The Art of Appreciation: Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain 9780520975897

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The Art of Appreciation

Research for chapters 1–3 and 5–7 was funded by a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship. Research for chapter 4 was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council postgraduate award (ref. AH/I501185/1). Support for this book was generously provided by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation also gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Richard and Harriett Gold Endowment Fund in Arts and Humanities.

The Art of Appreciation Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain

Kate Guthrie

University of California Press

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Kate Guthrie

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Guthrie, Kate, 1987– author. Title: The art of appreciation : music and middlebrow culture in modern Britain / Kate Guthrie. Other titles: California studies in 20th-century music ; 30. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020051224 (print) | LCCN 2020051225 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520351677 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520975897 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Music—Social aspects—Great Britain— History—20th century. | Music appreciation—Great Britain—History—20th century. Classification: LCC ML3917.G7 G87 2021 (print) | LCC ML3917.G7 (ebook) | DDC 780.941/0904—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051224 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051225

Manufactured in the United States of America 30 10

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To Adam, in deep appreciation of all your support

Contents

List of Figures and Music Examples 1. The Art of Appreciation 2. “Audiences of the Future”

ix 1 33

The Robert Mayer Concerts for Children (1924–1939)

3. Victorians on Radio

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Music and the Ordinary Listener (1926–1939)

4. Music Education on Film

99

Instruments of the Orchestra (1946)

5. Outside the Ivory Tower

136

Extra-Mural Music at the University of Birmingham (1948–1964)

6. The Avant-Garde Goes to School

172

O Magnum Mysterium (1960)

7. Epilogue

208

The Middlebrow in an Age of Cultural Pluralism

Notes Bibliography Index

219 267 287

Figures and Music Examples

Figures 1. Robert Mayer Concerts for Children publicity poster (November 21, 1925). / 45 2. Robert Mayer Concerts for Children publicity poster (March 20, 1926). / 46 3. Robert Mayer Concerts for Children publicity poster (November 8, 1930). / 47 4. Title page to Benjamin Britten, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, op. 34. / 106 5. Still from the filming of Instruments of the Orchestra (1946). / 109 6. Still from the filming of Instruments of the Orchestra (1946). / 110 7. Malcolm McKelvey, “Short Class: The Enjoyment of Music,” 1953. / 153 8. Wilfrid Mellers and Maurice Davies, “The Enjoyment of Music.” / 154 9. Wilfrid Mellers, “Music of the Viennese Classics.” / 164

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Music Examples 2.1. Johann Sebastian Bach, Orchestral Suite in B Minor for flute and strings, mm.20–24. / 61 2.2. Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony no.5 in C Minor, mm.1–4. / 61 2.3. Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony no.5 in C Minor, mm.63–66. / 61 3.1. Walford Davies, “Remark and Repartee,” including modified excerpts from Johann Sebastian Bach, E Major Fugue, Book 1. / 78 4.1. Benjamin Britten, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, Theme A, mm.1–4. / 105 4.2. Benjamin Britten, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, Variation B: Lento, mm.1–4. / 107 4.3. Benjamin Britten, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, Variation E: Brilliante: alla polacca, mm.1–4. / 108 4.4. Benjamin Britten, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, L’istesso Tempo, mm.1–6. / 111 6.1. Peter Maxwell Davies, O Magnum Mysterium, “The Fader of Heven.” / 182 6.2. Peter Maxwell Davies, O Magnum Mysterium, “Sonata I: Puer Natus,” mm.1–14. / 183 6.3. Peter Maxwell Davies, O Magnum Mysterium, “Sonata II: Lux Fulgebit,” mm.1–3. / 194 6.4. Peter Maxwell Davies, O Magnum Mysterium, “Sonata II: Lux Fulgebit,” mm.18–22. / 195

Chapter 1

The Art of Appreciation

It was not without reservations that BBC Television agreed to broadcast Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts.” Sometime around the start of 1967, Columbia Broadcasting System had been in touch with Humphrey Burton, head of Music and Arts Programmes at BBC-TV, to try to persuade the corporation to purchase a few of the programs.1 The Concerts had, by this time, been airing in the United States for nearly a decade. Initially broadcast live with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra from the nation’s most prestigious art music venue, New York’s Carnegie Hall, they had from their third season (1959–60) onward been recorded and, from November 1962, taken place in the Lincoln Center, which had opened earlier that year.2 The most recent seasons had benefitted from primetime slots, as programmers sought to diversify television’s offering in line with Federal Communications Commission chair Newton Minow’s exhortation that it should “serve the nation’s needs” rather than simply “cater to its whims.”3 With their aim of inspiring young people’s interests in art music, Bernstein’s Concerts seemed well positioned to further this civic agenda. But their popularity quickly began to wane; and soon, CBS would be embroiled in a struggle to find a sponsor for the eleventh season.4 From the American point of view, this was an opportune moment to expand the series’ international reach. On the other side of the pond, the desirability of airing the series was less certain. In the Concerts’ favor, their mission resonated with a 1

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decades-old concern in Britain to broaden access to art music. Over the preceding decade, the rise of both a British musical avant-garde and teenage pop culture had begun to open new directions in music education. Nevertheless, promoting the Western art music canon—as Bernstein’s concerts largely did, always in laudatory and sometimes even in deifying terms—remained a priority for many music educators.5 What’s more, whatever Bernstein’s approach lacked in innovation, it made up for in tried and tested familiarity. Somewhere between an illustrated talk and a symphony concert, each program began with a question about music that Bernstein explored using a combination of verbal explanation, short keyboard illustrations, and long extracts from orchestral works. Almost as old as the American symphony orchestra itself, this kind of event had been a staple of music education on both sides of the Atlantic for over half a century. Able to speak with “genial” clarity, Bernstein was a master of the genre. However, his expertise did not seem to be matched by the standard of production. When BBC-TV producer Walter Todds reviewed the episode titled “What Is Impressionism?” he perceived a host of deficiencies. For one thing, the sound quality was “abysmal” and lacking in presence.6 This not only marred the performance itself but, more concerningly, undermined the program’s pedagogic potential: close-up visual shots that might have helped young viewers to associate instruments with their individual timbres were left devoid of “aural meaning.” Some of the videography was similarly judged to be “very poor.” Todds singled out as evidence a shot of the trumpets that was “virtually nothing but heads and music stands.” No less problematic were the young people in the audience, who, as the reviewer tactfully put it, did not “always look as the producer had hoped (e.g., yawns).” If audience shots could serve as an implicit lesson in concert etiquette, these young listeners’ performance was below par. Finally, although the Concerts had a civic agenda, the negotiation between CBS and BBC-TV was also a commercial one. Michael Peacock, the Controller of BBC1 (for which the programs were being considered), was reluctant to pay the seemingly exorbitant fee that CBS initially proposed for the screenings.7 The discussions that must have ensued are undocumented in the BBC archives, but they culminated in the broadcasting of three Concerts. “What Is Melody?,” “What Is Sonata Form?,” and “What Is Impressionism?” aired on BBC1—the less highbrow of BBC-TV’s two channels— on consecutive Sunday afternoons in December 1967.8 If the Musical Times review is anything to go by, their reception was mixed. On the

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one hand, some of the more adventurous repertoire seemed misjudged. After questioning the choice of Hindemith’s “massively boring” Concert Music for Strings and Brass when “the whole of Stravinsky [was] there for the playing,” author Keith Spence went on to cite his ten-year-old daughter’s dismissal of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony as “too grown-up for children.”9 On the other hand, Bernstein’s easy-going manner was just what was needed to make the “love of good music . . . an accepted and natural thing.” Since British music educators tended to suffer from “prissiness” or a “patronizing attitude,” there was a lesson to be learned here. The programs, Spence advised, were “well worth the attention of any adult who is fascinated by .  .  . fostering the growth of musical knowledge in children.” •

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In their aims and methods, Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts” were designed to promote what an earlier generation of educators would have called “music appreciation.” This entailed far more than simply enjoying music. Rooted in the idea of listening as an “art,” “appreciation” described a process of acquiring specialist theoretical, historical, and biographical knowledge that would supposedly lead to enhanced musical understanding.10 In the words of the dictionary definition written by one of its pioneers, Percy Scholes, for his Oxford Companion to Music, it was “a form of educational training designed to cultivate in the pupil an ability to listen to seriously conceived music without bewilderment, and to hear with pleasure music of different periods and schools and varying degrees of complexity.”11 As Scholes’s words imply, it was first and foremost envisaged as a method of studying art music. Indeed, for its pioneers, music appreciation was a means both of sharing their love of music, and of justifying and promoting the system of cultural hierarchies to which they generally subscribed. This system measured artistic worth based on “highbrow” ideals of transcendence, autonomy, complexity, and timelessness, which were typically defined in opposition to “lowbrow” ephemerality, commercialism, and superficial, visceral appeal. Meanwhile, for its audiences, music appreciation was occasionally an unwelcome imposition and more often a sought-after leisure pastime variously pursued for enjoyment, self-improvement, or intellectual stimulation. Many encountered its methods for the first time as children, either within the context of school music teaching, or as an extracurricular activity. Because of its investments in old-fashioned ideas about “seriously conceived music,” its status as an educational (rather

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than an artistic) project, and its historical proximity to the discipline of musicology, which many contemporary scholars would find uncomfortable, music appreciation has featured at best peripherally in histories of twentieth-century music.12 Yet Bernstein’s celebrated “Young People’s Concerts” are a powerful testament to its pervasive and persistent presence in twentieth-century musical life—not just in the United States, but also in Britain and beyond. This book explores why and how music appreciation came to have such a far-reaching and defining impact—well beyond its origins as a late-Victorian liberal initiative in music education. In so doing, it tells a much bigger story than that of a particularly influential educational undertaking. For inasmuch as the appreciation movement was an attempt to negotiate art music’s place in a modernizing world, its concerns stretched far beyond music pedagogy. Efforts to nurture public interest in the arts inevitably intersected with questions about the commercialization of leisure. Discussions about how to manage the new forms of musical consumption facilitated by sound reproduction technologies were frequently bound up in debates about what “good” citizenship entailed. Disputes over the parameters of the Western art music canon reproduced wider tensions around the value of expert opinion. Educational initiatives were embedded in international cultural politics, as artists, educators, philanthropists, and policy makers (to name a few) worked within a transatlantic context and against the backdrop of a globalizing leisure industry. In short, music appreciation was entangled in a nexus of modern problems around leisure, education, and citizenship. Its history thus offers a powerful lens onto the central debates of twentieth-century musical culture. I want to be clear at the outset: this is not intended as a story of social progress and national enlightenment; nor is it a critique of an embattled elite caught in an increasingly futile struggle to protect high art from the modern threats of extinction on the one hand, or commodification on the other. The tension between sympathetic and censorious readings runs through the expanding body of scholarship on the creation and evolution of cultural hierarchies. The networks of individuals who promoted high art—whether ideologically, in practice, or both—have at one time or another been painted in both roles. Sometimes they have been defended as benevolent social reformers: an “intellectual aristocracy” (to borrow Noël Annan’s famous coinage) whose commitment to democratic ideals was expressed through a well-meaning paternalism that ran the risk of leveling artistic standards.13 At other times they have

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been fashioned as an arrogant, insecure elite whose primary concern was to preserve their self-appointed role as cultural guardians of the nation, even when doing so proved socially and culturally divisive.14 More often than not, the voices of the proverbial masses appear only in the margins, if at all. While such tensions are an inevitable undercurrent in what follows, it is not my concern to arbitrate. Narratives of progress and decline have been a recurrent trope in Western modernity, and they must above all be understood as historically contingent: they reveal perceptions of societal change, but not of any objective measure of value. Instead, drawing inspiration from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s observation that the past was made up of multiple simultaneous, conflicting presents, my interest lies in the myriad cultural negotiations: in the slippery terms in which musical hierarchies were framed; and in what appeared to be at stake in the fraught discussions that surrounded music appreciation.15 To chart the shifting contours of these debates, I focus on the decades from the 1920s, when rapid advances in sound reproduction technologies fueled new patterns of musical dissemination and consumption, to the early 1960s, when a burgeoning popular youth culture presented a new and powerful challenge to the highbrow/lowbrow dichotomy, at the same time as the heightened interest in the postwar avant-garde started to make its mark on music pedagogy. While remaining attuned to the international dimensions of the music appreciation movement, I center my account on Britain, grounding transnational debates in a specific set of historical concerns and historiographical trends. The remarkable accumulation of initiatives to create a larger and more diverse audience for art music in mid-twentieth-century Britain—and their enduring presence today—makes it a rich context for this study. Against this backdrop, each chapter reanimates the aspirations and anxieties of cultural entrepreneurs and, where possible, their audiences by providing a thick history of one initiative to broaden access to art music. I ask why these enterprises were born at their particular moments; explore the melee of utopian hopes and dystopian fears—of democratic intentions and illiberal attitudes—that underpinned them; and unpick the means through which they sought to mediate cultural access from distribution to consumption. The case studies have been chosen because they were at once atypical and representative: each, in its own way, was pioneering at its moment of conception; and yet, in part because of the powerful social and artistic connections of the progenitors, each quickly secured a place within what, for want of a less problematic term, we

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might call public culture. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, in confronting an acutely topical concern, these initiatives articulated ideas and practices that were already in the air. Any claim to innovation, then, was in the particular ways they adapted old cultural practices to emerging contexts.16 Together, these microhistories build a bigger picture. Indeed, by writing across the interwar, wartime, and immediate postwar years, I seek to disrupt scholarly narratives that have taken a strongly periodized perspective on culture at this time. This trend has been common across histories of the arts, even as the contours vary between disciplines. Perhaps the most pronounced example can be found in literary studies, where the influence of new historicism helped to consolidate the midcentury’s division into rough decades: the high modernism of the 1920s gave way to the politically oriented 1930s; then, following five years of war, a period of cultural stasis ensued before a generation of “angry young men” began to rejuvenate British culture.17 Meanwhile musicologists have often viewed the 1920s and 1930s as the heyday of the English Musical Renaissance; World War Two as a cultural hiatus; and the postwar decades as the era of the British musical avant-garde.18 There is, of course, some good historical justification for such an approach. Not least, it reflects the heightened temporal consciousness of a period studded with era-defining events: the end of World War One in 1918, the Wall Street Crash of 1929, or the advent of World War Two. Indeed, the fashioning of this historical view was begun by midcentury writers. To offer just one example, already in 1941, George Orwell observed that “Hitler’s attack on Poland in 1939 ended one epoch as surely as the great slump of 1931 ended another.”19 In addition, insisting on generational distinction was a common means by which young artists sought to carve out a distinctive identity from their forebears, a project pursued with particular conviction by the postwar avant-garde and their advocates. This way of writing history has also complemented prevailing scholarly sensibilities. For one thing, its emphasis on rupture and paradigm shifts broadly fits with the academy’s long-standing commitment to radical modernist ideals.20 For another, its associated methodologies, most notably close reading and thick history, are in keeping with the reaction against grand narratives, in particular their problematic tendency to overwrite localized experiences, that characterized much historical scholarship during the final decades of the last century.21 Nevertheless, despite these compelling historical and historiographical justifications, this approach is not without its limits. Most notably,

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the emphasis on disjuncture obscures the gradual currents of cultural change that were equally part of contemporary experience. The initiatives to create a broader audience for art music under consideration here shine a powerful light on this other side of twentieth-century modernity: they invite us to attend to what literary scholar Benjamin Kohlmann has called the “slow politics of reform,” which lack the glamour of speed and the provocative appeal of rupture.22 The sociopolitical developments that precipitated and underpinned reform agendas—the awkward transition to democracy, and the resulting paradox of a system that was justified by “projecting . . . aristocratic sensibilities outward onto humanity as a whole”—have often been viewed as defining traits of Western modernity.23 But if this is a story that could be told about any number of Western countries, creating space for “slow” histories is especially pertinent to Britain on account of its particular experience of modernity. As Richard Sheppard has observed, in Britain the sense of impending “apocalypse” was less intense than elsewhere for a variety of reasons, including the earlier impact of industrialization and urbanization, as well as the enduring commitment to liberal humanist values.24 It is also especially pertinent to the country’s midcentury musical culture, on which this slower modernity made a defining mark. As we will now see, this legacy has been a long-standing thorn in the flesh of British music histories—one that, as I will ultimately suggest, a longer perspective might help to redress.

British Music and Modernism It has become something of a truism to remark upon the mid-twentiethcentury British musical establishment’s uneasy relationship with modernism. The problem, simply put, is that the foremost composers of the day were less innovative than their continental counterparts; or, to frame the issue in the terms of the current discussion, that Britain’s slower modernity was blatantly manifested on the level of musical style. In an academy that has struggled to move beyond its commitment to what literary scholar Amanda Anderson describes as “the formally and conceptually challenging modes associated with radicalism,” scholars have persistently treated this belatedness as a problem demanding explanation, if not resolution.25 The ongoing prevalence of composerwork studies in the field has only exacerbated the situation, in part because such studies tend to foreground matters of compositional style, and in part because of the particular composers who have dominated

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scholarly enquiry (Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams are prime examples).26 The most recent attempts to extricate Britain’s midcentury musical culture from its dubious reputation have fallen broadly into two camps. On the one hand, revisionist historians have sought to restore a more multifaceted picture of Britain’s cultural landscape by challenging accepted ideas about the absence of the European modernist tradition, as well as about the terms on which composers in Britain engaged with it.27 Useful correctives, such accounts have begun to recover the matrix of conflicting beliefs and practices that made up midcentury Britain’s art music world. On the other hand, scholars have embraced the widespread movement within the academy advocating a broader understanding of modernism and have argued for a reassessment of a host of composers, compositions, and institutions traditionally labeled conservative. In the wake of Miriam Hansen’s much-cited (and widely misappropriated) article on “vernacular modernism,” some have proposed that modernism should be understood not simply in terms of aesthetics, but also as a response to modernizing tendencies.28 Others have appealed to early critical invocations of the word modern, suggesting that a leap of the historical imagination might create the necessary distance for us to perceive what was once radically new about music that is now comfortably familiar.29 These new avenues have proved expedient for British music studies, allowing scholars to contest the long-derided conservativism of their historical subjects. However, they have done so on grounds that limit both our understanding of modernism and—more pressingly for my study—of other cultural traditions, as well as the often fractious interactions between them. As far as modernism is concerned, our understanding of its role within twentieth-century culture more broadly risks losing its historical specificity, as “modernism” becomes a catch-all for any cultural product that can persuasively be presented as somehow responding to modernity.30 At the same time, scholars have continued to accept modernism as an arbiter of value, invoking it as an honorific. This perspective has not only perpetuated old anxieties about Britain’s relationship to a continental other that is consistently imagined as more innovative, more progressive, and timelier; it has also left scholars embroiled in wrangling over aesthetic worth, as they have struggled to accommodate ill-fitting repertory within a narrative that privileges radical responses to modernization above all else. By continuing to approach Britain’s musical culture through the polarizing terms set by a coterie of

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midcentury continental composers and propagated by the postwar academic establishment, academics have displaced its midcentury cultural ideologies with a later set of scholarly priorities. In so doing, they have left little space for mapping in-between cultural spaces on their own, often contradictory terms. This account takes an altogether different starting point. Its driving contention is this: If musical culture in Britain was undoubtedly less stylistically experimental than on the Continent, this was because throughout this period, composers’, critics’, and policy-makers’ desires for stylistic innovation remained in tension with their commitment to broadening access to high culture. Indeed, while the British musical establishment professed many of the “highbrow” values that came to define high modernism—such as an uneasiness with mass cultural forms and a belief in art music as transcendent, autonomous, and above commercialism—it simultaneously played a central role in mediating the distribution of high culture on an unprecedented scale: through nationwide programs of concerts; through radio and cinema; and through formal channels of music education. The music appreciation movement with which this book is centrally concerned cut across all of these spheres. While not responsible for every initiative to broaden access, its advocates were key players in the field. The widespread commitment to broadening access was not only articulated in critical discourse and cultural policies; in musical terms, it also found expression in cultural products. It shaped both how old repertories were appropriated and the aesthetics of new compositions. Its impact was most obvious where music with an educational or social agenda was concerned. Even more than repertoire for the professional stage, the stories of these musical works have been downplayed in scholarship. The accessible compositional styles arising from the blend of artistic and social impulses have proved particularly difficult to accommodate within the academy’s historic commitment to the ideals of autonomous art works and aesthetic innovation.31 As we will see, however, for contemporary composers and critics, stylistic accessibility was in such instances not just necessary but also desirable. Far from simply chronicling institutional reforms, then, I seek to document an emergent cultural milieu—one that provided the fertile ground in which music appreciation would flourish and that this far-reaching pedagogic movement in turn helped to configure. Already by the early 1920s, this milieu’s impact was becoming so pervasive that a new term entered the vernacular to describe it: the middlebrow. Closely intertwined with

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technological innovations, engaged with the democratic idealism underpinning recent constitutional reforms, but paradoxically committed to highbrow ideals of art as autonomous and transcendent, the middlebrow was situated at the crux of Britain’s experience of mid-twentiethcentury modernity. This cultural category invites us to explore how the period’s musical culture was necessarily inextricably intertwined with modernizing processes, but without obscuring its conflicted relationship with modernism.32 The middlebrow allows us, in other words, to reassess those aspects of Britain’s musical culture that have encouraged its image as insular and regressive on more historically sensitive terms: to reconsider its imagined relationship with European and American culture; to make sense of aesthetic modernism’s status as both an increasingly influential and contested cultural presence; and to take a less anachronistic approach to exploring the connections between repertories and styles that scholars traditionally viewed as disparate. Invoking this midcentury category is a gesture that risks causing contention, not least with those who have sought to elevate British music’s status through appeals to modernism. Despite—or perhaps because of— the centrality of middlebrow culture, the term has, since its instantiation, more often been the subject of derision than respect. Responding to this, musicologists have been slow to follow in the footsteps of the literary and film scholars who pioneered the field of middlebrow studies.33 There are to date only a handful of studies that concern the musical middlebrow. The first explicit engagement came from popular music scholars, who used the middlebrow to explain the processes through which popular musicians sought cultural elevation.34 This is an alternative perspective from that offered here in relation to midcentury Britain’s art music world, in which the term captured a tension between broadening access and guarding highbrow status. Meanwhile, historians researching art music in the American context have tended to view the middlebrow as predominantly a social phenomenon, focusing on processes of cultural mediation.35 The most recent contribution to the study of cultural hierarchies in Britain, Alexandra Wilson’s Opera in the Jazz Age, reproduces this trend, choosing reception studies as a primary methodology.36 While this scholarship has provided foundational insights into the workings of middlebrow institutions and the discourse surrounding them, it has also overlooked aesthetic and stylistic questions relating to the production of musical culture. If the oversight is simply a matter of individual scholarly preferences, it arguably implicates historic hierarchies in subtle ways, as

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middlebrow cultural products are consigned to the realm of social rather than aesthetic interest. The case for a more multifaceted approach is put forward in another recent publication, Christopher Chowrimootoo’s Middlebrow Modernism, which uses Benjamin Britten’s postwar operas to illuminate the aesthetic, stylistic, and critical ambivalences that shaped modernism.37 Taking the middlebrow compromises in Britten’s music on their own terms, this account uncovers how critical practices fed into compositional process and vice versa. The present study builds on this scholarship in two ways. First, it takes a longer historical perspective, exploring the middlebrow’s evolution from its late-Victorian roots, through its midcentury heyday, to the early 1960s, when the accumulating status of popular music reached a tipping point, catalyzing a reconfiguration of the prevailing system of cultural hierarchies.38 Second, by putting musical works into dialogue with the institutions that played an increasingly powerful role in mediating cultural access throughout this period, it brings to light the cultural mechanisms through which middlebrow values became pervasive in Britain, as well as suggesting how they found expression in particular stylistic trends.

