Social music-making in England: Finding the evidence
According to folk-memory, informal social music-making was once a prominent part of life in England: community-singing in pubs or on outings, singing in the charabanc on a day-trip or works' outing, and singing at work were all usual. Now it appears that these are no longer common practices, except in a few cases, and spontaneous social music-making is generally considered to be an indulgence of the drunk. Perhaps music-making has or should have a greater role in social life than is usually accorded to it. Storr writes that "domestic music-making has declined, but those who still engage in it know that making music together is an irreplaceable way of achieving closeness. The members of a string quartet sometimes develop a special intimacy which they claim is unmatched by any other relationship". [Storr 1997: p108].
Is this belief in the decline of informal music-making founded? In the first place, was the England of earlier times truly a country of song and dance and fiddle-playing? It may be that the image of jolly groups bonding in making music is a figment of Victorian-Edwardian imagination, and that the accepted folk-memory is merely a pretty picture of past golden ages. And is it true that the musicking (to use Small's term) has declined or disappeared, or has it merely changed its habitat and appearance? Small wrote that "what no longer exists in industrial societies is that broader social context in which performance, as well as listening, is constantly taught and musicking is encouraged as an important social activity for every single member of society" [Small 1977: p207]; however, he also felt that musicking continued: "while western art music developed, the everyday music-making of ordinary people did not disappear - except from view" [Small 1977: p28].
Thus the first task would be to look for evidence that social musicking was indeed prevalent in the past. Much of the knowledge of social musicking historically is from fictional descriptions of daily life by novelists such as Dickens and Hardy. In Pickwick Papers and A Christmas Carol (Dickens) and Under the Greenwood Tree (Hardy) there descriptions of making music as part of an evening's entertainment with friends or neighbours. These appear to be taken from life, but fictional accounts of social behaviour cannot be relied upon.
Historical social practices are particularly difficult to investigate. Published diarists such as Pepys who write of the minutiae of daily life are rare; most prefer to document their experience of great events, rather than what they had for dinner and what music the members of the household played after it. The same seems true of newspaper and journal records: accounts of outings may be detailed enough to list the participants and describe where they visited, but do not mention that they sang on the coach. Pepys is unusual in that he often mentions making music: "The ladies and I and Captain Pett and Mr. Castle took barge and down we went to see the Sovereign, which we did, taking great pleasure therein, singing all the way Tuesday 9 April 1661". He frequently noted that evenings at home were spent in playing music with his wife and their servants (indeed, one of his criteria for hiring servants was their ability to play an instrument. [www.pepysdiary.com]
In 1598 the tourist Hentzner described the English as "excelling in dancing, and in the art of music" as quoted by Baring-Gould [Baring-Gould 1890: p185]; Baring-Gould laments the decline of English folk-music in the following centuries (which was one of the main reasons for the rise of folksong collections in the early twentieth century). In spite the extensive work in collecting songs and tunes and the time which the collectors spent with rural musicians, their accounts lack detail of how the music was used. Baring-Gould himself writes of the characters of the singers he met and of their locations, but was more concerned to collect the words and music by asking the singers to perform them for him than to consider the role of the music in daily life.
