Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Temperley.

Taylor, Ian

Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Temperley. Edited by Bennett Zon. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012. [364 p. ISBN 978-1-4094-3979-0. 65 [pounds sterling]]

A cursory glance at the contents page of this volume--alongside a recognition of the fact that, in itself, it forms part of Ashgate's now firmly established series on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain--should serve to reassure anyone embarking on work in this domain that, unlike Nicholas Temperley in the 1950s, they no longer run the risk of 'throw[ing] away' a promising academic career on apparently 'inconsequential music and its inconsequential culture' (p. 1). The list of contributors, all nationally- and internationally-recognized scholars whose reputations rest either solely or in large part on their contributions to the study of music in Britain, is indication enough that, whilst there remains much exciting work to be done in completely overhauling the 'land without music' myth, the validity of such work is no longer in question.

Editor Bennett Zon's own excellent introduction--in which he, Temperley-like, integrates biographical detail with an illustration of importance and implication--offers a potent reminder of the centrality of this book's dedicatee to this not insignificant reversal of fortunes. As Zon notes, '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' (p. 3). Since the completion of Instrumental Music in England, 1800-1850 (Cambridge, 1959), Temperley has held academic positions at leading institutions in both the UK and the USA, notably at the University of Cambridge and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he remains today as Emeritus Professor. The complete bibliography with which this volume concludes offers a timely reminder of his vast and varied output which, in addition to a number of pioneering books and monographs, incorporates, according to Zon's summary, '25 chapters, 55 articles and hundreds of encyclopaedia entries' and covers topics from 'composers, performers, conductors' to 'genres, styles [and] instruments' (p. 3). Temperley has also played a leading role in the establishment of a number of academic initiatives, including the biennial conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain--at which he was the first keynote speaker in 1997 and out of which this collection of articles has arisen--and the North American British Music Studies Association. The latter's Temperley Prize for student work is, we are told, a testimony 'not only to Nicholas's centrality within the field, but to his encouragement and cultivation of upcoming talent' (p. 3).

Though the contributors to this volume have long since discarded the tag of 'upcoming talent', the range of topics covered here reflects the diversity of Temperley's interests. The volume falls logically into four distinct sections--Musical Cultures, Societies, National Music and Methods--across which topics range chronologically from Peter Holman's fascinating discussion of the 'long method' of orchestral direction first established at the Handelian oratorios of the mid-eighteenth century (The Conductor at the Organ, or How Choral and Orchestral Music was Directed in Georgian England', pp. 243-61), through to Leanne Langley's illustration of how the carefully constructed comparison between English and French orchestral ensembles served to define the face of public concert culture in London during the final decades of the 1800s ('Joining Up the Dots: Cross-Channel Models in the Shaping of London Orchestral Culture, 1895-1914', pp. 37-58). The 'long nineteenth century' which underpinned Temperley's own consideration of The Romantic Age in the 1980s appears to be getting longer, but scholarship is the more enriching and exciting for it.

Similarly, the acceptance of all forms of music-making evident in The Romantic Age is to be found here. Temperley's pioneering contribution to the history of British sacred music is evident, most obviously, in chapters by Philip Olleson ('Samuel Wesley and the Development of Organ Pedals in England', pp. 283-97) and Sally Drage ('William Cole's View of Modern Psalmody', pp. 263-81). At the same time, however, Susan Wollenberg's chapter on Anglo-Jewish relations in late nineteenth-century synagogues uncovers a potent new line of enquiry ('Charles Garland Verrinder and Music at the West London Synagogue, 1859-1904', pp. 59-81), whilst Charles Edward McGuire's exploration of Anglo-American musical crossover in the context of the English Temperance cantata ('American Songs, Pastoral Nationalism and the English Temperance Cantata', pp. 173-91) offers a reminder of the inclusivity of Temperley's musicology. Moreover, both articles reflect the fact that, as McGuire reminds us, 'a major benefit of ... Temperley's scholarly work has been the encouragement ... of musicological inquiry into the more ephemeral areas and genres of English music, noting how these heretofore unnoticed nooks and crannies often reflected (or even presaged) larger trends and developments in Victorian culture' (p. 173). Such a working outwards from the music towards broader cultural significance is equally evident in Derek B. Scott's typically vivacious exploration of the edifying qualities of music for the Victorian middle-class home ('Music, Morality and Rational Amusement at the Victorian Middle-Class Soiree, pp. 83-101).

Indeed, the strongest contributions to this volume are probably those inspired by Temperley's methodology and approach rather than by his specific areas of interest. Temperley's 'determination to change musicological boundaries' is now firmly established but it is instructive to be reminded that his attempts to do so are largely underpinned by a process of 'expanding and deepening our knowledge of nineteenth-century British music and then setting that knowledge within larger cultural contexts' (p. 2). This is certainly the case with Peter Horton's chapter on the development of British vocal composition ('The British Vocal Album and the Struggle for National Music', pp. 195-220). Here, Horton uses a close analytical reading of certain songs by key contributors to The British Vocal Album--a series published in London in the 1840s by Wessel & Stapleton--not only to challenge the detail of the 'land without music' myth but to explain its very existence, thereby further undermining its validity. His study considers the underlying tension, endured by many British composers of this period, between the desire to develop a national school of composition and the need to acknowledge models provided from overseas. Although adopting a more documentary approach, Julian Rushton's chapter on Elgar's Caractacus offers a similar insight into the difficulties faced by British composers throughout the 20th century ('Musicking Caractacus', pp. 221-40). Drawing extensively on the unpublished diaries and letters of Herbert Thompson, critic to the Yorkshire Post, Rushton addresses the role of this cantata in forging a sense of national identity by exploring the work's often challenging relationship with the changing notions of empire.