Music Appreciation and the “Middlebrow” From its conception, the term middlebrow was as contested as the cultural milieu that it attempted to describe. Its precise origin is hard to pin down: scholarly conjectures have ranged from an unspecified “reported appearance” in 1906 to the infamous Punch cartoon published in 1925 satirizing BBC audiences.39 Moreover, as we will later see, many of the cultural practices and values with which the word was associated can be traced back to the nineteenth century. What is certain, however, is that, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, changes in Britain’s social, technological, and political landscapes accumulated in a way that gave old cultural trends a new urgency. Their heightened significance was reflected in the new label: the idea of “middlebrow” culture encapsulated a constellation of concerns that had become acutely timely. Once the term entered common parlance, it quickly stuck. Already by 1927, the writer and public intellectual J. B. Priestley judged that there was no point refuting the language of the brows, for it was here to stay.40 The middlebrow’s earliest appearances occurred in discussions about the pursuit of cultural elevation, which was usually understood as being part of a broader agenda of social mobility. Like

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its counterparts “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” “middlebrow” was soon being applied to multiple aspects of the cultural field. In the hands of diverse writers, it was used to denote particular audiences; to explain modes of reception; to characterize institutions and cultural mediators; or to delineate artistic styles—literary, musical, and visual.41 Again like its counterparts, it was invoked with an array of contradictory connotations, from the disparaging to the defiant. With its expansive reach, the middlebrow implicated a broad range of musical styles (along with their respective audiences). At the lower end were the “light classics,” a term that broadly described the most accessible repertoire within the Western art tradition: Strauss waltzes, Hungarian rhapsodies, famous operetta numbers, and so on.42 Performed by everything from salon orchestras to dance bands and in original form or arrangement, this genre was epitomized by “pops” concerts and the last night of the Proms.43 “Middlebrow” was also commonly associated with the music of more “serious” contemporary composers who had shunned the atonal revolution in favor of tonality. In Constant Lambert’s 1934 polemic Music Ho!, Edward Elgar and Sibelius were held up as exemplary: at once “great” and “popular,” in Lambert’s eyes they represented the last generation of composers who had managed to stay “in touch with the public” while also composing music of “spiritual and technical” distinction.44 Meanwhile later in the century, critic Andrew Porter implicitly extended the category to include members of Britain’s musical avant-garde. The likes of Alexander Goehr, Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, and Malcolm Williamson, he posited, were authors of “an extraordinarily healthy and vital corpus of ‘central’ music, neither reactionary nor avant-garde.”45 If there appears to be little stylistic consistency across this middlebrow spectrum, what this repertoire had in common was that it trod the line between being accessible and prestigious in a way that prevented it from straightforwardly fitting into either the “highbrow” or “lowbrow” camp. While the cited critics presented middlebrow attributes positively, such traits were just as often a source of anxiety or downright repudiation. The in-betweenness of the cultural middle was at once a boon and a bane to those pursuing uplift. While the finer details of the boundary lines between musical styles and genres were often uncomfortably ambiguous, the various levels broadly mapped out a path for progression. Over and above the imagined distinction between art and popular music, the subdivisions within the art music world could prove useful here. If lighter repertory typically attracted larger audiences, it promised

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a way to overcome the initial hurdle of drawing new faces into the concert hall. One of the most famous advocates of this approach was impresario Robert Newman. His oft-cited vision for the London Promenade Concerts was to “train the public by easy stages. . . . Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music.”46 Whereas the lighter repertory’s commercial value prompted some to dismiss it as second-rate, Newman and his cofounder Henry Wood showed few qualms in programming it: confident that the public would quickly progress onto “higher” things, they embraced the light classics as a stepping-stone. Where initiatives like the Proms sought to elevate taste largely through exposure, music appreciation proposed a more academic approach: one premised on enhancing musical understanding through education. The notion that acquiring taste was an incremental process held an equally foundational place within this system. While an early appreciation manual advised that “the power of assimilating music . . . may be gradually developed,” students often talked about “graduating” to “good” music.47 In this instance, however, it was not just the music presented for study that created avenues for uplift. Appreciation teachers also used a range of methods to explain music; the kinds of knowledge that they variously promoted were thought about in similarly hierarchical terms. Although written from a detractor’s point of view, Adorno’s posthumously published “Analytical Study of the NBC ‘Music Appreciation Hour’ ” verily described one path along which many educators sought to guide young listeners: from “seeing a flute,” to conjuring up visual associations such as “a thunder storm,” before finally learning “to listen to music as music.”48 In this scheme, facts about music were superseded by more creative responses, which in turn paved the way for “musical” understanding. Another method rejected the use of visual images (which were especially contentious where abstract music was concerned), focusing instead on music’s constituent features. Novice listeners would begin their studies with “the more superficial phases of the art”—that is, “the ‘tune’ ”—before progressing to more advanced matters such as harmony and form.49 In every case, the ultimate goal was to promote a critical approach that supposedly enabled “active” or “intelligent” listening. This hierarchy in modes of reception reflected a conviction that how the public listened was perhaps even more significant than what they listened to. In a roundabout way, this belief was a response to the mistrust in public taste fueled by changing patterns of cultural distribution.

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For while technological advances made high art more widely accessible, they also facilitated the expansion of commercial mass culture. Music educators and critics frequently cited the increasingly hegemonic presence of the latter as evidence that the public were not naturally inclined to exercise sufficient levels of judgment. What’s more, they insisted that mass culture stoked the problem it had created by offering “cheap and easy pleasures” that supposedly encouraged “passive” engagement.50 Anxieties about public complacency (which was probably more imagined than real) were compounded by the rise of extremist politics and the unprecedented expansion of the electorate brought about by recent constitutional reforms.51 Imagining the shape of future society to be at stake, middlebrow educators sought to intervene, equipping listeners with the necessary tools for discernment. There was not always agreement about what the application of these tools might look like in practice. Some maintained that a love of mass culture and good taste were mutually exclusive. Others acknowledged the tendency to equate indiscriminate taste and mass culture for what it was—an intellectual conceit.52 This was the stance that Priestley took in his famous “High, Low, Broad” essay, in which he charged lowbrows and highbrows alike with being “equally and hopelessly uncritical.” In contrast, he styled those “broadbrows” who occupied the space between as having “real taste,” evidenced by their capability “of exercising independent judgment.”53 Ultimately, however, there were few who questioned the privileged status attached to intellectual modes of reception. Even among those who accepted that the public would make its own cultural judgments (whether because it was a right, or because societal trends made it inevitable), there was a general assumption that, to be valid, opinions must be rooted in critical engagement. In promoting a “proper” way to listen, music appreciation’s function within the multifaceted middlebrow landscape went beyond offering a route to cultural uplift. It also cultivated a language and a method through which its practitioners could account for, and so preserve, the alleged superiority of “good” music. Its narrative of music history was framed as a series of groundbreaking “great” composers writing timeless works. More significantly, the analytical tools that it promoted were ultimately designed to tease out “highbrow” qualities of autonomy, transcendence, and innovation—at an elementary level, simply by foregrounding the “music itself,” and as students progressed, by revealing the depths of meaning that supposedly resided in the music’s form. While

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the appreciation movement was conceived to diversify the audience for art music, then, it was paradoxically invested in many of the elitist ideals that were simultaneously being peddled by high modernists. What’s more, where practice and ideology diverged, appreciation advocates frequently resorted to acts of disavowal that several studies have shown to be central tools in modernists’ rhetorical apparatus.54 For all the things it had in common with modernism, however, there was a crucial difference: music appreciation’s success as a pedagogic enterprise made its investments in the marketplace irrevocably transparent. As such, it seemed—from another perspective—to embody the deepest threat that the capitalist forces of marketization posed to the arts: the prioritization of commercial considerations over artistic ones. Viewed through this lens, music appreciation became an obvious target for anti-middlebrow critique. Indeed, it was precisely this kind of pedagogic initiative that Virginia Woolf had in mind when, in her now-famous diatribe against the middlebrow—a letter written to, but never published in, the New Statesman—she insisted that such efforts to “teach” culture were motivated not by a real interest in art, but rather by a desire to make money. Treating culture primarily as a status symbol, middlebrow educators supposedly prospered by promoting their misplaced belief that a “cultured” cachet was something one could buy.55 Indeed, as Adorno’s NBC critique made clearer, what detractors found so problematic about such initiatives was the way in which they seemed to standardize the process of music education, as they disseminated knowledge about art under the veil of a “real” artistic encounter. Or, in his damning words, they promoted “some vague and largely erroneous information about music and the recognition of stiffly conventional musical values, instead of . . . a living relationship with music.”56 By distilling music history into a sequence of clearly defined stylistic periods and advertising a set of analytical tools that enabled the average listener to dissect their “standardized” forms, music appreciation, Adorno alleged, created a “pseudo-culture”: a “fictious musical world” brewed from a toxic mix of “personalities, stylistic labels, and predigested values” and “conventional, stereotyped”: audience reception.57 Adorno’s uncompromising dismissal of middlebrow pedagogy is remarkably like his critiques of mass culture. With its polemical tone, it betrayed the same “anxiety of contamination”—the evocative phrase coined by Andreas Huyssen to describe the deep-seated fear that highbrow culture would be tarnished by its associations with mass cultural forms and practices.58 It was a fear that Woolf, along with other

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modernist critics of the middlebrow (perhaps most famously, Clement Greenberg and the Leavises), shared.59 However, as she explained, it was not lowbrow culture, but rather middlebrow culture that posed the real threat. The middlebrow exhibited many of the worst traits of mass culture; but where lowbrows made no pretense to be anything other than what they were, middlebrows sought to dress their “sham” tastes up as truly artistic. As a result, middlebrow practice seemed blatantly to undermine many of the highbrow ideologies it professed. Worse than simply rendering middlebrow culture phony, this facet also risked disclosing modernists’ complicity in the modernizing trends, such as commercialization, that they so vehemently disavowed. A space into which cultural hierarchies threatened to implode, the middlebrow exposed the fault lines not just between highbrow and lowbrow, but more alarmingly within the art world itself. If, then, as Laura Tunbridge has suggested, commentators drew distinctions between high-, low- and middlebrow confidently, the preoccupation with demarcating the battle lines indicated that the distinctions between cultural forms and their audiences were far from clear cut.60 When, following critics’ lead, the public began freely to appropriate the “-brows” as identity markers, the growing number of voices in the debate only emphasized the lack of consensus about who or what they denoted.61 In part, this was because what fell into which category depended to some extent on where the person making the assessment was standing. As composer Julius Harrison explained, “The Plimsoll mark of the ‘middle-brow’ [has] never been accurately laid down, and so the ‘highs’ and the ‘lows’ [are] continually quarrelling over the disputed boundary line.”62 It was also a reflection of the reality that high, middle, and low had far more in common than most were prepared to admit. Music appreciation initiatives offer a revealing lens onto these crossovers, for their instigators were motivated by a dual, paradoxical impetus. They sought at once to mediate and to defend cultural hierarchies: to establish a larger and more diverse audience for art music through increasing dissemination, while also protecting its highbrow status by guiding reception. The rhetorical, pedagogic, and compositional strategies that they employed will be the focus of the chapters that follow. However, before we begin our journey through the decades that mark the heyday of the middlebrow, I want briefly to explore how this cultural milieu arose from Britain’s particular experience of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernity. This entails sketching some further

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threads in the web of social and political developments against which the debate about cultural hierarchies played out. As a way in, I start with the shift in attitude toward education that took place around the turn of the century—not because it was in any sense a primary cause, but rather because it is a useful node from which to track the middlebrow’s various constituting factors: the legacy of Victorian liberal thought; the advent of political democracy; the technological advances that fueled the modern leisure industry; the concurrent growth in public demand for art music; and the increasingly open attitude to centralized modes of governance that propelled Britain’s emerging welfare state. Against this backdrop, we can account for why art music was appropriated to social reform agendas, for who was promoting broader access, and for the structures through which they sought to connect with the aspirational public—in short, for precisely how and why a musical middlebrow became so pervasive.

Middlebrow Culture and Modern Britain Sometime around the end of the nineteenth century, Britain began to experience what philosopher and public intellectual Cyril Joad later described as “a revolution in the conception of education.”63 He put the change down to two “realizations” that had emerged in response to changes in Britain’s sociopolitical landscape. First, he detected a more holistic vision that emphasized the importance of “develop[ing] our latent potentialities . . . to become all that we have it in us to be.” He contended that “if we are to become whole men and women, we need, concurrently with the growth of intellect, a parallel development of feeling, of emotion, and of aesthetic insight.”64 As he went on to clarify, this did not mean the hedonistic pursuit of culture for its own ends—an approach for which first advocates of aestheticism and then modernists frequently came under fire—but rather cultivating a measured appreciation of beauty as a basis of good living. Second, he reported a growing belief that to achieve this, the public needed training in how to spend their free time. In his words, they had to be educated such that “they may tolerate their leisure without becoming a misery to themselves and a nuisance to others.” Despite Joad’s claims about the novelty of these realizations, neither was in and of itself without precedent. If the first was indicative of a heightening anti-intellectualism in interwar Britain (about which more will be said shortly), this liberal perspective on education also had roots

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in the nineteenth century. In particular, it stemmed from the Victorian ideal of “cultivation”: the development of character as a means of personal betterment and social amelioration.65 High culture had a central place in this vision of uplift. The contemplation of beauty was imagined as a route to moral fulfilment for the individual, as well as to a peaceful order for society. Perhaps the most famous articulation of these ideas was in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Written in 1867 in the aftermath of the Hyde Park Riots, the text argued that high culture could empower the population to think critically and reflectively, resolving “present difficulties” by liberating the public from the “stock notions and habits, which we [i.e., society at large] now follow staunchly but mechanically.”66 Similarly, how the public spent their free time was also central to the discourse of “cultivation.” Throughout the Victorian era, social reformers had sought to appropriate culture to a variety of interrelated ends: whether to protect the public against supposed corruption, to help them maintain respectability, or—as in Arnold’s case—to encourage the pursuit of enlightenment. On what basis, then, could the philosopher announce a “revolution”? The perception of a palpable change in attitude was first and foremost indicative of the heightened urgency that the Victorian civilizing mission acquired from the end of the century in response to developments in Britain’s sociopolitical landscape. For one thing, awareness of a rising tide of poverty inspired a new perspective on working-class plight. It exposed the fact that, to date, individual philanthropic initiatives promoting social elevation through self-improvement had been of limited impact; this in turn opened up the possibility that the workingclass predicament was less a result of individual immorality (as had traditionally been claimed) than of having been dealt an unlucky lot in an unjust world.67 No less significant was the establishment of a full, representative political democracy in the aftermath of World War One, a process that had been incrementally underway since the Reform Act of 1832. Even those sections of the governing classes that welcomed the change were hesitant about the public’s ability to discharge their newly acquired political rights with appropriate responsibility. Their concerns were compounded by the increasingly mechanized nature of modern, capitalist society, which threatened to reduce man to little more than a generic cog in a gargantuan industrial machine. The resulting de-individuation not only contravened personal freedom, an ideal that was central to the liberal ethos that had long prevailed among the governing classes; it also

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exacerbated fantasies of the public as an unruly mass.68 As the specialization of labor made the workplace less fulfilling, the rapid expansion of mass media and the “Americanization” that so often followed supposedly had a similar effect on free time.69 Rather than preparing the public to fulfil their civic duties, the leisure industry seemed only to encourage inertia, vacuity, and escapism: qualities that hardly seemed a desirable basis on which to build what Dan LeMahieu famously termed “a culture for democracy.”70 At the same time as these anxieties were brewing, rising levels of literacy and wealth, the increase in leisure time resulting from a more regulated labor market, and the growing affordability of sound reproduction technologies were driving an expanding market for high cultural pursuits. The clear public demand for the arts was another contributory factor to an increasingly centralized approach: where during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, statutory support had been at best sporadic (or, in music’s case, almost entirely lacking), the early and mid-twentieth century saw progressively more sustained interventions, ranging from greater financial support for cultural institutions (famously the BBC and the Arts Council), to more legislation concerning arts education.71 In line with a general move toward centralized modes of governance, the arts became more formally intertwined with governmental agendas. If “ ‘fellowship’ and the development of ‘personality’ ” were to be “active ingredients of civic life,” there was a growing belief that the state had a part to play in fostering these.72 As ideas about high culture’s place in society were debated within an ongoing program of social reform, the civilizing mission became more generous. For those pursuing this mission, the concurrent rise of modernism made the need for other, more accessible cultural forms only more apparent. The widespread ambivalence toward modernism and the divisions it appeared to cause in the reading and listening public fueled a growing anti-intellectualism.73 It was not just the public who held this bias: it was shared by many of those who might have been classed as “intellectuals.” Onetime Oxford don, the historian George Malcolm Young, for example, argued in a 1937 essay that the “terrorists of the higher culture” posed a greater threat to civilization than the press.74 The damage done by the “mischief of the sniff-brow pose,” he warned, began early in life, as it “frighten[ed] the young out of the honest, immature enjoyment which is the lure of attention and the foundation of judgement.” Over time, it quashed the “Liberal Curiosity”—the thirst for discovery and knowledge—that he considered the lifeblood of alert, living societies.

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Drawing a direct link back to the mid-Victorian era, when such a culture had supposedly existed, Young concluded: “A true, a sound, a social culture must be middle-brow, the high-brow elements serving as exploratory antennae, to discover and capture new ideas for the middle-brow mass to assimilate.”75 In direct disagreement with the likes of Woolf and Adorno, Young insisted that only by nurturing middlebrow culture would the public be saved from becoming an unthinking mass. In sum, the idea of a middlebrow encompassed both the most and least optimistic responses to modernization. A contested terrain, it spoke to the new possibilities for distributing and accessing high art, as well as to the dangers that this seemed to pose to highbrow values and cultural production. As we have already seen, discussions centered as much on modes of reception as on the scope of high culture’s dissemination: the question of how to read, listen, and view seemed as important as what the objects of (in)attention were. For those who believed that a cultured public was desirable and possible, just as for those members of the public who pursued culture for themselves, education was a primary vehicle. Consequently, in both a conceptual and a practical sense the middlebrow was strongly tied to the expanding provision of both state schooling and adult education. Liberal values (which had hitherto been the preserve of elitist establishments) held an important, albeit unstable, place in the developing education system, cementing a link between education at school and the edification of public leisure in reformers’ aspirations. Acoustician H. Lowery paraphrased the position held by many in a discussion about the musical education of children: “While discrimination and maturity of judgment only come with the growth of years, it is much more likely to be a gradual exercise if founded on a solid tradition of excellence.”76 The hope was that good schooling would foster an interest in learning and self-improvement, and that this in turn would have a lifelong impact on how the public spent their free time.77 While it would be reductive to describe Britain’s emerging middlebrow as a form of children’s or youth culture, as Lowery’s comment suggests, these demographics often held a special place within reformers’ imaginations. Where in the nineteenth century educational schemes had predominantly targeted adults, from around the turn of the century, children had begun to figure more centrally in discussions. Their prominent presence in middlebrow discourse was indicative of how over the previous half-century attitudes toward childhood had changed, as it was ever more widely viewed as a period that should be set apart to allow gradual growth to maturity.78 Spurred on by a growing volume of legislation, this

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emerging perspective brought what Stephen Kline describes as a “new force and legitimacy to children’s leisure and their learning”—another trend that was heightened by the fallout from World War One.79 Having had childhoods dominated by war, the generation that came of age in the 1920s determined that their children’s lives would not be similarly marred. Their commitment was aptly captured by writers Robert Graves and Alan Hodge: from now on, children would “have as healthy and happy a childhood as possible and be encouraged from the first to become industrious and responsible citizens of the world.”80 Since policy makers usually understood “responsible” citizenship in liberal terms, the nurturing of “good” taste was a recurrent theme in aspirations for childhood. What’s more, if innocence made children and young people more impressionable, they seemed to exhibit a different kind of agency from adults. They thus offered a more pliable canvas onto which reformers could project their most utopian ambitions.