Elbourne's study of musical practice in Lancashire in the nineteenth century draws together evidence from various newspapers, but he also complains of the lack of material: "Our more simple ancestors made a serious business of their periodical amusements, but we do not find that they deemed it necessary to publish long accounts. It is only from casual hints... that we learn anything authentic respecting their pastimes." [Elbourne 1980: p23] "This is particularly true of musical life, where the evidence is scarce and widely scattered" [ibid. p24]. He notes some reports such as that of a harvest festival in which "music, dancing, and the song concluded the day" - Preston Pilot 6 August 1836 [ibid. p23]. In the Wigan Gazette of 7 April 1837, a writer is described as "lamenting the paucity of descriptions of past sports and pastimes". Moses Heap wrote in his diary of the early nineteenth-century that "weavers would be singing away to the click of the shuttle" (My Life and Times pp52-53 - microfilm in Manchester Library). A letter to the Preston Chronicle of 29 December 1838 mentions "psalms and hymns which companies of those contented people join in singing in the lanes near their houses, especially on summer evenings". [ibid: pp 30, 31]
Up to the late nineteenth century it was common to meet to play music and sing, part-singing being particularly popular. The evidence for this is, however, most apparent in laments for its loss rather than accounts of the practice during its heyday. Senelick, in the preface to his edition of the diaries of a professional room-singer of the mid-nineteenth century, mentions the gradual effect of professionalism in music, in that private 'catch' or glee clubs became public meetings, providing a chairman, piano accompaniment, and displays of local talent; the "growing ambition" of tavern owners led to the "engagement of professional "room singers" and enlargement of the premises to accommodate an audience". Before 1866 when Canterbury Hall became the first recognised music hall, musical entertainment of the less highbrow kind had been primarily song-and-supper rooms for aristocratic and professional men, and 'free-and-easies' for the lower class. Although both originated in "the all join-in ambience of the eighteenth century catch or Comus clubs, by this time they had been infiltrated by professionalism" and the "intrusion of commercialism". He draws on editorials in The Town (Renton Nicholson's "scandal-sheet") which "disparage the trend"; what he does not report is any account of catch clubs when they were a common part of social life. [Senelick 1997: preface xiv]
One would have thought that the twentieth century should provide more fruitful sources of evidence for social musicking, ranging from accounts of folksong collectors to film and audio recordings. There is indeed some evidence in fictional films set in the early to mid twentieth century, though here again the risk is that a desire to romanticise may take precedence over historical accuracy. Most of our knowledge of musical practices of even the last century would seem to be in the form of folk memory, the "invisible heritage".
Music-making does not seem to play much part in collections of historical records, such as Bullock's of Salford, which contains only one relevant mention: in the volume for 1914-1920, where there is an article about the demise of the Pendleton Maypole which for centuries had served as a place for "well-organised revelries". [Bullock 2001: p64]
There are scattered references in autobiographies which may provide some evidence, for example Winifred Beechey's account of childhood in small town in 20s and 30s, in which she recalls singing with her mother when they went out to tea; and "in the evenings when the children were in bed... our mother played some songs, which we all sang". [Beechey 1984: pp 39, 118]. Searching autobiographies for random mentions of musicking is, however, a long and sadly unproductive task.
Dunn, who carried out research on singing practices in Suffolk villages in 1974, suggests a reason for this lack of documentation. A poem written in 1928 by local singer Bob Hart, listing the highlights of his village (Snape) such as the village Association, WI, British Legion, football, tennis, and swimming clubs, does not mention singing, even though Hart was the chief village singer and it was his main function in the community. Dunn proposes that this is "perhaps because the list of organisations and clubs seems more directly indicative of vitality and progress than mention of the ordinary, the self-made, and the spontaneous", and concludes that singing "was an integral, enjoyable, but not necessarily remarkable aspect of local life, and not recognised as an activity as such because of its sheer absorption into the most familiar fabric of village society".
[Dunn 1980: p50-51].
Musicology has concentrated on music as performance, i.e. with separation between those making the music and those listening to it. Where there have been studies of social music, the focus is on the musical material, not how it is used; hence the writings of musicologists yield little. According to De Nora, the problem with musicology when viewed from the perspective of music sociology is that it has been "too tightly committed to the interpretation and criticism of musical texts". [De Nora 2003: p36]. De Nora advocates a move to a focus on music practice, on "how specific agents use or interact with music", and actually doing things with music [ibid. p41]. In spite of this view, her own examples focus on critical analysis, reception, and consumption of music, rather than on making music.
Merriam, in one of his 'critical assumptions' says that ethnomusicology has been primarily concerned with "fact-gathering rather than to the solution of broadly-based problems couched in terms of the study of music as a part of human culture. This is emphasized in the literature of ethnomusicology, which tends to be devoted in the greatest part to the analysis of sounds of music without reference to what music is and does in human society. Ethnomusicology... has emphasized the what of music sound rather than the broader questions of why and how." [Merriam 1964: p38].
