Speranza
D. Scott
Before discussing the way in which Celts were subject to cultural assimilation,
it must be pointed out that there was some fusion of "Afro-American" and "Celtic"
songs in the nineteenth century, probably originally as a result of cultural
interaction between black and white on the American Southern Frontier.
The black
dancer William Henry LANE, for example, combined African dance with the Irish
jig to produce his acclaimed stage jig as 'Master Juba'.
Since the minstrel show
developed during the years when large numbers of Irish immigrants were arriving
in America, Irish songs were found to be a popular part of the show,
particularly new songs calling for the liberation of Ireland.
The Irish side to
minstrelsy was adopted by the British troupes, but with an emphasis on
'traditional' song: no. 14, vol. 5, of The Mohawk Minstrels' Magazine is
actually labelled 'Special Irish Number', and includes seven Tom Moore ballads.
Thus the ground was already laid for some of the remarkable Afro-American/Celtic
fusions of the present century, such as the bluegrass style of Bill
Monroe.
Celtic culture is not, of course, solely Irish but includes
Scottish,
Welsh,
Manx,
Cornish,
Breton, and
Galician cultures.
In this chapter,
however, for reasons of space, the main concern is Scotland and, to a lesser
extent, Ireland. Scotland is important because it occupied a special place in
the fascination of the Victorian bourgeoisie with the Celt's culture and
environment.
The debt owed to Scotland by the Romantic movement has long been
acknowledged.
A frequently quoted musical example of this debt is Mendelssohn's
overture The Hebrides (1830).
Queen Victoria's first visit to Scotland was in
1842, and then, with the development of rail travel, so popular did it become
among the middle class that, in 1866 alone, Thomas Cook catered for 40,000
tourists.
It became an escapist world of romance to the industrial bourgeois;
even if not all of them went as far as the mill-owning Bullough family from
Lancashire, who bought the Isle of Rhum in 1888, built a castle there (paying he
workmen an extra shilling a week to wear kilts!), and paid £2000 for an organ to
be installed in it.
Meanwhile, Highlanders were emigrating, some as a result of
the blight which destroyed the potato crop in Sutherland in the 1840s (those who
stayed were set to work building 'destitution roads'), and others driven out
because they could not afford to remain once the leases on their tenancies
expired and Lowland farmers competed for the land in order to place profitable
Cheviot sheep there.
The Highlands were in the hands of a few vast landowners,
and what was not leased out to farmers was treated as a huge recreation park.
Deer stalking was perhaps the favourite pastime among wealthy Highland landlords
and their business friends, many of whom would have made their fortunes selling
the new whisky, blended from Lowland grain (mostly unmalted) and Highland malt.
This state of affairs did not continue for the whole century: the Highland Land
League was formed in 1882, and by 1886 crofters had won security of tenure.
However, even at the outbreak of the Great War the land question and the problems
of Highlanders had still not been resolved.
Such, then, is the background
against which the Victorian image of the romantic tartan-clad Highlander must be
viewed; that image owed much to Scott's Waverley Novels and little to
contemporary realities.
Either writing verse to Scottish airs
contemporaneously with Burns, or following in his immediate footsteps, like
Nairne, Hogg, and Scott, were dozens of others.
Among the most prominent were
Mrs Grant of Corran (1745-1814)
Hector MacNeill (1746-1818)
Susanna Blamire
(1747-94)
Mrs Grant of Laggan (1755-1838)
Joanna Baillie (1764-1851)
William
Smyth (1766-1849), and
Sir Alexander Boswell (1775-1822).
Some, like the last
three, were prepared to set verse to a variety of Celtic airs, Irish and Welsh
as well as Scottish, while the market for them thrived.
Furthermore, Joanna
Baillie, although born in Scotland, spent most other life in Hampstead (she did
not even visit Scotland once in the last thirty years other life), and William
Smyth was a Liverpudlian who, from 1807 till his death, occupied the chair as
Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge.
Scotch songs
were great favourites in the early Victorian drawing room and were still very
much the rage in the 1850s, when singers like Mr Wilson and Mme Sainton-Dolby
introduced them into their concerts.
Just what made them so much admired may be
gleaned from an article printed in Eliza Cook's Journal in 1852, which picks out
characteristic features for approval: they are morally healthy in
advocating contentment with one's lot.
They abound in pictures of domestic peace
and comfort; and they show joy in the beauties of nature.
