Speranza
Musicologist D. B. Scott's focus has been on songs for the middle-class home that aligns itself with one of the
fundamental Victorian values, that of improvement.
It was the possession of this
improving or edifying quality that allowed songs to be described, in a favourite
Victorian phrase, as "rational amusement."
Scott has examined a range of issues
regarding the songs that were found suitable, their various types, their moral
tone, and their role in teaching lessons that improve both mind and spirit.
Scott concludes with more general matters concerning the perceived value
of some of these parlour songs.
Therefore, the conference theme of serious pleasures fit his topic, if
the term "serious" is taken to refer rather to the socially-constituted values
of the songs than to the presence of "serious" intrinsic musical processes or
structures within those songs.
Scott also discusses briefly some instrumental
(that is, piano) pieces.
Scott trusts that all this will bear witness to the
unimpeachable wholesomeness and impeccable good taste with which his name is ever
linked in the politest social circles.
Scott is selecting a variety of songs
suited to "at home" functions in America and Britain as case studies.
Since Scott's theme is "improvement" and his time limited he must pass over certain kinds of
songs: for example,
-- imitation Scottish and Irish songs
-- blackface minstrel
songs, and
-- comic songs (which were never very funny) and
-- LOVE songs love (which were
rarely passionate).
It's more than Scott can bear, however, to neglect "Come into
the Garden, Maud," so he must find a plausible reason for including that.
So,
what themes were found suitable for the purpose of improvement?
There are songs
that remind us of our own mortality, or place our human lives in a grander
scheme of things, or contrast the secular and the divine.
These, it should be
stressed, do not always have to have an overtly sacred theme.
There were other
songs that used children as a theme, perhaps celebrating the love of parents for
children, or touching on infant death, or using the presumed innocence of
children as a means of teaching adults a moral lesson.
In addition, there were
songs that dealt with friendship, with pride in one's country, and with courage,
whether in battle or in facing the grim realization that one had been jilted in
love.
The quality that makes the nineteenth-century popular parlour or drawing-room "ballad distinct
from those that came before and after springs from the desire to teach a moral
lesson, or educate people about appropriate social behaviour, or to edify and
uplift them spiritually and drive them on to do good deeds.
In short, American
and British drawing-room or parlour ballad writers and composers were often concerned to place
sentimentality in the service of other aims, and these other aims were social,
moral, religious, and political rather than aesthetic.
Perhaps the first song
that solidly established the kind of sentiment to be emulated by all songwriters
who saw the middle-class home as their market, was "Home, Sweet Home!" of 1823.
It was, interestingly, a collaboration between an American, John
Howard Payne and an Englishman, Henry Bishop.
In that, it also foreshadowed the
transatlantic traffic in this type of song that grew with every decade of the
century.
The song featured in the opera "Clari; or, The Maid of Milan" and has what Scott describes as "an
Italianate character".
----
This quality persisted in many of the songs composed by Henry
Russell.
One such was "Woodman, Spare That Tree!" (1837) another
Anglo-American creation, the words being by George Morris.
A few seconds of
listening will reveal that this is NOT a million miles from Bellini ("Casta
diva," for example).
This song brings us face to face more directly than does
"Home, Sweet Home!" with what some find the biggest single obstacle to taking
nineteenth-century ballads seriously.
It is what is perceived as exaggerated
sentimentality.
Here is a narrative concerning someone whose emotional ties to a
particular old oak are likely to seem excessive even to the most ardent
tree-hugging hippy.
However, Henry Russell is quite clear on this point.
Sickening sentiment is born of a sickening mind, he insists.
His
own songs, in contrast, exemplify a healthy moral tone.
Scott performs a variety of song types and piano music that would have been found in an
average middle-class home in the second half of the century.
Scott choses songs
that are available in the two collections by Michael Turner and Antony Miall
(1974 and 1975), since those books are found in many of the larger libraries and
can therefore be consulted by those who wish to explore further.
Further
information can also be found in Scott's book, "The Singing Bourgeois" (1989,
R/2001).
Scott begins with two songs that contemplate human mortality,
the first of which is "Three Fishers Went Sailing".