Merriam was of course writing in the 1960s, before ethnomusicology and sociomusicology were as developed as now. What of more recent musicology? Harker, writing about industrial folksong in 2000, says that "the problem was, and is, that very little sustained and detailed research has yet been done on the culture of the majority of English people" [Harker. 2000: p123]. Ethnomusicology has dealt in detail with cultures of Africa, Australasia, the Americas, and parts of Europe (at least, the less-industrialised parts) but there is little about England. Even more recently, Benson says in his presentation of a phenomenology of music theory that "we tend to assume that music making is primarily about the creation and preservation of musical works. And the reason we think that way is because the dominant form of music - or at least the form that has been the basis for most theoretical reflection - is that of "classical music". " (used in the broad sense, as music performed in concert halls). He goes on to say that "Sometimes it seems that philosophers have lost sight of the musical experience itself" [Benson 2003: preface ix].
Suspicic writes of defining the sociology of music as "the study of music insofar as it is a social phenomenon", but in spite of addressing the social history of music, his focus is on sociological aesthetics of music. i.e. the music rather than the musicking. He quotes and supports Schneider's opinion that "the further we look back into the history of humanity, the more we see music existing not in the form of entertainment or as a purely artistic manifestation, but as an element bound up in the most earthy details of daily social life" (from Marius Schneider, 'Sociologie et mythologie musicales' p13)". [Suspicic 1987: p86].
It becomes apparent that not only is there a lack of literature on the circumstances of social musicking, there is little research into it. There are many mentions of how it is not researched, but little investigation into it even by those who have noted the lack. Why is this? Perhaps it is because of the difficulty of defining social musicking, and because of its ephemeral nature, and also, as Dunn remarked, that it may be (or have been) so integral to social life that it is not deemed remarkable.
Only recently have sociologists begun to consider the role of music-making rather than music itself: Everitt has done some work on participation in music, emphasising the benefits to social cohesion and co-operative behaviour and linking the decline in music-making to a weakening of social structures. He distinguishes three "levels of engagement". It is noticeable that he relegates ad-hoc social musicking to the lowest class, as "a comparatively inert joining in - singalongs, moving and clapping to gospel music, and chants at football matches are examples". His classes are based on how much the critical faculties are engaged: the second level includes "the activity of choral societies and brass bands", where choices are made, "but such choices are probably based on instinct and taste rather than analysis". Finally, the third level "is no longer simply a question of music-making but of discussing matters of taste, quality and style and of becoming knowledgeable about the material... not just of practice... but of the conscious development of critical understanding". [Everitt : pp20-21] From an ethnological point of view, his criteria for classification may have missed some of the reasons for making music in groups; it has the result of less focus on the very area in which I am interested - that of music as an expression of social integration.
Given the scarcity of relevant data in literature sources, it may be necessary to investigate oral history, and to collect from primary sources in interviews. From a brief review of oral history sources, the subject of ad-hoc and spontaneous music-making in groups has been paid little or no attention, and is not easy to research using existing indexes. Interviews focused on this subject may be the best source of information on social musicking practices.
Bibliography
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine) 1890. Old country life, Methuen.
Beechey, Winifred 1984. The Rich Mrs Robinson, Futura.
Bullock, Roy 2001. Salford 1914-1920, Neil Richardson.
De Nora, Tia 2003. After Adorno, Cambridge University Press.
Dunn, Ginette 1980. Fellowship of Song, Croom Helm.
Elbourne, Roger 1980. Music and Tradition in Early Industrial Lancashire, 1780-1840, Folklore Society.
Everitt Anthony 1997. Joining in: Investigation into Participatory Music in the UK, Gulbenkian Foundation.
Harker, David. 2000. On Industrial Folksong, in Scott, Derek B., ed. Music, culture, and society: a reader, Oxford University Press 2000.
Merriam, Alan P. 1964. The Anthropology of Music, Northwestern University Press.
