Parlour Songs -- "Hegemony"

Speranza

D. Scott

It may seem, at first, slightly contradictory that, alongside songs of a loyal and patriotic nature, it is quite acceptable to sing ballads about outlaws and bandits in middle-class homes.

Reasons for the need to rehabilitate an outlaw hero like Robin Hood may be easily conjectured, but the negotiations and compromises involved in doing so are complex.

A major area of negotiation concerns what crime the outlaw has committed, and against whom.

If outlaws are perceived to be fighting local injustices in an age of feudalism (now rectified by capitalism), all is well.

These people belong to the band of noble robbers we call social bandits.

When outlaws fall into this category, a tendency of official culture to upgrade them socially as the price of assimilating them, i.e. to turn Robin Hood into a wronged Earl of Huntingdon.

Contradictions remain, however, revealing that a compromise has been reached.

For example, Robin Hood (a tenor?) continues to use a peasant weapon, the long-bow.

The key characteristics of the noble robber are that he is a male victim of injustice, kills only in self-defence, rights local wrongs, and ends by being betrayed.

This kind of social bandit had not been seen in England since the early seventeenth century,
but in the United States an example was furnished after the Civil War in the shape of Jesse James (1847-82).


As part of Jesse James's assimilation into the dominant culture, he was projected as a man who never robbed widows, preachers, or ex-Confederates, and who commanded respect as a devout Baptist and a teacher of church singing.

In Billy Ganshade's song 'Jesse James', written 'As soon as the news [of his death] did arrive,' he is already depicted as 'a friend to the poor', and as one who 'never would see a man suffer pain'.

Even so, he was too uncomfortably close in time to be sung about in North American or British drawing rooms, where preference was given to the kind of romantic bandolero made familiar in the writings of John Haynes Williams (1836-1908).

The street ballad, on the other hand, was always ready to forge links between the idea of the noble robber and contemporary criminals, as is demonstrated in the following lines, which supposedly issued from the lips of Leopold Redpath before his transportation:

I procured for the widow and orphan their bread,
The naked I clothed, and the hungry I fed;
But still I am sentenced, you must understand,
Because I had broken the laws of the land.

The reaction of the bourgeoisie to these ballads was one of outrage.

Some of these songs are indecent.

Almost all of them have a morbid sympathy with criminals.

It is obvious, therefore, that criminals or outlaws were only assimilated on certain conditions and after fierce struggle.

For an outlaw to be acceptable to the bourgeoisie, he had to be, in political terms, a reformer not a revolutionary.

Robin Hood emerges from his assimilation as a true patriot; he has no wish to abolish the monarchy and is ready to swear allegiance to a just king.

In some ways, the enthusiasm shown for Garibaldi (albeit a republican) in the 1860s is related to the enthusiasm for the outlaw patriot.

A million people turned out to welcome him in London on his visit in 1864. Indeed, old Hope Street (in Woolwich) became, of all names, Speranza Street (not to be confused with nickname of Lady Wilde, Oscar's mother).


There were Garibaldi blouses, Garibaldi Staffordshire figures, Garibaldi biscuits, and Garibaldi songs -- in English.


Besides Olivieri's Italian 'National Hymn' which had become well known in J. Oxenford's translation as 'Garibaldi's Hymn' (1861), Garibaldi songs included a 'Garibaldi' of 1860 and a 'Garibaldi' of 1864.

Moreover, after Italian unity in 1870 interest continued for some time yet, as is shown by 'Garibaldi the True' of 1874.

Another type of outlaw ballad, "The Wolf", works in a different way.

Here the protagonist boasts of his villainy but keeps his identity anonymous.

Thus, an important distinction is drawn between this kind of song and unacceptable 'low' ballads such as 'Sam Hall'.

In 'A Bandit's Life Is the Life for Me!' of 1872, the singer adopts the persona of a roguish brigand who dwells in the mountains with his brave comrades.


The appeal of the song would appear to lie in its offering the singer opportunity for a melodramatic performance calculated to inspire just the right degree of fear to stimulate excitement but not alarm on the part of listeners.

The drawing-room audience is shielded from anxiety by two distancing devices.

The musical accompaniment is based on a typical guitar-strumming pattern, and the bandit sings only of robbing monks and pilgrims.

A clear hint is therefore given in both words and music that this is NOT England.

Finally, the century which gave the world Frankenstein's monster and Count Dracula also produced the drawing-room ballad for a demonic outcast.

'Will-o'-the-Wisp' of 1860 comes complete with ghoulish laughter and a delight in evil:

To mark their shriek as they sink and die,
Is merry sport for me,
I dance, I dance, I'm here, I'm there,
Who tries to catch me catches but air;
The mortal who follows me follows in vain,
For I laugh, ha! ha! I laugh, ho! ho!
I laugh at their folly and pain.



Where songs of outcasts were concerned, a working-class vernacular culture exists which rejects the ethics and morality of the bourgeois drawing room.

A mid-century writer, commenting on the public house free-and-easy entertainment, notes how alien the costermonger race is in sympathy and life from the respectable and well-to-do.




Their songs are not ours, nor their aims nor conventional observances.

This cultural activity flourished in THE ENGLISH PUB, which was so markedly working class as to be unavailable as an arena for hegemonic negotiation.


The music-hall, on the other hand, frequently functions as such.


The music-hall plays a part in winning over a large portion of the working class to imperialist sentiment.

But the music-hall also provides a vehicle for bourgeois morality and values in the songs of 'respectable' entertainers like Harry Clifton in its early years, and Felix McGlennon in the later century.


Clifton specializes in "motto" songs (for example, 'Bear It Like a Man', 'Work, Boys, Work', and 'Paddle Your Own Canoe'), though the only song of his well known today is 'Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green'  (parodied as 'Cushie Butterfield').

Felix McGlennon's 'That Is Love' is a good song, but the song of his most familiar now, and one which follows an equally elevated plane of thought, is 'Comrades' (1890) -- one of my favourites.

Some music-halls, like Clifton's in London's East End, go in for regular doses of uplifting culture.