Scottish songs are
felt to be non-elitist.
The writers of the words for the songs - the Scottish
poets - have written them for the people - for the nation - for the many - not
for the few.
The music is thought to demonstrate honest heart-felt
expression, but it has to be considered lacking in refinement.
Scotch songs
are not pretty -- in the Italian sense of 'pretty'.
Though they have been the rage in drawing-rooms, they are yet
born of the people.
They were not meant to be merely ornamental; they were the
growth of simple taste, of true feeling, often of intense passion.
The
suggestion is that the Scottish people are a homogeneous mass, that their songs
spring from the people and are for the people, hence they have a universal
appeal.
Indeed, the writer goes on to advise Tennyson to be less classical and
strive for universality.
The organic Scottish society was, of course, a myth,
and Scottish song which was not actually bourgeois in origin still only reached
the drawing room after bourgeois mediation.
By 1852, not only were most of the
texts of Scottish songs the product of the Lowland middle class, or members of
the old Scottish aristocracy with a sentimental attachment to Jacobitism, but
many tunes had been freshly composed or modernized.
The extent of this rewriting
may not have been obvious to the writer quoted above, because in the first half
of the nineteenth century any song text which was written by a woman would be
published without attribution.
Therefore, anyone keen to be reassured of the
naturalness of bourgeois values might be ready to believe that these anonymous
songs had sprung from untutored Scottish peasants.
There was a ladies' musical
society in Edinburgh which encouraged anonymous songwriting.
Lady Nairne was a
leading member.
It was mentioned in the previous chapter that Felicia Hemans
played a key role in the emergence of women songwriters into the drawing-room
ballad market.
Two features of her work should be stressed, since they mark her
out from the Edinburgh ladies.
Felicia Hemans would rather be seen dead than writing in dialect.
Second, she did not
publish anonymously.
Anonymity was respectable (because modest) but worked
against the economic interest of women -- notably Felicia Hemans.
Lady John Scott, née Alicia Spottiswoode
(1810-1900) was composer and author of several successful ballads, but because
she remained anonymous until the mid-1850s her influence on other women was
slight compared with that of Caroline Norton and Maria Lindsay.
Also it meant
that, because she had no personal reputation, anything she did outside the realm
of Scotch song was liable to be overlooked.
One of her most well-known songs
today, 'Think on Me', a straightforward Bayly-style drawing-room ballad, was
first published ten years after her death.
Before turning to Alicia Scott's
output, there is an intermediate stage in the assimilation of Scottish song into
English bourgeois culture which needs to be considered.
Stage one was the
writing of new or improved verses to old airs; but many were of the opinion that
these airs were not pretty long before the writer in Eliza Cook's Journal and
regarded this as a fault.
Major keys were the norm for genteel music.
Yet a Scotch tune may be modal (Skirven's 'Johnnie Cope' and Burns' 'Highland
Mary').
Or a Scotch song have a pentatonic shape which shifted ambiguously between major and
relative minor (Blamire's 'What Ails This Heart o' Mine' and MacNeill's 'Come
Under My Plaidie').
Or the melody might pivot more strongly around the dominant
than the tonic (Nairne's 'The Land o' the Leal' and Glen's 'Wae's Me for Prince
Charlie').
It is, of course, unhistorical to talk of keys when discussing the
older Scottish tunes.
Nevertheless, in the drawing room those tunes would have
been perceived against a background of music with which the Victorian middle
class was familiar.
Hence, rather than accept them on their own terms, there was
a tendency to see the tunes as crudely groping after the refinement of the
classical key system.
The first thing that could be done to improve matters
would be to provide classical harmonies and decorate the melody with classical
ornamentation.
Here is a mid-century version of the opening of a pentatonic
Gaelic air, 'Crodh Chailein' it is from Mrs Grant of Laggan's song 'Flora to
Colin', a translation of the Gaelic original.
Burns reused this tune for 'My
Heart's in the Highlands'.
It will be seen that the melodic decoration
is designed around the concept of underlying harmonies, except for the trill
in the penultimate bar, and that calls for classical vocal technique.
Compare
this version of the tune with the way it might be tackled by someone playing an
instrument with a drone accompaniment.
Consider the first four bars with some
typical Highland bagpipe ornaments.
Now, in complete contrast, it would
be difficult to find harmonies to suit the grace notes.
Sometimes the whole
tune was modernized, as was 'The Flowers of the Forest' by Mrs Cockburn.