Senelick, Laurence 1997. Tavern Singing in Early Victorian London - The Diaries of Charles Rice for 1840 and 1850, The Society for Theatre Research.
Small, Christopher 1977. Music, Society, Education, Calder.
Storr, Anthony 1997. Music and the Mind (originally published 1992), HarperCollins.
Is this belief in the decline of informal music-making founded? In the first place, was the England of earlier times truly a country of song and dance and fiddle-playing? It may be that the image of jolly groups bonding in making music is a figment of Victorian-Edwardian imagination, and that the accepted folk-memory is merely a pretty picture of past golden ages. And is it true that the musicking (to use Small's term) has declined or disappeared, or has it merely changed its habitat and appearance? Small wrote that "what no longer exists in industrial societies is that broader social context in which performance, as well as listening, is constantly taught and musicking is encouraged as an important social activity for every single member of society" [Small 1977: p207]; however, he also felt that musicking continued: "while western art music developed, the everyday music-making of ordinary people did not disappear - except from view" [Small 1977: p28].
Thus the first task would be to look for evidence that social musicking was indeed prevalent in the past. Much of the knowledge of social musicking historically is from fictional descriptions of daily life by novelists such as Dickens and Hardy. In Pickwick Papers and A Christmas Carol (Dickens) and Under the Greenwood Tree (Hardy) there descriptions of making music as part of an evening's entertainment with friends or neighbours. These appear to be taken from life, but fictional accounts of social behaviour cannot be relied upon.
Historical social practices are particularly difficult to investigate. Published diarists such as Pepys who write of the minutiae of daily life are rare; most prefer to document their experience of great events, rather than what they had for dinner and what music the members of the household played after it. The same seems true of newspaper and journal records: accounts of outings may be detailed enough to list the participants and describe where they visited, but do not mention that they sang on the coach. Pepys is unusual in that he often mentions making music: "The ladies and I and Captain Pett and Mr. Castle took barge and down we went to see the Sovereign, which we did, taking great pleasure therein, singing all the way Tuesday 9 April 1661". He frequently noted that evenings at home were spent in playing music with his wife and their servants (indeed, one of his criteria for hiring servants was their ability to play an instrument. [www.pepysdiary.com]
In 1598 the tourist Hentzner described the English as "excelling in dancing, and in the art of music" as quoted by Baring-Gould [Baring-Gould 1890: p185]; Baring-Gould laments the decline of English folk-music in the following centuries (which was one of the main reasons for the rise of folksong collections in the early twentieth century). In spite the extensive work in collecting songs and tunes and the time which the collectors spent with rural musicians, their accounts lack detail of how the music was used. Baring-Gould himself writes of the characters of the singers he met and of their locations, but was more concerned to collect the words and music by asking the singers to perform them for him than to consider the role of the music in daily life.
