Parlour Songs -- Introduction to the 1st Edition (Scott)

Speranza

D. Scott

--

Scott's is not the first book in the Open University Press's "Popular Music in Britain" series to challenge certain assumptions about a particular body of music.

At issue, here, is the myth constructed around the idea of the 'Victorian parlour song' (or "drawing-room ballad," as I prefer) a term almost always used as if it denotes a clear-cut genre characterized by stereotyped musical and literary features.

Exemplars would be

"Just a song at twilight," -- by Molloy (1884) and

"Home, sweet sweet home" -- by Bishop/Payne, from the opera, Clari" (1823).

In fact, there is a remarkable VARIETY (even diversity) of musical forms and styles of song acceptable in the Victorian middle-class home.

Some of these, indeed, are firmly established well before Victoria comes to the throne in 1837, such as the 'refined' traditional air and the English (and even Italian) favourite "OPERATIC" air.

Though nothing now seems to immediately evoke an atmosphere considered more quintessentially Victorian than 'The Last Rose of Summer' (from a volume of Moore's Irish Melodies published in 1813) or 'Home, home, sweet sweet home" (from Bishop's English opera "Clari; or, The Maid of Milan" of 1823).

Religious non-conformists are brazenly eclectic in commandeering whatever musical features could be made to function in their interests and favoured a strong, tuneful idiom which also frequently finds its way into the parlour or drawing-room.

Later, the music of the blackface minstrel show and the 'respectable' type of music-hall song are added to the drawing-room repertoire.

So can we speak of a 'genre'?

The desire to categorize a particular portion of all this as 'Victorian parlour song' by reference to an arbitrary selection of musical and literary criteria creates a 'parlour song' consensus in its own way as misleading as the 'folk song' (or 'fakesong', as I prefer) consensus attacked by Dave Harker.

It is to avoid such categorization that Scott calls this book "The Singing Bourgeois" -- since no Aristocrat REALLY sang?

The 'parlour song' consensus, it should be stressed, is not something that is as systematically constructed by key mediators in the same manner as the 'folk song' (fakesong) consensus.

But it results rather from a sloppy use of terminology.

For example, using the term 'parlour song' sociologically but actually trying to define it _musicologically_.

There again, some writers use the term "drawing-room ballad" with the intention not of referring to the whole range of songs sung in the middle-class (or aristocratic) home (or stately home, in the latter case) but of pinpointing those songs aimed directly at the domestic market.

Yet, this use of "drawing-room ballad" is UNHELPFUL or misleading, because the real target of the sheet-music publication of almost all Victorian song is the middle-class home.

Even when some of the diverse ingredients of bourgeois song begin to solidify under the influence of the Ballad Concerts promoted by the music publisher Boosey (at St. James's Hall since 1867) it remains difficult to formulate an empirical definition of what constitutes the typical Boosey ballad.

So there.

Here is an attempt, not altogether felicitious, from "The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians".

"drawing-room ballad alla Boosey"

"The texts are sentimental verses about love, gardens, and birds".

The music is simple strophic settings marked by

(a) an easy melody
(b) a stereotyped accompaniment, and
(c) a maudlin harmonic progression.

One of the three 'typical' examples chosen to illustrate this, Sullivan's 'The Lost Chord', is not about love, gardens, or birds (for that matter). It is, rather, about a lost chord. (Metaphorically: death).

Neither is "The Lost Chord" a simple strophic setting ("Mary had a little lamb" is).

As for (a)-(b)-(c)

(a)

"The Lost Chord" is melodically "awkward" in parts rather than "easy".

(b) The piano accompaniment is unusual (rather than stereotyped) in having been contrived to suggest a church organ.

(c) whether the harmony of "The Lost Chord" is maudlin or not is a question which needs to be considered in relation to 'presentist' value judgements.

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It is evident that a 'parlour song' or 'drawing-room ballad' is more easily defined sociologically as a song designed or appropriated for bourgeois (never aristocratic) domestic consumption (even if the home is a stately home)


A QUESTION OF USE: against the pretentious use of 'ballad'.

In the nineteenth century the description

 'parlour song'

is extremely rare, although

 'drawing-room ballad'

is often encountered (and with increasing frequency after the establishment of Boosey's Ballad Concerts in 1867.

In the first half of the century, the description 'popular song' is very common.

Lke 'favourite' and 'celebrated' , "popular", as applie to 'song', is used by publishers to suggest widespread demand.