The Music Educator Network When it came to matters of musical taste, the individuals who sought to offer a guiding hand were multifarious. Their number included composers, conductors, and practicing musicians; university professors, schoolteachers, and Board of Education officials; businessmen, philanthropists, critics, and journalists. Often, a given person performed several such roles. While broadening access to art music was, of course, far from their only concern, it was an issue that repeatedly drew interested parties together, both in the discursive sphere of published criticism and around specific projects. For example, they coalesced at formal conventions such as the Anglo-American Music Conference that took place in 1929 and 1932; on institutional governing bodies, like that of the BBC or of the Robert Mayer Concerts for Children; or on the boards of consultative committees that helped to shape governmental policy on music education, like that charged in the early 1930s with producing a report on the state of music teaching in Cambridgeshire. By the early 1920s, such initiatives were occurring with sufficient frequency that contemporary writers began to gesture to the amorphous social network that surrounded them as if it had a distinctive group identity. Avoiding any mention of experts or intelligentsia (both words that, while in many regards fitting, evoked the negative connotations of “intellectualism”), journalists generally used the descriptors educators or educationists. They were deeply equivocal terms: rather like the middlebrow milieu that these educators

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were helping to shape, the specific connotations at any given moment seem to have been down to the perspective of the author. In the hands of detractors, they could suggest anything from the “boring” or the “distasteful” to pedantic or moralistic killjoys.81 On the other hand, for those who were happy to self-identify as such, they were suggestive of cultural enlightenment, individual wholeness, and social mindedness.82 Critical nomenclature aside, to what extent the individuals implicated in this “professional-cum-administrative-cum-academic” network at any given time subscribed to a collective identity and, if so, what form it took, is hard to pin down.83 Even among its most prominent members, social and educational backgrounds were heterogeneous. If the majority were born into what John Baxendale describes as “the rising class of the late Victorian and Edwardian era—the lower middle class of small business, minor professionals, state functionaries, clerks and the like,” their number also included those with a more illustrious parentage (Cambridge professor Edward Dent, son of the East Midlands landowner and politician John Dent, is a notable example).84 While many received formal music training and education through traditional routes, others— such as pioneer of broadcast music talks Percy Scholes and university professor William Gillies Whittaker—were autodidacts. And of course, membership of the group was fluid, as new blood erratically replaced old. What is more, although they shared an interest in societal reform, they never produced anything as definitive as a manifesto. Where they are known or can be inferred, political affiliations, official and otherwise, also seem to have cut across the spectrum: the prevailing social and cultural attitude among music educators was undoubtedly a liberal one; but with the decline of the Liberal Party following its electoral defeat in 1922 and subsequent reconfiguration of Parliament, reformers struggled to find a party that satisfied both their economic and social agendas.85 This provided them a further motive for channeling energies toward social and cultural causes, which offered alternative forums through which to pursue reform. The new focus for their energies was reflected in strengthening ties between local and national, and between individual and governmental musical agendas. Meanwhile within the reconfigured political landscape, Left and Right often took similar stances on questions pertaining to the state of contemporary culture, even if for differing reasons. The prevailing resistance to the rise of mass culture is a prime example. On the Left, as historian Jeff Hill has explained, mass leisure activities were widely thought to promote “ ‘capitalist values,’ not least among which was an inertia and indolence of

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mind on the part of the very workers whose support the socialist movement was seeking.”86 The political Right, lamenting Britain’s apparent failure to produce a prestigious national culture, viewed the growth of popular culture as painful evidence of societal decline.87 As Britain’s move toward centralized governance was a gradual process, the informal networks of non-statutory organizations that had long operated around the edge of Parliament and beyond retained a significant influence. Their usual modus operandi is neatly captured by Joseph Nye’s idea of “soft power.” Defined by its author as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments,” this concept evokes the genteel modes of persuasion through which those with access to networks of power typically sought to exercise influence.88 These methods and the particular mode of governance to which they gave rise had a determinative impact on Britain’s field of middlebrow cultural production: they created an informal social infrastructure that not only aided the exchange of ideas, but also bridged the various forums in which the ideological commitment to broadening access to high culture was translated into practice. To be more specific, the interaction between governmental and extragovernmental groups points to the close interpersonal connections and shared ideological values between what Mandler and Pedersen describe as the “governing” and the “cultivated” classes—links established during the Victorian era but persisting into the twentieth century.89 Wellconnected, educated and enterprising, the “cultivated” class functioned as intermediaries between state and civil society, acting at the points where the two groups’ respective ideological and practical agendas intersected and could be pursued to mutual benefit. Their influence was also a product of the new role for the expert that had developed alongside the expanding governmental remit. As Chris Otter details, already by the end of the Victorian era, “parliament was simply too small and too full of politicians to be able to consider in detail the physics of road surfaces, the chemistry of foodstuffs, or the biology of sewage”—or, we might add, music’s place in school curricula, the distribution of radio airtime between popular and classical styles, ways of expanding concert audiences.90 Those in advisory roles, and their extended networks, thus played a vital role in articulating social problems and imagining solutions, influencing which concerns became priority political issues.91 This was particularly important where something like music was concerned: since its place in the new order remained precarious, there was a constant need for advocacy to guard its role in national culture.

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This loose network of music educators lies in the background of the chapters of this book, which follow the debate about broadening access to art music through a miscellany of enterprises. The stories they tell are, in one sense, those of the cultivated class—of cultured values, of cultured discourse, of high cultural products; they obviously cannot be taken as unproblematic evidence of attitudes toward art music in general. In addition, the evidence offered is indicative more of how listening and citizenship were imagined than necessarily of how they were practiced. As Carolyn Abbate has reminded us, “an imaginarium, the imaginative proposals and speculations within a given culture at a given time, is a receptive, malleable, and changeable corpus, but an actual human being is far less so.”92 Failure to acknowledge this might invite charges of reproducing the presumptive paternalism that, as previously noted, inspired much midcentury educational discourse. Nevertheless, to understand what follows exclusively as intellectual history is equally problematic on several grounds. First, doing so does not adequately acknowledge the breadth of these educators’ sphere of influence. Taking advantage of their ability to access networks of power, they became responsible for making decisions that shaped art music culture on a national scale. As well as playing a significant role in determining what music was performed in concert halls, churches, and over the airwaves, they dominated the musical press: while journalists frequently reported on their activities (with varying degrees of enthusiasm), their writings negotiated the terms of critical discourse and offered guidance on reception. Their wide-ranging impact reflected the general pattern of social reform. As Daniel Rodgers has shown, despite a growing number of workers’ associations, it remained the “bourgeois and university-based reformers [who] carried a weight in the formation of the new social politics so far beyond what their numbers might suggest.”93 In short: theirs were the social networks through which middlebrow cultural values and practices became pervasive. Second, to insist that this cultural milieu was essentially elitist risks foreclosing the possibility that members of the public might have bought into it or adapted it for their own purposes—or conversely, that educators were to a greater or lesser degree responding to public demand for high culture. Indeed, the fashion for self-study was sufficiently widespread in the midcentury that music appreciation quickly became a lucrative commercial enterprise. The history of Scholes’s Oxford Companion offers one compelling testament: following its initial publication in 1938, the hefty volume went through seven editions in under a decade—even in

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the face of wartime austerity. What’s more, particularly where initiatives targeting adults were concerned, but also to a lesser extent those for children (where attendance often depended on an enabling adult), there is evidence that educators took audience preferences into consideration. Rather than reducing the middlebrow to “bourgeois norms imposed from above,” then, a more judicious approach would be to ask how beyond intellectual circles these values held “their own cultural distinctiveness as forms of life.”94 Tracing the middlebrow’s history “from below” was not the primary aim of this project. Nevertheless, in a bid to acknowledge that the milieu was shaped through a dialogue between educators, educational products, and their audiences, I have, where possible, set practitioners’ opinions in counterpoint with those of individuals who encountered their schemes. As the scattered pieces of reception by those not formally writing as critics show, opinion was as varied among the “public” as it could be among the critical establishment (and one would expect no less).

“Art and Everyman” The chapters that follow are deliberately eclectic. Ranging from concerts for children to adult education classes, the variety of subjects suggests the diverse responses elicited by the desire to broaden access to art music. Although, in a characteristically modernist act of disavowal, some of the practitioners we will encounter denied any associations with music appreciation, their methods and aims are in every case consistent with its agenda. Each initiative invites us to focus on a specific area of cultural negotiation in which middlebrow entrepreneurs were implicated—be it the relationship between education and entertainment, art and commerce, highbrow and lowbrow genres, active and passive modes of reception, emotional and intellectual responses, or past and present. While the enterprises pose individual sets of questions, however, there are also striking continuities; indeed, the central narrative of any one chapter could also have been traced through the entire book. The assorted coverage points to the transferability of ideas and practices across different media and across a variety of musical genres and styles. The alternation between initiatives aimed primarily at children and those targeted at adults suggests an aspiration to impact the breadth of society. It is my hope that each close-up will be read with one eye constantly on the long historical view, which helps not only to account for the pervasiveness of the middlebrow phenomenon

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in twentieth-century British modernity, but also to explain why what on the surface were debates about music education aroused such ire. Chapter 2 sets the scene for subsequent chapters, exploring an issue that fueled the preoccupation with broadening cultural access: the “problem of leisure.” This phrase encapsulated a set of interrelated concerns arising from the growth in the public’s spare time and disposable income on the one hand, and the burgeoning and allegedly corruptive leisure industry that was increasingly associated with American mass culture on the other. Among those who sought to address this problem was philanthropist Robert Mayer, whose Concerts for Children were founded in 1924 with a view to building audiences for the future. Drawing inspiration from Walter Damrosch’s Symphony Concerts for Young People in New York, Mayer sought to co-opt an old medium (the concert) to address a peculiarly modern problem: he hoped that the sense of occasion, together with the educational addresses, would militate against the bad listening habits that were supposedly on the rise because of the growing availability of gramophone and radio. By exploring the transatlantic dialogue around music appreciation, the chapter offers new perspectives both on Anglo-American relations during this period and on the widespread disavowals of art music’s investments in the marketplace. Scholars have often depicted the Anglo-American relationship in binary terms—America as a commercialized juggernaut of mass culture, Britain as an embattled defender of high culture. However, Mayer’s Concerts reveal an alternative perspective derived from a belief that, if America had created the “problem of leisure,” it might also provide the solution. In unpacking this other vision of America—as a source of inspiration as well as of anxiety for high-art practitioners—this chapter acts as a foil to the more conventional depictions of America that surface throughout the rest of the book. In chapter 3, attention turns to the foundational role that lateVictorian liberal ideals of self-improvement and social betterment played in music appreciation. It takes as a starting point Music and the Ordinary Listener, a long-running music education initiative for adults that was broadcast on BBC radio during the interwar period. Presented by composer and educator Walford Davies, the series offered lessons in music appreciation designed to combat the “passive” modes of listening that radio, with its idiosyncratic mixing of highbrow and lowbrow genres and its domestic context, supposedly encouraged. Recent scholarship has dismissed such BBC initiatives as straightforwardly paternalistic and sought to distance the BBC from charges of narrow-minded elitism

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by focusing instead on its modernist credentials. In contrast, this chapter offers a more reparative reading, recovering the paradoxical commitments that stemmed from radio’s entanglement in late-Victorian liberal ideals for “responsible” citizenship. Specifically, it shows how beliefs in a rigid system of cultural hierarchies were in constant tension with the aspiration to foster independent thought. By the early 1940s, it seemed that the investments of the previous decades were beginning to pay off, as wartime Britain reportedly saw an unprecedented growth in audiences for ballet, concerts, and opera. The impression that public participation in the arts was on the rise chimed with the socialist spirit of the decade: the notion that the state had a responsibility to ensure a certain quality of life for its citizens contributed not only to the expanding provision of state-funded schooling, but also to the new levels of statutory involvement in the arts. Chapter 4 uses Britain’s first music education film, Instruments of the Orchestra (1946), as a lens onto this moment of high optimism. Commissioned by the Ministry of Education and with a score by Benjamin Britten, this initiative sought to realize a holistic vision of schooling as a forum for the spiritual development as well as the vocational training of the next generation of citizens. While Instruments of the Orchestra was part of a growing movement to bring film into the classroom, film’s potential as an instructional medium was complicated by its associations with Hollywood glamour and escapism. To guard against these associations, the producers imagined an alternative cinematic experience: fusing the teaching methods of music appreciation with the practices of documentary cinema, they sought to create a film that would further a participatory culture premised on “active” listening. Chapter 5 examines another initiative birthed in the heat of postwar optimism: the University of Birmingham’s Extra-Mural Music Program. Its central concern is how adult educators navigated the increasing specialization of education that accompanied the professionalization of postwar British society. With this in mind, the chapter investigates the varied and often conflicting methods through which those planning and delivering Birmingham’s Extra-Mural Music Program sought to accomplish its central agenda: to “enlarge the horizons of public taste,” especially beyond the late-romantic repertoire whose predominant place in Britain’s booming concert scene caused alarm among the most highbrow educators. Wilfrid Mellers, Birmingham’s first staff tutor in music, was typical. He responded by advocating a kind of historically informed reception, which sheds light on how music appreciation could

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be adapted for a specialized educational landscape. Indeed, whereas histories of the postwar university have tended to reproduce the polarized distinction between the arts and sciences, and between liberal and vocational educational models, Mellers’s pedagogy tells a more nuanced story. It demonstrates how, in both rhetoric and practice, music educators sought to infuse a liberal educational tradition with values befitting of a professional society. At the same time, it reveals the fault lines that opened between the various styles of art music, as the success of early middlebrow initiatives also seemed to define the limits of their achievement. Chapter 6 explores a rather different manifestation of the postwar tensions between the arts and the sciences, investigating avant-garde composers’ unlikely contributions to school music. Its centerpiece is O Magnum Mysterium (1960), a multi-movement work composed by Peter Maxwell Davies for pupils of Cirencester Grammar School and the organist of Manchester Cathedral, Allan Wicks. Among the first of his generation to respond to growing calls for “real” composers to write “real” music for young people, Davies did away with arrangements of classical repertory, seeking instead to adapt contemporary continental modernist techniques to British sensibilities.95 Exemplary of his approach, O Magnum Mysterium rooted the most modern compositional techniques in an idealized, preindustrial British cultural past, using an eclectic mixture of medieval English and Latin sources, pointillism, and improvised passages. Both in theory and in practice, Davies’s pedagogy complicates the conventional image of Britain’s musical avant-garde as the artistic expression of postwar society’s scientific investments. It reveals how avant-garde music was imagined as a vehicle for liberal education that might counteract the dangers of a technocratic school system. In this instance, the route to cultural participation was via performance: Davies hoped that playing avant-garde music would ultimately inspire active appreciation. •

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Taken together, the stories of these pedagogic initiatives allow us to trace the contours of Britain’s midcentury middlebrow musical culture, bringing to light the creative means through which educators variously responded to public demand for the arts and sought to influence their tastes. Treating the boundaries between formal schooling and extracurricular education, between public and private spheres and between labor and leisure as porous, music educators sought to incorporate their

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preferred forms of cultural participation within an all-encompassing, holistic vision of good citizenship. However, since they also remained invested in highbrow ideals, this appropriation of art music was founded on a paradox: educators argued that training the public to appreciate the “best” would help to build a nation of good citizens, while also insisting that such art, by definition, transcended worldly concerns. Their pedagogic methods tended to emphasize the supposedly “intrinsic” value of great music, even as they explicitly sought to reap the social benefits of developing public interest in the arts. The crossovers with composers and critics meant that compositional and critical practices responded to these concerns, becoming vehicles for articulating middlebrow values through musical style and discursive praxis. Indeed, if the work of music educators accounts for how middlebrow values and practices became so pervasive, this is not to imply that the middlebrow pertained exclusively or even primarily to the domain of education. As Chowrimootoo’s and Wilson’s aforementioned studies of operatic culture suggest, its reach was far broader. But the discussions about music education provide a wide lens onto the conflicting social, political, and aesthetic commitments that catalyzed this cultural milieu. Viewed through this lens, the story that these initiatives tell is more than that of Britain’s middlebrow musical culture in the making. The middlebrow also becomes a focal point for exploring how the art music establishment responded to issues generated by late nineteenthand twentieth-century modernizations. For instance, it draws attention to the continuing influence of late-Victorian liberalism and the value it placed on cultivating breadth of outlook, even in the face of an increasingly specialized, technocratic society. It demonstrates how widespread the commitment to modernist ideals of innovation and originality was, as well as the extent to which old cultural traditions coexisted with the new. It suggests a measured celebration of technological advance, designed to capitalize on new media’s potential to democratize high culture, but without undermining such culture’s privileged status. It exposes the inconsistent aspirations to build a nation of independently minded, critical citizens and to “uplift” the public to the level of the educated class. In sum, the picture that emerges is less of a culture engrossed by the experience of radical change than of one caught between the past and future. The fraught negotiations that shrouded middlebrow endeavor bespeak the challenge of navigating midcentury British modernity—not just through its upheaval and novelty, but also through its slowness and familiarity.

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Beyond its historical usefulness, the middlebrow also serves as a conceptual device for getting at the process through which cultural boundaries are negotiated. As we have already begun to see, this was a particular concern of the era in which the term was coined: during the first decades of the twentieth century, an expanding cultural marketplace threatened to replace artistic considerations with commercial ones as the primary measure of worth; in response, commentators developed a new preoccupation with delineating cultural categories. In the art music sphere, “highbrow” ideals of artistic autonomy, originality, and timelessness were generally pursued in favor of “lowbrow” populism and ephemerality. “Middlebrow” captured the points at which this dichotomy collapsed—where the contradictions between ideological beliefs and cultural practice were too conspicuous to ignore; it also described the critical, pragmatic, and stylistic negotiations that ensued. This system of cultural hierarchies remained dominant throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century; but what happened to the “brows” thereafter? In a discussion of the American counterpart to this cultural phenomenon, David Savran argues that commentators’ interest in “pigeonholing taste” in the 1950s reflected an awareness that the old system was facing imminent demise. During the following decade, he explains, the notion that “a hierarchy of taste was a useful and accurate guide to the disposition of economic, educational and cultural capital in the United States” would cease to hold water.96 On the other side of the Atlantic, by the time that Davies joined Cirencester Grammar in 1959, Britain too was on the cusp of what would be experienced as another watershed moment of cultural change. As cultural historian Bernard Gendron explains, the dominant spirit of the 1960s was one “of revolutionary hubris and generational self-absorption” that appeared “to usher in a new cultural age.”97 At its heart was a purported rejection of the uncompromising distinction between highbrow and lowbrow on which the reigning art establishment had supposedly been built; in its place was a new postmodern outlook that courted mass culture, reveling in sensation and ephemerality, and proclaiming indifference. From here on, the popular sphere would provide an ever-stronger counterbalance to Britain’s art music establishment. Among the plethora of new challenges with which music educators had to contend were an expanding youth culture that rejected the staid mores of its parental generation; a new rebellion from within the artistic establishment, as the likes of Andy Warhol and the Beatles’ fictive Sargent Pepper delighted in the playful melding of commercial and artistic cultures; and a nascent cultural

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pluralism that would become increasingly dominant in the new millennium. Meanwhile, the binaristic cultural outlook propagated by many of the post-war continental avant-garde took a progressively stronger hold within the academy. As the musicological establishment made a final stand for modernist aesthetics, it would disavow its historic investments in music appreciation and would all but write middlebrow culture out of Western art music history. If the 1960s was a crucial moment in the move toward the pluralist mind-set that predominates today, this might seem a logical endpoint for my account of Britain’s midcentury middlebrow culture. But by ending my central case studies here, I do not mean to imply that this cultural milieu disappeared over night. On the contrary, a slower history could surely be told of the latter decades of the twentieth century, exploring how the values that had driven midcentury music education initiatives persisted: how the anxious hope placed in the possibility of popular audiences, the precarious belief in artistic autonomy and the aspirational commitment to notions of cultural prestige continued to shape art music practices in Britain. The afterlives of the individual initiatives could also be traced from a range of perspectives. Such an undertaking might involve investigating the continuation of the Robert Mayer Concerts for Children into the 1980s, alongside his efforts to engage with postwar international cultural politics through a new venture, Youth and Music. It might also involve an account of the radio broadcasters who picked up the baton following Davies’s death in 1941, as well as an exploration of how the advent of television and much later the internet expanded the avenues through which the BBC delivers its program of music education. It might explore recent performances of Britten’s Young Person’s Guide, which has remained a staple of the concert repertory, even if the film for which it was initially commissioned has become an artifact of history. It might assess the extent to which Mellers’s extra-mural music pedagogy influenced his subsequent work as the first professor and head of music at the University of York. It might ask how Davies’s pioneering use of avant-garde music in the classroom inspired subsequent educators, or where such practices continue today. More broadly, these midcentury reverberations raise questions about the in-between spaces in contemporary culture: where they are found; how critics, artists, and audiences respond to them; and their function within the wider cultural sphere. Some answers are posited in the epilogue, which brings this study up to the present day. Drawing inspiration

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from discussions surrounding the 2011 Proms performance of Gabriel Prokofiev’s classical–hip hop hybrid Concerto for Turntables, I close by reflecting on how the category of the middlebrow remains useful for making sense of cultural practice, even in an age purportedly committed to pluralism.