Elbourne's study of musical practice in Lancashire in the nineteenth century draws together evidence from various newspapers, but he also complains of the lack of material: "Our more simple ancestors made a serious business of their periodical amusements, but we do not find that they deemed it necessary to publish long accounts. It is only from casual hints... that we learn anything authentic respecting their pastimes." [Elbourne 1980: p23] "This is particularly true of musical life, where the evidence is scarce and widely scattered" [ibid. p24]. He notes some reports such as that of a harvest festival in which "music, dancing, and the song concluded the day" - Preston Pilot 6 August 1836 [ibid. p23]. In the Wigan Gazette of 7 April 1837, a writer is described as "lamenting the paucity of descriptions of past sports and pastimes". Moses Heap wrote in his diary of the early nineteenth-century that "weavers would be singing away to the click of the shuttle" (My Life and Times pp52-53 - microfilm in Manchester Library). A letter to the Preston Chronicle of 29 December 1838 mentions "psalms and hymns which companies of those contented people join in singing in the lanes near their houses, especially on summer evenings". [ibid: pp 30, 31]
Up to the late nineteenth century it was common to meet to play music and sing, part-singing being particularly popular. The evidence for this is, however, most apparent in laments for its loss rather than accounts of the practice during its heyday. Senelick, in the preface to his edition of the diaries of a professional room-singer of the mid-nineteenth century, mentions the gradual effect of professionalism in music, in that private 'catch' or glee clubs became public meetings, providing a chairman, piano accompaniment, and displays of local talent; the "growing ambition" of tavern owners led to the "engagement of professional "room singers" and enlargement of the premises to accommodate an audience". Before 1866 when Canterbury Hall became the first recognised music hall, musical entertainment of the less highbrow kind had been primarily song-and-supper rooms for aristocratic and professional men, and 'free-and-easies' for the lower class. Although both originated in "the all join-in ambience of the eighteenth century catch or Comus clubs, by this time they had been infiltrated by professionalism" and the "intrusion of commercialism". He draws on editorials in The Town (Renton Nicholson's "scandal-sheet") which "disparage the trend"; what he does not report is any account of catch clubs when they were a common part of social life. [Senelick 1997: preface xiv]
One would have thought that the twentieth century should provide more fruitful sources of evidence for social musicking, ranging from accounts of folksong collectors to film and audio recordings. There is indeed some evidence in fictional films set in the early to mid twentieth century, though here again the risk is that a desire to romanticise may take precedence over historical accuracy. Most of our knowledge of musical practices of even the last century would seem to be in the form of folk memory, the "invisible heritage".
Music-making does not seem to play much part in collections of historical records, such as Bullock's of Salford, which contains only one relevant mention: in the volume for 1914-1920, where there is an article about the demise of the Pendleton Maypole which for centuries had served as a place for "well-organised revelries". [Bullock 2001: p64]
There are scattered references in autobiographies which may provide some evidence, for example Winifred Beechey's account of childhood in small town in 20s and 30s, in which she recalls singing with her mother when they went out to tea; and "in the evenings when the children were in bed... our mother played some songs, which we all sang". [Beechey 1984: pp 39, 118]. Searching autobiographies for random mentions of musicking is, however, a long and sadly unproductive task.
Dunn, who carried out research on singing practices in Suffolk villages in 1974, suggests a reason for this lack of documentation. A poem written in 1928 by local singer Bob Hart, listing the highlights of his village (Snape) such as the village Association, WI, British Legion, football, tennis, and swimming clubs, does not mention singing, even though Hart was the chief village singer and it was his main function in the community. Dunn proposes that this is "perhaps because the list of organisations and clubs seems more directly indicative of vitality and progress than mention of the ordinary, the self-made, and the spontaneous", and concludes that singing "was an integral, enjoyable, but not necessarily remarkable aspect of local life, and not recognised as an activity as such because of its sheer absorption into the most familiar fabric of village society".
[Dunn 1980: p50-51].
Musicology has concentrated on music as performance, i.e. with separation between those making the music and those listening to it. Where there have been studies of social music, the focus is on the musical material, not how it is used; hence the writings of musicologists yield little. According to De Nora, the problem with musicology when viewed from the perspective of music sociology is that it has been "too tightly committed to the interpretation and criticism of musical texts". [De Nora 2003: p36]. De Nora advocates a move to a focus on music practice, on "how specific agents use or interact with music", and actually doing things with music [ibid. p41]. In spite of this view, her own examples focus on critical analysis, reception, and consumption of music, rather than on making music.
Merriam, in one of his 'critical assumptions' says that ethnomusicology has been primarily concerned with "fact-gathering rather than to the solution of broadly-based problems couched in terms of the study of music as a part of human culture. This is emphasized in the literature of ethnomusicology, which tends to be devoted in the greatest part to the analysis of sounds of music without reference to what music is and does in human society. Ethnomusicology... has emphasized the what of music sound rather than the broader questions of why and how." [Merriam 1964: p38].