John Pyke
Hullah (1812-84) was for thirty years professor of vocal music at King's
College, London, and for the last ten years of his life was Musical Inspector of
Training Schools for the whole of the UK.
Hullah was a major influence on British
government policy toward music in education, and it was largely through his
efforts that music was taken seriously as a subject for boys and girls in
schools.
His main disappointment was that the fixed doh system he advocated
(where the note "C" is always doh) was ignored in favour of the easier Tonic
Sol-fa method (where the keynote is always doh).
That was no doubt inevitable
under a "payment by results" regime of educational funding, since children could
demonstrate an ability to sight-read music much more quickly using Tonic
Sol-fa.
The words of the song are by the Rev. Charles Kingsley.
Its
catchphrase "Men must work and women must weep" is part of a Victorian "separate
spheres" ideology that was hardly ubiquitous among the working class.
Women
worked down the mines, for example, alongside the men in the pit villages of the
North East.
In this ballad, the wives of the poor fishermen have very little of
an active role to play in day-to-day life.
They watch their menfolk sail away;
they trim the lamps in the lighthouse; and they wring their hands when the
bodies are washed up on the beach in the morning.
If the song fails to
convince today, it is because it is so rooted in a bygone social worldview, not
because the events it narrates are implausible or because we are not convinced
that the author cares about his subject matter.
There is also a sense that we
are being preached at by a rather glum vicar.
The parallel structure of the
stanzas suggests a link to oral ballad traditions, and the musical setting is
one approaching a folk air (underlined by the 6/8 meter).
However, restraint
does not always work in its favor: its gentle but persistent rhythm suggests a
banality uncolored by irony at the deaths of the men, and the tragic dénouement
is thus more prone to be received as bathos rather than pathos.
Adelaide Procter's poem, "The Lost Chord" is not really about
the mystery of whither a particular chord has disappeared.
Rather, "The Lost Chord" is concerned with
the mystery of life, and is intended to offer comfort in the contemplation of
death.
Hence, it was of special significance to Sullivan at his dying brother's
bedside.
The source explaining the circumstances of its composition in 1877 is
found in a monograph by Charles Willeby (1893):
"One night, the end was not
very far off then, while his sick brother had for a time fallen into a peaceful
sleep, and he was sitting as usual by the bedside, he chanced to come across
some verses of Adelaide Procter's with which he had five years previously been
much struck."
"He had then tried to set them to music, but without satisfaction to
himself. Now in the stillness of the night he read them over again, and almost
as he did so, he conceived their musical equivalent."
No one has doubted the sincerity of Sullivan's composition.
It was not written for sale, and its melody and accompaniment are
scarcely typical of popular ballads of its period.
Yet, its commercial success
exceeded that of all other British and American songs until the 1890s.
The
singer it became most associated with was the American alto, Antoinette
Sterling.
Sullivan's setting is structurally sophisticated in its treatment
of Procter's verses, and offers a contrast to the simple strophic setting of
Kingsley's verse that we've just heard.
This demonstrates the variety of forms
to be found in drawing-room ballads before there were moves toward greater
homogeneity in the 1880s, when the song structured along the lines of a clearly
delineated verse and chorus began to win the day.
For the most part, the song
steers clear of the predictable.
There is no imitation of the "angel's psalm,"
or rhythmic agitation at "fever'd spirit," or harp-like chords at the mention of
heaven.
There are some delightful surprises, such as the sudden coloring of
the harmony with the old church Mixolydian mode as the singer recounts the
striking of the mysterious chord.
Sullivan shows a thorough understanding of the
possibilities of the piano, ranging widely across its compass and making
powerful dynamic and textural contrasts.
He also does a fine job of imitating an
organ style in the introduction.
Sullivan's compositional skill where words are
concerned is evident in the way he treats the quatrains of Procter's poem,
linking some in pairs in a broad span of music, omitting others, creating a
subtle musical structure that avoids an obviously sectional character, despite
the poem's hymn-like form.
"Oh Mother! Take the Wheel Away" (words and music
by Claribel, c. 1865).
Claribel was the pseudonym of Mrs Charlotte Alington
Barnard (1830Ð69), who was one of the most successful popular song writers of
the 1860s, although she died at the young age of 39 in the last year of that
decade.