Very soon there was an urge to compose fresh tunes to those songs
which presently consisted of old tune and fresh words.
An early example of this
is the Rev. William Leeves' setting of'Auld Robin Gray', published in 1812.
The
words were by Lady Anne Barnard, née Lindsay (1750-1825). the eldest
daughter of the fifth Earl of Balcarras.
Living in Fifeshire, but spending
winters in town, as was customary among the aristocracy, Lindsay was probably
encouraged to try her hand at a Scotch song as a result of mingling in
Edinburgh society.
However, like all lady songwriters, Lindsay kept her authorship a
secret.
Lindsay finally confessed to writing it in a letter sent to Walter Scott two
years before her death.
A Captain Hall relates that Scott told guests at his
home in 1825 that, when Anne Lindsay first heard the tune, it was accompanied by
words of no great delicacy, whatever their antiquity might be.
Lindsay's letter to
Scott, dated 8 July 1823, declares that she longed to sing the tune to different
words,'and give its plaintive tones some little history of virtuous distress in
humble life, such as might suit it.
Written in 1771, 'Auld
Robin Gray' became such a drawing-room favourite that in 1780 it formed the basis of an
entire ballad opera, "William and Lucy", complete with new happy ending).
However
suited Anne Lindsay's words were meant to be to the plaintive tones of the
tune, the old modal melody was immediately banished from the drawing room when
Leeves' version became available.
Today, the song invariably begins at the
second stanza ('Young Jamie lo'd me weel'), since Leeves began his setting with
a recitative.
Leeves relies on classical procedures for expressive effect, such as
the contrast of major and minor key, and the use of chromaticism.
Leeves's Scottish
flavouring is limited to one or two snap rhythms.
Mrs Gibson of Edinburgh
(1786—1838) must have experienced similar feelings to Leeves when she
contemplated the gloomy minor melody which accompanied Byron's poem 'Lochnagar'
(from Hours of Idleness, 1807).
Her bright and mellifluous alternative soon
became a favourite drawing-room tenor song.
Although a dubious tribute to 'dark Lochnagar',
it creates a Scottish atmosphere by plentiful use of pentatonic shapes.
Thus,
the foundation was laid for Alicia Scott to both write and compose original
Scottish songs.
Her best-known song is 'Annie Laurie', which consists of two
stanzas rewritten from an earlier song and a third stanza other own, all set to
her own music.
She found the words in "The Songs of Scotland" (1825), edited by Allan
Cunningham, but felt they were in need of 'improvement'.
A comparison of the
original second stanza with her version gives an insight into drawing-room
propriety.
she's backit like a peacock,
she's breastit like a swan
she's jimp about the middle
her waist ye well may span
her waist ye
well may span
& she has a rolling eye
& for bonnie Annie Laurie
I'd lay down my head and die
her brow is like the snaw-drift
her throat
is like the swan
her face it is the fairest
that e'er the sun shone
on
that e'er the sun shone on
& dark blue is her e'e
& for
bonnie Annie Laurie
I'd lay me doune and dee.
It is noteworthy that
Lady Scott's version sounds a great deal more Scottish than the original.
But
her attachment to the Lallans dialect derives from her sentimental Jacobitism
rather than an interest in ordinary Scottish people, so expressions which seem
to her vulgar, like 'backit', 'breastit', and 'jimp about the middle' are
dropped.
For the latter she substitutes 'Her face it is the fairest', but in the
1854 version she forgoes her alliteration in order to translate the English 'fairest' as the Scottish 'bonniest'.
It is a telling change.
Indeed,
throughout the Scottish songs for which she provided texts, Lallans is treated
merely as a vocabulary of romantic words, rather than a dialect with its own
syntax.
Musically 'Annie Laurie' is typical of her style.
It is a simple
strophic song which sets the words syllabically to a sixteen-bar diatonic melody
decorated with an occasional 'Scotch snap'.
The word pretty would not be
inappropriate as a description of its elegantly crafted tune. Its tonality is
unambiguously major, and its musical tensions rely on changes of harmony.
For
example, the tension on the word 'bonnie' in the first line, 'Maxwelton braes
are bonnie'.
Lady Scott used to sing her songs to a harp accompaniment, though
she seldom wrote down anything but the melody.
Lady John Scott's songs were published
anonymously in arrangements by others.