Chapter 2

“Audiences of the Future” The Robert Mayer Concerts for Children (1924–1939)

In April 1928, music educator Percy Scholes sailed for America on RMS Aquitania, a luxury Cunard ocean liner that ran the North Atlantic route. He had been asked to speak at the Music Supervisors’ National Conference (MSNC), which was taking place in Chicago. The convention was set to be a historic occasion, marking a turning point for the MSNC. Founded in 1907, this gathering of American educators had grown exponentially during the mid-1920s. Celebrating this expansion as evidence of a growing commitment to music education, the 1928 conference was conceived on a grander scale than any previous event: reportedly attended by over four thousand six hundred delegates, it was held in the Stevens Hotel—at the time, the largest in the world. It also featured an array of performances highlighting national music making, the highlight of which was a 351-strong choir of school children from all over the United States.1 The overall effect was such that it would subsequently be heralded as the organization’s “coming of age.”2 What motivated the invitation to Scholes remains unclear. The British pedagogue reported that it had been extended in a “personal capacity,” but his behavior suggested that he perceived the voyage to be of more diplomatic significance.3 For one thing, he bore an ambassadorial gift: a bound volume of letters from the British musical establishment. Described in the British press as “The Book of Friendship,” it was a veritable who’s who of national music. It featured composers, conductors, educators, “cathedral organists,” “school-music authorities,” 33

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“officials of our music societies,” and editors of key musical publications, as well as broadcasters and music critics; and so the list went on. Among the better-remembered names were the current and future Masters of the King’s Musick, Edward Elgar and Arnold Bax, and the conductors Henry Wood, who founded London’s Proms, and Adrian Boult—to mention just four.4 Far from a neutral gesture, the book evidently ran the risk of arousing political sensitivities; for when Scholes took to the floor, he sought preemptively to appease his audience: Nothing sinister is to be read between the lines of this message from the “Master of the King’s Musick.” This is no preliminary to an attempt to plant the Union Jack on top of the latest and largest hotel in the world or to annex the second greatest city of the United States and convert it into a suburb of London, nor is it intended or desired that this volume should be used as a text book in Chicago’s Public Schools or even placed upon the shelves of its Public Library. This book, Sir, is a gift to you personally. . . . It is innocent of the intention of turning you into a red-faced and imperialistic John Bull. It is a gesture of amity—all that, but nothing more.5

It is ironic how the long list of disclaimers seems to undermine their purported intent. Even if the book had been envisaged simply as a gesture of goodwill, in going to such lengths to profess its transparency, Scholes made his bid for neutrality unsustainable. What is more, the content of his presentation proper—titled “Orpheus as Educationist”— did anything but move away from politicizing rhetoric. On the contrary, while making a case for the benefits of transnational exchange, Scholes framed his discussion in explicitly nationalist terms. The content of his discussion is worth recounting, for his argument touched on several issues that are central to this chapter. At root, his paper advanced a philosophy for music education premised on his belief that the value of art lay in its metaphysical appeal: it promised to fix the mind on divine beauty that transcended mere earthly concerns. Or, as he put it, the “art of Orpheus” might turn young people away “from the materialistic conceptions of life which constitute one of our great modern dangers.”6 This was, of course, an old rhetorical strategy: the imagined dichotomy between the artistic and commercial spheres had been well established during the nineteenth century.7 However, the need to reinforce the distinction had become newly urgent—and newly problematic—in the light of a number of interrelated social developments, which Scholes went on to elaborate. First, he noted that the Fordist revolution in manufacturing processes had increased both leisure time and leisure products. These changes,

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he admitted, were in theory welcome: in as much as America was the “continent of leisure,” it was the subject of “European longing.”8 On the other hand, however, the speaker also expressed concern that life was becoming too much about making a living, a claim that might be read as a masked critique both of the capitalist preoccupation with the pursuit of wealth and of the repetitive forms of labor that facilitated it. Worse still, the forms of leisure that the contemporary world had spawned were deemed “shallow.” By way of example, he contrasted the lute and lyre to the saxophone, using classical imagery to suggest that the former had a divine power that the latter categorically lacked. (He omitted to mention that the saxophone originated in the Old World—in Belgium.) In contrast with recent cultural developments, the invocation of Greek mythology put art music on an alternative plane. The Orpheus reference not only drew attention to the Old-World roots of the Western canon; it also gestured to a celestial allure that promised to entice students away from vacuous modern leisure pursuits. In short, then, Scholes painted a picture of an increasingly materialist and money-oriented world from which art music supposedly stood apart. It was a world that America had created and so it was America that he now charged with providing a solution: “It is ‘up to you,’ ” he urged MSNC delegates, “to teach the world also how to use the leisure it has gained.”9 In many ways, Scholes’s transatlantic voyage was typical of its moment. As historians Thomas Bender and Daniel Rodgers among others have shown, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the rise of “an intense .  .  . traffic” between countries on the North Atlantic not just in cultural products, but also in political and social policies.10 During this period, these countries underwent similar and, crucially, interconnected processes of modernization. While an emerging capitalist economy tied the transatlantic region in an ever-more-intricate web of economic connections, industrialization and urbanization generated a common set of social challenges. Concurrent advances in shipbuilding opened up the North Atlantic as a travel route for tourists as well as merchandise, catalyzing the trade in ideas. The result, to borrow a phrase from Bender, was “an age of social politics”—an era in which a “new language of politics constructed around the idea of the ‘social’ ” developed and shaped an international conversation about societal reform.11 The potential for exchange was especially strong between Britain and America, which shared not only a common language, but also similar cultural persuasions.12 Transatlantic connections played a central part in shaping late-Victorian liberal reformers’ agendas, whose

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social and cultural aspirations in turn became central to twentiethcentury Britain’s musical middlebrow.13 By the mid-1920s, one of the most pressing concerns on both sides of the Atlantic was how the public spent their free time—or, as it was becoming known, the “problem of leisure.” As Scholes’s account suggested, recent changes in work patterns, rising levels of disposable income, and technological advances had led to an unprecedented commodification of leisure, which in turn created a heightened sense of cultural flux. The “problem,” at least as far as many cultural critics were concerned, arose because the recreational value of the new mass culture seemed doubtful: its easy appeal was at odds with the striving for selfimprovement that traditionally characterized bourgeois leisure pursuits. In boarding RMS Aquitania, Scholes hoped to engage in a conversation about how music educators might combat this unsettling situation. For him, the vessel was not so much a luxury liner as a “musical shuttle . . . weaving a web of mutual knowledge” across the Atlantic.14 Convinced that both nations would benefit from the opportunity for dialogue, he sought to channel the energy generated by the conference into launching a more regular program for exchange. He began by arranging a “field day” for Anglo-American educators in London later the same year, an event whose diplomatic importance was corroborated by “gracious messages” of support from King George V and President Herbert Hoover, and whose musical significance was evidenced by the support of, among others, the American conductor and educator Walter Damrosch (whom we will meet again shortly).15 The following summer, four hundred delegates gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland, for the “first Anglo-American Conference.”16 Looked at through another lens, however, Scholes’s American sojourn also provides a useful point of departure for this chapter because it poses a challenge to the predominant narrative about American-British relations at this time. In cultural histories of interwar Britain, as in those of other European countries, America has more often than not been depicted as a juggernaut of mass culture, a globalizing force that threatened to debase art to little more than an “ornament” and to discourage the public from political engagement.17 There is, of course, a compelling historical explanation for this historiographical trend: as American mass culture increasingly pervaded Europe, many intellectuals feared that local and national culture would gradually be displaced by foreign imports. Their response was to craft a discourse that pitted an established high-art tradition against the new lowbrow other. The nationalist

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motives that underpinned this discourse have been uncovered by literary scholar Genevieve Abravanel, who argues that the attempts to differentiate high art and popular culture were a form of rhetorical resistance against a perceived threat of cultural colonization.18 The emerging cultural polarity was mapped through various binaries; one of the most common—and the one that this chapter seeks to complicate—was that of commercialized versus non-commercialized culture (with the former characterizing the American leisure industry and the latter the European high art tradition). While the most vociferous proponents of this discourse were those committed to the high modernist tradition, its influence extended far beyond their elitist fold. Not least, it infused Britain’s emerging middlebrow culture, shaping the terms on which art music was promoted to the public.19 But if this became the dominant narrative of the mid-twentieth-century, it did so by obscuring messier accounts of cultural relations. This chapter’s opening vignette has already gestured to an alternative American imaginary, one in which “the continent of leisure” was identified not only as the source of the problem, but also as its possible solution. The notion that there were aspects of American musical culture that Britain might aspire to emulate was particularly pronounced when it came to the issue of concert audiences. For if Britain and America shared a commitment to the idea of the arts as morally and socially elevating, it was the younger nation that had seemingly succeeded in broadening access to highbrow culture. Indeed, what the New World lacked in an autochthonous musical heritage, it compensated for in its concert tradition—and it had done so even in the absence of the significant public subsidies that had made the European concert tradition the envy of Britain. With transatlantic travel on the rise, the disparity between Old- and New-World audiences was becoming a talking point in Britain. In what follows, I want to reanimate this other America to bring to light the fraught process through which Britain’s educated classes sought to navigate the rise of a commercialized, transnational leisure industry. My particular interest is to expose how music educators invoked a distinction between the artistic and commercial spheres that was more an ideological than a material reality. A case study is provided by the Robert Mayer Concerts for Children, an initiative founded several years before Scholes delivered his MSNC address, but which was premised on a similar, supposedly anti-materialist philosophy of music education.20 Intended to foster a love of art music from a young age, the concerts

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are exemplary of contemporary efforts to create an alternative to mass culture that at once sought to preserve art music’s highbrow credentials by foregrounding its supposedly transcendental qualities. What is more, this series was, as we will now see, likewise the product of a transatlantic encounter.

“An Example from New York” The Robert Mayer Concerts for Children were founded at the Central Hall, Westminster, in London on March 29, 1924, but the story behind their creation, as their originator told it, begins several years earlier and on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1919, the forty-year-old Mayer journeyed from London to America with his new bride, the soprano Dorothy Moulton, to take up a position in a New York–based metal firm.21 A Mannheim-born, naturalized British citizen, Mayer had retained his childhood love of music, despite his father’s early ruling that it would make an unsuitable career. It did not take long for the pair to become regular visitors at Carnegie Hall, where one concert series reportedly made a strong impression: Walter Damrosch’s Symphony Concerts for Young People. The Damrosch family had moved to America during the wave of German immigration that took place in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As practicing and enterprising musicians, they had played an important part in transplanting the German symphonic tradition to American soil.22 The Concerts for Young People were one of the schemes they devised to build a lasting audience: founded in 1909, the series was conceived to cultivate a taste for highbrow culture from childhood.23 It introduced children to canonical symphonic repertory through a two-pronged approach that combined high-quality performances with lighthearted instructional talks providing elementary guidance in how to listen. Moulton and Mayer were so taken that, on returning to England in 1921, they decided to set up a series of such concerts.24 More than just an opportunity to share their love of music, this was, to Mayer’s mind, a way of fulfilling “a sense of duty to society” fostered by his reading of Tolstoy.25 There is no reason to question the veracity of this account; nevertheless, Moulton and Mayer’s claim to have been inspired by Damrosch is intriguing—not least because the idea of concerts for children was hardly new to Britain. On the contrary, they had for some time been a common fixture in the London concert diary and further afield: the Aeolian, Steinway, and Kingsway Halls (to name just a few) often

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hosted educational lecture-recitals of everything from chamber and orchestral music to opera.26 Although it was less common in Britain to program symphonic-scale works for such events, it was certainly not unheard of.27 What is more, pedagogically minded concert organizers had also sought to create opportunities for children to hear orchestral music by inviting them to dress rehearsals. One such initiative in early 1920s South London even worked in partnership with the School Music Review, which published analytical notes so that teachers could prepare students in advance.28 While it is unclear whether Moulton and Mayer had attended such events in Britain, it seems likely, given their musical connections, that they would at the very least have been aware of them. As the critical discourse surrounding the concerts makes clear, however, foregrounding Mayer’s transatlantic connections served specific strategic ends. For one thing, Damrosch was a conductor of international renown, whose services to music had recently inspired the French government to award him the prestigious Legion of Honour.29 Taking full advantage of the timing of this award, Mayer persuaded Damrosch to make a brief diversion from his Parisian tour to conduct the second concert in the opening series, which took place on May 17, 1924, in Westminster. It was an astute publicity move: Damrosch’s presence attracted widespread attention from the British press, which gave the Children’s Concert generous coverage; it was reported as far afield as India.30 Besides raising the profile of Mayer’s initiative, Damrosch’s involvement was also used by journalists to position the concerts within a broad field of discourse about British-American cultural relations. In using the “example from New York”—as the Times headline ran—to spell out the deficiencies in Britain’s concert culture, commentators set a bar against which Mayer’s initiative could then be distinguished. In particular, critics drew attention to the scale of Damrosch’s initiative, which, by the time the Mayers began to frequent the Carnegie Hall, had run regular concerts for over twenty years. The longevity of this series drew a stark contrast with the situation in Britain, where achieving long-term stability was an ongoing challenge for impresarios. What British critics found enviable was not so much the popularity of his concerts per se, but rather what it implied about public attitudes toward orchestral music and the pecuniary benefits it brought. Where in London, “half-empty concert halls” allegedly remained the norm (with the notable exception of the Henry Wood Promenade season), in New York,

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Damrosch had made concertgoing a habit for life.31 The knock-on effect was that American orchestras sustained a higher standard of performance, not only because they had the financial stability to do so, but also because audiences expected it. Meanwhile, in Britain, low concert attendance meant that it was harder to make orchestral concerts pay, and consequently organizers were forced to muddle through with “inadequate rehearsals and deputy players.”32 Arguably more important than any of these things, however, was the fact that Americans “got into the habit of thinking musically in their early years”—so packed concert halls were reportedly populated with attentive rather than disengaged listeners.33 Commentators attested that Damrosch’s efforts, combined with those of Stokowski in Philadelphia, had inspired a genuine love of art music. The conductor reinforced this perception, telling British newspapers that his difficulty was not getting audiences to come to his Children’s Concerts, but rather persuading them to stop coming when they reached maturity. Given that social research was very much in its infancy at this time, it is unsurprising that claims about New York audiences appear largely to have been founded on speculative observation rather than any sort of empirical research. They are arguably more revealing of British aspirations for music education, especially since the ultimate goal in invoking the American ideal appears to have been to expose British shortcomings. If Damrosch had taught the public to appreciate highbrow culture, comparable pedagogic initiatives in Britain had allegedly been conducted in such a way as to have decidedly the opposite effect. As journalist Ivor Brown noted in the course of a long diatribe against educational philanthropic initiatives, pedagogues extinguished any spark of interest with their dry and uninspiring approach. Efforts to provide an attractive alternative to “commercial” entertainment were often “stultified . . . by a pathetic belief in the saving power of dullness”—a belief so deeply entrenched that even “the abler enthusiasts who had sense enough to see that art is meant to be enjoyed, instead of to be yawned at, suffered for the sins of the injudicious.”34 In the article announcing Mayer’s new series, the Times journalist voiced a similar concern about children’s concerts: contrary to their intentions, “zealous enthusiast[s] for ‘appreciation’ ” had exacerbated the public’s apathy towards art music by putting too much emphasis on “the educational side.”35 The challenge, in other words, was how to talk about music in a way that led audiences toward rather than away from the work of art.

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By involving Damrosch in his opening series, Mayer created the opportunity for critics and pedagogues to experience his celebrated methods firsthand. Even before the much-hyped event, Mayer’s advocate at the Times was predicting the novelty of Damrosch’s approach in adulatory tones: since the conductor was “the person least likely to put talk in the place of music,” he would offer “just a word to excite interest in the contrasting tones” and otherwise leave the music to speak for itself. To facilitate this music-centered pedagogy, the commentator continued, Damrosch was aided by a strategic choice of repertoire that was at once “attractive to, and not too exacting for, the youthful mind.” In this instance, the eclectic program was carefully conceived to “show the various forms of orchestral music”—a focus that built on that of the first concert, which had been designed to “illustrate the component parts of the orchestra.”36 In the second concert, Weber’s Oberon overture was followed by the second movement Andante from Haydn’s Symphony no. 94, known as the Surprise; this lyrical number was succeeded by the spritely second movement Allegretto scherzando from Beethoven’s Symphony no. 8 and Berlioz’s playful “Rákóczi March,” before the concert closed with Strauss’s “Blue Danube” waltz. The decision to perform excerpts from multi-movement works again built on Damrosch’s experience from New York, where he had found an incremental approach to be the most successful.37 Variety was not the only sense in which the program was child-friendly. From the fairies of the Oberon overture to “the horrors of five-finger exercises” evoked by the metronomic second movement of the Beethoven Symphony, the pieces also invited children to use their imaginations.38 Through a careful balancing of words and music, Damrosch thus cultivated a “homely, intimately happy manner” that supposedly beguiled his young listeners.39 In addition, he sought to engage his audience through participation, asking those present to join him in singing a rhyme—“two and two are always four, always that and nothing more”—to the melody of the Haydn Andante.40 While such antics were targeted at the youth, they appear to have made an equally strong impression on commentators, who were unanimously effusive in their praise. In an Observer article, music journalist W. R. Anderson seemed pleased to report that the conductor had been elevated to the status of “Uncle Walter.”41 Meanwhile a writer in The School Music Review applauded the “marvellous force [of] personality” that “made the audience feel that its members really were part of the music, almost as important as the orchestra.”42 This last comment seems especially revealing when set against one of the

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emerging critiques both of children’s concerts as a form of music pedagogy, and of the music appreciation movement more broadly: namely, that they failed to bring people “into direct contact with [the] composer” in the way that learning an instrument could.43 The School Music Review comment seems designed to assuage pedagogues who worried that listening was of lesser value than performing, since it limited children to experiencing music indirectly. In claiming that Damrosch had given his audience something akin to a direct musical encounter, the commentator alleged that the conductor had come as close as was possible to surpassing even this limitation of the concert hall. In short, Damrosch had apparently managed to strike a vital balance between education and entertainment so that his audience did not even realize they were being instructed. Far from viewing such covert methods as ethically problematic, critics tended to welcome them on the grounds that they were more likely to achieve the desired end. For, as one explained, “Any taint of the ‘lesson’ in a children’s concert is likely to be detrimental to the general spread of musical culture.”44 The unequivocal praise that greeted Damrosch is more surprising than it might at first appear, for reasons that will become apparent later. For now, suffice it to observe that by celebrating the conductor, critics set the stage for aligning Mayer’s initiative with the American one, a strategy that implicitly distanced it from the more maligned features of British instructional concerts. In other words, they performed a sort of rhetorical volte-face: where first they used the transnational comparison to show up Britain’s failings, they now sought to appropriate Damrosch’s example to serve their own cultural agendas. If he had made concertgoing a pursuit that was at once appealing and enlightening, critics suggested that, by copying his example, Mayer might do the same.

Cultivating Taste in Britain It was not just by involving Damrosch that Mayer strategically played to the gallery of the musical press. His rationale for the concerts and the mode of delivery also promised to redress many of the grievances expressed by critics. First, he arranged for the concerts to take place in large halls and cinemas rather than schools—a decision that was not especially novel, but which allowed him to distinguish their “festive” character from the more sober “atmosphere of the class-room.”45 To ensure that the standard of performance would be high enough not to detract from the broader mission of inspiring a love of art music,

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he employed reputable conductors to work with an ad hoc professional orchestra. For the inaugural season, which, besides the concert conducted by Damrosch, included performances on March 29 and June 14, he secured the services of Adrian Boult, who had recently been appointed as the conductor of the City of Birmingham Orchestra.46 This partnership, however, was to be relatively short-lived, owing to Boult’s growing commitments. By the start of the second series of six concerts, which began on October 18 the same year, the baton had been handed to the young Malcolm Sargent, initiating a collaboration that would last until the outbreak of war.47 The choice of conductor was important for more than just musical reasons. Again, following the American lead, Mayer required him to play the role of educator: he would not only help to shape programs that married quality with appeal to young audiences, but also be responsible for delivering any explanations. In line with Mayer’s own preferences, the “great German masters” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries featured prominently.48 At the Westminster concerts, by far the most-played composers were Mozart (who featured fifty-two times in interwar concert seasons) and Beethoven (who featured forty-eight), with Bach, Schubert, and Handel close behind.49 Unsurprisingly, performances tended to peak in anniversary years, meaning that Beethoven came top in 1927 (the centenary of his death), Schubert in 1931 (for the same reason), and Haydn in 1932 (the second centenary of his birth). Measured against those of the interwar Proms, Mayer’s programs can thus be described as built on the higher end of the orchestral repertory that was gaining popularity during the interwar period.50 While all of the aforementioned composers featured regularly at the Proms, late nineteenth-century Proms favorites such as Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff—whose sentimental romanticism was a growing subject of critics’ ire at this time—hardly ever appear in Mayer’s programs.51 Besides his personal preferences, the relative absence of such music can also be explained by the large-scale orchestral forces it typically required, which were beyond what his resources could easily accommodate. Counterbalancing the prominence of these already celebrated figures, the organizers also strove to include representative works from a range of historical periods from the sixteenth century to the present day. The earliest composer performed was Palestrina, whose motet Exultate Deo was programmed in February 1935, and the most recent Benjamin Britten, whose Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge were played in November 1938. When it came to the contemporary music

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scene, British composers writing in a tonal idiom tended to dominate: Delius, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Holst were comparatively well represented, with around ten performances. The only continental composer who came close to this was Debussy, whose Prélude à l’aprèsmidi d’un faune and “Fêtes” received three and five airings respectively, in addition to the one-off renditions of “Danse sacrée,” “Danse profane,” and Petite Suite. Meanwhile the suite from Stravinsky’s Firebird was heard three times; works fusing jazz and art music idioms, a style that in the 1920s was becoming popular with composers in the Weimar Republic among others, remained absent. There was, in summary, nothing extraordinary about the choice of works. Built around canonic repertoire that was short and melodic enough to be child friendly, the programs were, as a later chronicler put it, “tabloid versions of [what was] heard by their elders at the Queen’s Hall.”52 Exhibiting a typically middlebrow eclecticism, they primed young audiences for attending concerts in adulthood. Setting the right tone on printed publicity appears to have presented more of a challenge. Over the first few series, the posters advertising the event underwent a significant change in style. The original design was austere: aside from the text providing details of the program and performers, the only other feature was a picture of a lute entwined with a natural horn and a recorder (Figure 1). Partway through the third series, these erudite pre-Classical instruments were replaced by a more childfriendly image: young people crowding the steps of what is presumably the entrance to a concert hall (Figure 2). Meanwhile, posters for the eighth series showed a queue of well dressed, smiling boys and girls— and so long that it seemed to disappear off the poster (Figure 3). The impression is reminiscent of the story of the “Pied Piper,” to whom both Sargent and Mayer were at various times compared.53 Furthermore, while the designs are hardly on the cutting edge by 1920s standards (compare, for example, the avant-garde publicity discussed in Michael Saler’s study of the London Underground), they nevertheless suggest both a growing sensitivity to childish sensibilities and a desire to market the concerts as exciting occasions.54 Yet for all the efforts to dissociate the concerts from compulsory education, Mayer sought to plug the series into Britain’s multifaceted network of music education providers, which encompassed institutions as diverse as state schools and commercial gramophone companies. In London, where the Local Education Authority’s (LEA) progressive educational ethos inspired an openness to school trips, he quickly built

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Figure 1: Robert Mayer Concerts for Children publicity poster: Series 3, Concert 3, November 21, 1925. Robert Mayer Archive, McMaster University.

a relationship with the music advisor to the London County Council, John  E. Borland—a partnership that points to the growing interest of statutory bodies in music education.55 With this in place, concerts could be promoted through schools, promising access to a much larger audience than could be reached by “conventional publicity” alone.56 As the series became more established, he also sought to join forces with the

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Figure 2: Robert Mayer Concerts for Children publicity poster: Series 3, Concert 7, March 20, 1926. Robert Mayer Archive, McMaster University.

BBC for similar reasons. Besides wanting to expand the impact of his series through broadcasts, he hoped to gain access to the BBC orchestras; but his efforts here were far less successful.57 From the outset, negotiations were extremely fraught; not until 1937, when the BBC finally agreed to publicize Mayer’s concerts during Children’s Hour broadcasts, did he cease objecting to their use of Sargent during the program.58

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Figure 3: Robert Mayer Concerts for Children publicity poster: Series 8, Concert 2, November 8, 1930. Robert Mayer Archive, McMaster University.