There an entirely local audience of sailors, tradesmen and worse are regularly treated to a half-hour's drawing-room entertainment given by a small troupe in evening dress, with a piano, who recited and sang operatic and ballad numbers.


Blackface minstrel troupes, who often appear at music-halls as well as more respectable establishments, also include ballads (and, oddly, parodies of ballads) in their entertainments.

Minstrels, perhaps more than any other group of performers, help to disseminate bourgeois song among the working class, since they performed in a wide variety of venues — large public halls, theatres, and pleasure gardens.

Harry Hunter, the interlocutor of Moore's minstrels,'shares Clifton's passion for earnest motto songs (for example, 'Keep a Good Heart', and 'There's Danger in Delay').

 The influence of the minstrels is spread far and wide by their being imitated in villages and by urban street performers.


Street singers of all kinds — glee singers, ballad singers, blackface Ethiopians — who have bourgeois songs in their repertoire, provide another source of access to this material for the working class.

The street singers themselves, according to one of their number, pick up tunes mostly from the street bands, and sometimes from the cheap concerts, or from the gallery of the theatre, where the street ballad-singers very often go, for the express purpose of learning the airs.

Some of these singers, of course, learn songs to earn money in middle-class neighbourhoods rather than their own.


Nevertheless, the printing of drawing-room ballads as broadsides shows that an interest exists in working-class environs.

Other street entertainment is provided by the variety of mechanical instruments which had begun to appear at the end of the eighteenth century.


On a recent recording of nineteenth-century mechanical instruments, a Cabinetto paper-roll organ can be heard playing blackface minstrel songs, a Celestine paper-roll organ playing nonconformist hymns, and a street piano (commonly known as a 'barrel organ') playing music-hall songs.


These instruments, particularly the street pianos (which are developed in the 1870s from the cylinder piano), are mostly made by Italian immigrants living in London.


They are pushed around by itinerant street musicians who often had no knowledge of music and cared little for their maintenance and tuning.

Legislation was introduced in 1864 to combat what was being declared a public nuisance.

However care is needed in determining the class nature of the public to whom they had supposedly become such a nuisance.

Consider, for example, the following contemporary words of caution.


Let not those who write abusive letters to the newspapers, and bring in bills to abolish street music, think they will be able to loosen the firm hold which the barrel-organist has over the British public.

Your cook is his friend, your housemaid is his admirer.

The policeman and the baker's young man look on him in the light of a formidable rival.


The players of mechanical instruments did take pains, all the same, to appeal to both a middle-class and a working-class audience, for obvious economic reasons.

As one of them explains to Mayhew, you must have SOME OPERA TUNES for the gentlemen, and some for the poor people, and they like the dancing tune.

 Then there were, in the street also, the German Bands.

These other groups of immigrant musicians constituted the second great fact of street music.

The priority goes to to the barrel-organists.

The German bands, too, have a varied repertoire which included ITALIAN OPERA arias, occasional movements of symphonies, ballads, music-hall songs, and dances.


The working class find further access to performances of bourgeois music in parks (military bandstands), spas (spa orchestras), and fair grounds (especially after the perfection of the steam organ in the 1870s).

There were also the cheap concerts, such as those begun in the Crystal Palace by August Manns in 1855, which took place in a hall holding so many people that only a small charge was made for admission.

The pleasure gardens are usually referred to as being in decline in the nineteenth century.

Part of this decline has been attributed to the need for land for housing and industry, but that fails to account for the opening of new pleasure gardens like the Eagle Tavern in 1822 and Cremorne in 1836.

The latter replaced Ranelagh (closed 1803) as Chelsea's pleasure garden.

It would seem reasonable to suppose that the meaning of the word 'decline' is in no small measure related to the hostile bourgeois reaction to the pleasure gardens being increasingly invaded by the petit bourgeoisie and wealthier working class (together with what they saw as a consequent increase in vulgarity and rowdiness).

The bourgeoisie were beginning to feel alarmed at the thousands of idle pleasure-seekers in the gardens in the 1850s.


The wages boom of the 1860s and expansion of leisure time encourage further working-class interest in pleasure gardens.

During this decade the wealthy residents of Chelsea complain that the value of their property was falling on account of its propinquity to Cremorne.

When the garden closes in 1877, its open air dissipation is compared to the indoor dissipation of the music hall.

Having seen how the working class finds access to bourgeois song, the next thing to consider is the question of intention and reception involving this cultural material.

For, if a relative autonomy exists, allowing meaning to be made in the process of consumption, then the meaning constructed by the working class during the consumption of bourgeois art may differ from that intended by its bourgeois creator.

Tennyson, for example, might write of 'Airy Fairy Lilian', but the working class might make a new meaning of this epithet.

The dialectic between intention and reception emerges in examinations made by the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature in 1832.


Thomas Morton, answering questions, remarks that there is a tendency in the audience to force passages never meant by the author into political meanings. (cfr. Grice, IMPLICATURA and DISIMPLICATURA).

As an illustration, Morton recalls that when the king commanded a performance of Massaniello during the time of the revolution in France, handbills were printed about the town to induce the public to assemble in the theatre, not to partake with His Majesty in the social enjoyment of the drama, but to teach him, through the story of Massaniello the Fisherman, the danger to his throne if he disobeyed the wish of his people, and the King was advised to change the play in consequence of that.


The author of the play, James Kenney, is later brought before the Committee, and he explains with bewildered irritation, there is no question, if I may be allowed the expression, that it has a Tory moral.

The revolutionary fisherman is humiliated, and a lesson is taught very opposite to a revolutionary one.

Some of the songs of Tom Moore provide a musical parallel to the above.

'The Minstrel Boy', for example, as performed by a celebrated singer in the Crystal Palace, may have been considered a purely uplifting aesthetic experience for the huge audience, and an occasion for winning wider appreciation of bourgeois art.

I shall never forget Grisi's rendering of 'The Minstrel Boy' at the Crystal Palace.

Grisi refused to sing again after three encores.

The audience who had listened to her singing spellbound, rose in a mass, and the applause was like thunder.

Yet 'The Minstrel Boy' also came to be appropriated as an Irish REBEL song.