A guarantee of quality follows, because a song is popular in a commercial sense only by attracting sufficient numbers of musically literate bourgeois consumers.

Naturally, the bourgeoisie think the songs they enjoy are of unquestionable merit and take comfort in the knowledge that, if a song is described on its sheet music as 'popular', it automatically implies that it is regularly performed in other 'respectable' (stately) homes.

We choose to employ the term 'drawing-room ballad' rather than 'popular song' in order to avoid possible confusion about the class orientation of the 'genre'.

We must stress, however, that we use "drawing-room ballad", as a generic and not a specific term until we reach the 1870s.

From the 1870s on there is, indeed, a move towards a standardization of songs which are accorded this label.

We would like to argue that, used generically, 'drawing-room ballad' helps to locate a cohesive body of song of a class-aligned nature.

The tightly controlled, written-out structures of songs produced for the drawing room are singularly adaptive to the bourgeois INDIVIDUALIST ideology.

The performer implicit in these structures is an interpretative servant of the song-writer.

This is not to say that a bourgeois song cannot be appropriated by the working class, who have the possibility of constructing new meanings in the way they consume it.

Conversely, the bourgeoisie are able to appropriate working-class musical practices and through the effort of mediation assimilate oppositional elements.

Apart from the easy judgements that are made in categorizing bourgeois domestic song, our understanding of this music is  hampered by the contempt now heaped upon it from some quarters.

The expression 'presentism' is coined to describe a critical vision which implies that our present values are objective rather than historically conditioned.

 Informed critics of the nineteenth century are equally convinced of their objectivity in describing Restoration comedy as the result of an embarrassing lapse of artistic standards.

The status of an artistic genre is better regarded as 'whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given purposes.

The modernists musicologist's scorn for bourgeois domestic song arises from its failure to meet the criteria of the Western art music tradition, in which an assumption is made that art progresses under its own laws independently of the material basis of the society within which it is produced.

The movement of art is therefore interpreted as a succession of styles, each led and perfected by creative geniuses.

Modernist theory accepts with equanimity the absence for centuries of important female composition, and even that an entire country may be without any real music.

Before Smetana, for example, there had been no genuine Czech music.

From this perspective, which still so often sets the terms of the debate, a figure as important to British musical life in the nineteenth century as Sullivan can be dismissed in half a sentence, failing to illustrate a purely musical-historical movement.

An alternative theoretical framework exists, in which the nineteenth-century bourgeois song-writer is seen as inextricably bound to and providing a cultural response to the society of which he forms a part.

Song production can be located in terms of its function and use, its relationship to class dominance and hegemonic struggle.

The bourgeois popular song is the first product which shows how music is profitably incorporated into a system of capitalist enterprise.

It is in the production, promotion, and marketing of the sheet music to these songs (and the pianos to accompany them) that we witness the birth of the modern music industry.

For whatever apparent reason a song was originally written (say, for an "opera" -- Italian or English), it is possible for it to be tailored to the requirements of amateur music-making in the middle-class home.

Class is a problematic term when it comes to the English, and this warrants a few words of explanation.

Class is only discernible in a relationship.

When we use the term 'middle class' or 'bourgeoisie' we refer in the eighteenth century to

a) merchants
b) artisans, and
c) shopkeepers.

In the nineteenth century, we refer to the capital half of the capital/labour relationship.

It is important to remember that class is a process.

The middle class is constantly changing and adapting.

It can be argued that the term 'middle class' immediately hypostasizes this process.

The description 'bourgeoisie' is preferred by many writers on the Victorian period to avoid the seeming contradiction of a dominant class being given a label which carries a suggestion of a fixed hierarchical position BENEATH the aristocracy or landed gentry.

Along with coercion, a class manifests its supremacy by exercising "hegemony", a key political term which describes intellectual and moral leadership.

The dominant culture in a society is "hegemonic".

The dominant culture aims to win its position of ascendancy through consent rather than by force.

Hegemony is a process of struggle which often calls for compromise.

For example, in the later nineteenth century membership of a trade union was finally accorded respectability.

The state apparatus is invaluable in establishing hegemony.

The dominant culture is mediated through institutions such as schools, in, for instance, the choice of songs for teaching purposes.

It might be thought that the diversity of ideology found in bourgeois songs (drinking vs. temperance, belligerence vs. compassion) argues strongly AGAINST the theory of hegemony, though.

Gramsci, however, argues that bourgeois HEGEMONY necessitates an alliance of fractions, a 'historical bloc'.