Mayer’s persistence in promoting his initiative paid off: by the mid1930s, the annual season (which, as mentioned, had begun with three concerts in London), had expanded to include sixty-five concerts in twenty-four different locations spanning the length of the country— from Maidstone in the south, to Newcastle in the north.59 At the same time, the number of children attending the concerts reportedly rose

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from two thousand to eighty thousand; by 1939, it was thought to have reached a peak of one hundred thirty thousand.60 The rapid pace of expansion disguises just how fraught the boundary between education and entertainment could be in Britain at this time. When intellectuals attempted to differentiate the terms on an ideological level, definitions of one often ended up overlapping significantly with the other. The confusion was reproduced on an institutional level, in particular through the hazy relationship between formal schooling on the one hand and enlightening leisure pursuits on the other. In the case of Mayer’s initiative, schools quickly came to be viewed as a forum in which children could undertake preparatory work prior to attending a concert— instruction that, it was hoped, would enhance appreciation. Starting with school children promised an opportunity “to instill a taste for the best music” that might last a lifetime.61 As his first audiences aged with the series, he enthusiastically celebrated the fruits of his initiative: by the end of the 1930s, he reported having to instigate a system of “students’ permits” for older children who wished to continue attending performances.62 Further muddying the waters between school and leisure, the founder envisaged a ripple effect, whereby children, having been awakened to the wonders of music, might go on to “infect” adults with similar enthusiasm.63 Not only did he permit grown-ups to attend concerts, provided that they were “accompanied by a child,” but he also saw to it that brochures were distributed in the hope that families would discuss the concerts at home.64 In some localities, the popularity of these concerts with adults was reportedly so great that they inspired “evening symphony concerts as sequels.”65 While the scale on which Mayer sought to roll out his Concerts for Children was exceptional, the fundamental assumptions driving his vision were typical of the moment. The notion that the public needed to be taught how to use their free time, whether through formal schooling, or extracurricular instruction, was something that outreach initiatives generally had in common. The pervasiveness of this belief in interwar Britain raises a host of questions: What was behind the idea that the public needed to be trained for leisure? Why was the size of concert audiences such a pressing concern? What was it about the interwar moment that pushed these issues to the fore? These issues were becoming more urgent, and also more complicated, in the light of the emerging leisure industry. For the values espoused by new forms of mass culture frequently clashed with the highbrow ideals that art music advocates typically endorsed.

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Commercializing Leisure To-day leisure plays a greater role than at any previous time. On all sides educationalists and social workers say that the urgent questions are what people do with their spare time, how to guide their activities into the “right” channels and particularly how to tackle the juveniles in this context. —Henry Durant

By the late 1930s, when social researcher Henry William Durant penned these words, there was a broad consensus among Britain’s intellectuals that leisure had become a “problem.”66 More than that, it was conceived as a peculiarly modern problem—an unsettling by-product of the considerable industrial and urban expansion that Britain had witnessed during the previous century. Contrary to the reigning image of the interwar period, for the majority of the British public these decades brought a real increase in individual wealth. Although the economic slump that accompanied the “Great Depression” perpetuated widespread unemployment, especially in regions that had built their wealth on Victorian industries such as coal mining, textiles, and shipbuilding, those who remained in work—around 75 percent of the population—benefitted from rising wages and an almost 30 percent reduction in the cost of living.67 As John Stevenson and Chris Cook have shown, the 1930s marked the beginning of affluence: “It became possible for an average salaried person to buy his own house, usually on a mortgage, run a car, and begin to afford a range of consumer durables and household goods hitherto considered quite out of reach.”68 At the same time, perceptions about the importance of free time were gradually shifting, as is evidenced by the growing volume of legislation regulating the labor market. Initially concerned with limiting the hours that people of various ages could work, the government eventually began to turn its attention to the public’s consequent free time. In 1938, after several decades of lobbying from the Trade Union Congress, the Holidays with Pay Act was passed, which increased eightfold the number of workers entitled to paid leave.69 Thus the British public (especially women and adolescents) were acquiring both more money to spend and more time in which to spend it. Eager to capitalize on this situation, entrepreneurs drove a rapid expansion in the market for consumable goods, as well as in related industries such as marketing, PR, and tourism. The far-reaching impact of these developments was evident from the changes wrought on the urban landscape, which saw what sociologist Ida Craven described as “a formalizing and separation

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of the spheres of activity that set amusements apart in time and space and function from other activities.”70 By the interwar period, Britain was on its way to becoming a consumer society. This expansion of the leisure industry was a transnational phenomenon, both in the literal sense that countries traded leisure products, and in an ideological sense, as is apparent from the terms in which the leisure debate was often couched. In particular, America runs like a red thread through the British—and, for that matter, much of the European— discourse on leisure. In his speculative 1928 tract Diogenes; or, The Future of Leisure, for example, philosopher C. E. M.  Joad described recent developments in terms of US expansionism. Since America was “increasingly impos[ing] her standards upon Europe,” Britain’s “future was an American future.”71 What is more, if America was the archetype of “the modern world,” the figure who encapsulated this best, in Joad’s mind, was the businessman: ostensibly believing that money could buy happiness, he worked simply that he might spend his wealth on the pursuit of pleasure. For the writer, this stereotype exemplified the modern tendency to approach recreation with a consumerist mind-set. Cultural critics’ uncertainty about the rise of “American-style capitalism” and the consumer-oriented leisure industry that frequently accompanied it were at the heart of the “problem of leisure.”72 America’s growing presence was simultaneously greeted with admiration and anxiety, acceptance and resistance. For all its apparent inevitability, an “American future” held mixed appeal. Some advocated consumerism as a means toward social mobility and political empowerment. Advocates of the cooperative movement and Left-leaning socialists promoted the idea of the “consumer as citizen,” whose civic rights were imagined to include access to “necessitous goods.”73 In this conception, the ability to purchase was touted as an expression of democracy. Others on both the Right and Left took a more sententious view, linking consumerism with excessive materialism.74 One such was Durant, who, attributing the rise in ostentatious “display[s] of wealth and leisure” largely to the influence of cinema and the press, denounced a society that placed more value on how much time and money an individual had to spend than on what they had “achieved.”75 In such a system, recreation had been reduced to a status symbol: the “highest in the hierarchy of social values.”76 Bound up in the anti-materialist critique was a concern that consumerism was morally corrupting or decadent. This anxiety often stemmed from a belief that modern leisure fostered a “herd mentality,” which commentators imagined would lull the public into conformity and a

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sense of escapism.77 In a 1923 essay on “Pleasures,” Aldous Huxley blamed the problem on a shortage of intellectual stimuli: where in the past, he alleged, leisure pursuits had demanded intelligent engagement, now they were “progressively more and more imbecile.”78 To Huxley’s mind, the deceptive allure of “modern ‘pleasure’ ” was so dangerous that it posed a greater threat to civilization than “wild men, wars, and the bankruptcy that wars bring after them” because it undermined people’s capacity to think. Durant and Joad took the argument a stage further. They contended that the problem was not just that mass leisure pursuits were unfulfilling on a personal level because they lacked the spiritual depth of the arts; worse still, they threatened to undermine the individual’s capacity to play an active part in society, as their ready accessibility encouraged indolence. Durant articulated the dilemma by contrasting a bygone age of “spontaneous popular leisure” with the current era, when the public’s spare time was dominated by the “machinery of amusement.”79 Shirking responsibility for initiating leisure, the public, he argued, increasingly looked to machines to do the work for them. Remarking upon a similar trend, Joad drew attention to the crucial role that money now played in the production of leisure: “Our notion of entertainment or amusement as something for which one pays resolves itself into the confession that we must pay other people to do for us what we can no longer do for ourselves. And since, like all bought pleasures, bought entertainment rapidly palls, leaders of society range the world in vain and restless pursuit of the satisfaction which comes to tramps and artists unsought.”80 Leisure, he concluded, had been reduced to “the art of spending money.”81 Like many of their contemporaries, these critics were deeply troubled about the way that the Fordian manufacturing revolution, which inaugurated mass production by automating parts of the manufacturing process, was encroaching on leisure. As an array of cultural products began to be marketed on a mass scale, the leisure pursuits of the general public seemed increasingly to replicate the most negative conditions of their labor. Drawing attention to this trend, intellectuals framed the “problem of leisure” in terms that alluded to mass production. Huxley, for example, observed: “The working hours of the day are already, for the great majority of human beings, occupied in the performance of purely mechanical tasks in which no mental effort, no individuality, no initiative are required. And now, in the hours of leisure, we turn to distractions as mechanically stereotyped and demanding as little intelligence and initiative as does our work.”82 Huxley’s fears were far from

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atypical. For many, it was not just work prospects or leisure opportunities but the future shape of society that appeared to be at stake. If mass labor was restructuring social and political relations, mass leisure served to perpetuate the very structures it put in place. Rather than a source of relief, critics argued, leisure had become another forum through which power-hungry capitalists sought to secure their position by a strategic disempowerment of the electorate. Mass media also supposedly discouraged consumers from seeking out the more “difficult” pursuits that might bring real satisfaction. While such critiques were most often directed toward mass entertainment and more or less explicitly the lower classes, on occasion commentators discerned similar issues in the pursuit of high art by the well-to-do. In Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist, Huxley questioned the integrity of their apparent enthusiasm for patronizing and practicing the arts. He insisted that they were motivated by “shallow and insincere” snobbery, rather than genuine interest: “The leisured classes take up art for the same reasons as they take up bridge—to escape from boredom.”83 Here, the difference between upper- and working-class leisure was presented as a matter of degree rather than kind: aligning the Russian Ballet with cinema, live opera with gramophone records, and casinos with bookies, Huxley contended that the only thing that really differentiated these activities was cost. In the wrong hands, even ostensibly highbrow pursuits risked being tarnished with the negative effects of the increasingly pervasive leisure industry. Critiques of commercialized leisure responded to a disquieting awareness that mass media operated under a market value system that conflicted with highbrow measures of aesthetic worth. Popularity, as measured in purchases, meant success.84 As the public voted with their money on an unprecedented scale, their preferences frequently did not tally with those of the art world’s curators. In other words, commercialization threatened to undermine the established cultural order, by diminishing the weight attached to aesthetic judgment. The prevailing response in the high art world was to draw a categorical, value-laden distinction between commerce and art. In an article on “The Problem of Leisure” first published in 1932 in the Hearst corporation’s Chicago Herald and Examiner, Huxley juxtaposed “economic values” with “human values,” the former obviously relating to financial concerns epitomized by the leisure industry, the latter ostensibly encompassing an array of loftier attributes, such as the pursuit of learning and personal growth.85 The problem with modern society, Huxley complained, was that when the

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two value systems conflicted, “economic values” invariably prevailed. Meanwhile, for Harvey Grace, editor of Musical Times, the ability to assess worth on aesthetic grounds was a matter of national pride: “We have a better sense of values than [the American public],” he arrogantly proclaimed, “and we reserve such expressions as ‘great’ and ‘national importance’ for something more momentous than best sellers.” 86 As these writers’ choice of words suggests, discussions about how the public spent their free time were often framed in the language of the market, even where the terms were invoked only in order to decry them. Even those advocating supposedly non-consumerist, socially uplifting forms of leisure borrowed their criteria from capitalism. Mayer was typical, claiming that music was a worthwhile hobby because it filled spare time “profitably.”87 Elsewhere, he discussed leisure in terms of how it might be “best employed.”88 Times critic Henry Colles described music as a product that could be “imported.”89 Official documents did likewise: a report produced by the Education Department of the northern city of Wakefield stated that, since “the majority of the members of society are to have more time on their hands than ever in the past, it becomes increasingly important that they should know how to use it with profit and pleasure.”90 In such instances, the imagined “profit” is  figurative: an abstract social or moral gain derived from pursuing what Mayer described as the “cult of beauty.”91 Nevertheless, the default use of this language reveals the extent to which the logic of capitalism was shaping ideologies of leisure. Throughout the interwar period, children featured prominently in these discussions. Commentators perceived consumerism as an especially potent threat to young people—the generation that had been born into a consumer society.92 Durant argued that whereas previous generations had supposedly had the creative initiative to entertain themselves, to modern children it was “self-evident that, in order to achieve ‘a good time,’ it is necessary to spend money,” since “[a]ll forms of leisure [had] become commercialized.”93 Recreation and wealth, he supposed, had become inextricably intertwined in the youthful imagination. This heightened the perceived importance of encouraging good spending habits from an early age. But as cultural critics struggled to account for the discrepancy between their own aesthetic preferences and those of the public, they were divided about the extent to which the public were complicit with the leisure industry. In the “intermittent but unceasing” discussion, opinions tended to fall into one of two camps, as Ivor Brown explained.94 There were those who regarded the public as

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a vulnerable mass manipulated by the whims of commercially minded business men—“the wretched victims of commercialism, wanting the meritorious and being fobbed off with the meretricious;” and those who upheld an even less flattering image of “a mob fired with base desires or petty lust for the paltriest sweetmeats of writing or design.” Both sides overlooked the reality that many of the public were also keenly interested in highbrow culture (as the market for music appreciation manuals, among other things, attests). Conversely, the idea that a respectable consumer might freely choose and be satisfied by mass entertainment was apparently untenable. For those who were unwilling to leave the mob rotting in their imagined den of iniquity, education seemed the most promising way to ensure that “the increase of leisure is to be, as it should be, a source of greater moral strength to the nation.”95 While an expanding leisure industry increasingly recognized young people as a subset of the market with significant purchasing power, the custodians of art found themselves confronting the difficult question of where high culture might fit in this evolving world.96 The growing interest in children’s concerts during the 1920s was one manifestation of the broader preoccupation with guiding the public in its use of leisure. Yet despite the rhetoric of moral elevation, the impetus was not straightforwardly altruistic: if the all-encompassing reach of commercialization apparently left no leisure pursuit untouched, then art music too had been commercialized. This is not to suggest that musical culture had previously been devoid of commercial considerations. On the contrary, as journalist and BBC program advisor Filson Young admitted, prior to the 1920s “music could only be obtained by effort and labor, or at least by the expenditure of time and money,” whether that be the purchasing of instruments, opera tickets, sheet music, or tuition.97 What had shifted after the war were the contours of the leisure industry—and with them, the cultural status of leisure, commerce, popular entertainment, and art. From a purely pragmatic point of view, the public’s growing free time and disposable income were resources that could be channeled either to the benefit or detriment of the art world. As anxieties about the negative impact of American mass media took root, there was a growing consensus that a concerted effort should be made to train the “audience of the future.”98 But although the need to promote art music to a wider audience was becoming more urgent, the implications for its status remained unclear: economic necessity alone was not sufficient to resolve the tension between the dominant ideologies surrounding highbrow culture and commercialization.

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Between Charity and Commerce At first glance, it might seem strange to suggest that Mayer’s initiative was implicated in this debate. A nonprofit enterprise, it was motivated by a philanthropic concern for public well-being. Underpinned by a paternalistic, Arnoldian belief in the “civilising influence” of music, the concerts set out to “disturb youth with the joy of elevating thoughts, [and] take them out of the rut of everyday life.”99 What is more, the series was exempt from the Entertainments Tax on the grounds that its primary function was educational.100 Keen to promote awareness of this status, Mayer made a point of asserting that the events were of “a non-commercial character.”101 In addition, for the second series he changed the title of the concerts, using his name to reinforce the charitable side of the endeavor: “Orchestral Concerts for Children” was replaced by “Robert Mayer Concerts for Children,” as his lawyer suggested that this would help them “avoid being aped and exploited by commercial competitors.”102 However, the relationship between charitable and commercial concerns was not as transparent as the entrepreneur’s rhetoric suggests. Inevitably, his Children’s Concerts were intertwined with commercial networks and Britain’s expanding leisure industry in all sorts of ways. We have already touched on the sense of crisis that pervaded the orchestral scene in interwar Britain, and how it tapped into broader concerns about the public’s apparent preference for lowbrow cultural forms. Another side of the crisis concerned the financing of concert performances and the compensation of musicians. Since the final decades of the nineteenth century, with its wave of trade unionism, musicians had become vociferous about their poor working conditions.103 Their insistence on higher fees, as well as remuneration for rehearsal time, made large-scale ensembles so shaky a business venture that commentators began to predict that orchestral concerts would soon be a thing of the past. Given these circumstances, critics suspected that concert organizers would prioritize commercial rather than artistic concerns. According to one Times journalist, for example, evidence was found in the growing number of international celebrity recitals, a medium that could “more easily be turned to profit” than performances by larger ensembles.104 Mayer was acutely aware of the funding challenges facing orchestras. From early on, his rhetoric of social reform was interspersed with pragmatic assessments of the economics of the concert industry. In an article chronicling the development of his Concerts for Children, he logged his belief that the rich alone could not sustain Britain’s concert

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culture, asserting that “to rely on those who can afford expensive seats is to build on sand.”105 Instead, he advocated a model similar to that of the well-established Henry Wood Proms, which sold high volumes of tickets at low prices, confident that “halls are full as long as seats are cheap enough.” Where his Concerts for Children were concerned, ticket pricing had little bearing on the actual cost of putting on orchestral performances, which were heavily subsidized. Rather, it was a way of setting children’s expectations for the future, by ensuring that they understood that they were being offered something valuable. As Mayer put it, charging a nominal price for admission demonstrated that they “really want the music and are not merely there to get something for nothing.”106 Moreover, it also chimed with the liberal ideal of facilitating individual freedom—a value to which, as we have seen, Britain’s educated class was strongly committed. Thus one of the expressed, albeit less widely publicized, aims of Mayer’s series was to get children “into the habit of .  .  . paying for tickets.”107 His pricing strategy appears to have been designed to set realistic expectations for the cost of attending concerts in adulthood. For the 1930–1931 season, for example, those wanting to attend a concert at the Central Hall, Westminster, had four options: a season subscription giving access to all seven concerts with reserved seating, priced at 12s. 6d.; the equivalent in unreserved seating at 6s. 6d.; or single tickets at 2/- and 1/-.108 To encourage prospective audiences to take advantage of the block booking option, schools were encouraged to buy multiple subscriptions, which they could then pass between groups of pupils from one concert to the next.109 For comparison, ticket prices in the same season for regular concerts at the Queen’s Hall (one of London’s major concert venues) ranged between 12/- and 2/-, while a night at the Proms series would set you back between 7s. 6d. and 2/-.110 While the Children’s Concerts were significantly cheaper than the most expensive seats in the Queen’s Hall, the difference from the cheapest seats was relatively marginal, especially given that the concerts were much shorter. What is more, compared to the cinema, one of the most popular leisure activities of the period, the London concerts seem fairly competitively priced: in 1930, the average national cost of a night at the movies was 1s., although in high-end metropolitan cinemas it could be as high as 2s. 6d.111 To put that in perspective, a four-pound (around 1.8kg) loaf of bread retailed on average at 8d. in the capital.112 Although Mayer seems to have been keen not to deflate ticket prices too far, he did sometimes take into account the relative wealth of the

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neighborhood in which a given series was staged. During the 1930–31 season, for example, tickets for concerts at the People’s Palace in the more deprived East End district were differentiated according to school stage: elementary pupils and teachers had to pay 6d. for entry, while secondary school children and teachers were charged 1/-, as were parents.113 Even with these efforts to aid affordability, however, it was perhaps inevitable that the audience would include children from wealthier backgrounds. Although precise details of attendance have not survived, the list of schools in the Greater London and the Home Counties areas to which invitations were sent includes not just state-funded primary and secondary establishments, but also a large number of grammar schools, which, while publicly funded, tended to draw students from socially privileged backgrounds. What is more, one chronicler recalled that Westminster “regularly sent . . . boys in silk hats,” while Sargent spotted “Society children” in the audience.114 While the choice of great yet accessible music was ostensibly high minded, Mayer and Sargent’s decision-making was also influenced by commercial considerations: what music was available on gramophone record affected what was played. For example, when plans were being made for the 1935 season, Bach’s Suite in C was initially included, but subsequently dropped on the grounds that it was “not popular owing to the fact that it is not recorded on the Gramophone.”115 Choosing programs on this basis partly reflected the widespread belief that audiences liked what they knew—and they were more likely to know works that had been recorded. But it was also a fact that Mayer had enlisted the support of gramophone companies to mutual benefit. Having a vested interest in audience expansion, many gramophone companies established their own education departments, which were responsible for producing and promoting instructional materials.116 Mayer fostered an arrangement whereby company employees were sent round to “Mayer schools” to instruct teachers how best to prepare classes for the concerts, allowing companies to advertise their products, while also raising awareness of Mayer’s scheme.117 On occasion, advertisements for relevant records were also featured in the printed concert programs. In short, in seeking to educate children about orchestral music, the Mayer concerts contributed to wider strategies for promoting and responding to public interest in art music. Commentators openly acknowledged that, given the financial challenges facing orchestras, promoting their repertory in this way had become a necessity. As the American example had proved, the teaching of music appreciation had become

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“an essential part of the educative propaganda by which [these] institutions can be kept alive.”118 The New World was already reaping the long-term benefits of such an investment. Reporting back from a threemonth tour of New York and the surrounding area in early 1924, Colles made the financial ramifications of the American attitude explicit: “The idea of music as a thing worth having is gradually permeating; and when an American says ‘worth having,’ he means worth paying for. His is no academic approval.”119 As he went on to explain, this had fueled rising standards: if audiences were to pay, they wanted to hear the best. The art music world had become subject to—had even been enhanced by—the logic of the marketplace. But if such work had encouraged the popularity of the American symphony tradition, Colles, like Mayer, seemed uneasy about its commercial overtones. In his celebration of the Children’s Concerts run by Damrosch and Stokowski, he went to some lengths to clarify that, although a form of musical propaganda, the motivation was not to make a profit but to benefit society: “They do not expect the concerts to pay in the commercial sense,” he noted, “but they do expect them to be used by a musical community.” As with Mayer’s concerts, this claim was in the most literal sense true, but it conveniently disguised the fact that the scheme was a financial investment for the future: developing “the musical proclivities of the young” increased the likelihood that they would mature into the ticket-buying audiences of tomorrow. To put it another way, it was precisely through a social agenda of educating and elevating the public that such initiatives ultimately sought to realize a commercial goal. From the outset, financial and philanthropic considerations were inextricably interwoven. Viewed through this lens, Mayer’s assertions that his concerts were of a non-commercial character appear somewhat disingenuous, but they reproduced a trope that pervaded criticism more broadly (as the writings of the Times columnist have suggested). The oscillations between transparency about financial pressures and acts of rhetorical erasure suggest that there was more at stake than simply economic pragmatism. In the ongoing mediation between education and entertainment, commercial and artistic concerns, the struggle was really an ideological one. As modernist discourse framed the value systems of artistic and commercial spheres in increasingly polarized terms, the fact that art music was necessarily implicated in the marketplace was a source of growing discomfort. In particular, the idea that cultural value could be quantified in monetary sales jarred with a fundamental tenet of the

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high art narrative: that art music had what writer J. H. Elliot termed an “intrinsic merit” that set it above worldly concerns.120 In the eyes of high modernists, commercial failure could be held up as a measure of artistic worth, but middlebrow entrepreneurs could not afford that luxury.121 They not only believed in the innate superiority of art music, but were also deeply committed to broadening cultural access, to which end audience approval mattered. The situation was ironic: the rhetorical distinction between art and commerce sought to protect highbrow culture from the negative connotations of the marketplace, but once the distinction existed, it could also work against art. It created the possibility that highbrow culture might be implicated in the very things against which the dualism had been intended to defend. This precarious situation throws Mayer’s disavowals into relief. For in many respects, the success or failure of the initiative hinged on the organizers’ abilities to manage its involvement in the commercial sphere: they needed not simply to make art music sufficiently enjoyable that it might become a popular pastime, but— crucially—they needed to do so without appearing to resort to populist methods that might debase the musical fare. In other words, the concerts had to offer a musical experience that reinforced art music’s supposed autonomy. Positioning art music “above” the market was crucial to achieving this.122 What was really at stake, then, was not so much the status of Mayer’s concerts—commercial or otherwise—but rather the status of orchestral music. Although it was a commonplace among critics that highbrow culture was intrinsically valuable, it could not be taken for granted that the public shared their view. Moreover, while the status of a concert could easily be quantified in terms of philanthropic subsidies, the qualities that supposedly made art so valuable were more nebulous and harder to pin down. This ambiguity raised the stakes—just how high became apparent in 1926, following an incident at one of the Mayer concerts that provoked an explosion in the critical press.