Claribel's songs were perfectly attuned to parlour performance in subject
matter and in the lack of heavy demands on either singer or pianist.
Few of her
songs are still known, although her "Come Back to Erin" is sometimes heard.
That
is an example of the pseudo-Irish song, a genre popular in the home from the
1840s onwards.
There is an evaluation of Claribel's oeuvre in James Brown's
Biographical Dictionary of Musicians of 1886, which damns her with faint praise.
It reads as follows:
"It is a mistake to suppose that the popularity of these
effusions was due to bad taste on the part of the public, for the truth of the
matter is that the people prefer songs which contain an element of humanity,
however distorted, and of necessity must accept the efforts of those who will
deign to write to their level."
"Great composers, as a rule, do not strive to
elevate the taste of the people by first writing music easy of comprehension and
afterwards raising the tone of their efforts, but uniformly confine themselves
to the production of works calculated to please the learned."
"The songs of Mrs.
Barnard lay no claim to be considered works of art, but they are certainly
healthy and fairly interesting."
This is an indication of the
ever-widening schism between the popular and the "artistic" in the later
nineteenth century that was to lead to "mass culture" theory and the modernist
polarization of art and entertainment.
For us, now, her songs provide more
insights into the lives and dreams of young nineteenth-century women than most
songs that enjoy the status of Great Art -- and, for that reason, they prove
extremely interesting and, it might be added, affecting.
"Oh Mother! Take the
Wheel Away" is a lesson in appropriate behavior for a jilted
middle-class girl on the day her sweetheart marries another.
Today it produces
an ambivalent reaction.
It is sad enough to bring us close to tears, but it is
so foreign to our social world that it also prompts laughter.
The heroine
suffers with such restrained dignity, taking these disappointing events "on the
chin" as it were; yet, she is just a little too perfect in her martyrdom.
Although this song seems so much a part of its time, it is interesting to note
that there is an ancient Sappho fragment in which a girl tells her mother she
cannot mind her spinning wheel because of the pangs of love.
Scott has not been able to find any evidence to show that spinning was a
regular activity for middle-class girls, though it certainly was for
working-class girls who were put to the looms in their thousands in the mills of
Lancashire.
It is far more likely that, under the sad circumstances described in
the last song, a girl would be telling her mother she couldn't play the
pianoforte that evening.
That would be especially likely in the case of the next
item, since it mentions a wedding in its title.
This is Turner's "Fairy Wedding
Waltz" which contains some of the fastest scale passages found in
piano pieces of this time.
Fortunately they can be accommodated using a
technique (the back-of-the-nail glissando) that was later to be embraced with
much enthusiasm by Jerry Lee Lewis.
This piece illustrates that, when displays
of piano technique were demanded in musical soirées, seeming difficulty was at a
premium.
The Irish composer Michael Balfe (1808--70) made his
setting of words from Tennyson's Maud shortly after it appeared (performance).
It seems that the publisher John Boosey sent the poetry directly to Balfe,
asking him to compose a new song for the celebrated tenor Sims Reeves (Boosey
1931: 17).
Tennyson's monodrama has a narrator whose vivid imagination is not
always suitable for the wholesome confines of the drawing room, and Balfe
tactfully revises the last stanza of this particular part of the poem (titled "A
Night-Song of Love") to avoid the lines:
my dust would hear her and
beat
had I lain for a century dead
would start and tremble under her
feet
& blossom in purple and red.
Unfortunately, Balfe's excitable
conclusion and choice of repeated words has not always been found a convincing
solution.
The form of the song is unusual, being that of the old roundelay, in
which contrasting and unrelated sections break up the repeats of a
refrain.
Scott's excuse for including "Come into the Garden, Maud" is that it
helps us to put in context the adverse reaction to poetic love songs, such as
that found in Felix McGlennon's 'That Is Love' (1889).
McGlennon, an Irish
composer, did his very best to raise the moral tone of the music hall in songs
like this and the much better-known "Comrades" (1891), before abandoning
propriety with his lyrics to "And Her Golden Hair Was Hanging Down Her Back"
(Monroe Rosenfeld).
