Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  The most popular of his publications – going through sixteen editions in its first thirty years – was Music and Morals (1871). In this book he complained that England was not only lacking in proper religious feeling, but also in the appreciation of all the arts, most notably music. Much as Schmitz would conclude over thirty years later, Haweis decided that ‘the English are not a Musical People […] England is not a musical country’. English composers, he suggested, were far too influenced by European music. They did not write for English audiences, and English audiences far preferred drawing-room ballads and music-hall songs to serious music. This deplorable state of affairs would not change ‘until music is felt here [in England], as it is felt in Germany, to be a kind of necessity – to be a thing without which the heart pines and the emotions wither – a need, as of light, and air, and fire’. His solution was to forge a national music:

  We must not be content with foreign models, but we must aim at forming a real national school, with a tone and temper as expressive of, and as appropriate to England, as French music is to France, Italian to Italy, and German to Germany […] When we have a national school of music, and not before, we shall have high popular standards, and the music of the people will be as real an instrument of civilization in its way, and as happily under the control of public opinion, as the Press, the Parliament, or any other of our great national institutions.

  Haweis’s book was published at a time when many people were echoing his complaints and attempting to do something about it. The Education Act of 1870 had made provision for the teaching of music in elementary schools, while the National Training School for Music (NTSM) was founded by public subscription and with royal patronage in 1876, with Arthur Sullivan – ‘the only English composer we have’, as The Orchestra magazine bluntly put it – as its first principal. The school was to be part of the cultural complex built on land in South Kensington bought with the proceeds of the Great Exhibition of 1851. The aim of the NTSM, according to its charter, was ‘To establish for the United Kingdom such a School of Music as already exists in many of the principal Continental countries, – a School which shall take rank with the Conservatories of Milan, Paris, Vienna, Leipsic, Brussels, and Berlin, – a School which shall do for the musical youth of Great Britain what those Schools are doing for the talented youth of Italy, Austria, France, Germany, and Belgium.’ This the Royal Academy of Music had signally failed to do: while it had some success training people to teach, the music critic who carried out the 1866 survey of London orchestras stated that he could ‘not remember one great instrumental player the Academy has turned out during the last 25 years’.

  The NTSM was established precisely to address the failings of the RAM, but itself foundered after only six years, partly because Sullivan was a reluctant and lacklustre principal. Like the RAM, the School failed to attract orchestral instrumentalists, or (as was the original intention) enough people applying for scholarships. It had also attracted less funding than had been planned for, and so few objections were raised when the scholarship scheme was abandoned and the places filled by those who could afford the fees. These students unfortunately tended to regard music as a drawing-room accomplishment rather than a profession, and the examining board concluded that the standards of teaching were similarly unambitious. When these criticisms were ascribed to his laissez-faire directorship, Sullivan argued that ‘when a principal had exercised due care in the choice of his staff and in the organization of work of a Music School it was not for the best interests of the school that he should be constantly fretting the teachers by undue interference in the details of the instruction given to the pupils’. He nevertheless resigned in 1882, and was succeeded by John Stainer, the organist at St Paul’s Cathedral who would go on to compose The Crucifixion and other popular oratorios. Under Stainer’s direction the School staggered on for a few months until it was subsumed into the Royal College of Music.

  The original plan had been to merge the NTSM and the RAM, but the latter institution was opposed to this idea. Instead proposals for a Royal College of Music, led by the Prince of Wales and actively supported by other members of the royal family, were put forward at the end of 1881. The person behind this scheme was George Grove, editor of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which appeared in four volumes between 1878 and 1889. International in scope, the dictionary nevertheless did much to promote English music, with Purcell allotted a longer article than Bach. Although Grove was not a professional musician, he was appointed the RCM’s first director when it opened in 1883, remaining in the post for eleven years. His staff included Charles Villiers Stanford, Hubert Parry and Walter Parratt, and his aim, in which he largely succeeded, was to produce ‘more and better music in England, more and better English music’.

  The question remained: What kind of English music should English composers produce? The answer, it turned out, was pastoral music celebrating the English landscape. In many cases this landscape would be a real one, with pieces named after specific geographical locations; elsewhere the music would portray a more generic or idealised landscape of the sort Housman depicted in A Shropshire Lad. At a fundraising meeting for the RCM held in December 1881, the newly created Duke of Albany (otherwise Prince Leopold, the Queen’s youngest son) had declared that England had been the first great musical nation of Europe. In support of this unfashionable notion, he drew the audience’s attention to the well-known medieval song ‘Sumer is icumen in’, ‘one of the choice musical treasures of the British Museum, [which] is now accepted by the most learned antiquaries of England and Germany […] as the work of a monk of Reading in Berkshire in or about the year 1226’. ‘This tiny glee,’ he went on, ‘which is the germ of modern music, the direct and absolute progenitor of the Oratorios of Handel, the Symphonies of Beethoven, the Operas of Wagner, is a purely English creation, dealing with English sights and sounds – the cuckoo, the blooming meadow, the budding copse, the buck, the doe, the cattle, the sheep and lambs, of the pastures of Berkshire’.

