“Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ in Music: The Vulgarity of Over-Refinement.” In British Music Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850-1950, edited by Jeremy Dibble and Julian Horton. 199-234. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2018. (original) (raw)
This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the ‘national’ and the ‘universal’ in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a ‘world’ on various scales and explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time as well as in space shaped a conception of ‘humanity’ in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter re-examines those early-nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to highlight their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the ‘world’ is something that must be actively created—through collection, anthologizing, traveling, the writing of universal histories, participating in public debate and music-making—rather than passively observed or described.
Wider Still and Wider: British Music Criticism since the Second World War
The Cambridge History of Music Criticism, 2019
The story of British music criticism since the Second World War is straightforward and disheartening. At least, it is straightforward to the various fellow academics, critics, musicians, promoters and assorted music cognoscenti who have kindly (and sometimes not so kindly) shared their views on the matter over the past decade. It is a story of a long golden age, in which venerable figures were given unlimited acres of space to espouse their great wisdom, followed by a precipitous decline in both quantity and quality. It is a perception that echoes a generally nuanced 2001 editorial by Marc Bridle for Seen & Heard: 'Since then [the 1980s], critics have lost their influence as movers and shakers, in part due to philistinism amongst arts editors and decreased critical coverage in newspapers. Moreover, the decline of classical music is irrevocably linked to the rise of popular musicand the nefarious (and probably incorrect) belief that this is what readers want.' 2 As will become apparent, this widely-and sincerely-held perception of postwar music criticism in Britain is, at the very least, questionable, if not demonstrably flawed in key respects. It is not that this view is necessarily entirely wrong, but it is certainly simplistic and usually based purely on anecdotal evidence. Throughout the period in question, and especially the decades at each end, the
Finding Musicology in nineteenth-century Britain: contexts and conflicts
2018
Music has long been a degree subject in British universities. Yet its academic form and status changed dramatically during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chapter examines the introduction of history and analysis within music programs, the development of ‘musical science’ outside the university and ongoing debates about the ways in which academic musical studies should relate to musical practice, between the early nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. These changes are related to concerns about the status of musicians, as well as the perceived paucity of talent within British composition. It is clear that, while music long held a place at many university institutions, the position of musicology as a core discipline was not settled until the mid-twentieth century.
Journal of the Royal Musical Association 138.1 (May 2013)
The spectre of music as a transcendent artistic ideal figures prominently in the literary criticism of Victorian aestheticism, though the extent to which aestheticism of the movement actually influenced the thinking of British composers has received only marginal scholarly attention. By the first decades of the twentieth century, aestheticism had become decidedly unfashionable even in literary circles, so it is unsurprising that composers of the time would choose to distance themselves from its rhetoric. The prevalence of a certain type of metaphysical conception of the creative act of the artist and intuitive act of the critic, however, may suggest an important remnant of aesthetic influence. Drawing from new critical trends which themselves mirror those of aestheticism, this article posits a revised conception of aesthetic discourse as an activity of self-cultivation, and examines its role in shaping the lives of selected British composer-critics from the early part of the twentieth century. By casting the aesthetic ethos not as a doctrine but as a set of internal practices that inform the creation and subversion of doctrine, the article demonstrates how a ‘relational musicology’ can act as a tool for historical inquiry.
Despite historical attempts to construe the practices of musicology in terms of music criticism, there is still a marked reticence to include essays in music criticism in the history of the discipline, or to treat critical thought on music with the same seriousness and contemporary relevance with which, for example, literary studies treats historical literary criticism. Far from being mere ephemera, early twentieth-century discussions about the proper function of the music critic in evaluating modern music became a means by which writers explored and debated some of the most significant concerns of the day. Central to these discussions were questions about how to drive a middle way between tradition and innovation, and the possibility of genius and its relationship with processes of history and culture. By exploring the notion of ‘aesthetic democracy’ and drawing from contemporary aesthetic/anti-aesthetic debates in the humanities, this article provides a template for the exploration of the interaction between historical ideas about music criticism and these broader questions of historiography and aestheticism. It does so by examining the work of a collection of radical music critics published in the formative issues of the English music journal The Sackbut during 1920-1. The aim is to highlight ways in which the current ‘aesthetic turn’ and its attendant claims regarding autonomy, self-determination, history, and ideology were prefigured by inter-war discussions about the reform of music criticism in Britain.