It is unusual for a music-hall song to lay claim to the
moral high ground, but "That Is Love" helps us to understand why love songs were
not so highly-regarded by those whose appetite for moral tone exceeded all else
— though another reason for their unpopularity in the parlour was no doubt the
irresistible opportunity they offered singers for doing a little flirting.
McGlennon is having no truck with "the dalliance of youth and maid," his mind is
set on loftier examples of love, the first of these being, unsurprisingly, the
love of mother and child.
see a mother gazing on her baby boy
with
ecstatic eyes and heart that fills with joy
he to her is purest gold without
alloy
for him how she prays to Heav'n above
how she guides his footsteps
through this vale of strife
watches o'er his bedside when infection's
rife
risking for her baby boy her health, her life
that is love, that is
love.
The music of "Anchored" (performance) is by William Michael Watson
(1840-d.?), who was a composer of songs and piano music, born in
Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
The author of the words wishes to advertise the fact that
he holds the degree of MA on some published copies of this
song.
It is a
dramatic narrative ballad containing contrasting sections in a manner that has
its origin in certain operatic scenas.
In the nineteenth century composers of
any kind of descriptive music were able to deploy musical devices that, as a
consequence of having become familiar from opera and other stage works, had
established various extra-musical connotations.
Thus, in this song, there are a
variety of musical signs at the composer's disposal, and he eagerly makes use of
them.
The jaunty 'rum-ti-tum' of the 6/8 metre has associations of pastoral
innocence and merry peasants and emphasizes the youthful optimism of the sailor
lad journeying home.
There is a dramatic swerve to the minor and percussive
chords at "Sudden the light'nings flashed," suggesting a violent change in mood
and the presence of menace.
Rolled chords then signify angelic harps at "But
bright was the starry light," and the twinkling of the stars is represented in
the high triplets at "And a soft smile came from the stars."
Is it any wonder
that the Times newspaper announced, "The copyright of 'Anchored' realised
£1212.15s — the largest price, we believe, that has ever been given for a song"
(quoted on the front cover of The "Strand" Musical Portfolio of Copyright Songs
& Music, No. 5, London: Newnes, 1910).
Familiarity with religious
iconography may have alerted many of its nineteenth-century audience to the
outcome of the narrative.
Carved anchors were not uncommon on mariners'
gravestones as a symbol of faith and the hope of resurrection:
"Which hope we
have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast" (St Paul, Hebrews, 6:19).
A ship's anchor was one of the attributes of St Nicholas (Hall 1979: 15).
It is
enough to make a Victorian suspect there could be a twist in the destiny of the
young lad longing to be safe in his father's home.
Another ballad of this
descriptive type is Willoughby Weiss's setting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's
"The Village Blacksmith", in which conventional musical devices
are found for the blacksmith's heavy sledge, the sexton's bell, the children
hurrying hurrying home from school, the blacksmith's visit to the church, his
thoughts of his wife in heaven, his sorrow, and his simple but sturdy
determination to personify the Protestant work ethic (symbolized by decisive and
unadorned unisons in the accompaniment).
The Battle March of Delhi (John
Pridham, 1857)
Explanations of sections of The Battle March of Delhi
Having seen an example of musical signs at work in a song, we now encounter
an abundance of them in this "descriptive fantasia".
John Pridham,
a schoolteacher in Taunton, Devon, based his piece on The Battle of Sobraon by
Schubert. Adolphe Schubert that is, not Franz.
The section labeled "Indian
Air (at a distance)" may suggest to us that the missionaries have already
arrived . It is the hymn "There Is a Happy Land," written by Edinburgh head
teacher Andrew Young in 1838, but purportedly based on an Indian melody played
to him by the mother of one of his pupils (Mable 1951: 202).
In connection with
this hymn, Adair Fitzgerald narrates an anecdote about William Makepeace
Thackeray, in which the novelist encounters a "band of gutter children sitting
on the pavement" in a London slum district.
He draws near and discovers that
they are singing this hymn.
As he gazes at "the ragged choristers and their
squalid surroundings," and sees "their pale faces lit up with a thought which
brought both forgetfulness and hope," he bursts into tears (1898: 201Ð2).
The
story is attributed to Professor Mason, but no source is given, and Mable (1951:
203Ð4) attributes the same anecdote to the Rev. J. C. Carrick in an article
appearing in Life and Work (1890).