'Annie Laurie' first appeared with an
accompaniment by Finlay Dun in The Vocal Melodies of Scotland, volume 3, 1838,
published by Paterson and Roy, Edinburgh.
It has been noted that it was
customary for women songwriters to remain anonymous at this time, whether they
had written words, music, or both.
As the ballad market began to open up for
women in the mid-century, attribution was no longer thought
immodest.
When Lady Nairne died in 1845, and her authorship of songs was
acknowledged, the situation must have eased a little.
Lady Scott was first given
credit as a songwriter when she published six songs in 1854 for the benefit of
the wives and families of soldiers who had been sent to Crimea (the songs
included 'Annie Laurie' and 'Katherine Logic').
THE HIGH ROAD, THE LOW ROAD
A song often attributed to her
is 'Loch Lomond'.
owever, its earliest known appearance is in W. Christie's
Traditional Ballad Airs, volume 1, 1876.
Its largely pentatonic character seems
stylistically unlike Scott, and lends credibility to the argument that it is a
modern version of'Robin Cushie', first printed in McGibbon's Scots Tunes Book of
1742.
The words are another possibility, since they are very much in her
English-with-a-Scottish-accent style.
This might also serve as an appropriate
description other music.
She embraces the major key world of the drawing room,
avoiding 'antiquated' modality (the musically unpalatable equivalent of words
like 'breastit'?), and applying dabs of regional colour with the odd pentatonic
turn of phrase and snap rhythm.
HIGHLANDERS -- GAELIC
It may have been noticed that, with the
exception of'Crodh Chailein' ('Colin's Cattle'), all the Scottish songs
discussed so far have been Lowland songs.
Some Gaelic songs were published in
the early nineteenth century: 'Crodh Chailein' appeared in Fraser's Airs
Peculiar to the Scottish Highlands (1816), and another all-Gaelic collection was
Alex Campbell's Albyn's Anthology, which came out in two volumes (1816-18).
Gaelic songwriters, a large proportion of whom, incidentally, were women,
continued to produce new songs throughout the century. Some even wrote new words
to old tunes, as had happened with Lowland songs; 'An-t-Eilean Muileach' ('The
Isle of Mull'), penned by a homesick Dugald MacPhail in Newcastle, is an
example. Gaelic music divides not into 'serious' and 'popular' but into big
(ceol mor) and small (ceol beag).
The absence of'high' and 'low' categories
reflects the socio-economic basis of Gaelic society, which was comprised of clan
communities led by chiefs, and kept in existence by subsistence agriculture
(based on cattle) and, in the case of some clans, fishing.
There were inequalities of wealth and status within the clan, but it saw itself as a
cohesive whole. Little Gaelic song entered the drawing room because in a
capitalist society art is part of leisure, but to the Highlanders art was a part
of work as well, and their types of song reflect this — waulking songs (three
speeds, depending on the weight of the cloth), nurses' songs, milking songs,
rowing songs, etc.
Even where a Gaelic song might be thought to have a universal
appeal - laments for lost loved ones, such as Christina Fergusson's lament for
William Chisholm, or songs of emigration, such as 'Gur Moch Rinn Mi Dusgadh'
('Early Did I Awaken') - the authentic voice of the Gael was rejected in favour
of an invented voice (for example, C. Mackay's 'The Highland Emigrant' of 1861).
Eventually Gaelic song was to find a form suitable for drawing-room consumption
this century, mainly owing to the mediations of Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser and the
interest among the English middle class in 'Celtic Twilight' romanticism.
The
general opinion in the mid-nineteenth century was that Gaelic culture was crude
and unimportant.
The Highlanders, who inhabit the mountainous and picturesque
part of Scotland, have added very little to its stores of national music, except
a few wild pibrochs, befitting the uncouth instrument on which they are usually
played — the Highland bagpipe.
An invented culture filled the gap created by
ignorance of the Highlander's culture.
Highland dress, for instance, was no
longer regarded as subversive; but, in order that it might fit in with the
construction of a romantic Highland mythology, dozens of colourful fraud tartans
were produced.
Queen Victoria's desire for a personal piper owed more to
Highland romance than to an interest in piobaireachd.
The changes in pipe music
illustrate how Gaelic culture was part marginalized and part assimilated in the
nineteenth century. Angus Mackay, Queen Victoria's first piper, was an authority
on the great music (ceol mor) of the Highland bagpipe, but by the 1880s the
craze for the 'competition march' had marginalized this music.