Merriam was of course writing in the 1960s, before ethnomusicology and sociomusicology were as developed as now. What of more recent musicology? Harker, writing about industrial folksong in 2000, says that "the problem was, and is, that very little sustained and detailed research has yet been done on the culture of the majority of English people" [Harker. 2000: p123]. Ethnomusicology has dealt in detail with cultures of Africa, Australasia, the Americas, and parts of Europe (at least, the less-industrialised parts) but there is little about England. Even more recently, Benson says in his presentation of a phenomenology of music theory that "we tend to assume that music making is primarily about the creation and preservation of musical works. And the reason we think that way is because the dominant form of music - or at least the form that has been the basis for most theoretical reflection - is that of "classical music". " (used in the broad sense, as music performed in concert halls). He goes on to say that "Sometimes it seems that philosophers have lost sight of the musical experience itself" [Benson 2003: preface ix].
Suspicic writes of defining the sociology of music as "the study of music insofar as it is a social phenomenon", but in spite of addressing the social history of music, his focus is on sociological aesthetics of music. i.e. the music rather than the musicking. He quotes and supports Schneider's opinion that "the further we look back into the history of humanity, the more we see music existing not in the form of entertainment or as a purely artistic manifestation, but as an element bound up in the most earthy details of daily social life" (from Marius Schneider, 'Sociologie et mythologie musicales' p13)". [Suspicic 1987: p86].
It becomes apparent that not only is there a lack of literature on the circumstances of social musicking, there is little research into it. There are many mentions of how it is not researched, but little investigation into it even by those who have noted the lack. Why is this? Perhaps it is because of the difficulty of defining social musicking, and because of its ephemeral nature, and also, as Dunn remarked, that it may be (or have been) so integral to social life that it is not deemed remarkable.
Only recently have sociologists begun to consider the role of music-making rather than music itself: Everitt has done some work on participation in music, emphasising the benefits to social cohesion and co-operative behaviour and linking the decline in music-making to a weakening of social structures. He distinguishes three "levels of engagement". It is noticeable that he relegates ad-hoc social musicking to the lowest class, as "a comparatively inert joining in - singalongs, moving and clapping to gospel music, and chants at football matches are examples". His classes are based on how much the critical faculties are engaged: the second level includes "the activity of choral societies and brass bands", where choices are made, "but such choices are probably based on instinct and taste rather than analysis". Finally, the third level "is no longer simply a question of music-making but of discussing matters of taste, quality and style and of becoming knowledgeable about the material... not just of practice... but of the conscious development of critical understanding". [Everitt : pp20-21] From an ethnological point of view, his criteria for classification may have missed some of the reasons for making music in groups; it has the result of less focus on the very area in which I am interested - that of music as an expression of social integration.
Given the scarcity of relevant data in literature sources, it may be necessary to investigate oral history, and to collect from primary sources in interviews. From a brief review of oral history sources, the subject of ad-hoc and spontaneous music-making in groups has been paid little or no attention, and is not easy to research using existing indexes. Interviews focused on this subject may be the best source of information on social musicking practices.
Bibliography
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine) 1890. Old country life, Methuen.
Beechey, Winifred 1984. The Rich Mrs Robinson, Futura.
Bullock, Roy 2001. Salford 1914-1920, Neil Richardson.
De Nora, Tia 2003. After Adorno, Cambridge University Press.
Dunn, Ginette 1980. Fellowship of Song, Croom Helm.
Elbourne, Roger 1980. Music and Tradition in Early Industrial Lancashire, 1780-1840, Folklore Society.
Everitt Anthony 1997. Joining in: Investigation into Participatory Music in the UK, Gulbenkian Foundation.
Harker, David. 2000. On Industrial Folksong, in Scott, Derek B., ed. Music, culture, and society: a reader, Oxford University Press 2000.
Merriam, Alan P. 1964. The Anthropology of Music, Northwestern University Press.
Senelick, Laurence 1997. Tavern Singing in Early Victorian London - The Diaries of Charles Rice for 1840 and 1850, The Society for Theatre Research.
Small, Christopher 1977. Music, Society, Education, Calder.
Storr, Anthony 1997. Music and the Mind (originally published 1992), HarperCollins.
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