found suitable, to their role in lessons that improved both mind and spirit. American and British ballad writers and composers often placed sentimentality in the service of social, moral, religious and political, rather than aesthetic, aims: the moral tone is what makes the Victorian ballad differ from later songs.

In Part II, ‘Societies’, we turn to the role of private and public organizations in British musical culture. Simon McVeigh investigates the Anacreontic Society, at which new instrumentalists and new repertoire faced a semi-public trial in front of influential amateurs and the musical establishment before transferring to the prestigious Hanover Square concerts. Exploring the ambiguities and transgressive nature of the society through a series of dualities – private and public, bourgeoisie and aristocracy, amateurs and professionals, men and women – this chapter raises important issues about modes of taste formation, not least the approval given to music of Haydn and Pleyel in the 1780s, and the contrasting reception accorded to Clementi as symphonist, to English instrumental music and above all to that of Mozart. Depicting a much later period, Michael Allis’s chapter focuses on the activities of the Working Men’s Society, a private group promoting progressive repertory in London in the second half of the nineteenth century. Membership was confined to four pianists with ‘progressive’ credentials, Walter Bache, Edward Dannreuther, Frits Hartvigson and Karl Klindworth, and two lay members, Wilhelm Kümpel and Alfred Hipkins. Allis considers the nature of their meetings, members’ motivation and the complex relationship between private and public music-making, whether as a reaction to negative experiences of public performance, useful preparation for public performance, experience that could inform certain ‘texts’, or as a way to explore specific works. In a different realm, Charles Edward McGuire examines the English temperance cantata, cultivated in the late nineteenth century by volunteer temperance choral societies. Used to promote abstention from drink, these works might comprise a service of anti-alcoholic readings, hymns and messages, but often included a plot on the destruction drink could bring to everyday English people. Using American temperance songs as a model, composers and arrangers exploited pastoral imagery to forge a national, alcohol-free utopia. Urban blight was seen as a uniformly corrupting influence, while village and countryside life attracted moral rectitude: only pastoral values could ‘save’ the drunkard and stop his cycle of destruction.

Opening the third part, entitled ‘National Music’, Peter Horton examines a series of British songs published in London in the 1840s by Wessel & Stapleton, under the editorship of James William Davison and entitled The British Vocal Album. Although it ran to only 32 numbers, it provides an excellent illustration of the aspirations and difficulties facing contemporary British composers of ‘serious’ music: their desire to develop a national school of composition, the need to look overseas for models, the failure of British audiences and performers to support native composers, and the often uneasy co-existence of those musicians who supported ‘native talent’ (exemplified by the newly formed Society of British Musicians) and those who objected to such ‘special pleading’. Julian Rushton’s chapter takes an altogether different angle on forging national identity, this time through Elgar’s cantata Caractacus and its relationship to empire and rural England. Commissioned by the Leeds Festival of 1898, the work has a mixed reputation, partly because its closing chorus directs attention to the eventual fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the British, spreading peace, civilization and freedom to its subject peoples. Rushton views the work’s production through the unpublished diaries and letters of the Yorkshire Post music critic, Herbert Thompson, who wrote programme notes for the premiere in consultation with Elgar, as well as articles on the rehearsals and a review of the performance.

Peter Holman opens the last part of the volume, ‘Methods’, with a practical consideration of how choral and orchestral music was directed in Georgian England. Using evidence of close collaboration between leader and keyboard player, Holman argues that Handel devised a particular method for his oratorios in the 1730s: a ‘long movement’ of trackers connected a harpsichord in the middle of the orchestra with a large organ at the back of the performing area, enabling the organist-conductor to keep the choir (apparently placed at the front of the performing area, behind his back) in time by playing a reduction of their lines on the organ. This method of direction was used in London and provincial festivals for large-scale choral and orchestral music until the 1830s. Sally Drage’s chapter on William Cole’s View of Modern Psalmody (1819) opens a window onto performance problems of provincial psalmody in both nonconformist and Anglican churches. As a surveyor, Cole could give precise directions on the best placing of singers; as a teacher he observed that lining out was no longer necessary because most people could read. For him everyone should be able to join in the singing; music should not take precedence over text; and correct pronunciation meant words could be heard clearly. Collectively his instructions were designed to make congregational participation easier, thus enhancing spiritual experience.

Using Samuel Wesley as a case study, Philip Olleson investigates the problems associated with composing performable music to take account of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Music Examples
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• General Editor's Series Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Musical Cultures
• Part II: Societies
• Part III: National Music
• Part IV: Methods
• Nicholas Temperley Publications
• Index