The Art of Appreciation: Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain
From the BBC Proms to Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, initiatives to promote classical music were a pervasive feature of twentieth-century musical life. Their goal was rarely just to reach a larger and more diverse audience; many also sought to teach a particular way of listening designed to help the public "appreciate" music. This book examines for the first time why and how music appreciation had such a defining and long-lasting impact -well beyond its origins as a late-Victorian, liberal project in music education. Putting new archival research into dialogue with social, political and cultural histories, it traces the networks of musicians, composers, critics, philanthropists, policy-makers and music educators who sought to shape the new markets for classical music through the central decades of the twentieth century. Both optimistic and anxious about advances in sound reproduction technologies, they worked across diverse forums and media -from concert halls to universities, from radio to cinema -to share the values and methods of music appreciation with aspirational audiences. Far more than the history of a uniquely influential movement in music education, The Art of Appreciation recounts how listening became entangled in a nexus of modern problems around citizenship, leisure and education. In so doing, it reveals a twentieth-century musical culture shaped less by radical rupture than by gradual change. At its heart was a milieu that encapsulated Britain's experience of modernity: the middlebrow.
Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth‐Century Music
The American Historical Review, 2005
The origins of this book," a colleague of mine once wrote, "are obscure even to myself, but the occasion of its conception I remember quite vividly." 1 In my own case, the occasion that launched this book is indeed clear to me, though at the time I had no clue of the eventual project's shape. In August 1990 I gave a short preconcert lecture on Brahms at the first Bard Music Festival. To an audience awaiting a performance of the D minor piano concerto, I argued that the urgency and debate in Brahms's musical texture engaged cultural issues and differences as well as musical ones, that Brahms's late nineteenth-century musical discourse had incorporated music's capacity to think, to argue, and to develop the position of a thinking, feeling subject in juxtaposition with a multiple and challenging cultural and political world. "Absolute" music, I argued, lived in the world and spoke to it. Here was the first kernel of this book's argument of the importance of nineteenth-century music as a language of subjectivity. I gave that lecture and ultimately wrote this book as a cultural historian committed to music not only as an object of study (or a vehicle of pleasure) but as a mode of cultural experience and understanding and, itself, as a potential language of cultural analysis. What we colloquially refer to as "classical" European music (a category looser than and distinct from that of the classical style or period) accrues through the nineteenth century as a mutually referential world of unusual coherence. The composers and works I engage in this book are generally well known to their peers and successors. In a process itself reflective of that coherence, this book's argument has evolved incrementally. Through the 1990s, the project was nurtured consistently by my lecture and essay assignments at the Bard Festival and its annual reconsideration of a single composer: Mendelssohn in 1991, Strauss in 1992, Dvořák in 1993, Schumann in 1994, Bartók in 1995. A volume of essays and documents on each year's composer "and his world" has appeared annually since 1990 from Princeton University Press; this book's chapter 4, on Mendelssohn and Schumann, contains arguments initially explored in essays I wrote for these collections. In the early 1990s I introduced aspects of the project into my cultural history courses at Cornell, and by the time of a sabbatical year in 1995-96 I had developed the conviction that there should be a book here, though there certainly wasn't one yet. A first draft was complete in 1998; its revisions continued to benefit from the
2015
While the New Manchester Group were popularly regarded by the later 1950s as leaders of a British wing of Darmstadt-style musical modernism, they were hardly alone in their awareness of trends being promulgated forcefully by European contemporaries. Boulez's assertion that "all composition other than twelve-tone is useless" 1 was famously brash (even down to his polemic-italics), but his critique of Schoenberg's own serial music as "twisted romantic classicism" set the scene, in 1952, for a decade of debate among younger composers. Boulez's call was for a new language, moving beyond Schoenberg's traditional melody-accompaniment textures and "poor, even ugly, rhythms." 2 His suggestion that row organization should structure non-pitch parametersduration, tone-production, intensity, and timbrewas taken up most directly by the younger composers who visited Darmstadt in the 1950s, but such thinking quickly permeated discussions internationally. In the Cold War standoff, serial thought was itself portrayed as a supra-national phenomenon (a position with its own ideological charge), 3 but beyond journalistic bluster and artistic posturing, British responses centered on the questions of structure and style framed by Boulez. Davies, in a feisty 1956 article, rebuffs claims that newer techniques were "too cerebral to be compatible with what is called 'musical expressiveness.'" 4 His early works, like those of Goehr and Birtwistle, were received with excitement or dismay, but in either case, were taken as accomplished reflections of what Darmstadt radicals had to offer; the Manchester colleagues attracted the publicity they did ("Modernest Moderns") precisely because they were articulating the artistic concerns of many in their generation, and of some slightly older. Glock's Score magazinethe venue for the Boulez and Davies articles just quotedpublished ongoing debate on serial aesthetics throughout the 1 Boulez, "Schönberg is Dead," The Score 6 (May 1952), 21. The essay was first published in English; a French text appeared in Boulez's 1966 essay volume, Relevés d'apprenti. 2 Boulez in 1972 again cited Schoenberg's "rhythms of insufferable squareness," a result of his neoclassical adoption of "dead forms": Boulez, Conversations with Célestin Deliège, 30, 31. 3 See Chapter 2 above, in particular "Cold-War internationalism and the British." 4 Davies, "The young British composer," 84; see also Chapter 1 above.