The official
recognition given to pipers by the War Office in 1854 acted as a stimulus to the
formation of pipe bands, and they, in turn, developed a repertoire distinct from
that of the solo Highland piper (who originally played only piobaireachd or
jigs).
Only when the socio-economic foundation of Gaelic communities was
being almost everywhere undermined (even Lewis found itself host to British
Aluminium in 1896) was there a rush to document and preserve their disappearing
culture.
According to John Blackie, who initiated the Gaelic mod, there is
evidence in 1885 of enlarged public sympathy in welcoming Gaelic song,
although a great army of tourists and travellers still comes to Scotland and
thinks no more of inquiring into the social conditions of Highlanders than they
would into the economy of a few sparrows on the roadside.
Part of the
interest in Gaelic culture was motivated by an interest inherited from German
theorists of Volkslied; this is shown by the use of terms like 'folksong' and
'popular song'.
The later term 'folk-song' is not identical to Volkslied, since
the latter did not necessarily imply anonymity).
While Gaelic culture in
the Highlands and Islands of Scotland managed to survive the nineteenth century
in an attenuated form, the Gaelic culture of Ireland was all but wiped out.
This
was a result of the changes in social relations which followed on the heels of
the political defeats of the late eighteenth century.
Bunting had
collected the music of an almost defunct bardic tradition, which he published in
three collections in 1796, 1809, and 1840.
The other major nineteenth-century
collection was that published by Petrie in 1855, initiated at the request of the
Society for the Preservation of Irish Music.
While collecting, Petrie discovered
that the art of harp playing had died out: 'The Irish harp cannot be brought
back to life; it is dead forever.
In Ireland the harpist was the musician who
held the highest social rank. Pipers were of much lower status, but their
instrument, too, was found to be 'rapidly disappearing in favour of the flute
and violin'23 in 1890.
The method of tuning the Irish harp favoured the
pentatonic scale, while allowing the possible use of other notes.
This state of
affairs finds an echo in the scale of the Highland bagpipe (a scale ideally
suited to three varieties of pentatonic tune) and thus may account for some of
the similarities between Irish and Scottish music.
THE IRISH BALLAD.
The Irish music which
found its way into the drawing room followed, more or less, the same stages as
Scottish music.
There were one or two differences.
For example, in the second
half of the eighteenth century the Irish comic song had become established.
As
usual, Dibdin was to the fore, with songs like 'Paddy O'Blarney'
Indeed, it is
unlikely that most Irish comic songs were anything but English in origin, but
the nineteenth century inherited the tradition. Another difference was that
Moore showed greater concern for the suitability of his songs to the drawing
room than did his Scottish counterpart, Burns.
An example which demonstrates his
sure understanding of that taste is his song 'The Meeting of the Waters', which
uses the tune 'The Old Head of Denis' but converted from the old Aeolian mode
into a modern major key.
Moore had disciples waiting to assume his mantle in
the same way as Burns had his followers. Moore's most important successor was
Samuel Lover (1797-1868), the son of a Dublin stockbroker. Lover at first took
up his father's profession, but finding it was not congenial decided to become a
portrait painter.
In addition to painting, he proved to be a man of many skills:
for example, he turned his successful ballad 'Rory O'More' (1826) into an
equally successful novel (1836) and then into a play (1837). His reputation for
miniature portraits encouraged him to move to London in 1835, where Songs and
Ballads was published in 1839.
Then, in 1844, his eyesight failing and
threatening his income as a painter, he devised a one-man show called Irish
Evenings, consisting of his own poems, songs, and stories.
After returning from
a lengthy tour of Canada and America, 1846-48, he gave a new entertainment
entitled Paddy's Portfolio. Lover's songs reveal a similar stage of fusion
between drawing-room idiom and Celtic music as that attained by the songs of
Alicia Scott. In 'Rory O'More', for example, he writes a jig incorporating the
typical repeated tonics which originally served the function of emphasizing the
pitch of the drone; at the same time, his melody shows little pentatonic
influence or any disposition to avoid or flatten the seventh.
Another song of
his, 'Molly Bawn', from his burlesque operetta "Paddy Whack in Italia" (1841),
mixes pentatonic writing with occasional chromaticism and passing modulation.
As
far as subject matter is concerned, Lover shows an interest in romance,
character, and a desire to perpetuate the myth of the comic
Irishman.
An 'Irish song' from the late 1830s, 'Kathleen
Mavourneen', was an enormous success.