The Anglo-Irish bourgeoisie, too, in struggling to shake off English political and economic restraints, lighted upon Moore's songs.

'The Shan Van Vocht', a rewritten 'Love's Young Dream', was published in The Nation, 29 October 1842, Dublin.

The 'Shan Van Vocht' is the 'Poor Old Woman' who had come to symbolize a distressed Ireland.

It is doubtful, however, that any Moore song held the same popularity as the songs born out of the people's own struggles, like Caroll Malone's ballad of 1798, 'The Croppy Boy' (cropped hair was the style of French revolutionaries).


The Westminster Review in 1855 notes that this song has even now, in that unhappy isle, a fatal attraction and dread significance.

The Croppy Boy' was not absorbed by bourgeois culture until the present century, when it was recorded by the concert tenor John McCormack and also featured prominently in the sirens chapter of James Joyce's landmark of literary modernism, Ulysses.


There is a variety of ways in which the working class could respond to bourgeois song.


It can be accepted without conscious alteration, any changes to words and tune being attributable to oral transmission.

Thus the present-day 'Jingle Bells' is a simplified version of James Pierpont's 'The One Horse Open Sleigh' of 1857, published by Oliver Ditson & Co., Boston.


The bourgeois song becomes, in cases like this, a sort of folksong, although one to be weeded out by mediators who have felt able to define what true folksong is.

Fred Jordan, for example, a Shropshire farmer discovered by Peter Kennedy in 1952 whilst on a field trip recording for the BBC Folksong Archive, had bourgeois songs like Henry Clay Work's 'Grandfather's Clock' in his repertoire which earlier collectors would have rejected.


A common method of working-class appropriation of bourgeois song was deliberately to change the words, but to model the new text around the original text.


A nineteenth-century broadside ballad published by Pitts, 'The Chartist Song', uses Burns' 'For A' That, an' A' That' as its basis.


The first stanza runs,


Art thou poor but honest man
Sorely oppressed and a' that.
Attention give to Chartist plan
'Twill cheer they heart for a' that.
For a' that and a' that,
Though landlords gripe and a' that,
I'll show thee friend before we part
The rights of men and a' that.26
The Burns original begins,
Is there, for honest poverty,
That hangs his head, an' a' that?
The coward slave, we pass him by,
We dare be puir for a' that!


Throughout 'The Chartist Song', Burns' emphasis on moral victory is transformed into the desire for political victory.


Sometimes the new text, while loosely based on the original, is changed in order to make the song more relevant to the social circumstances of the singer.


Henry Clay Work's 'The Ship That Never Return'd' (1865) was transformed into the railroad song 'The Wreck of the Old '97', in which appropriated form it has survived today while the original has been forgotten.

Sometimes the new text parodies the original in an attempt to ridicule its sentiments, a technique Joe Hill uses in 'The Preacher and the Slave', a parody of'Sweet By and By'.

A new text may show the influence of the bourgeois original but depart from it so radically as to require a new tune.

  'The Spinner's Ship', a union song of the Preston strike of 1854, shows the influence of Charles Mackay's text to Henry Russell's song 'Cheer, Boys! Cheer!' (1852) but has dispensed with the latter's tune.

Conversely, the tune may be retained but the original text completely ignored.


This was, of course, common practice when the tune is a traditional air but also happens when the tune was of recent bourgeois origin.

'Strike for Better Wages', a song of the London Dock Strike of 1889, uses the tune of Root's 'Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!' of 1864.

It most often occurs with blackface minstrel songs, a well-known example being Joe Wilson's 'Keep Yor Feet Still!' which used the tune of Handby's 'Darling Nelly Gray'.

Occasionally the tune survives more or less intact as a dance and the words disappear altogether, as happens with 'The Dashing White Sergeant' in Britain and 'Turkey in the Straw' in the United States.


What also must be considered is the collision between bourgeois and working-class musical practice.

It should not be assumed that bourgeois song was automatically simplified when adopted by a working-class singer.


The author recollects hearing an archive recording of a 'folksinger' performing 'The Mistletoe Bough' with decorations not in the original.


Embellishments found in vernacular musical practice (for example, slides and decorative two-note runs up or down to a main melody note) often derive from traditional methods of enhancing an unaccompanied tune, whereas the ornamentation in bourgeois music is frequently designed to exploit the tensions of a harmonic background.


Another difference between bourgeois and working-class song performance is that of timbre, the colour of the sound.


The timbre of the untrained voice lends a more natural emphasis to words, since the tone is produced as in speech, forward in the mouth, with a considerable volume of air passing down the nose.

The classical singer employs artifices like the chest register and consciously avoids a nasal tone.

The appropriation of bourgeois song had its effects on working-class song, however, most noticeably in the increasing fondness shown for the major key rather than the old modes.


Furthermore, there is a growing assumption of accompanying harmony to tunes, and a tendency for them to imply the characteristic chord progressions of bourgeois songs.


Examples can be found today in American country music, which of all twentieth-century popular musical culture relates most closely to nineteenth-century bourgeois domestic music.


To take but one example, a turn to sub-dominant harmony for the first half only of the second bar of melody — a move much favoured by Joseph Skelly (as in 'A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother', 'The Picture with Its Face Turned to the Wall', and 'The Old Rustic Bridge') — finds an echo in Bill Monroe's 'Little Cabin Home on the Hill' and Hank Williams' 'Why Should We Try Anymore?', among others.

The primary link is probably the blackface minstrel show.

Indeed, the first country star, Jimmie Rodgers ('the singing brakeman'), sometimes performed in blackface in his early days.

Some nineteenth-century minstrel songs, such as 'Buffalo Girls' and 'When You and I Were Young, Maggie', have become bluegrass standards.

Outside the world of pure country, Mitch Miller had a million-selling record in 1955 with 'The Yellow Rose of Texas', a minstrel song written almost a hundred years before, in 1858.


However, it is country music which  most to absorbs and revitalizes bourgeois song, and not just minstrel song.

Johnny Cash had a hit record in 1959 with 'Lorena', a ballad aimed directly at the domestic market in 1857.