Marketing Music: Beethoven for the Masses Of all the compositions that might have aroused controversy in interwar Britain, Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 seems an unlikely candidate. Securely established within the Western art music canon, it was a concert hall staple: popular with audiences, respected by critics, and representative of what in the mid-1920s was a long-accepted style. However,

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against the odds, in 1926 it took center stage in a fierce and protracted debate about the musical education of British children. The incident that triggered the critical exchange was documented at length in the Musical Times by Grace, whose account—albeit written from the standpoint of an enraged critic—provides a helpful starting point. The offending performance took place on the morning of Saturday January 23 in the Central Hall, Westminster, in a concert that also featured Bach’s Orchestral Suite in B Minor for flute and strings, Delius’s On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, and Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture. To maximize the chances of a positive reception, musicians at the top of the London orchestral scene had been booked to perform under the direction of critically acclaimed violinist Samuel Kutcher and conductor Sargent. As was customary, the conductor prefaced each piece of music with a few explanatory remarks. Delivered in his characteristically “happy informal” manner, Sargent’s opening remarks on Bach’s Suite seemed to augur well.123 But when he went over to the piano to illustrate the fugue from the Suite’s overture, matters quickly began to degenerate. Having played the subject “several times,” he invited the audience to sing along using the words “You must hear me tootle on the flute” (Example 2.1). When the overture ended, he proceeded to introduce each of the subsequent dances before it was played, breaking the Suite into a “set of snippets.” Ignorant of conventional “concertroom deportment,” the young audience compounded the situation (and further antagonized Grace) by applauding after each movement. The worst, however, was yet to come. Next on the program was the opening Allegro con brio from Beethoven’s Fifth. Encouraging the children to use their imaginations, Sargent suggested that the first and second subjects might evoke the Giant and his wife from Jack and the Beanstalk. Once again, he invited those present to sing the main themes. The first subject, which he associated with the terrifying Giant, was set to “Fee fi fo fum,” while the second, which supposedly belonged to the Giant’s gentle wife, was given the words “Never mind, for naught can harm me” (Examples 2.2 and 2.3). As we know from the Damrosch concert discussed earlier, Sargent was not the first pedagogue to set words to music. Nor was this the first time that Beethoven’s famous symphony had inspired such creative fantasies. On the contrary, the practice of using stories to help popularize the classics had become well established in the nineteenth century, especially in the case of audience favorites like Beethoven’s Fifth. In his 1896 study of the composer’s symphonies, George Grove reported

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Example 2.1: Johann Sebastian Bach, Suite in B Minor for Flute and Strings, BWV 1067, “Overture,” mm.20–24.

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Example 2.3: Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony no.5 in C Minor, mm.63–66.

of the Fifth: “No Symphony, perhaps no piece of orchestral music, has been the source of so many anecdotes.”124 Grove’s study contributed to this trend. Drawing a parallel with Beethoven’s biography, he argued that the opening movement was an “actual portrait” of the composer and “his relations to the Countess” Theresa Brunswick. He also made a broader appeal to natural imagery, likening the music to “a series of peaks, each with its characteristic features—its clefts, its glaciers, its descending torrents and majestic waterfalls, its sunny uplands and its shining lakes.”125 Fifteen years later, E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End described a performance of this same symphony at the Queen’s Hall, during which one of the protagonists, Helen Schlegel—a young cultured woman of partially German descent—finds her mind flooded with an array of images from “heroes and shipwrecks” to “goblins, and then a trio of elephants dancing.” Nevertheless, for Grace, as for some of the other musical experts in Mayer’s audience, the combination of symphony, song, and story was unbearable. He reported being “moved . . . to such a state of fury that, had it been expressed instead of being bottled up under a smiling face, would have ended in my being cast out for brawling.”126 Eager to give full vent to his feelings in print, he not only dedicated almost the entire March editorial to the matter (rather than continuing his usual practice of reporting on a range of current musical affairs), but he also

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reproduced some of Beethoven’s score to demonstrate the underlaying of the words. In his extended tirade he insisted that this pedagogic method would instill “too programmatic a view of music” in the young mind: “Many of the finest things in music are free from such bases— indeed, their chief beauty lies very largely in an entire freedom from any kind of anecdotal or imitative connection.”127 While appealing to the imagination in this way was supposed to draw children in, to Grace’s mind this approach ultimately threatened to limit enjoyment, by burdening the music with distracting and “incongruous” associations. His article set the stage for a controversy that raged in the musical press for months and continued to resurface at regular intervals for several years thereafter, as critics inconclusively debated the merits and dangers of encouraging children to use stories as a way into appreciating art music. While the fact that the trigger-event concerned a piece of non-programmatic abstract music certainly exacerbated the situation, the underlying issues pertained to music education more broadly. Critical uneasiness with Sargent’s methods tapped into a growing uncertainty about whether it was possible to broaden access to highbrow culture without degrading it. Grace articulated the heart of the matter more clearly the following year, when, responding to an article in the American journal Modern Music, he once again recalled the Mayer concert. Music educators, he warned, were becoming so consumed by their mission to broaden access to art music that they had begun to lose sight of “the obvious dangers” that this movement posed “to the art itself.” While he would not go as far as the American journalist, who had reportedly predicted that music “must automatically be harmed in proportion as popularization is successful,” Grace was concerned that popular pedagogy was doing more harm than good.128 In a revealing turn of phrase, he insisted that it should be possible for the public to “realise the beauty of a work without recourse to methods which . . . cheapen it.”129 Although the problem was not Beethoven’s symphony per se, Grace was concerned that the masterpiece might be tarnished by such attempts to heighten its appeal—or worse, perhaps that the music itself might somehow be implicated in its less-than-illustrious mode of reception. The challenge was to communicate the “intrinsic merit” of art music in terms that children could understand, but without rendering its meaning superficial. The fact that there seemed to be a clear musical basis for public popularity compounded, rather than alleviated, the situation. Reflecting on why the likes of Bach and Handel had secured widespread and long-lasting approval, Grace noted: “It would be difficult to name

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an example [of a work] that has neither a good tune nor a vital rhythm. On the other hand, it would be as hard to find one that owes its popularity to its harmony alone.”130 Measured against these parameters, Sargent’s method ought to have appeared apt: it focused attention on melody and rhythm, leaving the bigger question of harmony to one side. What is more, Beethoven’s music, in particular the paradigmatic Symphony no.  5, lent itself to this approach. The entire Allegro con brio is famously developed from a small amount of melodic material— principally the opening four-note motif, with its iconic rhythm; and the lyrical four-bar second subject (in other words, the two figures that Sargent invited his audience to sing)—both of which are sufficiently memorable that an audience familiar with the Western art music tradition could easily be taught to recognize them. The problem, however, was that memorable tunes and catchy rhythms were precisely the qualities that the public supposedly found so compelling in popular music. Making them the subject of pedagogy threatened to muddy the distinction between art music and mass culture, suggesting that the two had far more in common than critics were prepared to admit. As this “anxiety of contamination” grew, critics advocated an alternative approach that drew attention to high-level structure.131 The Musical Times writer was typical in warning that “the tendency is to lead the children to think of details when they would be better occupied with the whole.”132 More or less explicit in their rhetoric was the idea that the ability to process musical form promised a deeper musical encounter than could be achieved through melodic and rhythmic understanding alone. As Elliot explained, for example, “Aural pleasure must form the foundation; only a matured sensibility will complete the structure and add the necessary reinforcements of emotionalism and intellectuality.”133 Besides drawing attention to the formal complexity of art music, critics also sought to protect it from the negative connotations of commercialized mass culture by invoking an established discourse about its transcendental status. In one of the most explicit instances, a writer described music as “a weapon against the growing materialism of the age—as the mediator between the life spiritual and the life sensual.”134 But while such appeals to the spiritual value of art music helped to elevate it above worldly concerns, it also raised the stakes: the more precious the sacralized object, the greater the risk of desecration. The onus on educators was to help the young audience ascend to the higher plane, rather than bringing the gods down to earth. Central to achieving this

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was ensuring that students’ attention was drawn to the musical work rather than the ancillary elements of any given performance. Earlier in the season, a Times commentator had judged Sargent more successful in this regard. Following a concert that had focused on the role of the brass, the paper reported that the strength of his approach was that “he never allows his young audience to think that valves and second subjects are music.”135 If there was a common conviction that the aesthetic object and the social trappings of performance were fundamentally distinct, it was a sine qua non of good education that it did not confuse the two. Yet even when this ideological distinction was duly upheld, a minority maintained that guiding children toward a transcendental musical encounter was an impossible task. The most skeptical contended that an ability to appreciate great music was simply not something that could be taught. Among those to hold this extreme view was Music Bulletin editor Basil Maine, who insisted that it was the privilege of a lucky few “to sense the mystery of sweet sounds.”136 Although reluctant to write the children’s concert movement off entirely, he expressed strong reservations about the value of trying to explain the music. For others, the issue was less fundamental and more one of life stage. While adults had the intellectual and emotional maturity to understand art music, “the child who could really appreciate Beethoven,” as Alec Robertson put it, “would indeed be a monstrosity.”137 Another who shared this perspective was H. E. Wortham. Adding his tuppence-worth to the debate, he framed the issue in more abstract spiritual terms: “Listening to absolute music is a metaphysical process which conveys nothing to the ordinary child.”138 In the case of the Beethoven symphony, the composer’s reputation as the archetype of “Romantic maturity” surely intensified the expectation that his music might provide a transcendental experience. •

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It is remarkable that a series of children’s concerts could arouse such prolonged controversy—and all the more so given that, as noted, both the idea of concerts for children and Sargent’s teaching methods built on well-established nineteenth-century traditions. That these old practices became newly contentious in the mid-1920s is indicative of how broader social developments were unsettling Britain’s musical culture, and in ways that seemed to resonate far beyond the musical world. Just how much appeared to be at stake is revealed in a comment made by Maine early in the debate, which predicted that stifling the nation’s

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musical development in this way would have far-reaching consequences for society as a whole: “Children’s concerts on the present lines,” he warned, “will only help to raise a nation of shopkeepers, bankers, and civil servants.”139 His objection—which, had it been written at a later date, could be called Adornian—was that music pedagogy practiced by the likes of Sargent focused attention on melodic snippets, turning the listening experience into a spot-the-musical-entry puzzle. While this might develop mathematical abilities in “categorization,” it would not, Maine insisted, advance musicality. The disparity in critical reactions to Damrosch (in 1924) and Sargent (in 1926) is less indicative of a decisive change of heart than of the level of ideological uncertainty provoked by the rise of the leisure industry. Nevertheless, as the interwar years wore on, the concern provoked by the expansion of mass media increasingly impinged on how British critics perceived American attempts to democratize art music. With the need to guard against “educational ballyhoo” becoming seemingly more urgent, there was a growing tendency to deny rather than embrace the influence of and similarities with American educational methods.140 Although the surviving programs for Mayer’s series reveal that conductors and educators in the provinces continued to set silly words to abstract music, there is little evidence to suggest that Sargent continued the practice in London. Even Anderson, whom earlier we saw waxing lyrical about Damrosch’s methods, can be caught changing his tune. He voiced an increasingly prevalent opinion when he insisted that “It is really no defense of methods of training or entertaining children in England that similar methods have been working successfully in New York and, anyway, England and America are very different places.”141 Another critic went as far as to suggest that the use of symphony orchestras in the children’s concert movement was short sighted: “Children’s concerts begin at the wrong end by concentrating on the orchestra,” he contended. “The extra-musical attractions are so powerful that a youngster who gets his first liking for music through the orchestra is pretty sure to complain that mere pianoforte, chamber, or vocal music is dull.”142 With the large forces, variety of timbres and the sheer volumes that could be achieved, the symphony orchestra had a “glamour” from which children might never be weaned.143 It is telling that this comment was written in response to an article by a young Alexander Fried in the American journal Modern Music, which praised orchestral concerts for precisely the reasons the British critic found them problematic. It points to the fact that, while the symphonic repertory was

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for the most part borrowed from Europe, the use of orchestras as an educational tool was more strongly associated with America.144 But even in the face of such shifting attitudes, critics continued periodically to admit that the sense of occasion created by the concert and its attendant paraphernalia might actually encourage more attentive listening. Such admissions were usually made in response to concerns that sound reproduction technologies were encouraging background listening, even where the likes of Beethoven and Bach were concerned. Mayer’s concerts helped to “counter-act this danger,” making “the hearing of great music an event to be looked forward to, prepared for, and remembered afterwards.”145 Founded within this fraught cultural environment, Mayer’s Concerts for Children interacted with Britain’s emerging leisure industry in ways that were far from transparent. Yet it is precisely for this reason that this initiative offers such a revealing case study of how the middlebrow negotiated the conflicting ideologies of art and commercial culture. The gap between rhetoric and reality exposes one of the contradictions at the heart of the middlebrow project. As recent scholarship in modernist studies has shown, the disavowal of the marketplace was one of the strategies through which cultural commentators sought to distinguish art and mass culture: erasing its own process of cultural production became part of the “logic” of high culture.146 Or, to put it another way, the very idea of art’s autonomy became crucial to the marketing of highbrow culture. Like high modernists, pioneers of the middlebrow were deeply invested in the ideal of autonomous art, along with all the cultural baggage that this concept was accumulating. But unlike modernists, who placed a strong value on the minority appeal of their works, pioneers of the middlebrow were committed to making highbrow culture available to a broad audience. The need to “sell” art was thus at the heart of the middlebrow project both metaphorically and literally: metaphorically in the sense that it aimed to persuade the general public of art music’s appeal, and literally in that its efforts to create a financially sustainable space for art as a leisure pursuit inevitably led to its involvement with commercial organizations. Broadening the audience for art music without compromising its status required a careful exercise in marketing, for the very processes of diversifying cultural access threatened to lay bare the uncomfortable proximity of high art and mass culture. The legitimacy of initiatives like Mayer’s, then, depended on their ability to dissociate art music from the marketplace, even as they looked to preserve a niche for highbrow

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culture within an expanding international leisure industry. In this sense, the concerts became a forum for processing Britain’s changing status on the world stage—its need to defend itself from encroaching American influence, even as it sought to emulate America’s celebrated orchestral concert tradition.

Chapter 3

Victorians on Radio Music and the Ordinary Listener (1926–1939)

On Tuesday January 5, 1926, the British Broadcasting Company launched a new series of music education talks for adults, Music and the Ordinary Listener. Initially planned as a twelve-part series, the program was scheduled for Tuesday evenings at 10:10 p.m.—immediately after the second news bulletin and weather forecast.1 During the twenty minutes that followed, professor and composer Sir Walford Davies held forth on music, providing elementary lessons in theory interspersed with musical examples played from gramophone records or on the keyboard. It was not the first time that Davies had been on air. Although the British Broadcasting Company was barely three years old, he was already a seasoned broadcaster. He had been among the first to recognize that radio was a medium particularly suited to music instruction and a natural extension of his education work, which had already seen him engage with gramophone companies.2 For one thing, aural illustrations were more accessible than the excerpts from printed scores that furnished the educational manuals that had been growing in number and popularity since the turn of the century. Listening was not a skill premised on literacy. For another, radio had a broader reach. It enabled Davies to capitalize on public interest in music appreciation by connecting with an unprecedentedly large audience: Music and the Ordinary Listener was simultaneously broadcast from London to all national stations.3 Broadcasting thus presented a new means for combating the “apathy in the educational world with regard to Music,” which Davies 68

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considered “abysmally deep and widespread.”4 Keen to realize radio’s potential, he had made his debut with a broadcast for school children on April 4, 1924; in July the following year he was appointed to the newly created Music Advisory Committee; by September his popularity was such that the Programme Board started to plan the new series.5 Music and the Ordinary Listener quickly cemented Davies’s name and voice in the mind of the nation: aside from a two-and-a-half month break between July and September, it was broadcast almost weekly in 1926, even after Davies’s poor health necessitated the hasty recruitment of additional speakers (Geoffrey Shaw, Donald Tovey, and H. E. Sears contributed broadcasts for March and June, April and May, and June respectively). Following this lengthy first series, illustrated keyboard talks became a radio staple of the interwar period, frequently with Davies at the microphone.6 Novelty of the medium and durability of the program aside, Music and the Ordinary Listener was in many ways an unremarkable development. A nascent art, broadcasting had been quick to attract some of Britain’s most innovative minds: pioneers such as producer Lance Sieveking, whose unusual combination of scientific and artistic energies found a creative outlet in experimental radio productions.7 Against this backdrop, an illustrated music talk in the established vein of a lecturerecital was hardly groundbreaking. Nor can Davies be credited with initiating the practice of talking about music on air. Although the earliest broadcast talks had focused on scientific subjects, reflecting the interests of an audience made up primarily of amateur technophiles, their purview quickly broadened as the listener base expanded. Following the appointment of Percy Scholes as the Company’s Music Critic in May 1923, broadcast music criticism had been a regular feature.8 Admittedly, music talks tended to be scheduled earlier: after the first news bulletin at 7:00 p.m. Nevertheless, the later slot was an equally obvious choice in that on weekdays it was generally reserved for “topical talks.” Perhaps the least innovative aspect of the series was its agenda. Davies’s desire to share his love of music with the constituency of the public who were eager to learn went hand in hand with a paternalistic outlook that, from today’s vantage point, appears deeply conservative. His pedagogy was premised on a belief that the public’s ability to appreciate art music would be enhanced by formal training. This belief had been a core tenet of the appreciation movement (which Davies helped to pioneer) from the start; but the rapid popularization of radio in interwar Britain raised the stakes.9 Conceived to supplement the

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large amount of art music in the broadcasting schedule, Music and the Ordinary Listener’s goal, simply put, was to encourage “good” listening habits—in its presenter’s words, by “help[ing] the listener to an ever growing interest in the act of listening in his arm chair.”10 To this end, the program disseminated a set of analytical tools designed, first, to cultivate musical understanding that might deepen art music’s appeal; and second, to enable the discernment that would protect art music from being confused with the popular genres also available on radio. Thus Davies sought to preserve art music’s highbrow associations—with autonomy, transcendence, and greatness—even as it was promoted to a larger audience. At a time when changing patterns of musical dissemination contributed to a pervasive sense of cultural flux, the need to pin down cultural distinctions acquired a new urgency. The agenda behind Music and the Ordinary Listener also linked with the broader vision for radio as a “social service.”11 As numerous accounts have shown, this vision, famously promoted by the Company’s first director general, John Reith, was rooted in the late-Victorian liberal ideal of “cultivation.”12 “Cultivation” was premised on the pursuit of individual enlightenment through education, self-discipline, and elevating leisure pastimes—activities that promised to bring about not only “self-improvement,” but also “social amelioration,” as David Wayne Thomas has argued.13 Providing a means to educate the public on a mass scale, radio clearly complemented this agenda. As Reith explained in his 1924 manifesto Broadcast over Britain, if “noble conceptions can be inculcated by wireless, broadcasting may serve as an antidote to the harm which is being wrought . . . by the conditions under which [the public] live.”14 This “civic ambition”—to borrow a phrase from historian David Goodman—was soon to be formally enshrined in the organization’s constitution: in December 1926, a Royal Charter transformed the commercial British Broadcasting Company to a non-commercial public Corporation (hereafter BBC). While allowing the BBC to retain its independence from government, the charter granted it a monopoly over the airwaves on the grounds that to do so was in the “national interest.”15 British radio was thus embedded in the discourse of citizenship, an association that prompted BBC policy makers to conceptualize radio listening—in Kate Lacey’s words—“as a public act.”16 In this sense, the organization was emblematic of a shift that had taken place in liberal culture since the final decades of the previous century. Whereas in the past, liberalism’s advocates had hoped to realize a civilized democracy through organized politics, by the early 1920s the Liberal Party

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was in decline; consequently, as Peter Mandler and Susan Pedersen have explained, reformers increasingly looked to culture “as the pursuit of politics by other means.”17 Broadcast music education talks were a promising vehicle. Operating at the intersection of debates about citizenship, leisure, and education, music appreciation became a national concern. In recent years, the late-Victorian paternalism that shaped official policy at the young BBC, as well as many of its broadcasts, has been important to a new wave of scholarly critique. Viewing this heritage as the driving force behind a straightforwardly narrow-minded and elitist strain within the institution, scholars have questioned the central place afforded Reithian values in earlier narratives. In particular, they have sought to unearth ostensibly more progressive aspects of the organization’s programs and policies—an alternative side of the BBC that sits more comfortably within the pluralist perspectives that dominate today’s academy. David Hendy, for instance, has used Sieveking’s experimental radio documentaries to “question whether the BBC as a whole is too often misrepresented as a self-enclosed and bureaucratic institution inimical to creativity.”18 In a similar vein, Todd Avery’s Radio Modernism complicates the BBC’s image as “an institution of social elevation and control” by exploring ways in which its operation ran contrary to Reith’s ideals.19 Avery draws attention, among other things, to a leveling of the playing field between rich and poor and the involvement of modernist writers, whose broadcasts adopted a socially critical—or even, in some cases, overtly anarchic—stance. In shifting attention away from the influence of the “Mussolini”-like director general, these authors have provided a compelling and nuanced corrective to earlier perspectives.20 At the same time, however, the terms on which they have done so replicate an ongoing trend in scholarship about twentieth-century culture that this book seeks to problematize: to uphold modernism uncritically as a marker of positive value. Indeed, both accounts more or less implicitly reproduce an old dualism that pits modernist progress and commitment to social critique against a reactionary conservativism rooted in the late-Victorian era. In this chapter, I want to put pressure on the traditional picture of the BBC from an altogether different angle. My starting point is the conviction that it was not just modernist interventions that helped British broadcasting avoid an unequivocally narrow-minded tone. On the contrary, even the more paternalistic broadcasters frequently displayed a tension between directing public taste and promoting individual freedom of thought—a tension that in turn stemmed from unresolved

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ideological complexities in the late-Victorian liberal project.21 Despite Music and the Ordinary Listener’s conservative veneer, it provides a useful starting point from which to reexamine this aspect of the BBC’s heritage. Its presenter was, as already suggested, deeply invested in protecting art music’s highbrow credentials. At the same time, however, the prospect of the public embracing highbrow ideals, along with the system of cultural hierarchies that they upheld, was complicated by the discourse of good citizenship in which both radio and music educators were entangled. This discourse emphasized not only the value of developing an interest in high culture, but also the importance of independent thinking. In turn, it led to an uneasy situation: if the public were to apply their critical faculties to all kinds of music, it could not be guaranteed that they would arrive at the same conclusions. The resulting tension was reflected in Davies’s pedagogy, which he openly and paradoxically defined in opposition to the methods advocated by “highbrows.” Where the latter seemed to place an overwhelming emphasis on intellectual understanding of musical processes, Davies pursued what he imagined to be a more accessible approach: one that aimed to strike a balance between feeling (people’s natural response to music) and thought (which promised to regulate public opinion). To be clear, in unpacking the contradictory impulses driving Music and the Ordinary Listener, I do not mean to suggest that the BBC’s music education broadcasts were devoid of problematic notions of cultural and, less explicitly, moral superiority. The very concept of critical listening was, of course, deeply value laden. Rather, my aim in exploring this series is twofold. On a general level, I hope to provide an account that does not simply subvert the historical tensions that pervaded middlebrow education initiatives, even though to dismiss such schemes with all the negative connotations of “conservatism” might feel more comfortable from today’s perspective. In addition, by challenging the opposition of modernist progress with conservative narrow-mindedness in some recent accounts, I want to offer a more specific corrective, challenging musicological studies in which the emphasis on radio’s innovative aspects has served as a strategy for asserting British musical culture’s commitment to modernist values and aesthetics more broadly.22 In keeping with many interwar music appreciation initiatives, Music and the Ordinary Listener exhibited a characteristically middlebrow tendency to oscillate between tradition and innovation, as educators sought both to realize the potential and to avoid the pitfalls of technological and social change. It is in this sense, too, that the BBC was emblematic of twentieth-century British

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modernity: less because of its straightforwardly progressive features, than because of radio’s ambivalent status as a novel medium caught up within a longer tradition of social reform.