Simon McVeigh's chapter--written in memory of the late Meredith McFarlane, who was to have been a co-author--serves simultaneously to illuminate a previously largely-ignored institution within British musical culture and to place it within the context of more familiar canonic works and ideas ('Trial by Dining Club: The Instrumental Music of Haydn, Clementi and Mozart at London's Anacreontic Society', pp. 105-38). Focussing on the London Anacreontic Society, McVeigh argues that an organisation traditionally dismissed as little more than a convivial drinking club actually functioned as a highly important, and hugely influential, arbiter of artistic taste. Whilst the Society's most obvious legacy might appear to be such popular tunes as 'To Anacreon in Heaven'--now heard regularly as the melody to 'The Star Spangled Banner'--McVeigh reveals that a series of pre-dinner concerts at the Anacreontic not only employed many of London's leading musicians but offered a discerning audience of influential amateurs and members of the musical establishment the opportunity to 'vet' the latest performers and composers before their transference to more prestigious public concert venues such as the Hanover Square Rooms. Even more significantly, McVeigh uncovers the pivotal role that the Anacreontic Society played in shaping public musical taste in London. By comparing the preferential treatment enjoyed by Haydn and Pleyel with the problematic reception of Clementi and, more notably, Mozart, McVeigh argues that the contrasting fortunes of these composers within turn-of-the-century West-End concert culture can be traced in no small part to the levels of success, or otherwise, experienced within the concerts at the Anacreontic. Once again, we are encouraged to reconsider long-held assumptions and to view musical development through a more refined critical lens: despite its 'informal and quaintly bibulous setting' (p. 107), the Anacreontic had a critical role in 'providing a forum for serious artistic debate about modern instrumental music, in that very British way: empirical, practical and convivial' (p. 138).

Like McVeigh, Michael Allis considers the influence of networks of private promotion on patterns of public reception, exploring the influence of the Working Men's Society--a collective of four prominent pianists--on the promotion of so-called 'progressive piano repertory' in late nineteenth-century London ('Performance in Private: "The Working Men's Society" and the Promotion of Progressive Repertoire in Nineteenth-Century Britain', pp. 139-71). With these topics, both Allis and McVeigh reflect one of the major methodological advances upon Temperley's work contained in this volume. This is an advance made all the more explicit by Leanne Langley who notes that, for all the strengths of Temperley's research--his Athlone History in particular--it 'never seriously examined any aspect of performance history--the making of performers or listeners, the achievements of institutions devoted to performance, the processes connecting professionalization, repertory formation and public reception' (p. 37). Langley's own chapter goes a long way to redress this, examining the manner in which conductors Henry Wood and Thomas Beecham and entrepreneurs such as Robert Newman managed their orchestras in order to establish viable audiences for serious orchestral music by the end of the nineteenth century. Whilst the focus remains on the canonic nineteenth-century repertory with which modern concert audiences are now familiar, Langley offers a clear and coherent illustration of how this familiarity was achieved, revealing the mechanics of the music industry and dispelling the former stigma attached to issues of commercialism and corporate organisation.

 Composers and their works, judged by critics and
 criticism, have not dropped out of view. But genuine
 questions about a range of economic interactions
 involving performers and audiences have
 continued to stimulate new thinking about the
 practical realities for serious music in a free-market
 system based on supply and demand--with
 no state or civic subsidy (p. 38).

Although focused on what, in many ways, represents an altogether different, less obviously commercial, sphere of activity, Christina Bashford's chapter on networks of violin activity in the late nineteenth century is no less impressive ('Hidden Agendas and the Creation of Community: The Violin Press in the Late Nineteenth Century', pp. 11-36). As she has done so successfully on a number of occasions in the past, Bashford utilizes a biographical study to illustrate the interdependence of a number of strands of activity during this period, revealing that the 'craze for fiddling' was not simply a product of cultural uprising but rather a carefully constructed interdependence between performers, publishers and examination boards. Whilst McVeigh and Allis's reception histories focus on the relationship of 'public' and 'private' spheres, therefore, Bashford and Langley explore the position of the composer within a broader range of market focus and illustrate the importance of what Bashford has previously referred to as the 'enablers' of the music industry.

In short, this volume offers both a fitting tribute to the work of Nicholas Temperley and a testimony to what this work served to generate. The range of topics covered provides the reader with an illustration of the diversity of musical life within a country which can no longer be dismissed as the 'land without music' whilst the shared methodology underlying many of these studies reveals the gathering strength which challenges the very premises on which that myth has been allowed to develop. It is rewarding to see that a clearer picture of history of music and musical activity in Britain is emerging in tandem with an ever more convincing reconstruction of the narrative of its historiography.

Ian Taylor

Thatcham, Berkshire, England