The explanation for the appeal of bourgeois song to working-class people and the meanings they were able to make of it are complex and, to a degree, IMPENETRABLE issues (for -- why should everything has to BE explained?)


Bourgeois music is part of the dominant culture, which in the nineteenth century gives it an exclusive claim to the label 'culture'.

Drawing-room music, therefore, signifies certain social aspirations, perhaps not simply economic, but moral and intellectual, too.

The attraction of its refinement may have lain in the realm of fantasy or escapism.


A Balfe aria, like 'I dreamed that I dwelt on marble halls' (from "La Zingara") suggests a world outside the squalor of working-class slums, and signifies the hope of a higher quality of life.

The reason for the connection between nineteenth-century bourgeois domestic music and modern country music may lie in the fact that the latter so often serves to articulate the aspirations of the American lower middle class.


Those who fail to be won over to bourgeois values or pursued their own unofficial culture pose the biggest challenge to nineteenth-century bourgeois society.

Here, a breakdown in hegemony inevitably resulted in its replacement by coercion.

It would have required considerable daring, for example, to sing 'The Wearing of the Green' in England while the Fenian struggle raged, though whether it was an actual criminal offence or not has now been debated

Military bands are not allowed to play the 'Marseillaise' for much of the century.

But, what is more, all public performances of the song were long proscribed.

In addition to the attempt to eradicate songs of a highly political nature, there are constant moves to censor on moral grounds.

Sometimes, however, an unexpected construction of meaning in the consumption of even the most impeccable bourgeois song could cause havoc.

------------

As Buddy Bolden's band plays 'Home, home, sweet sweet home" during
the embarkation of troops for the Spanish-American
War (1898), many soldiers
jumped overboard and swam ashore, an
incident which prompts the US Army to
prohibit its performance at all
future departures.




The best kind of censorship, of course, is achieved when people censor themselves.

Tennyson's 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', written in hot-blooded mood at the news from Balaclava and printed shortly after in a a newspaper, becomes popular with the Crimean troops, who relished the unprecedented suggestion of blunder:

forward the light brigade
was there a man dismayed
not tho' the soldier knew
someone had blundered.


After Tennyson's friends point out to him the offence given to the War Office, he removes the lines from his next published collection of poems (they remain excised from a recent Penguin anthology of Victorian verse).

In this case the censorship was only temporary, probably because the monumental mismanagement of the war was laid at the feet of the old aristocracy.

John Blockley's setting of 1860, the only one to enjoy any measure of drawing-room success, is based on the original text.


Bourgeois song is also consciously employed as a medium of persuasion by various fractional interests within the hegemonic bloc.



At times the persuasion is aimed at encouraging the working class to embrace bourgeois values, at others it was targeted at the 'better nature' of the bourgeoisie themselves, by depicting working-class misery.

Temperance groups are especially fond of harnessing the power of music to their cause.


The favourite method is to promote songs which portray the devastating effects of drunkenness on the home and family life, such as Henry Clay Work's 'Come Home, Father' of 1864.

Mrs Parkhurst, a friend of Stephen Foster in his alcohol-sodden latter days, performs temperance songs in public with her daughter, 'little Effie', adding thereby an extra poignancy to compositions like 'Father's a Drunkard and Mother Is Dead' of 1868.



Sometimes the fervour of the gospel hymn is joined to temperance ideals, as in the Rev. Ufford's 'Throw Out the Life-Line!', which makes typical metaphorical use of men needing to be saved from drowning at sea.

 Sometimes a stern admonition is given, as in 'Don't Marry a Man If He Drinks'.

Temperance songs are published by respectable firms in Britain, usually on the cheaper side of the market, suggesting the lower middle class as a target.

The last-mentioned song was No. 4444 of the Musical Bouquet (1874), but an even cheaper publisher, Davidson, had earlier issued a Temperance Melodist.


The in some ways radical Salvation Army was willing to parody any kind of songs which were already popular, in order to spread the word.

Other groups tended to use parodies only of respectable songs, choosing those they thought had widest appeal.


Whatever diffidence there may have been concerning the original material, the message of the temperance song was forthright.


Here is the beginning of Emmet Coleman's parody of 'The Last Rose of Summer':


there's no hope for the drunkard
left dying alone.


It will be noted that most of the temperance songs, like the gospel hymns, come to Britain from the United States.



Examples of bourgeois songs designed to persuade in a direct manner are legion.


Where the young were concerned, the Sunday School provides an opportunity to drive home bourgeois ideology, at times with military-style drilling.

Sabine Baring-Gould's 'Onward Christian Soldiers' (1864) was written for his Sunday School scholars to march to.

It was originally written to a tune by Haydn.

Sullivan composed his well-known tune later.


In her efforts to smother egalitarian sentiments, Mrs Alexander verges on feudal absolutism in one frequently omitted verse from 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' (from Hymns/or Little Children of 1848).


the rich man in his castle
the poor man at his gate
God made them, high or lowly
& order'd their estate.

-- which fascinated Dennis Potter and used it in Episode II of "Pennies from Heaven".


Besides promoting the dominant ideology, bourgeois song strongly attacks alternative ideologies, like Jacobinism.

Dibdin's efforts are interesting.

But a hundred years later W. S. Gilbert can still be found attacking republicanism in "The Gondoliers" (1889), particularly in Don Alhambra's song 'There Lived a King', with its message,

when every one is somebodee
then no one's anybody.

The song has an almost identical message to the one Capt. Marryat tries to put over in Mr Midshipman Easy (1836), when Jack Easy rebels against his father's views on the rights of man, and exclaims,

were we all equal in beauty there would be no beauty for beauty is only by comparison
were we all equal in ability there would be no instruction, no talent, no genius.
 
Marryat no doubt hoped to signify in young Jack's rejection of his father's opinions that Paine's ideas were outmoded.

Indeed, the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie were as keen to dismiss Paine as out of date as today's Conservative politicians are to write off Marx.


There were, in addition to the myriad songs of an openly didactic nature, the more subtle variety which fostered an imaginary relationship on the part of the working class to the real social conditions in which they lived.