D'Almaine
& Co. issued the twentieth edition in 1850, and the song remained a
favourite in the drawing room for the entire century.
The words are commonly
attributed to Mrs Crawford, although not without some misgiving, and the music
was composed by Frederick Crouch (1808—96).
Its contrast of major and minor
tonality is very much in the European classical mould, and its suggestion of an
Irish quality is only evident from two or three pentatonic turns of phrase, an
occasional drone bass, and the typically Irish use of triple time for a love
song (the most famous example being 'Eileen Aroon', attributed to the
sixteenth-century bard Gerald O'Daly).
Apart from this, the modulations,
chromaticism, and sobbing dissonances (implying the need for classical harmony)
mark it down as a sentimental ballad for the middle-class home.
Ironically, as a
song of leave-taking, it adumbrates the mass exodus from Ireland a few years
after it was written.
----
Ireland did not figure so prominently in the Romantic
movement as Scotland, though the novels of Maria Edgeworth (1767—1849) may be
seen as in some ways an Irish equivalent to Walter Scott's Waverley Novels.
Moore's "Irish Melodies" were perhaps the most influential contemporary literature
to come out of Ireland.
Berlioz composed nine fresh settings of Moore's verse in
1830, and Mendelssohn based his Phantasie über ein Irlandisches Lied of the next
year on 'The Last Rose of Summer'.
However, the extent of poverty in Ireland,
the constant agitation for land reform and for repeal of the Union did not
encourage tourism.
Finally, the Great Starvation 1845—51 made it impossible to
see the beauties of the country without witnessing the barbarous treatment of
its people by those who owned the land. During these years a million died and a
million emigrated (followed by another million in the 1850s).
The famine was
partly the result of a potato blight, but more importantly the result of having
to sell off other crops to pay rent to landlords.
Songs of farewell were
numerous, not written by starving Irish emigrants, but by bourgeois songwriters
and, in the case of Lady Dufferin, the Anglo-Irish aristocracy.
Lady
Dufferin, née Helen Sheridan (1807-67) was the elder sister of Caroline Norton
and moved to Ireland when her husband succeeded his father as Baron Dufferin in
1839.
Her song 'The Irish Emigrant' views the desperate situation in Ireland
from the perspective of the Anglo-Irish peerage.
The sufferings of the poor
are only hinted at ('I'm very lonely now Mary, for the poor make no new
friends') and so too is the lack of food and employment (in the land the
emigrant is going to 'They say there's bread and work for all').
The impression
given by the song is that the man is leaving Ireland not for his own survival,
but to make a fresh start after the death of his wife: he goes because 'There's
nothing left to care for ' now.' There is no suggestion, either, that his wife
has died as a result of the famine.
Yet Lady Dufferin was not ignorant of, nor
unsympathetic to, the problems facing her Irish tenants; the land question long
occupied her husband, and in the year of her death he published a book entitled
Irish Emigration and the Tenure of Land in Ireland.
George Barker, who provided
the music to 'The Irish Emigrant', had acquired celebrity as a drawing-room
composer with 'The White Squall' (c. 1835), and, as may be guessed, the song is
not remotely Irish in character.
The musical setting merely serves to
emphasize that this is a ballad for the English middle class.
It, in fact,
published in London by Chappell in 1846 and made available with either piano or
guitar accompaniment to suit home music-making.
In 'Terence's Farewell to
Kathleen' (1848), Lady Dufferin chooses to fit her words to a traditional air,
and also attempts an Irish dialect/
Te result is a cross between a serious
farewell (the girl is leaving to find work in England) and a comic song like
'Katey's Letter' which she also wrote in dialect.
The emphasis falls not on the
departure but on the attention Terence's sweetheart will have from 'iligant
boys' in England, and how she will come back 'spakin' sich beautiful English'.
Lady Dufferin decided, like her Scottish female counterparts and not like her
sister, that she would publish anonymously, although her identity as a
songwriter began to be known in the 1850s and attributions given to her.
It
was during the process of cultural assimilation described in the previous pages
that Celtic song evolved into just one more species of the genus of the
drawing-room ballad.
The English composer and publisher Sydney Nelson (1800— 62)
may be used to illustrate the point: he had only four lasting ballad successes,
two Scottish ('Mary of Argyle' and 'The Rose of Allandale'), one Irish ('Oh!
Steer My Bark to Erin's Isle'), and one English ('The Pilot').