There is no mention in either source of what
he did next, but a typical next step, if ballads about ragged children and
orphans are anything to go by, would be to give them something useless like a
flower, or to wander off wiping away the tears and reflecting upon the moral
lessons children are able to teach us.
Descriptive comments of events during the
lifting of the siege of Delhi are given on the sheet music.
It is as this point that Scott
apologizes for my neglect of temperance songs.
In excuse, Scott argues that some
of these (such as the Rev. Ufford's "Throw Out the Life-line!" (performance)
frequently sounded too haranguing even for many in the nineteenth century who
otherwise prided themselves on their respectability.
Where alcohol was
concerned, the watchword tended to be moderation not prohibition: the advice
given to in "I Come from the Beautiful Rhine" (performance) is "drink, but
measure it."
The most affecting type of temperance song overcame the resistance
to being harangued about the evils of alcohol by putting its message in the
mouths of children, examples being "Come Home, Father" and "Father's a Drunkard
and Mother is Dead."
Since Scott has no time to cover the temperance song repertory, he has to make do with the astonishment generated in the song "The Volunteer
Organist" by the discovery that the old man who staggers down the
aisle is not actually the drunk the congregation suppose him to be — or perhaps,
there is a hint that he was once a drunkard and has now reformed, his trial
still somehow showing through in the way he plays the organ. The Old Hundredth
("All People That on Earth Do Dwell") is quoted, as it had been in Weiss's
"Village Blacksmith;" we assume that this is the hymn the volunteer plays.
It is
a hymn full of significance, brought over to America with the Pilgrim Fathers.
There is a contrast between the austere harmonies of the psalm tune and the
fashionable chromatic harmonies of New York's commercial songwriting
district.
The author and composer were in partnership as the music publishing
company Spaulding and Gray. It is an early Tin Pan Alley song of 1893, and
contains an example of what was to become a familiar Tin Pan Alley cadence
(heard in the falling semitones at the end of the piano introduction).
Perhaps,
the intention is to emphasize the no-nonsense, old time religion of the aged
organist by framing his performance in music of an up-to-date, modern
style.
Turner and Miall call it "a fine example of good bad art" (1975: 156).
It is interesting to ponder that phrase and ask what makes "good bad art".
Is it
something along the lines of "Ooh, you are awful, but I like you," or is it
memorably bad in contrast to forgettably bad, or is it that it half works for
us, but we cannot take it seriously?
There are other songs that might be
described as "good bad" like "That Is Love," but others that escape this label,
like "Annabelle Lee" (performance).
The "Volunteer Organist"
shows that music has remarkable power and may even substitute for
autobiography.
Another message of the song is that no matter how disreputable
someone may look, a modicum of musical skill is enough to guarantee his
impeccable character (please note!).
For corroboration of this high estimation
of the moral value of music, we can peruse Arthur Sullivan's address to members
of the Midland Institute, delivered in Birmingham, England, in 1888.
Music, he
claims, "is absolutely free from the power of suggesting anything immoral," and
continues:
Music can suggest no improper thought, and herein may be claimed
its superiority over painting and sculpture, both of which may, and, indeed, do
at times, depict and suggest impurity.
This blemish, however, does not enter
into music; sounds alone (apart from articulate words, spectacle, or descriptive
programme) must, from their indefinite nature, be innocent.
Let us thank God
that we have one elevating and ennobling influence in the world which can never,
never lose its purity and beauty.
[Sullivan's complete address, "About Music,"
is reprinted in Lawrence 1899: 261Ð87; this excerpt is taken from p.
285]
Here, Sullivan offers a reason why music was found such a powerful ally
in the moral struggle.
The moral tone, whether we regard it now as healthy or
not, is what makes the Victorian ballad differ from the songs that came after.
The early twentieth-century ballad tends to shy away from the moral didacticism
found in the previous century's ballads.
This does not suddenly happen, of
course. Although the Kipling poem "Mandalay" is earlier, in American composer
Oley Speaks' setting of several verses in 1907, published as the song "On the
Road to Mandalay" (performance) we are aware that the spirit is of a new age.