"Home, home, sweet, sweet home" with its apparent praise of the humble dwelling, is an interesting one.

The coincidence of Weiss's setting of Longfellow's 'The Village Blacksmith' (that famous tribute to the poor, honest, hard-working individual) appearing in the same year as the great strike in Preston is also interesting.

To give one more example, the favourite drawing-room song in the early nineteenth century about farm life is the anonymous 'To Be a Farmer's Boy', which scarcely seems to belong to the same world as that of the Tolpuddle Martyrs of 1834, and the farmers' boys who, throughout the land, were being forced to accept cuts in wages.

Perhaps the effect most desired by the bourgeoisie is that their songs  persuade the working class of the rightness of bourgeois morality.


The 1851 ecclesiastical census had disturbingly found an unconscious secularism in big towns, where funerals were the only important religious ceremony.

Outside the church the Utilitarians' scientific approach to morality ran into difficulties when measuring the moral priorities of certain needs against the preference of the majority.


Soon the music-hall seemed set to overtake Christian teaching in guiding social morality, and the first example of what would now be called a moral panic occurr over the lions comiques.



As sources of social morality, the music halls and music-hall songs become as important as the modern media'.

Gazing into this moral void, the bourgeoisie seizes upon the supposed ability of music to influence behaviour.

Haweis advised, 'Let no one say the moral effects of music are small or insignificant'

But the most powerful apparatus of the hegemonic bloc proved to be state education.


Before turning to the efforts made to teach the working class how to appreciate good music, some thought must be given to those who saw in the drawing-room ballad an opportunity to prick the consciences of the bourgeoisie and campaign for social reform.

An early example of a songwriter frequently engaged along these lines was Henry Russell in songs like 'The Maniac' and 'The Song of the Shirt'.


Bourgeois disapproval of this kind of socially concerned art was usually couched in terms of a circumscribing definition about the purpose of art.

For instance, a favourite argument was that this was an area for charity work, not art.

Art should show that suffering enobles, not degrades.



Nevertheless, a part of the bourgeoisie could not shake off their fear that a lack of social reform might prompt the working class to violence.

Christian Socialism, for example, begins in response to the 1848 revolutions abroad and to Chartism at home.

 It was a movement without a coherent manifesto, and its key figures, Ludlow, Maurice, and Kingsley, are largely ignorant of socialist thought; their paramount considerations were education and moral improvement.


From 1849 the publication of Mayhew's articles entitled London Labour and the London Poor is a spur to action.


The Rev. Charles Kingsley's attitudes are sometimes contradictory.

Kingsley despises the industrial bourgeoisie, but he says that it was God who teaches us to conceive, build and arrange that Great Exhibition' of 1851.

Kingsley also has periodic losses of religious faith.

His poem 'Three Fishers Went Sailing' which later in the century proves an outstanding success when sung by Antoinette Sterling in the musical educator John Hullah's setting of 1857, contains, surprisingly, no angels or other heavenly consolation in its final desolate stanza:

three corpses lay out on the shining sands
in the morning gleam as the tide went down
& the women are weeping and wringing their hands
for those who will never come back to the town
for men must work and women must weep
& the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep
& goodbye to the bar and its moaning.



Unfortunately, the fate of the poor fishermen arrives in an all too predictable manner for the song to convince today.

And, indeed, the familiar tragic sea-song structure of embarkation, storm, and disaster never required more than an acquaintance with drawing-room ballad conventions to respond to its emotional content.

Any knowledge of the class of people the song concerned was purely incidental.

A point made by Sterling herself, who claimes that although she had never been to sea in a storm nor had even seen fishermen, she understood the piece by instinct.

Kingsley, himself, becomes ever more suspicious of attempts by working people to take control of their own destinies and finally moves to condemning the activities of trades unions in the 1860s.



Another problem exists with this kind of socially concerned ballad.

It may throw light on the plight of an oppressed class, but it was addressed to the oppressing class, as its elegant diction and musical refinement make clear.

Hood's 'The Song of the Shirt' (text) was published in Punch (1843), not The Poor Man's Guardian.

Failure to recognize this, creates an apparent contradiction.

The greatest song-writer for the people was, beyond all question, Thomas Hood.

Hood feels their wrongs and sorrows of the people most keenly.

But, nevertheless, the great majority of his countrymen never hear of either Hood or his songs.


The above writer, however, acknowledges Hood's efforts 'in rousing the sympathies of the higher classes for their suffering brothers.

When Hood, in fact, was sent a collection of poems by Ebenezer Jones, a poet with Chartist connections, whose verse, in spite of its consciously poetic diction, made no appeal in its sentiments to the bourgeoisie, he reacted with outrage.

It may seem ironic that some Chartist songs resemble the style of bourgeois domestic music, an example being 'Song of the Lower Classes' of 1856 (words by Ernest Jones, music by John Lowry).



The relationship, it must be stressed, is one of style and not content, but it does show the strength of the dominant culture, in that protest or complaint is thought to be given greater dignity or status in this way.



The bourgeois, socially concerned ballad continues to reverberate around drawing rooms (to little practical effect) throughout the century.


A later example is Piccolomini's 'The Toilers' of 1888.

In this song two orphans relate how their respective fathers died toiling for bread (one was a miner, the other a fisherman), and the appeal goes out:


O happy ones of this fair earth
while gather'd round your glowing hearth
think of the toilers' load of care
& pray for all, in God's own pray'r
Give us, this day, our daily bread!


The 'hearth', of course, is a talismanic word conjuring up bourgeois family values and given added significance here by the song's being about orphans.

Typically, however, the call is not for action, but for prayers.

It may be wise to pause, before moving to educational questions, and consider the dominant culture's claim to the best values in the arts.

A fruitful comparison would be Beethoven's arrangement of 'Johnnie Cope' and Ewan MacColl's 'folk-style' performance of the song accompanied by Peggy Seeger, as recorded on the album The Jacobite Rebellions.

A striking difference is found in the musical accompaniment to each version.