It was not just
that Celtic features were incorporated into imitation 'Scotch' and Irish songs
for the drawing room, sometimes a supposedly Celtic musical feature could be
invented in the same way as a new tartan.
For example, the change from major key
to relative minor for a middle section, as in 'Rory O'More', 'Kathleen
Mavourneen', 'The Irish Emigrant', 'The Rose of Tralee' (words by E. Mordaunt
Spencer, music by Charles Glover), and 'Come Back to Erin'.
Here the
drawing-room Irish ballad has established its own tradition.
While
enthusiasm for Scottish song began to wane in the 1860s, interest in Irish song
was sustained by the popularity of the minstrel shows and a craze for Irish
melodrama.
Balfe's 'Killarney' comes from "Peep o' Day" (1861), one of Edmund
Falconer's several Irish melodramas.
Falconer had acquired an appetite for this
theatrical genre after acting in Boucicault's.
The latter was set in Killarney,
and the most famous music it inspired was Benedict's opera "The Lily of Killarney"
(1862).
-----
As mentioned earlier, there is no room to deal with other Celtic
cultures in any detail here, but a few words may be said here.
Some
well-known Welsh airs, like
"Ar Hyd y Nos"
"All Through the Night
and
'Gorhoffedd Gwyr Harlech' ('March of the Men of Harlech'), were first published
in Edward Jones's Relicks in the late eighteenth century.
'The March of the Men
of Harlech', incidentally, was a favourite harp or piano piece which only had
words put to it in the 1860s.
Dibdin, predictably, seems to have been the
first Englishman to write 'Welsh' songs, for example, 'Taffy and the Birds'.
Many other familiar names also appear in connection with Welsh songs (Joanna
Baillie, Felicia Hemans, William Smyth, Mrs Grant), some of them involved in
'improving' enterprises such as the Beethoven.
Welsh Songs. Welsh music
remained popular in the drawing room as long as the harp was in favour.
John
Parry of Denbigh (1776-1851) was a highly regarded figure.
Parry published a
collection of Welsh melodies entitled "The Welsh Harper"
(volume 1,
1839; volume 2, 1848) and also adapted Welsh airs to English tunes.
-----
ISLE OF MANX:
Manx
music was virtually ignored until the 1890s, although a collection of
inaccurately notated Manx tunes, "Mona Melodies", had been published in London in
1820.
The research into Manx music, Gaelic music, and even Indian music, which
began in the 1890s, was a response to the growing interest in the
field-collecting of-folk-song.
From now on there was a change of direction in
cultural appropriation.
Less and less were people to see their musical culture
absorbed into the bourgeois form of the drawing-room ballad.
Instead, their
music would be variously selected and mediated according to bourgeois values,
then accepted in the drawing room as 'folk-song'.
------
REFERENCES
Anon., 'The songs of Scotland', Eliza Cook's Journal 7 (1852).
S. A. Allibone, Dictionary of English Literature, (Philadelphia:
Lippincott, 1858; republished Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1965)
For the original tune, see Beethoven's 12 Scottish Songs, No. 9.
The two versions are printed in A. Ross (ed.), Thirty Songs by Lady John Scott
(Edinburgh: Paterson, 1910).
Anon., 'The songs of Scotland', Eliza
Cook's Journal 7 (1852)
J. S. Blackie, 'Popular songs of
the-Scottish Highlanders', Macmillan's Magazine 52 (1885)
Blackie
constantly speaks of volkslied or of 'popular song'; E.J. Breakspeare in 'Songs
and song-writers' (RMA Proceedings 8 (1882): 59), speaks of volkslied or or
'folk's-song'.
Quoted in A. W. Paterson, 'The characteristic traits of
Irish music', RMA Proceedings 23 (1897): 96.
F. St. John Lacy, 'Notes on
Irish music', RMA Proceedings 16 (1890): 180.
The song may be found in
49 Irish Songs (London: Bayley & Ferguson, n.d.): 28, in an arrangement by
Alfred Moffat.
Turner and Miall.
The song itself is given on pp.
196-201 (it contain one or two printing errors).
The song may be found
in Turner and Miall 116-19
.
In Welsh Melodies (London: Lamborn Cock,
Addison & Co., c. 1865).
See W. H. Gill, 'Manx Music', RMA
Proceedings 22 (1895)
The early English field-collectors are
discussed in D. Harker, "Fakesong" (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985),
pp. 146-69
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