Liberal Critics and Modern Music in the Post-Victorian Age
How can we best understand the resistance to modern music in a large part of the British musical establishment in the early twentieth century? It would be easy to point to conservative attacks on new music in Britain. But it would be easy to point to such attacks in almost any country. A more rewarding approach is to study the response to modern music by cultural 'liberals', those who viewed themselves as open-minded and sympathetic to 'progress' in art just as in society. The liberal outlook on music flourished in the post-Victorian period—the years before the Great War and immediately after—and was developed in essays and treatises by some of Britain's most influential musicians. Liberal critics were acutely aware of the mistakes of their predecessors who had condemned composers later to be acclaimed as masters. They accepted that there were no timeless rules for musical composition, and that style and technique would always change. So they tried to do justice to modern music. But there were limits to their tolerance, stemming from their commitment to 'beauty', their insistence on incremental change in music history, and their idealist aesthetics. Although they did not appeal to religion to ground their criticism, metaphysical modes of thought lingered in their belief in eternal values to which all great art, whatever its historical situation and technique, should aspire.
Forum 'Who Is British Music?' Placing Migrants in National Music History
Twentieth-Century Music 15:3, 439-92, 2018
The 20th Century has been called the era of displacement, exile, and mass migration. Bringing their music with them, migrants arrived in Britain throughout the century from all over the world. To this day, however, there has been no holistic discussion of their impact on British musical life. While excellent scholarly investigations of migrations and mobility as crucial factors for music in Britain have been undertaken, the field is fragmented, with insufficient collaboration across discussions of specific musical genres and diasporic communities. More broadly, musicology has long neglected migrations and migrants in its historicisation of a national cultural history. This forum places the migrant within discourses on national identity. The authors embrace a multi-faceted approach to the history of Britain’s diverse musical immigrants across a wide range of musical styles and genres that span the entirety of the 20th century, reaching into the late 19th and the early 21st centuries. We reveal the impact of immigrant composers and second-generation migrants and diasporic communities with global backgrounds on popular music, musical comedy, jazz, concert music, folk music, and film music. The forum highlights the connections across genres, the time period, and diverse migrant backgrounds, thus revealing a multi-faceted narrative in which debates concerning ‘the national’ form a current in British musical life and open up questions regarding constructions of a national music history and historiography. The forum thus highlights the contributions of immigrants to British musical life; the extent to which immigrants are, or are not, narrated as part of British music history and the extent to which their musics have been marginalised or otherwise; and what opportunities this poses for an understanding of British music. In combination, the contributions challenge the notion that the migrant and the nation are incompatible, highlighting instead a narrative of (musical) diversity. Discussing the impact of migration as a sonically enriching experience seems urgent given how current debates frame immigration as a crisis at the heart of national socio-cultural discourses more broadly. Putting music centre stage, this colloquy widens the debate on migration as it encourages a discourse that is not restricted solely to economic, legal, and narrow political contexts. The focus on music allows for an exploration of the impact of highly skilled creative migrants on British cultural history. In turn, it sets it against questions of national belonging and the sonic-cultural narratisation of the nation. The forum includes contributions by Florian Scheding, Justin Williams (University of Bristol), Catherine Tackley (University of Liverpool), Derek B. Scott (University of Leeds), Erik Levi (Royal Holloway University of London), and Tom Western (University of Edinburgh).
The English Voice of the Mid Twentieth Century
This thesis explores how the reception of Kathleen Ferrier, Alfred Deller and Peter Pears’s voices gave new insights into the constructions of national musical identity in mid-twentieth century Britain. I highlight how an exploration of the ‘national voice’ constitutes both an idealisation of musical sound and national belonging. Through voice, I offer not only a new methodological approach to the question of musical nationalism, but also an understanding of its embodiment through concepts of gender and sexuality. In my first chapter, I identify how the drive for a distinct English musical identity is ultimately a manifestation of the need for a ‘national voice’. This figures prominently in the mid-twentieth century where the musical careers of Ferrier and Deller were built on precedents of the past: Ferrier on Clara Butt and Deller on Purcell. The second chapter addresses how both Ferrier’s and Deller’s voices embodied gender and sexual mismatches between their onstage roles and offstage bodies in performances of opera. In the third chapter, reviews of both Deller’s and Pears’s performances highlighted discrepancies between ideals of sexuality with their voices, that pointed to underlying tensions of homosexuality and effeminacy in the broader national and cultural landscape. The last chapter demonstrates that the BBC’s broadcasts of these singers’ voices were done in promotion of a collective sense of national aural identity. These three singers’ voices navigated the stratification of tastes evident during the BBC’s early years. Pears and Deller characterised the emergence of elitist ideals that were clearly advocated in the Third Programme, while Ferrier’s voice challenged the classification of highbrow/lowbrow distinctions in broadcast culture. Through analysis of the national tropes and claims written about their voices, I offer a new approach to music history and a chance of national vocal redress for Britain’s musical future.