  ‘Sumer is icumen in’ is in fact a very sophisticated little song in the form of a six-part ‘rota’, a kind of English part-song, in which each voice comes in at precise, overlapping intervals. Musical scholars have come to different conclusions since 1881; although the exact date and authorship is unknown, the words of the song are in a robust Wessex dialect of the sort local people would have recognised. That the authorship could once have been confidently ascribed to a monk in Berkshire goes to show that the countryside it described was generically English rather than characteristic of a specific region. The two-note song of the cuckoo has always been regarded as the traditional herald of the English summer, while references to seeds growing, meadows blowing, and sheep and cows calling after their young are equally timeless and regionally unspecific. This was the English landscape that many of the leading figures in the English Musical Renaissance would turn to for inspiration – and many of them would be graduates of the Royal College of Music. Amongst those who studied composition at the RCM, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ivor Gurney, Arthur Somervell, John Ireland, E.J. Moeran, Ernest Farrar and George Butterworth all set Housman’s poems in the early years of the twentieth century.

  The Tunes of Old England

  Composers were not only inspired by the English landscape, but also by the kind of music that had for centuries been made by ordinary people in rural areas. English folk song may not have had quite so ancient a lineage as ‘Sumer is icumen in’, but it was nevertheless handed down generation by generation and had its roots in the English countryside. In the search for a new kind of English music many composers began exploring these old traditional songs, which had long been neglected by the musical establishment. Anticipating both Haweis and Schmitz, Carl Engel, a London-based German musicologist who specialised in music and nationality, noted in An Introduction to the Study of National Music (1866) that ‘Although the rural population of England appear to sing less than those of most other European countries, it may nevertheless
be supposed that they also, especially in districts somewhat remote from any large towns, must still preserve songs and dance tunes of their own inherited from their forefathers.’

  What virtually no one had done was to make collections of these English songs and dances as had been done in both Wales and Scotland, though in the same year that Engel’s book appeared John Hullah, Professor of Vocal Music at King’s College, London, had published The Song Book: Words and Tunes from the Best Poets and Musicians. Hullah’s selection was inclusively British rather than narrowly English. ‘In the bringing together of the Songs of Great Britain and Ireland,’ he wrote in his preface,

  an opportunity will be afforded both for confirming a just impression in respect to them, and also for removing a false one; – by showing, on the one hand, that, as a body, they will not suffer by comparison with those of any other nation – perhaps, even, with those of all other nations put together, – on the other, that the English, as well as the Scottish, the Welsh, and the Irish, have national melodies – a truth which, old and irrefragable as it may be to those who have looked into the matter, will be altogether new to, and require confirmation with, those who have not.

  These were ‘National songs – songs which, through their truth to nature, their felicity of expression, and the operation of time, have sunk “deeper than did ever plummet sound” into the hearts of the people among whom they have sprung up and circulated’.

  English songs occupy the first and largest of the book’s five sections, with 114 songs compared with 80 from Scotland, 50 from Ireland and a mere 14 from Wales; but although Hullah’s selection includes a few genuine folk songs such as ‘The Miller of Dee’ and ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’, these sit beside ‘Rule, Britannia’, ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’, and songs from the plays of Shakespeare, The Beggar’s Opera, and such now forgotten eighteenth-century operas as William Shield and William Pearce’s Hartford-Bridge, or, The Skirts of the Camp. Hullah had drawn heavily on William Chappell’s Popular Music of the Olden Times (1855–9), much of which was similarly taken from printed and authored sources. These songs may have become ‘traditional’, but they were evidently not what Engel meant by ‘national songs’.

  A few years later, in a series of articles written for the Musical Times and collected as The Literature of National Music (1879), Engel returned to his theme. There are surely, he wrote,

  English musicians in London and in the large provincial towns who might achieve good results if they would spend their autumnal holidays in some rural district of the country, associate with the villagers, and listen to their songs. What change can be more desirable for a professional man, who in the greater parts of his engagements moves in the fashionable circles of society, and is compelled to inhale the impure air of the concert-room – what could be more beneficial to him than an occasional abode among the peasantry in a village, where the pure and invigorating air, and the beautiful scenery, invite to rambles in the fields and woods, and chase away those morbid feelings and crazy notions which very likely have taken possession of the drawing-room musician?

  When Engel published his book there was in fact one very small collection of genuine English folk songs, the Rev. John Broadwood’s Old English Songs as now sung by the Peasantry of the Weald of Surrey and Sussex, published privately in 1847. The importance of Broadwood, whose book contained only sixteen items and was not widely distributed, is that he noted down the songs he heard with great accuracy. His work was carried on by his niece Lucy Broadwood, who with H.F. Birch Reynardson published in 1889 an expanded edition of her uncle’s book as Sussex Songs. That same year saw the publication of the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould’s collection of Songs and Ballads of the West, collected in Devon and Cornwall and subtitled ‘A Collection Made from the Mouths of the People’. Unfortunately Baring-Gould occasionally found what came out of the mouths of the people indelicate if not actually indecent, and his important work in collecting folk songs was somewhat compromised by his insistence upon rewriting offending lyrics to make them suitable for a middle-class Victorian audience.