Beethoven provides a carefully written out score for tenor, violin, cello, and piano to be followed precisely, whereas MacColl has Seeger's semi-improvisational guitar for support.

Furthermore, Beethoven interrupts the stanzas of the song with musical interludes which hamper the dramatic pace of the narrative and necessitate cuts so that the piece does not become over long.

The cuts are also necessary to avoid monotony, since the singer can bring little variation to his part on account of its being doubled throughout by the violin, whereas MacColl can not only make spontaneous changes, but also indulge in the metrical irregularity of beginning a fresh verse halfway through a bar of accompaniment.

In short, Beethoven's compositional efforts serve only to cramp the song in ways which cannot be redeemed by invoking the best values of high art.


One might ask, too, what the choice of instruments signifies.

Do the violin, cello, and piano represent an ideal timbre for the song, or are they chosen because they are instruments of the drawing room, in other words instruments  representative of the taste of a particular class?



The inappropriateness of Beethoven's version may not be contested now, but it must be remembered that Thomson's purpose in commissioning it from one whose own work carried the authority of high culture was to raise the song's status as art.

Therefore Beethoven's failure provides grounds for arguing that the cultural practices of subordinate social groups are not necessarily improved by applying the values of the dominant culture.



Now, if culture bears a class character, then educationalists and those intent on 'culturing' the working class must be seen as performing a hegemonic function in promoting the dominant culture.



To an early cultural theorist like Matthew Arnold there was no working-class culture, there was only one culture embracing the best values,'the best knowledge, the best ideas.

Arnold wastes no time in "Culture and Anarchy" on the music hall.

The state was rather late in coming round to the opinion that culturing the lower orders was desirable.

Steps to promote good music were taken first by religious groups and moralists wishing to create an appetite for rational amusement among the working class.


Moreover, it was hoped that an interest in music might lead to the substitution of wholesome recreation for that principal and notorious working-class recreation, drinking.

The method most commonly chosen was to involve them in a choir.


Here was the first snag.

Bourgeois music is based on a literate tradition requiring an ability to read musical notation, yet a musical skill like that had to be formally taught.

Before the 1840s what little instruction in music was given in such places as Sunday Schools tended to rely on rote learning.

In some areas, for example, Derbyshire, Lancashire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire, whole oratorios had been learnt in this manner.

These northern manufacturing districts were held up as a model.



Almost every town has its choral society, supported by the amateurs of the place and its neighbourhood, where the sacred works of Handel and the more modern masters are performed, with precision and effect, by a vocal and instrumental orchestra, consisting of mechanics and workpeople.

And every village church has its occasional oratorio, where a well-chosen and well-performed selection of sacred music is listened to by a decent and attentive audience, of the same class as the performers, mingled with their employers and their families.


Hence the practice of this music is an ordinary domestic and social recreation among the working classes of these districts, and its influence is of the most salutary kind.

There were, of course, those on whom the salutary influence of music was thought to be wasted.

For example, Huddersfield Choral Society (founded in 1836) had a rule prohibiting socialists from joining.


Brass bands are also associated with the North and were seen by many of the industrial bourgeoisie as another way of providing rational amusement for their workforce.


In 1855 John Foster and Sons of Queensbury sponsored the band renowned today as the Black Dyke Mills Band.


The growth of the railways creates an opportunity to travel to competitions which were often very well attended.

At  Hull's Zoological Gardens in 1856, 12,000 people pay to hear a contest in which first prize was awarded to the Leeds Railway Band.


The repertoire of brass bands relied heavily on bourgeois taste.



The correspondent of a London paper, while
visiting Merthyr was exceedingly puzzled by
hearing boys in the Cyfarthfa works whistling
airs rarely heard except in the fashionable
ball-room, opera-house, or drawing-room.


He afterwards discovers that the proprietor of the works, Mr Robert Crawshay, establishes among his men a brass band, which practises once a week throughout the year.




It is interesting to note that the above, written in 1850, refers to a band being sponsored in Merthyr Tydfil, a hotbed of Welsh Chartism less than a decade earlier.



During 1840—50 the bourgeoisie began to place increasing trust in the power of music to win the working class over to their values.

The following two quotations from this period show typical opinions on music.

A  means of softening the manners, refining the taste, and raising the character of the great body of the people.

And a means of refining the tastes, softening the manners, diffusing true pleasure, and humanizing the great mass of the people.




These quotations are separated by an interval often years, which helps to illustrate that the phrases softening the manners and refining the tastes were truisms.

The breakthrough in bringing good music to the great mass of the people comes with the development of new methods designed to facilitate sight-singing.

The key figures were Joseph Mainzer (1801-51), whose book "Singing for the Million" was produced shortly after his arrival in Britain in 1841

John Hullah (1812-84), whose text book Wilhelm's "Method of Singing Adapted to English Use" was also published in 1841.

And John Curwen (1816-80), whose "Grammar of Vocal Music" of 1845 sowed the seeds of the system which finally won out.

Mainzer embarks upon a lecture tour, spreading his method of teaching to the provinces (particularly Bristol, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Manchester) and to Scotland.

His efforts are supported by the temperance movement and various educational establishments, including mechanics' institutes.


The latter, dating from the early 1820s, turned into places of rational recreation for the lower middle class by the 1840s and were eagerly starting up singing classes for members and their families.

One of Mainzer's most notable achievements is founding Mainzer’s Musical Times and Singing Circular in 1842.

It was taken over by Novello two years later and survives today as "The Musical Times".



Hullah begins his classes at about the same time as Mainzer, but the second edition of Hullah's text book has the advantage of being able to refer to its having been produced 'Under the Superintendence of the Committee of Council on Education', thereby indicating government approval.

The government may have been swayed in so doing by the French government's formal sanction of the Wilhelm method (the basis of Hullah's own).

Nevertheless, encouragement was all that was given.

An article in 1850 pointed out, the government  never contributed one shilling to the support of any of Mr Hullah's classes.


Hullah's success is seen in 1847 to be of a limited kind, however.

It was almost wholly confined to the preparatory adult classes of choral societies and normal institutions -- places for teacher training -- and he had failed generally to connect music with the primary instruction of elementary schools.