The music strongly supports the singer's desire to escape to a place "where
there ain't no ten commandments."
In the later ballad, emotion is frequently
indulged in for its own sake — as, for example, in "Somewhere a Voice Is
Calling" (Newton/Tate, 1911).
In the nineteenth-century ballad,
kids are not just cute in their misery.
Compare the girl in "Give Me a Ticket to
Heaven" with the boy in "Put My Little Shoes Away" who, as death approaches,
seizes the opportunity to give his parents a lesson in unselfishness and the
value of recycling by asking them to hang on to his little shoes because they'll
fit the baby when he's bigger.
There is a transitional period during the two
closing decades, when the variety of ballad types and ballad structures
decreases.
The diversity illustrated by songs like "The Lost Chord" and "Come
into the Garden, Maud" gives way to more predictable shapes of post-1880 ballads
like "Tatters", "Auntie," and "The Holy City," in which
irregularities are accommodated to a more obvious overall verse and refrain
form.
The move in the direction of what Adorno was to condemn as
"standardization" was accelerated by the song sheet production of what in the
1890s came to be known as Tin Pan Alley in New York.
The importance of a
moral tone to the American and British bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century was
a powerful incitement for the rejection of a moral dimension by many modernists
of the twentieth century, especially when the production of art for bourgeois
consumption became strongly associated with notions of pandering to the market
place and with personal insincerity or a lack of artistic truthfulness.
Thus, it
became typical for twentieth century high-status art to parade its complete lack
of any kind of moral dimension — somewhat paradoxically — as a virtue.
The
license to shock without conscience became the prerogative of the modern artist.
Ironically, one aspect of Victorianism continued — the idea that art is good for
you.
In fact, it is that which justifies the shocks you are made to suffer; art
was still serious even if it was no longer a pleasure.
For some years, the only
artistic medium that has raised and debated moral issues with some of the fervor
found in the nineteenth century is that of the TV soap opera.
Yet, perhaps this
indicates that the cultural changes since the nineteenth century have not been
as momentous as we might imagine; for there is a parallel to made.
These TV
soaps are, after all, produced as "serious pleasures" for consumption in the
home.
Where do we find songs in more recent decades that bear
a kinship to those of the nineteenth-century parlour?
The answer is, in country
music.
Many of the songs of Dolly Parton, especially of her early period, are
close to the Victorian ethos.
"Coat of many Colors" teaches a moral lesson about
motherly love and the riches of the imagination. "Jolene" can be seen as an
updated "jilt song."
"My Tennessee Mountain Home" praises the home with a
Victorian enthusiasm.
"Me and Little Andy" and "Jody's Afraid of the Dark" are
close cousins of Victorian songs of dying children, like "Close the Shutters,
Willie's Dead."
REFERENCES:
Russell, Henry. 1895. Cheer, Boys, Cheer!
London: John Macqueen.
Turner, Michael R. and Antony Miall, eds. 1974. The
Parlour Song Book: A Casquet of Vocal Gems. London: Pan.
Turner, Michael R.
and Antony Miall, eds. 1975. Just a Song at Twilight: The Second Parlour Song
Book. London: Michael Joseph.
Scott, Derek B. 2001. The Singing Bourgeois:
Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour [1989]. 2d. ed. Aldershot:
Ashgate.
Willeby, Charles. 1893. Masters of Contemporary Music. Osgood &
McIlvaine: London.
Lawrence, Arthur. 1899. Sir Arthur Sullivan: Life-Story,
Letters, and Reminiscences. London: James Bowden.
Brown, James D. 1970.
Biographical Dictionary of Musicians [Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1886].
Reprinted Hildesheim: Georg Olms.
Gilbert Murray, Cyril Bailey, et al., eds,
1930. The Oxford Book of Greek Verse. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Boosey,
William. 1931. Fifty Years of Music. London: Ernest Benn.
James Hall. 1979.
Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art [1974]. Rev. ed. London: John
Murray.
Mable, Norman. 1951. Popular Hymns and Their Writers. Rev. ed.
London: Independent Press.
Fitzgerald, S. J. Adair. 1898. Stories of Famous
Songs. London: John C. Nimmo, 1898), 201-2;
Monday, December 24, 2012
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