Listening at Home Before turning to Music and the Ordinary Listener, I want briefly to set the scene by sketching how the advent of radio changed Britain’s musical landscape and the particular challenges this seemed to pose to art music. For all of their building upon established pedagogy, Davies’s broadcasts were conceived in response to a novel set of problems that hovered around the broadcast medium. At the heart of these was the way in which radio enhanced the home’s potential as a space where citizens could be cultivated. While the varying quality of radio sets and differences in reception areas meant that users’ experiences were far from uniform, the simultaneity of broadcasting nevertheless brought the disparate nation together in a shared act of listening, one that traversed the boundaries of public and private spheres. In delivering the broadcasting service to the nation’s living rooms, the BBC, as Lacey explains, created “the paradoxical situation of a predominately privatized modern public, characteristically encountering public life within domestic space.”23 The resulting “reconfiguration of the home as a site of leisure” had a particularly marked impact on musical culture. Music making, of course, had long been a part of bourgeois domestic life: as a genteel accomplishment predominantly pursued by women. Consequently, it had acquired some dubious connotations. These were aptly captured in educator Stewart MacPherson’s 1915 manual The Musical Education of the Child. Referring to the kind of elocution lessons that just a year previous had been dramatized on the London stage in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, MacPherson bemoaned the fact that the study of music had come to be seen on a par with “young ladies’ seminaries and ‘Papa, potatoes, prunes and prisms.’ ”24 It had, in other words, been reduced to a vehicle for and indicator of bourgeois refinement. The advent of broadcasting promised to redress this, allowing the public to experience professional ensembles of the highest order at a distance from the live performance. Even large-scale genres like operas and symphonies, which had previously been restricted to public domains, could now be listened to from the comfort of the home. The BBC was quick to capitalize on this potential. As Jennifer Doctor’s program analyses show, by 1925 around two-thirds of the broadcasting

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schedule was given over to music.25 Of this, almost 20 percent was allocated to classical genres; by 1929 this had risen to just above 30 percent, an increase facilitated by the development of an additional, experimental longwave service. The range of music broadly reflected Britain’s concert industry, not least because the young BBC tended to rely on the transmission of public performances (partly to ensure a high standard of performance and partly due to limited studio space).26 In terms of genre, broadcasts ranged from operas to symphonic works, chamber ensembles to solo recitals. Meanwhile, repertoire was chosen to accomplish one of two aims: to give musical novices a firm grounding in the art music canon; or to expand the horizons of those who already possessed such knowledge—whether by introducing them to obscure historical figures or challenging contemporary ones.27 Waxing lyrical about the transformation to Britain’s musical landscape, Davies proclaimed that radio had “made a sudden, momentous, unavoidable and permanent revolution in the destiny of music as a popular interest and pursuit throughout the world, since for the first time in history it gives music access to all, and repeated access, and may now bring perfection of performance to all.”28 The impression that radio had transformed musical culture was strengthened by the rapid rate at which the technology took root. In 1923—the year after the British Broadcasting Company was founded—one hundred and sixty thousand households bought licenses; by the outbreak of the Second World War, this had increased to nine million, around 75 percent of homes.29 Of course in these early days the quality of sound reproduction undercut bold claims about radio’s potential: complaints about “metallic,” “unsatisfying” and “tinned” music abounded.30 Nevertheless, Davies’s hyperbolic account displays the sense of wonder that often accompanies technology in its infancy.31 Finding scientific explanation inadequate for the opportunities created by radio, he asserted that, pace its critics, the BBC’s accomplishments to date were “little short of miraculous.” But if radio rapidly expanded the domestic consumption of art music, it also raised questions about what sort of listening experience the home environment could offer. It was an issue discussed in relation to broadcasting in general, but one that, again, was particularly pertinent to art music. The previous century had witnessed a growing interest in how performance environments conditioned certain types of listening. As concert halls and opera houses were increasingly thought of as shrines for the artwork rather than sites for high society to indulge in public display, European audiences were becoming more disciplined: quieter,

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more attentive, more genteel. Epitomizing this trend was Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, whose architectural design was famously conceived to focus attention exclusively on the Gesamtkunstwerk. The impact of these developments was felt in Britain, where the idea of artistic experience as unmediated and potentially transcendental had taken hold. To offer just one example, in 1920 Gustav Holst described the process of “listening to music” as “the direct impulse from one mind to another.”32 By the time the composer made this claim, the introduction of technologized listening at home (by means of the gramophone) had already begun to present a new challenge. Where public performance venues had evolved to remove anything that distracted from the work on display, how this tradition of devoted listening might translate to music disseminated into the private sphere via radio was unclear.33 Over and above the unprecedented distractions of the domestic environment, one of the greatest sources of anxiety was the public’s perceived proclivity for what Davies described as “indiscriminate ‘turning on.’ ”34 Whereas gramophone users made a choice about which record to play, radio audiences could be accidental listeners. As BBC programs advisor Filson Young explained, simply “by turning a switch,” the public might “hear the finest orchestral music in the world.”35 While the broadcasting schedule enabled programmers and broadcasters to advance their own cultural agenda, the downside of radio was the ease with which art music could now be accessed; as Britain entered an “arm chair period of civilization,” musical performances became a commodity of daily life.36 In characteristically apprehensive language, Young predicted that the sheer availability posed a “danger” to art itself: concerned that the public might not recognize the value of what it was hearing, he warned that music would be “intrinsically cheapened by being laid on, so to speak, like water to every household.”37 This situation was only compounded by competition for airtime from the popular music industry. Throughout the 1920s, light music, dance music, and gramophone records accounted for over 60 percent of music broadcasts, a trend that continued in subsequent decades.38 With its standardized forms and memorable melodies, popular music was— some felt—all too alluring. The rapid expansion of the popular industry seemed only to confirm the public’s inclination toward the lowest common denominator; and, as a consequence, radio’s tendency to consolidate rather than combat lowbrow tastes. What’s more, although cultural commentators tended to map critiques about the mind-numbing impact of mass media onto popular genres, they remained concerned

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that “ordinary listeners” might take the same, supposedly indiscriminating approach to art music (as Davies’s and Young’s warnings against background listening have already suggested). In short, the notion that all music might be listened to in the same way was profoundly uncomfortable because it threatened to blur the boundaries between highbrow and lowbrow. In so doing, it risked degrading art music, saddling it with the negative connotations of a mass medium.39

Music and the Ordinary Listener However, many music educators hoped that the converse might be possible: if radio could be appropriated for pedagogic ends, then there was the possibility that broadcast art music might elevate not just the medium, but also the minds of the nation. Davies’s educational undertakings were built on such an aspiration. Motivated by religious convictions instilled during his staunchly Protestant upbringing, as well as by the wider liberal discourse that viewed music as a means of personal enlightenment and so ultimately of social reform, he insisted that, in listening to music, “we look to be wholly moved, or, if the longer word is helpful, wholesomely moved.”40 Music and the Ordinary Listener was an attempt to facilitate just that. But how exactly? First, the program’s timing was key. The talks were originally scheduled at 10:10 p.m. and were moved to 9:30 p.m. at the end of April (for reasons that remain unclear).41 Neither slot was specifically associated with art music programs: dance bands and theatrical dramatizations were just as frequently broadcast at this hour. They were, however, points in the evening when the public were likely to be tuned in (respectively after and before the news) and free from domestic distractions. At the same time, the hour was sufficiently late that tiredness threatened to increase susceptibility to “casual” listening, which in turn heightened the need to mitigate the pitfalls of the domestic environment.42 The armchair listener might be physically relaxed but should remain mentally alert. No less important was striking a tone that would facilitate audience engagement. However, finding one was far from straightforward, as was evident from Davies’s self-conscious remarks about his pedagogic approach. In the inaugural broadcast, he went to some lengths to reassure his audience that “tiresome technical knowledge of how a tune comes about” was of little value to the ordinary listener. Rather, the listener should pursue the ability to make a “straightforward discriminating appreciation of a well-set-up, well-balanced tune directly he

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meets it with his ears.”43 To this end, Davies sought to lead his audience through what he described as a “simple test of homely analysis.” However, even the qualifying domestic adjective (homely) seemed insufficient to soften the negative connotations conjured by analysis. Davies immediately continued: “It is fatally easy to spoil a good thing by the slightest excess of analysis. I must try not to do that.”44 This reads like a note-to-self, but it might also have been a preemptive attempt to stop listeners switching off—literally or metaphorically. A similar ambivalence can be seen in the apparent incongruity between the talk’s content and its subtitle: “Mere Listening.” Deceptively nonchalant, this disguised the intentionality with which Davies wanted his students to approach their subject. So, what did an appropriate level of “homely analysis” entail? And in what sense could a demonstration serve as a vehicle for encouraging good listening habits in the general public? To answer this, a short excerpt from a typical talk will be useful. It is one of the few that survives in recorded as well as draft script form (meaning that we know exactly what was broadcast, including what musical examples were used).45 Aired on December 3, 1937, the talk concluded an eight-part series on the opaque subject of “Remark and Repartee.” The illustrations were taken from the E Major Fugue from Book 1 of Bach’s WellTempered Clavier and were played by Davies on the studio piano. He delivered the lecture in received pronunciation, the preferred accent for #### c Œ ‰ j r œ ≈ BBC&broadcasters at œ time. œ this œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

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“Good evening listeners! This is the last of our talks in this series. Last week I managed and talked too much and crowded out that delicious Bach # # Œ badly ‰ soj the ≈ fugue end, & # #atcthe œ œtoœyou. œ œrHere is the salient œ œ firstœthing œ œthat œ isœtoœplay œ phrase:

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There are lots of other interesting phrases. Chief among them is this:

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Of course, as you know, in a fugue, everything is about the chief phrase or arising what the headmaster of a school near London ####cout ofjit. But letœusœ do œ œ œ ‰ does with his boys when they’re or an Unfinished, ˙going toœ hearœ aœBeethoven, œœ˙ & œ œ œ or a New World, he simply puts the themes firmly into their memory he told # œ œ at me #and then jhe’s astonished with which they listen to the œ ˙the keenness & # #c ‰ without œ œ any œfurther œ œœœœ˙ œ whole work œ guidance:

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That If we’ve got it in our memory we shall never miss # #occurs #c Œ twelve j times. ≈always sings it thus: œ œ œ œ œ r ‰ my &A#member it. of œ œ family œ œ œ œ œ

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even part of the phrase coming. Look out for the ending:

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œ œ ≈ œ œ œ œ œ œ ≈ œ œ œ œ more spread part. Now here it is. Deliciously succinct after the other rather

# ##3.1: Walford Example Davies, œ œ “Remark œ œ ˙ and œRepartee,” œ œ œBBC Radio Broadcast, ‰ œj including & # 3,c 1937; œ œ modified ˙ December excerpts from JohannœSebastian œBach, E Major Fugue, Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV 854, Book 1.

There followed a performance of the complete fugue. The excerpt exemplifies how Davies sought to translate pedagogic principle into method, combining techniques that were common to the # ##c music with his own distinctive œ œ ofr pre≈ Œ ‰ œj movement œ style & #appreciation œ œ œ œ œ œ of œ œ toœ theœ particularities sentation, developed in response the broadcast Hel - lo! You sil - ly fel - low would you like to hear a fugue? medium. For one thing, the tone—which is that of a casual, even rambling, monologue—attempts to capture the fluency of speech but within clearly defined bounds, such that the speaker would not appear to be interrupted or constricted by the broadcasting schedule. It was for this reason that presenters were encouraged to work from carefully crafted scripts. This process was evocatively codified several years later by the ? # ##c ‰ œJ œ ≈ œ œ œ œ BBC’s #second director of talks, C.œA. Siepmann, as “double artifice”: œ “What was natural had to become artificial before it would sound natural again.”46 (As the apology that opened the December 3 broadcast

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suggests, however, theory did not always translate perfectly into practice: despite his prepared scripts, Davies had a tendency to wander, meaning that his broadcasts often overran or failed to cover all he had promised.)47 Besides practical concerns, the mode of address also cultivated a sense of intimacy designed to counteract the absent presence of an invisible speaker. Davies described the “new method” as one of imagining listeners in his “mind’s eye” to ensure “continuous touch . . . by audible means.”48 In case this sounded too saccharine for those accustomed to more stringent pedagogy, he stressed that his approach was a “vital technique,” crucial for holding listeners’ attention. Meanwhile, to enhance the impression of a conversation, the BBC advised against listening to talks through earphones, especially in group contexts, because “it feels unnatural to sit eavesdropping.”49 Instead, using a loudspeaker supposedly heightened the sense that the broadcaster was present in the room. Davies’s aim, of course, was not simply to draw audiences into his broadcast, but into the music under discussion. He hoped to lead listeners from what he considered the superficial level of melodic recognition to a deeper understanding of form. This reflected a guiding principle of the appreciation movement: that the formal complexity of art music lent itself to repeated hearings, inviting growing interest over time. It was on this basis too that educators maintained that “familiarity” with canonical repertoire promised a kind of “enjoyment” that was qualitatively different from that found in popular song, which allegedly induced inertia.50 The journey of musical discovery laid out before the aspiring listener was captured by Reith, who imagined that “even those who demand a ‘tune’ in music, come to discover form in what they took to be mere sound. They realize how the charm of music grows upon them: repetition brings greater understanding rather than staleness.”51 In other words, since catchy tunes had an uncomfortably easy appeal, appreciation had to be grounded in the higher pursuit of comprehending form. In Davies’s broadcasts, using illustrative “snapshots” to highlight the main motifs provided a set of melodic hooks that hastened the process of getting to know the music.52 The ultimate purpose, however, was to equip listeners to identify the fugue’s twelve subject entries in order that they might go on to hear the rest of the material “arising out of it.” At the same time, this excerpt demonstrates how Davies’s use of language was carefully tailored for his audience. Seeking to use the intimate tone of the medium to his advantage, he made frequent use of emotive vocabulary, while avoiding musical jargon. “Delicious” appears twice, while “chief phrase” stands in for “subject,”

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and, after a fumbling hesitation, he substitutes the vague “spread part” for the “development section.” What is more, he uses a humorous aidemémoire to help his adult audience identify the fugue subject—a bold move given that he had come under fire earlier in the year for using limericks to teach sonata form (like Malcolm Sargent had a decade earlier, as we saw in chapter 2).53 Beyond guiding listeners through an elementary musical analysis, Davies was reluctant to provide any background context for the works under discussion. As he explained to program-planner George Barnes, information about the composer’s life and times was best eschewed in favor of an exclusive focus on “the facts of ordinary listener’s [sic] experience while listening to music itself qua music.”54 In the excerpt transcribed above, for example, the details of which Bach fugue he is performing are never given. As far as we can tell from the surviving talk transcripts, this was typical: Davies rarely gave the titles of works in full, if at all. Instead, he tended to move quickly from one musical example to the next—and even on occasion from one genre or period to another—with little by way of explanatory links. The result was an eclectic potpourri of de-historicized music excerpts through which he hoped to heighten listeners’ attentiveness to the music itself. Davies’s refusal to address matters beyond the “music itself” did not reflect the prevailing approach among middlebrow educators. On the contrary, contemporary education manuals frequently introduced the Western art music canon through composer-surveys. A typical example, Scholes’s 1921 volume Learning to Listen by Means of the Gramophone included chapters on Purcell, Handel, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Elgar (among others).55 Music and the Ordinary Listeners’ American equivalent, Walter Damrosch’s celebrated NBC Music Appreciation Hour, was similarly centered on a linear understanding of musical progress, setting information about composers’ lives and times alongside a heavily periodized perspective of stylistic development.56 Even the guest contributors to Music and the Ordinary Listener proved more eager to situate music within its historical contexts (this, for instance, was the approach that Francis Toye took in his broadcast on “The Enjoyment of Music”).57 Davies’s stance was closer to that usually taken by critics of the middlebrow, who feared that such “external” details—as Adorno described them in his damning critique of the NBC program—drew listeners’ attention away from the music itself.58 From this perspective, biographical information presented an “obstacle to real understanding,” as listeners supposedly ended up mistaking knowledge

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about the music for a direct experience of the music.59 More optimistic than Adorno about the public’s potential to learn, Davies maintained that focusing on musical processes, on the other hand, would aid the kind of structural understanding that he believed was necessary to comprehend great music’s hidden depths. If Davies’s approach was a paradoxical reaction against the middlebrow milieu of which he was very much a part, his attitude also lays bare one of the ideological values that was central to music appreciation: a commitment to the ideal of musical autonomy. While in the broadcast quoted above this is primarily evidenced by his pedagogic strategy, elsewhere he made the point more explicitly. Perhaps the most telling instance relates to two consecutive 1928 series. The first, “Music in Double Harness,” set music within the broader context of the arts— not with a view to promoting interdisciplinary perspectives, but rather as a route “to detached thoughts about music alone,” unencumbered by extra-musical associations.60 The apogee came in the following series, which finally introduced listeners to what Davies considered “the vital thing of all”: “Audible Form.” Although he never said as much directly, we can speculate that the need to reinforce art music’s autonomy seemed especially urgent in the context of radio: because art music’s co-option to the BBC’s public service broadcasting agenda made its complicity in sociopolitical agendas uncomfortably transparent. Besides more or less explicitly endorsing art music’s alleged autonomy, Davies’s pedagogic approach was also guided by a methodological agenda: Music and the Ordinary Listener had been conceived “not to give expert musical instruction, but to give listeners of normal intelligence and musical tastes guidance in their daily recreation of listening to all kinds of music.”61 In this sense, it came broadly in line with the policy of the Talks Department, under whose remit it fell. Created in 1927—by which time Music and the Ordinary Listener was into its second series—this department was responsible for “talks other than those of a definitely educational kind.”62 Explicitly educational programs were left to the Adult Education Section, which was founded around the same time and charged both with delivering instructional talks for adults and with producing and distributing associated teaching materials: “Aids to Study” pamphlets for individual and group use.63 In practice, the distinction between the two departments’ outputs was far from clear-cut. Not least, the “weekly critical talks” planned by the former often took a remarkably similar form to the “systematic short courses of lectures” prepared by the latter. Nor did internal departmental divisions always

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reflect how programs were consumed.64 Nevertheless, even after the Adult Education Talks were handed over to the Talks Department in August 1934, the latter remained “opposed to music talks on a definitely instructional, educational basis.”65 The series was instead imagined as a sort of elevating entertainment. The resistance to “definitely instructional” talks brings to mind the BBC’s aspiration at once to “inform, educate and entertain” the public, a set of commitments that sat uneasily alongside one another.66 On the one hand, the perceived need to “inform” and “educate” reflected a hostility toward mass culture, which many commentators perceived to be providing the wrong sort of entertainment. Not least, critics feared that it aroused the emotions in such a way as to fuel irrational or escapist behavior. On the other hand, the emphasis on entertainment reflected a growing aversion to intellectualism. As Stefan Collini has shown, in interwar Britain the “idea of the intellectual” attracted a host of negative and frequently xenophobic connotations, from snobbery to political radicalism.67 Resistance to the “definitely instructional” also reflected the lack of consensus about what education might look like in the new broadcasting context. Some feared that a direct approach might put audiences off. Young, for example, warned: “The listener must never be allowed to feel that something is being done to him, that he is being subjected to this or that treatment for his own good. Any such suspicion raises in a normal mind a stubborn resistance against the influence thus imposed.”68 For those who shared this opinion, the strength of radio lay rather in its capacity for “insidious education”—a phrase whose shady connotations belie the positive intentions of its advocates.69 Maintaining that education should be a process of “wooing” not “forcing,” they insisted that repeated exposure to the “right” sort of culture would bring about gradual, if unquantifiable, social and moral elevation.70 However, others argued that the belief in such “inductive method[s]” was misplaced. Writing in 1925, a Guardian correspondent contended that it was naïve to think that real interest in high culture might be cultivated simply by increasing its availability: a more explicit and formal approach was needed to effect change.71 These discussions betrayed a more fundamental ambivalence about the viability of the public education project as a whole, as well as about the methods through which its proponents sought to accomplish their aims. It is to this wider discussion that we now turn to explore how, in seeking to navigate a path between education and entertainment, Davies was not simply aligning his program with official BBC policy.

