Speranza
D. Scott
Scott's book originally appears as part of the series "Popular Music in
Britain" published by the Open University Press.
In revising the work for
republication, Scott confronts two problems.
The first is that the work
is cited a fair number of times in the past ten years.
Moreover, Scott's essay is adopted as a key text for the course "Victorian Popular Music", one of the modules of
the Open University's MA in Humanities.
It was, therefore, a matter of concern that the pagination of the original be maintained.
Hence, for his second
edition Scott chooses to to add a completely fresh chapter rather than to
expand on the ten existing chapters.
Scott also provides an extensive bibliography which benefits other researchers of nineteenth-century British and American
popular song.
Scott appends references to recent research in a new section at the end of the notes to chapters.
Scott's second
problem relates to the period in which the book is written (the 1980s), and the
stage that cultural theory reaches during that decade.
This is a time when
Cultural Studies, Literary Theory, and the New Art History are creating turmoil
in academia.
Initially, the new cultural theorizing taking place in the UK is
heavily indebted to the work done in the 1970s at
The Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies,
University of Birmingham
- which, in turn, relied upon the
ground-breaking work of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson.
Then, the influence
of continental thinkers increases and, while some are accommodated easily
enough (the Frankfurt School), others (for example, Barthes and Kristeva) cause
battle lines to be drawn up between two contending camps.
Culturalists on one
side and structuralists on the other.
Structuralism gives way rapidly to
post-Structuralism but struggles harder and longer against the claims of
culturalism.
Now, the whole point of this over-general history lesson is to point
out that Scott's book bears some of the scars of this cultural theoretical warfare.
Within three years of its publication, Scott finds himself drawn firmly into the
Post-Structuralist camp.
The deciding factor, for Scott, is his difficulty in
accounting for some sort of inner expressive essence when he embarks upon
further research into questions of
(a) sexuality
(b) gender, and
(c) ethnicity in
the Victorian drawing-room ballad. (Why so few ballads of homoerotic social content?)
If he had written his book in the
1990s it would have turned out rather differently from the product before
us
In returning to the theoretical framework of this book, Scott adds a few words designed to defend it against a mis-reading made by some of his
critics.
While Soctt is somewhat
mono-lithic in his characterization of the Victorian bourgeoisie, he is well aware
of the pit-falls of mapping high- and low-status music onto high- and low-status
consumers in a simplistic manner.
Such was certainly never his intention.
We all know la-di-dah people who love the simplest unsophisticated tune, and "low-class" (as SHE would call them) people who enjoy a symphony.
Scott readily acknowledges that a middle-class factory owner could enjoy a black-face
minstrel song, and a factory worker could enjoy singing in Handel's "Messiah" or
even playing Mendelssohn's music as a member of a brass band.
There is no relation between musical taste and social class, and a member of the working-class could well think of adapting a tune he heard at the Royal Italian Opera (if he gets a ticket) in his drawing-room (if his has one)
There is
also a strong argument to be made for the effectiveness of different styles in
articulating distinct class interests. In this women feature large, since, as Trudgill notes in his essays in dialect, they are more class-conscious than the opposite sex (the male sex).
Furthermore, the field of the popular that opens up in the nineteenth century
is one in which different classes and class fractions fight over silly questions of
intellectual and moral leadership or what we prefer to term hegemony. (The word has an odd etymology),
This
struggle concerns matters of cultural status and legitimation, and popular
culture functions frequently as an area of compromise over values, allowing the
working class to adopt evasive or resistant strategies.
In other words, popular
song can and, Scott argues, does function as a site for the contested meanings of
social experience. (Try to sing "Waiting in the church" while waiting in the church).
Another matter that raised critical hackles in some
quarters was the Marxist perspective Scott adopted.
Scott continues to argue, however,
that to begin to understand matters relating to music and class in the
nineteenth century, it is important to know how ideas of class were being
re-formulated during that epoch, when a new perception grew of classes as
socio-economic groupings with the capacity to effect social change.
From this
perspective, some groups
are regarded as left over from a previous mode of production (for example,
the aristocracy and peasantry were perceived as residual feudal elements -- tell that to the Prince of Wales and his two sons).
Others are seen to represent a modern clash of class interests: for example,
capitalists and the working class.
Ideas of class struggle and class
consciousness developed in the nineteenth century and their relationship to
song has to be duly considered.
The crucial determinants of
class position in economic terms are:
First, whether or not one has ownership
of the means of production.
Second, whether one had the ability to
purchase labour power or needed to sell one's own.
This still remains
the most convincing analysis of the class divisions (described in terms of
working class, middle class and upper class) that arise during the time of the
Industrial Revolution in England.
It is important to note, however, that the new
conceptualization of class sees social position as something that is, at
least partially, attained by anyone.
The former ideas, based on notions
of hierarchy and rank, were linked to a belief that these were determined at
birth: once a commoner always a commoner. (vide "Blue Blood" in Gilbert & Sullivan, "Iolanthe, or the peer and the peri").
It is clear from the above that we remain unrepentant and, thus, he foregoes asking the reader to pity the lot of someone who, in a reworking of
Strephon's sorry condition, is a Marxist down to the waist but finds his legs
are fanatical about Gilbert and Sullivan.
There again, I like to think that had
the great castigator of capitalism lived a little longer he would have found
much to enjoy in "Utopia Limited", an opera that choses the unlikely subject of
political economy as the target of its satire.
Monday, December 24, 2012
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