It herefore follows that the dominant culture is not homogeneous but subject to (and able to tolerate) conflicting strands within the hegemonic alliance.

Since the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688 the middle class holds a share of power.

But the middle class is not a hegemonic class until the nineteenth century, after a long period of struggle marked by important victories in 1832 (the passing of the Reform Bill) and 1846 (Repeal of the Corn Laws).

There should not, then, be any surprise to find the eighteenth-century middle class enjoying the satire in Gay's "The Beggar's Opera" directed at a government which was in part middle class.

The power bloc which allows stable class rule is only achieved through struggle between various contending classes and fractions.

Only one class within the alliance exercises hegemony.

But the dominant culture (although in itself hegemonic) contains evidence of the conflicts within that alliance.

Notice that the key Victorian term "respectable" has a hegemonic function.

The adjective "respectable" connotes adherence to a code of what is socially acceptable and thus seeks to impose a behavioural conformity which sanctions the existing social structures.

The terms 'polite' and 'wholesome' are used in a similar fashion, to lay down the correctness of certain social values.

We should explain what we mean by 'dominant culture', and clarify the standpoint from which we view the relationship of art to the society within which it is produced.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

In feudal society, paying homage to one's lord seems natural, just as consumerism seems natural in a society based on generalized commodity production.

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.

Marx introduces the notion of "economic base" and "ideological superstructure" -- a model which gives rise to a type of Marxist theory now commonly referred to as 'vulgar Marxism', 'reflectionism', or economic determinism.

This asserts the primacy of the economic base and reduced the complex relationship between that and the world of ideas to one of rigid determinism.

The seductiveness of reflectionist thinking is illustrated by the argument that playing the piano was considered such an essential accomplishment for well-bred Victorian girls because the major commodities of the music industry were pianos and sheet music (and today musical literacy is no longer valued because records are a more important commodity than sheet music).

An argument like this, of course, begs many questions, including why playing the piano was more important for girls than boys.

Evidence that economic determinism was already gaining theoretical ground in the late nineteenth century is shown by the desire to emphasize that the economic element is not the sole determining factor.

Recent theorists have been at pains to stress the dialectic between social existence and social consciousness rather than fall back on the mechanical metaphor of "economic base" and "ideological superstructure".

The culturalists and structuralists of the 1970s, with their contending paradigms, are at least agreed in attributing relative autonomy to the artist -- albeit for different reasons.

Culturalists stress that social existence, including cultural experience, influences and conditions consciousness rather than determines consciousness, allowing an active role for human agency.

Structuralists underline the importance of differing pre-existing systems of signification present in each field of creativity.

If ideological signs determine consciousness, it is always with the understanding that those signs mean different things to different social groups.

Our own approach is oriented towards culturalism in so far as we seek to examine these songs in relation to the class outook of the Victorian bourgeoisie.

The concept of the hegemonic bloc we also find helpful in contributing to an understanding and explanation of the internal conflicts within the bourgeoisie (who ought not to be viewed as monolithic).

Overall we adopt what may be called the 'popular culture' perspective as opposed to the 'mass culture' perspective.

The mass culture perspective  tends to focus on the depraving effects of the 'culture industry'.

On the other hand, the hallmark of the 'popular culture' perspective is that meaning is made in the consumption — here is a space for relative autonomy and hegemonic negotiation.

The 'popular culture' perspective does, of course, pose a challenge to the uncritical acceptance of'high culture'.

We should add, in concluding this section, that there is no easy one-to-one relationship between art and social history.

For example, it is possible to find melancholy songs in times of economic buoyancy (or when a war is going well) and optimistic or romantic songs in times of depression.

The historical specificity of our genre of song needs explaining.

We start in the eighteenth century in discussing the foundations of bourgeois domestic song styles not because there is any kind of absolute beginning there, but because the performance of the politically combative " Beggar's Opera" seems a more significant cultural moment than, say, the publication of Yonge's "Musica Transalpine" -- a collection illustrating the importance of bourgeois taste in the late sixteenth century.

We  close the survey around the year 1898 when the drawing-room ballad of the Boosey type was wilting in the face of the challenge from Tin Pan Alley as the United States of America moved to dominate the commercial music industry.

That year, too, musical comedy from the United States was exciting interest after the sensational London premiere of Kerker's "The Belle of New York".

Furthermore, dissemination of music is soon to be transformed.