In 1849 the Westminster Review remarks that Hullah's classes, instead of spreading over the country, as is intended, are chiefly confined to the training of recruits for one or more of the London Sacred Harmonic Societies.

It should be pointed out, though, that many of the members of these choirs are of the working class (aristocrats have THINGS to do).


It was the nonconformist clergyman and non-musician Curwen who produce the tonic sol-fa system which eventually overtook all else.

He commissions, at a Sunday School conference in Hull, to find the simplest way of teaching children to sing by note.

His inspiration is the Norwich Sol-fa Ladder of Sarah Glover (1785-1867), which had a movable doh, in contrast to the fixed doh of the Hullah and Mainzer systems.

It meant, in effect, that there was only one key, "doh" being the name given to the first note of any key (there are obvious similarities to the use of a capo on a guitar).

So successful was Curwen that from the mid-1870s enormous Tonic Sol-fa Festivals became an annual event at the Crystal Palace, tonic sol-fa choirs having by then spread to almost every town in Britain.


Despite government approval for the use of Hullah's method in schools, by 1860 tonic sol-fa dominated. Schools begins to play an important role in disseminating bourgeois musical values among the working class, particularly after the Elementary Education Act of 1870, in which the government makes provision for a system of 'National Education' controlled locally by 'School Boards'.


The school is a crucial part of the hegemonic cultural apparatus.]

Shool is the dominant ideological state apparatus of capitalist society.

The school becomes the dominant ideological state apparatus not as the result of simple choice on the part of the bourgeoisie, but as the result of class struggle.

Otherwise the church could have continued to function as the dominant ideological state apparatus, as it does in feudal society.


Hence, even in 1885 one can find the complaint that our Government literally does next to nothing for an art that has the power of making better citizens by its refining influences, and a plea put forward for a central Metropolitan Institution, aided by Government grants and subject to Government inspection to develop a system of musical elementary education.

Music is, in fact, designated a grant-earning subject in the rate-aided elementary schools

Msic is acknowledged and supported by the State in the form of payment on results.

In England, where the same code applies, a payment of 1s. per head of the average school attendance is made where the children can give some evidence of understanding written musical characters, and can sing from sight to a small extent.

Where music from note is not taught a payment of 6d. is made for singing by ear three or four songs previously learned.


The money given by the state was in recognition of music's importance 'from a trade point of view' and its well-recognized claims 'from a social standpoint'.

The 'payment by results' system helped the cause of tonic sol-fa since there was an understandable tendency for schools to opt for the system which most easily produced the results the inspectors were looking for.

Nearly all board schools (rate-aided schools) opted for tonic sol-fa.

Other methods, including ordinary notation, survive almost exclusively in PUBLIC (i.e. private) schools and voluntary schools (schools supported by voluntary contributions, as well as a fee paid by each [195/196] child).

The Committee of Council on Education expressed no opinion on the merits of tonic sol-fa, but merely recognized it as having been adopted on a sufficient scale to justify official sanction.

As musical education is increasingly perceived to be important to working-class children in the 1870s, the prestigious public schools also find it necessary to remedy their previous neglect of music and ensure that their pupils were taught the difference between good music and bad, since many of these pupils had succumbed to the attraction of the very music which board schools were trying to eradicate from the minds of working-class pupils.


To the musician, nothing is more pathetic than to find a nice clean cherub-faced youngster hailing from the wilds of Scotland or Wales, the possessor, perchance of an angelic voice, knows nothing of 'Auld Lang Syne' or the 'March of the Men of Harlech', but can howl the latest London music hall vulgarity.



Although 'Slap, Bang, Here We Are Again' and 'Champagne Charlie' would not have been considered appropriate for music lessons in any school, some of the contemporary blackface minstrel songs were.

In a list of songs taught to children attending the National School in the small Yorkshire village of Pocklington in the late 1860s and early 70s,70 minstrel songs of the improving variety are found, such as 'I'd Choose To Be a Daisy' and 'I'm Lonely Since My Mother Died'.

The children there also sing hymns, such as H. F. Lyte's 'Far from My Heavenly Home', and simple arias, like 'O Forest Deep and Gloomy' ('Bois epais' from Lully's Amadis).

This school seems to have used tonic sol-fa, because several of the songs used appear in the Tonic Sol-fa Times, which ran from 1864 to 1873.


In some elementary schools a remarkable degree of accomplishment was attained, with glee-singing in two or three parts and even the mounting of large-scale works, as the description below from 1885 tells.


There is a school in the neighbourhood of Gray's Inn Road and Clerkenwell — not a Cultured or aristocratic region — a school where fees are a difficulty, and boots a ceaseless care - where boys, girls, and teachers united in studying Mendelssohn's 'Athalie'

The performance was listened to, and heartily appreciated, by a crowded audience of children, parents, school managers, and a few members of the board.


The school performs this oratorio from a tonic sol-fa edition.

It will be noted that music in schools means, as it should, VOCAL music.

Very few schools (including prestigious public schools) offer any other kind of musical instruction.

It is thus clear that music which acts as a vehicle for text was deliberately privileged, partly no doubt because singing was the cheapest form of music-making and the most amenable to class teaching, but also perhaps because the dominant ideology can function more actively through the medium of song than through the abstract medium of instrumental music.


To conclude with one among countless examples which illustrate this hegemonic function, a new version of 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' was composed by J. Tilleard (who was heavily involved in compiling school music for Novello) and intended to be sung by Schools' in commemoration of the passing of the Elementary Education Act'.



Having been given an understanding and maybe an appetite for bourgeois music as working-class children, greater access to concerts and recitals then needs to be provided in order to keep up the good work.

An example in London was the People's Concert Society (formed in 1878) designed to cater for the poorer parts of London (Lee 87).

In the provinces, concerts are also promoted for their humanizing influence on the working class.


The chief constable of Chester states, in his report for the year ending 29 September 1870, that with the opening of Saturday evening concerts a considerable decrease in the amount of drunkenness takes place.

