Parlour Songs -- "Introduction to 2nd Edition" (Scott)

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.