The pianola arrives in 1897 and the English Gramophone Company sets up business the following year.

We have tried to locate the roots of that distinctive character which lends a homogeneity to nineteenth-century bourgeois song-types.

There is some inevitable cramming in our attempt to condense within a single chapter everything in the eighteenth century which we thought relevant.

We examine  the early amateur music market, and we follow this up by concentrating on the opportunity taken by women, who are so crucial to this market, to write songs themselves.

We consider  the manner in which the ethnic cultures of Celts and Afro-Americans are subject to assimilation by the English and North American bourgeoisie (symptomatic of this was the creation of two new 'American' instruments, the five-string banjo and the 'concert D' uilleann pipes).

A few of these songs have a religious theme.

We deal chronologically with the range of sacred music which became available and discuss the emergence of the 'sacred song' as a branch of the drawing-room repertoire.

All these chapters are concerned mainly with pre-1870 developments.

After 1870, a period of rapid growth begins which sees the development of a more organized music industry.

So we return to the subject of the music market during these years and the changes being brought about by the increasing professionalization of music.

We try to demonstrate the extent of formula following during the post-1870 ballad boom.

For that purpose, it is necessary to include detailed analyses in order to show how our conclusions have been obtained.

 A problem we feel we have not resolved is how to explain artistic distinction without romantic mystification.

We looks at bourgeois song in the context of the growth of English nationalism and the continuity/discontinuity debate concerning British imperialism.

We deal in brief with bourgeois song and hegemony.

We give an account of the dilemma facing ballad composers as a result of the challenge from the United States and the simultaneous feeling of exhaustion which had overtaken the British ballad.

In the main, given fair representation of song types and influential composers, our selection of songs for the purpose of analysis has been directly related to their degree of commercial success, in the belief that the producer/consumer relationship is clearest where the mutual rewards are apparently highest.

Nevertheless, failure is also important, since it helps to define the tolerances of the genre when pulled in the direction of either of the polar extremes of novelty or familiarity.

We discuss a failure like Adams and Weatherly's "The Light of the World" because it shows that the application of a familiar formula does not guarantee success, thus offering further confirmation of the relative autonomy of the consumer.

The contemporary relevance of a study of nineteenth-century bourgeois domestic song extends beyond the insight it provides on the workings of the commercial music industry and on the continuing resonances of this music which may be felt in twentieth-century gospel and country music.

To the nineteenth- century bourgeoisie it is never simply a question of how best to produce and consume a particular musical product, but how to put into practice the belief that music-making was of benefit to everyone's development as a human being.

Any future society which thinks practical musicianship to be life enhancing will have to address the same question.

There was a genuine, if ideologically motivated, attempt in the mid-nineteenth century to promote the musica practice, that some regard as having almost disappeared from high culture.

Of course, drawing-room ballads are NEVER *popular* in any truly democratic sense.

Victorian domestic music is class based and reinforce bourgeois ideology (particularly that of the family).

All the same, there is a search for a kind of music which permits maximum participation.

In recent times punk rock is seen as a determined though brief attempt to develop a proletarian democratic style derived from the 'garage band'.

Vastly different in almost every respect as the music of the Sex Pistols is from that of Stephen Foster, they each represent the ultimate simplicity and directness in their respective genres and thus helps to demonstrate the enormous potential for diversity of expression those qualities may contain.

REFERENCES

Harker 1985: 198-210. -- A. Lamb, 'Popular music in Sadie 15 (1980).

For a short historical account of the several uses of the word 'popular', including its shift in sense to mean 'well-liked' in the nineteenth century, see R. Williams, Keywords, (London: Fontana, 1976) rev. and expanded edn 1983.

T. Eagleton, Literary Theory, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
Musical reformers like Palestrina, Bach, Gluck, Beethoven, Berlioz and Liszt have shown the art its laws.' A. Einstein, Music in the Romantic Era (London, Dent: 1947).

R. M. Longyear, Nineteenth Century Romanticism in Music (London: Prentice Hall: 1969).

A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart: 1971)

K. Marx and F. Engels The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers: 1964).

 S. K. Padover, (ed.) The Essential Marx (New York: Mentor Books: 1979).

 Letter to J. Bloch, 21 September 1890, quoted in R. Williams, Culture and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963).

R. Barthes, 'Musica Practica' in Image-Music-Text, ed. S. Heath, (Glasgow: Fontana, 1977).

For a full-length study of British punk rock, see D. Laing, One Chord Wonders (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985).