In Glasgow the Abstainers' Union established Saturday evening concerts at the City Hall, which the magistrates recognizes as a most valuable auxiliary in keeping the streets quiet on a Saturday night, in the prevention ofdrunkenness and brawls, and in the improvement of a healthy and moral tone.

 Further stimulus to active participation in various forms of music-making (choirs, brass bands, etc.) is created by the ever growing number of competitions and competitive festivals from the 1880s onward.


The last words go to Henry Leslie, a prominent judge in such competitions.

His sentiments epitomize bourgeois hopes and desires regarding music as a means of promoting social order and family values among the working class:


If there exists any rational mental employment that can be given to the masses after their hours of daily work, no one will deny that a humanizing, elevating, and refining influence will be obtained, that must be productive of increased strength to the ties of social and family life, and consequently of powerful good to the national life.



REFERENCES



E.J. Hobsbaum, Bandits (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1969), 30n.


It is worth noting, too, that highwaymen had disappeared when the train replaced the coach as a means of transporting the Royal Mail in the late 1840s.

Bratton  mentions that ballads by Moore (especially 'The Last Rose of Summer') and operatic arias by Balfe are found as broadsides.

 Music of the Streets (Gloucester: Saydisc Records, 1983).
H. R. Haweis, Music and Morals (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1871, reprinted 1912): 535.
Military bands began to flourish after the founding of the Royal Military School of Music, Kneller Hall, in 1857.
R. Raynor, 'London, §VI, 5: concert life - halls', in Sadie 1980, II: 205.
Taken from a quotation from the Standard, given in Lee 92.

The phrase may have gained currency via the 'cockney ballad' 'She Ain't No Airy Fairy', referred to in Disher 1955: 120.

 Minutes of Evidence before the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, 1832, British Parliamentary Papers (Irish University Press, 1977), Stage and Theatre, I, 219, minute 3945.

Sleeve notes to the album Irish Songs of Rebellion, The Clancy Brothers, Everest. (Tradition, 2070).
Unattrib., 'Ballads of the people', Westminster Review, 7 N.S. (1855): 37.

The original song, in its second edition of 1859, may be found in Jackson 93-96.
See Harker 1985: 193.
The song may be found in R. Richards and T. Stubbs, The English Folksinger (Glasgow and London: Collins: 1979): 178-79.

The original song may be found in Wiley Hitchcock 1974: 91-94.

 Joe Hill's song, published in the 3rd edn of the IWW Songbook may be found in M. Collins, D. Harker, and G. White, (compilers), enlarged ed., The Big Red Songbook (London: Pluto Press, 1981): 55 and 108.
. The words of'The Spinner's Ship' may be found in 'Ballads of the People', Westminster Review 7 (N.S.), 1855, 47-78.

 'Strike for Better Wages' may be found in Richards and Stubbs, op. cit., 174-5

'Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!' is fairly easily located, but a reprint of the original sheet music is in Jackson 1976: 214-17.

The tune was also used by Clifton for Work, Boys Work.

 The image of Joe Wilson as working-class hero has taken a battering recently; however, in Harker, D., 'Joe Wilson: "Comic Dialectical Singer" or Class Traitor?' in Bratton 1986.

 I have been unable to trace either the recording or the name of this singer whom I heard on the radio.
 He recorded the song, slightly adapted from the original, on 8 August 1959; it was released on Columbia B-2155.

 Manny Shinwell recollects that during his childhood in London's East End his mother's favourite song of optimism was this Balfe aria (BBC 1 Tribute, 8 May 1986, the day of his death).

 Fuld 1971: 630 and footnote.

J. C. Hadden,
 'Our Patriotic Songs', in British Minstrelsie, vol. 5 (London: Blackwood: n.d. (1890s]) Le Bas: v.
E.G. Coleman,, The Temperance Songbook (1907), republished by Wolfe Publishing Ltd., London, 1972.
Capt. F. Marryat, Mr. Midshipman Easy, Chapter 36.
L. Rutherford,

'"Harmless nonesense"
The comic sketch and the development of music-hall entertainment', in Bratton 1986.


Charles Kingsley, Sermons on National Subjects (1852), quoted in E. Norman, The Victorian Christian Socialists, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 38.
 Quoted in Turner 1975: 73; the complete song is on pp. 71—73.
'Ballads of the People' op. cit., 44.
See P. M. Ashraf, 1978 Introduction to Working Class Literature in Great Britain (Berlin: Humbolt University). Part I, Poetry: 153-4. Publication of enlarged edn in US forthcoming.

The Jacobite Rebellions (London: Topic Records Ltd., 12T79, 1962), side I, band 8.
.Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), chapter I, §25.
 Unattrib., 'On Musical Taste', Eliza Cook's Journal I (1849): 278.
Jullian, G. Hogarth, G., and W. H. Wills, 'Music in humble life', in Dickens, C. (ed.), 1850 I (1850): 161.
Westminster Review 35 (1841): 249-50.
Samuel Smiles,
'Music in the home', Eliza Cook's Journal, 6 (1851-52): 211.
Jullien, Hogarth, and Wills, op. cit., 163.
Westminster Review, vol. 46, 1847, 311.

H., 1849 'Notation of music', Westminster Review, vol. 50: 463.

For more information on the Sacred Harmonic Society, see Raynor, H., 'London, §VI, 3: concert life-choirs', in Sadie 1980: vol. II.

For more information on sight-singing in the nineteenth century, see Scholes 1947: vol.I,1-19.

 'Ideology and ideological state apparatuses', in Althusser, L., 1971 Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Books.
Leslie, H., 1885 'Music in England', Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 52: 250.
 Hill, A., 1888-9 'Rate-aided schools of music', RMA Proceedings, vol. 15: 134.
SeeBrowne, M. E., 1885— 6 'Music in elementary schools', RMA Proceedings, vol. 12: 1 and 4.
Hadden.J. C., 1890-1 'Thejubilee of tonic sol-fa', Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 63: 205.
Parker, L. N., 1893-4 'Music in our public schools', RMA Proceedings, vol. 20: 98.
 I am indebted for a list of song titles to Janet H. Bateson, a local historian working for the Workers' Educational Association in Yorkshire.