  Other collections included Frank Kidson’s Traditional Tunes (1891), collected in Yorkshire and southern Scotland, and Lucy Broadwood and J.A. Fuller-Maitland’s English County Songs (1893), covering most areas of England. The seriousness with which folk music was being taken by the end of the century can be judged from the fact that when the English Folk-Song Society was established in June 1898, it included among its vice-presidents both Parry and Stanford, as well as Stainer and the principal of the RAM, Alexander Mackenzie. The ‘primary object’ of the EFSS was ‘the collection and preservation of Folk-songs, Ballads, and Tunes, and the publication of such of these as may be advisable’. At its inaugural meeting the following February (attended, amongst others, by Elgar, who formally proposed the adoption of the committee’s first report), Parry gave an address that echoed Engel in its notion that the collecting and study of folk music was a thoroughly salubrious occupation for the jaded denizens of metropolitan drawing rooms. Unlike Baring-Gould, Parry found ‘nothing in folk-music common or unclean’, nothing to resemble the sort of songs that diverted the populace – and indeed Housman – in the music halls of the period. Folk music was, however, under threat in the same way that the English countryside was. ‘The modern popular song reminds me of the outer circumference of our terribly overgrown towns,’ Parry told the assembled guests,

  where the jerry-builder holds sway, and where one sees all around the tawdriness of sham jewellery and shoddy clothes, the dregs of stale fish, and pawn shops, set off by the flaming gin-palaces at the corners of the streets. All these things suggest to one’s mind the boundless regions of sham. It is for the people who live in these unhealthy regions, people who have the most false ideals, who are always scrambling for subsistence, who think that the commonest rowdyism is the highest expression of human emotion; for them popular music is made, and it is made, with a commercial object, of snippets of musical slang. This is what will drive out folk-music if we do not save it. The old folk-music is among the purest products of the human mind. It grew in the hearts of the people before they devoted themselves assiduously to the making of quick returns. In the old days they produced music because it pleased them to make it, and because what they made pleased them mightily, and that is the only way in which good music is ever made.

  Folk music, Parry concluded, was ‘characteristic of the race – of the quiet reticence of our country districts – of the contented and patient and courageous folk, always ready to meet what chance shall bring with a cheery heart’. In all but cheery hearts, this race bears comparison with the one that inhabited Housman’s imaginary Shropshire in a book that additionally embraces the popular notion that quiet country places are more appealing than noisy, populous cities. It was in these cities that the English race was seen to be degenerating to a point that it was unfit to be sent out to police the Empire. Parry’s speech asserted not only that folk song provided a pure and unpolluted cultural source for the regeneration of national music, but that this regeneration was as much a national enterprise as building and maintaining the Empire.

  One person not apparently in attendance that evening was Cecil Sharp, who would nevertheless become the most important figure in the English folk-music movement. Born in 1859, Sharp had shown considerable musical ability at school, but had studied mathematics at Cambridge, after which he went to Australia to work first in banking and then as a lawyer, eventually becoming assistant to the Chief Justice of South Australia. In 1886 he contracted typhoid and returned to England to recuperate; he would suffer from ill health in various forms throughout his life and once gave instructions that any announcement of his death should read ‘after a long illness most impatiently borne’. He had also continued to pursue his musical interests in Australia, becoming director of the Adelaide String Quartet Club in 1883, and his original intention upon returning to England was to remain there and find employment as a professional musician. When these
hopes foundered, he resumed his life back in Australia, eventually giving up his job in the justice department to become co-director of the Adelaide College of Music. After quarrelling with the other director, he returned to England in 1892 to write and to teach music.

  Sharp’s interest in folk song was prompted by an encounter with a group of Morris men on a snowy Boxing Day in 1899. He was staying with his mother-in-law at Headington, near Oxford, and was looking out of a window onto the drive when ‘a strange procession appeared: eight men in white decorated with ribbons, with pads of small latten bells strapped to their shins, carrying coloured handkerchiefs; accompanying them was a concertina-player and a man dressed as a “Fool”’. The men formed two lines and when the concertina player ‘struck up an invigorating tune, the like of which Cecil Sharp had never heard before’, they started their leaping dance. That tune was ‘Laudnum Bunches’, and was followed by three others: ‘Cease your funning’ (from The Beggar’s Opera), ‘Blue-eyed Stranger’ and ‘Rigs o’ Marlow’. Sharp had been unwell but he entirely forgot his illness as he listened to and then questioned the men. The concertina player was a young man called William Kimber, from whom Sharp noted down five tunes the following day, and many others later on.