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More significantly, he engaged with a pedagogic debate that had been playing out among music educators for some time about the relative merits of emotional versus intellectual responses to art music. Examining this debate about music appreciation methodology will ultimately expose a tension at the heart of middlebrow educational ideals: between the desire to encourage independent thought and the commitment to a narrow system of cultural hierarchies.

Feeling and Thought The summer of 1931 saw a heated discussion in the Musical Times about the methods employed to teach music appreciation. As accusations flew between defenders and detractors, music educator Howard McKinney— who subsequently authored several books on appreciation—called for a more measured approach: “We cannot be satisfied with simple naive emotional responses any more than we can be with the ability to tack formal labels on to pieces: both are in danger of leading nowhere. We must not only present music as a beautiful thing to be enjoyed, but as an enjoyment worthy of a serious mind.”72 In calling a truce between the two sides, he revealed the crux of the issue: there was little consensus about how to strike the right balance between emotion, which encapsulated the public’s innate musical instincts, and intellect, which promised a means to rationalize and measure their natural response. The conflict was an old one. Since at least the early nineteenth century, Britain’s educated classes had struggled to find a compromise between the puritanical values broadly upheld by protestant society and the more sensual aspects of musical experience. Put simply, the widespread belief that music appealed primarily to the emotions rather than the intellect did not sit comfortably within an intellectual tradition that was wary of self-indulgence and placed a high value on rational thought. In this climate, music’s visceral appeal undermined its artistic credentials. As Scholes intimated, borrowing Harvard President Charles William Eliot’s words, it was widely viewed among the educated classes less as an art than as “a mere recreation, a refined hobby.”73 This echoed the dismissive position taken in Kant’s age-old Critique of Judgment, but there was more than aesthetic doctrine at stake here.74 The educated classes of mid-Victorian Britain imagined the ability to think rationally as a primary vehicle for “self-cultivation”—the pursuit of moral and social elevation to improve one’s own lot and, through this, to ameliorate society. Developing one’s critical faculties promised a way to rise

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above the narrow-minded barbarity of the masses and opened up the possibility of appreciating true genius. The promotion of self-cultivation became only more urgent during the latter part of the century, when governmental reforms began to expand the electorate. Particularly significant was the 1867 Representation of the People’s Act, which gave a proportion of the working-class male public the right to vote for the first time. As concerns mounted that the public might not discharge their newly acquired civic responsibilities in a suitably judicious fashion, education was increasingly considered a fundamental part of citizenship. Its importance was heightened by the “new marketplace of viewpoints” that emerged in conjunction with electoral reform, as Thomas has argued.75 Against this backdrop, “the cultivation of viewpoints [became] a pervasive concern for those who could fear the impending effects of uncultivated social and political agents, whether of the working-class male variety or of the hidebound middle-class liberal variety.” Reflecting on a variety of perspectives promised to be a route to rational thought. This ideal, which for Thomas is encapsulated in the concept of “many-sidedness,” found perhaps its staunchest advocate in John Stuart Mill, in whose hands it became fundamental to the liberal vision of “cultivated agency.”76 The discourse surrounding self-cultivation made a strong mark on Britain’s musical culture. Not least, to counteract the art form’s problematic associations with the emotions, educators, musicians, and critics (who, as noted in chapter 1, were often the same people) sought to promote the study of music as an intellectual undertaking worthy of serious minds. One of the most influential responses came from a coterie of composers connected with the Royal College of Music, who, during the final decades of the century, sought to elevate their profession by promoting it as “a subject for positivist academic study.”77 In contrast to artistic stereotypes of the decadent aesthete (who was uncomfortably effeminate) or the inspired genius (who bordered on insanity), this generation cultivated a more measured image of the composer as hardworking professional—an image better suited to Victorian values. As David Gramit and Corissa Gould among others have suggested, their efforts to present composition as a skill demanding academic training and rigorous self-discipline helped to counteract music’s associations with effeminate sentimentality.78 It was not long before these ideas began to filter down into music education more broadly.79 In his 1915 manual, for instance, MacPherson insisted that music should no longer “be approached in a spirit of

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mental idleness as a soporific; it is not a species of vapour-bath, in which our senses may wallow, but it is an art to be understood and appreciated (i.e., valued) by the alert use of our mind and the exercise of our intelligence.”80 Like many of his musical contemporaries, he advocated a higher view of music as a “Divine art” rather than a genteel pursuit. Two decades later, the argument was reiterated in a report on Music and the Community. Bemoaning the persistence of old attitudes, the writers complained: “We are told with at least enough emphasis and frequency that music appeals to the emotions, literature to the intellect.”81 Besides undermining the status of the art, the report writers contended, this attitude limited the public’s musical understanding and supposedly also their enjoyment. Only when music was taken more seriously would society recognize the true value of the art. Invoking music’s intellectual appeal, however, was not without its own problems. Not least, cerebral analyses of musical form and harmony risked missing the point of “art.” Already in 1892, Oxford professor and founder of the Musical Association John Stainer had sounded a warning: as musical knowledge and understanding developed, the emotional engagement that was supposedly crucial for a real artistic encounter was being sidelined. In a published lecture exploring Music and Its Relation to the Intellect and the Emotions, he explained that “as the Unknown in Art becomes known and systematized, so in proportion the field of the operation of the Intellect is extended, and the effect on the Emotions is pushed farther back.”82 The consequences for musical understanding were hardly positive: while a knowledge of “musical grammar” was a necessary foundation for criticism, it could not ultimately explain the aesthetic beauty that distinguished real art from merely “correct” compositions. The expansion of public music education during the first decades of the twentieth century did little to allay concerns. On the contrary, many pedagogues maintained that the pendulum had swung too far the other way. Choral conductor and university lecturer Dr. William G. Whittaker, for example, used his platform at a 1926 Conference of Educational Associations to warn against “reducing [music] to a purely pedantic subject.”83 Such an approach, he contended in appropriately evocative language, was unlikely to “arouse an unquenchable enthusiasm” for great works, which should be the aim of all music education. In a similar vein, Scholes criticized the “highbrow writers” who produced such analytical program notes that only “trained musicians . . . willing to put aside artistic pleasure” in favor of “detective work” could

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make any sense of them.84 Pitting themselves against the highbrow end of the musical establishment, Scholes and Whittaker sought to defend a more unbridled appreciation of art music—an approach that they hoped would instill a deep love of art music in the public, but without degrading it to the level of the popular. Any prospect of defining the right balance of feeling and thought was further confounded by contemporary stylistic trends. In particular, European art music composers—whose heritage continued to be held in the highest regard in Britain and who consequently set the terms of musical discussions—appeared to be staging the dichotomy between emotion and intellect on a stylistic level. On one side, the late-romantic tendency toward what Richard Taruskin has evocatively termed “maximalism” amplified concerns about excessive sentimentality and to such an extent that even unlikely composers became implicated.85 In Eric Blom’s diagnosis of this disagreeable trend, for example, Liszt and, perhaps more surprisingly, Mendelssohn were offered as typical of the two types of sentimentalist. The former was characteristic of the “sentimental sensualist,” who was constantly toying with or tipping over into excess; the latter exemplified the “sentimental formalist,” whose music suffered from a reliance on superficial stock gestures—or, in Blom’s terms, from “the rigid maintenance of the mere formalities of sentiment.”86 In both cases, the critic’s objection was not to the presence of emotion per se, but rather to music that too obviously wore its emotions on its sleeve. The difficulty, however, was that the line between appropriate sentiment and excessive sentimentality was alarmingly nebulous. If in this account Liszt and Mendelssohn fell on the wrong side, Verdi and Noël Coward fared better. In ironically effusive language, Blom claimed cadential closes from the former’s Othello and the latter’s Cavalcade as “truly affecting, tear-compelling passages,” passages apparently untarnished by the accompanying theatrical spectacle. Imagined to be at the other extreme from late nineteenth-century idioms was the “geometrical” approach to composition advocated by twelve-tone composers.87 This difficult modernist aesthetic supposedly demanded an intellectual engagement that promised to protect the music from emotional excess. However, this trend brought its own set of issues, for in attempting to prevent the public from “sentimentalizing over” their music, these composers had developed an aesthetic that risked going too far the other way. “Music,” the education reformer and musicologist Henry Hadow observed, “has become to us an unknown tongue.” In these circumstances, it was “not reasonable to expect”

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appreciation.88 Indeed, the intellectual nature of modern music limited its capacity to redress the balance, particularly where the public at large was concerned. Lamenting the way modern composers “den[ied] music its thrill,” one Guardian commentator complained: “I know it is considered out of date to feel emotion over music, moderns regarding it as merely a juxtaposition of sonorities, but I think that if people have ceased to be thrilled with music they ought to start all over again.”89 Davies made the link between musical styles and the kind of appreciation they invited more explicit, drawing a distinction between “vapid, sensational music,” which “soon bores us, leaving our minds stranded and our imagination comatose,” and “a very different kind of music—unneighbourly, learned, specialized, brainy music,” which was no less “boring, leaving the ear unpleased and the imagination stupefied.”90 Viewed from this perspective, the relationship between composer, music, and listener was at best hazy: while music appreciation put the onus on the listener to cultivate wholesome habits as a basis for their daily listening, it often seemed that only certain music could facilitate the right response. But at a time when contemporary composers seemed to be pushing toward one or the other extreme, audiences were caught between a rock and a hard place. The heightened sentiment of late romantic sensibilities on the one hand, and the modernist pursuit of objectivity, on the other, made finding a “creative response”—to borrow Davies’s phrasing again—between that of the “sensation-monger” and that of the “musical ‘cross-chord-puzzler’ ” especially difficult.91 It was perhaps for this reason that, in his broadcasts, Davies seems to have favored music composed before the mid-nineteenth century— repertoire that was more restrained in emotional expression and more accessible in style than either of the respective contemporary extremes. To give just a few indicative examples, Series II explored “The Mind of Beethoven” and Series VIII, twelve little-known overtures composed by “Handel at the Harpsichord”; meanwhile the few surviving recordings of broadcasts show him quoting Bach, Mozart, and Schumann, as well as the famous hymn tune, the “Old Hundredth.” These choices suggest an uneasiness about late romantic idioms that was common among music educators (a subject explored more fully in chapter 5). In their pursuit of a middle-ground, liberal-minded educators remained indebted to the late-Victorian aspiration to many-sidedness (to invoke Thomas’s term once again), as well as to the strong ideological association between education, citizenship, and civilization that flowed from this. Indeed, for all that music pedagogy promoted the

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ideal of aesthetic autonomy, music continued to be bound up in this social discourse. A 1939 study of broadcasting, for instance, concluded that widening the public’s musical interests was one way in which radio could combat the “parochialism of outlook” and “class barriers which are the result of paucity of common interests.”92 In so doing, it would help to build a nation of “responsible citizens”—those “ordinary working men and women” who exhibited well-developed “critical and creative” faculties and “that breadth of outlook and knowledge of affairs which become daily more necessary.” This was a function of broadcasting that even the arch-paternalist Reith admitted was important: there seemed to be nothing less than the future of society at stake.93 Taking a characteristically long view, he explained that “the boys and girls of today are the citizens of to-morrow, and the ancestors of the citizens of the future. Seed sown in the twentieth century will bear its fruit in centuries to come.”94 In language redolent of his late-Victorian forebears, he went on to reiterate the crucial role that self-cultivation would play in building a better world: “the only real hope for the future lies in eradicating the weed of ignorance, if the garden of civilization is to flourish and grow beautiful.” At the BBC, the Talks Department played a key part in this, most often by airing a cross-section of views on a given topic, from which the public could then form their own opinions. Music and the Ordinary Listener pursued a similar end via different means: it aimed to facilitate musical discernment not by presenting different readings of specific pieces of music, but by equipping the public with a set of analytical skills that could guide their listening in general. The ultimate aim, in other words, was to enable listeners to make their own, informed judgments. However, from the outset, this liberal impetus was complicated by the concurrent belief in a system of cultural hierarchies that privileged art music—from the canonical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertory “about which the most extreme schools are in agreement” to a more contested canon of early and contemporary works—above all else.95 It was a system that Davies, as well as most of the adjunct presenters, upheld. Indeed, Music and the Ordinary Listener sat on the fault line between these two contradictory sets of values—and it is precisely along this line that the program’s deepest paradoxes appear. For even as broadcasters encouraged the public to think critically, the notion that certain perspectives were more valid than others fueled doubts about their capacity to do so, undercutting confidence in the accuracy of their judgments.

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“Every Man His Own Critic” Even before the Talks Department had begun to sketch a policy for music education broadcasts, Scholes (who was earlier introduced as the first BBC music critic) had set out a guiding principle: “Every man his own music critic.” He had the opportunity to remind listeners of this central principle fifteen years later—in 1938—when he was invited to deliver guest lectures for a series of Music and the Ordinary Listener on “Modern Music.”96 A fuller explanation is given in the “Criticism of Music” entry in his best-selling Oxford Companion to Music: “Finally, it may be laid down, without any suggestion derogatory to the value of the work of professional critics, that the true principle of music criticism is ‘Every man his own critic.’ In other words, the public should be encouraged, whilst carefully reading the views of experts, to form its own—and to be ready to change them on cause being shown. This is a necessary condition of a healthy artistic life, and the best service the professional critic can render is to stimulate the amateur to think for himself.”97 Behind this ideal were a host of personal, pragmatic, and ideological considerations. An autodidact, Scholes had directed his own journey from musical amateur to authority—and with such success that he made a career as a music critic and educator.98 He was, then, living proof that the self-taught man could become an expert. At the same time, he recognized that, pace those who insisted otherwise, criticism could never be objective: “It would be arrogant of any music critic,” he explained in a lengthy subsection titled “Criticism Is Opinion,” “to claim that he knows the way to ‘simple impersonal truth.’ ”99 If the pursuit of truth was not in this instance a valid goal, music education had to be justified on other grounds. Emphasizing the public’s right to form their own opinions offered more than a merely logical solution: it also chimed with the democratic spirit of the interwar years. Britain was, as Scholes put it, “a free country where one’s personal opinions are one’s personal property.”100 Given this, it was categorically not his job as critic to “press” the public to agree with him. Finally, this approach implicitly acknowledged that musical taste was, in reality, neither static nor homogenous. Listening preferences tended to cut across genres and styles and the profusion of music on radio only promised to encourage this. While Scholes takes the credit for coining a catchy slogan, he was far from unique in advocating the “every man his own critic” principle. Liberal-minded educators, who tolerated—or at least resigned themselves to—the diversity of musical interests, frequently imagined

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their role as one of equipping the individual to map his own path through this abundant landscape. To offer just two further examples, reporting on an educational conference that took place at the start of 1922, Times critic Henry Colles concluded: “That is the beginning and end of musical education, to set the perceptions free.”101 Meanwhile a 1933 report on Music and the Community compiled by a committee of high-profile policy makers, critics, and educators insisted that a proper music education would teach the student “to form his own taste and to develop and change that taste as often as he may find it necessary in the course of his life.”102 The prevailing attitude, then, was that music education needed to do more than just teach the public to parrot educated opinion. Failure to do so, the authors of the report warned, would result in a public “permanently cramped by the extraneous imposition of a ‘good taste’ which [it] has not discovered for [itself].” It was precisely this kind of aspirational, crowd-following listener that Punch magazine mocked in its 1925 caricature of the BBC as having discovered a “a new type, ‘the middlebrow,’ ” comprised of “people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff they ought to like.”103 More than simply satirizing the BBC’s audience, the paper was also targeting the institution, which was so earnest in its attempts to elevate public taste. The liberal vision of public education marked Music and the Ordinary Listener in a variety of ways. On the most fundamental level, it inspired Davies’s conviction that anyone could appreciate art music: “We are all in the same case when it comes to hearing PERFECT music,” he asserted at the start of the second broadcast, implying that music was a universal language that people had an innate ability to understand.104 It was also reflected in the apparently ambiguous hierarchy between teacher and student. Even as he believed that the public needed instruction, Davies encouraged his audience to think of him as an equal: not as a “lecturer” who would tell them what to think, but as a “companion” with whom to explore the world of music.105 He welcomed the written correspondence in which listeners expressed their own views on matters arising and posed questions.106 Frequently responding on air, he fostered a sense of dialogue that resisted the natural limits of the medium. Meanwhile, when listeners mistook him for a teacher, he was quick to correct them. After one wrote in questioning his apparent endorsement of modern music, for example, he responded: “I did not know I could have given the impression of claiming that so-called modern music is beautiful. I rather wish to disclaim any right to do more in your name

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than to continue in a lively way to love every note and every relation of notes that my mind can contain.”107 In addition, Davies often seemed to suggest that what ultimately mattered was the ability to distinguish value within a given genre. “It isn’t a question of so-called High brow music and Low brow music or Middle brow,” he explained in another early broadcast, “It is a question of ‘thank God that we’ve got a Brow’ . . . one common indomitable love of anything perfect when we hear it or see it.”108 On a subsequent occasion he went further, arguing that jazz, art music, and Anglican chant were in fact remarkably similar and shared common strengths and weaknesses. Whether it be “the turgid orchestration of a symphony” or “the non-musical animal noises of jazz,” the underlying faults—in this instance, “extraneous noises”—were the same.109 If perfection could be found in popular or classical, jazz or folk music, the aim was to teach the public to discern what made a particular piece “good of its kind.”110 Music and the Ordinary Listener purported to do just this by imparting listening techniques that applied to “all kinds of music.” In such moments, it modeled a vision of a cultured public that was remarkably similar to that evoked by the long and eclectic list of middlebrow pastimes in Priestley’s famous “High, Low Broad” essay: one premised on taking a critical interest in a range of musics.111 At the same time, however, the notion that radio could further this agenda was complicated by its associations with mass culture, the easy appeal of which seemingly threatened to encourage indolence and moral turpitude. The “obvious danger,” as one early study put it, was that broadcasting would “weaken individual thought and initiative, and blunt the critical faculty.”112 In this instance, radio would not foster responsible citizens but their obverse: the stereotypical lover of mass culture, who frittered away his time on mindless and superficial distractions that left him politically disempowered. The perceived need to take active steps to avoid this undesirable course was heightened by concurrent developments in cinematography. Driven by commercial rather than artistic concerns, filmmakers had, as Reith explained, allowed “sensationalism” to dominate, a quality that undermined any “ethical and educational value” that cinema might have had.113 For all radio’s promise, the line between utopian dream and dystopian nightmare seemed uncomfortably narrow. Where music in particular was concerned, the burgeoning popular music industry added further complexity. If everyone was “in the same case,” as Davies had insisted, this was not reflected in any consensus on

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the amount of airtime allotted to popular genres versus art music, nor in the balance of the various styles of art music. Public debate about the balance of BBC broadcasting foregrounded a troubling dilemma: while a freethinking public seemed politically expedient, the possibility that they might dislike “great” music jarred with the doctrine of high art that was concurrently gaining force and to which the vast majority of music educators subscribed. In addition, validating the public’s right to their own views ultimately risked undermining the value placed on expert opinion, rendering the professional critic’s role defunct. A provocative editorial in the Radio Times asked whether, with “music . . . being made a universal possession by broadcasting, it [was] not the right of the amateur to take over from the professional critic the function of critical comment and interpretation.”114 These tensions created an ideological impasse, which was exposed through educators’ contradictory claims. Many of those who openly professed to encourage independent thought can elsewhere be seen defending highbrow judgments as superior—either directly, as in the case of the aforementioned Radio Times editorial, which cited Dr. Johnson’s warning that “the self-taught man . . . has a very ignorant fellow for his master”; or indirectly, by asserting that musical training was crucial. Davies was guilty of the former: where we saw him invoking the language of the brows in a bid to refute it, his off-air pronouncements about the differences between functional music and art music— between music “wanted as a cheery background for conversation and for sociabilities” and music that should be listened to “as and for itself”—were less open minded.115 Moreover, if on air he could be coy about his opinion of the music under discussion, he was transparent in his efforts to recuperate the act of listening. Rather than staking out the cultural terrain purely on the basis of styles, aesthetics, or genres, he foregrounded listening practices as the site of negotiation, as he sought to lead the public in “a gentle rebellion . . . against the terrible noises they hear daily in the name of music.”116 Scholes exhibited a similar duplicity. Despite his “every man his own critic” mantra, he also warned that it would be “fatal” if sound reproduction technologies led people to believe that “anyone without previous preparation” could “do what is called ‘Appreciation’ work.”117 This perspective was widely shared among music educators, many of whom believed that proper study could have only one outcome: a realization of the crassness of popular music. Mr. Arthur Goodchild’s words, music master at a boys’ school in Kent, are exemplary: “The ‘appreciationist,’ ” he declared, “will have

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achieved his object if he has formed in his pupils the habit of intensive listening, irrespective of what they are listening to; for he who listens intently to jazz must very soon switch it off!”118 In such moments, educators betrayed an underlying and ironically narrow-minded belief that “responsible citizenship” could only really be cultivated through highbrow pastimes. In short, far from being straightforwardly elitist, Music and the Ordinary Listener was caught between contradictory impulses. Struggling to find a middle ground, the series toed a precarious line between encouraging the public to trust their own judgments and simultaneously trying to protect the highbrow credentials of art music by teaching the “correct” way to listen. This tension was not just manifested on an ideological level. It also came out in music pedagogy—most obviously in the fraught attempts to balance emotional and intellectual forms of engagement. Given that music educators could not agree on where to draw the boundaries, it comes as no surprise that consensus proved equally elusive when the public joined the debate. Indeed, it was barely a matter of weeks after the inaugural broadcast before Music and the Ordinary Listener became a subject of controversy in the national press.

Tired Listeners On January 19, 1926, a letter titled “Tired Listeners” appeared in the Times. Written by Mr. Eustace Baynes, a resident of the wealthy Sackville Street in Mayfair, London, it featured an extended complaint about Davies’s new series, which was just two episodes in.119 The opening broadcast had urged “the casual listener, even the tired listener, not only to listen with the ear of the body but with the constructive ear of the mind,” on the grounds that their enjoyment would be increased by “noting consciously [the music’s] construction, its features.”120 The second talk built on this, expounding the “three great joys of art”—“energy,” which was expressed through rhythm; “mastery,” which was embodied in form; and “wonderment,” a rather vague category that gestured to the “inspiration, imagination, vision, mysticism, mystery, reverence, devotion” that great art supposedly inspired.121 Davies illustrated the first with a technological stunt, combining “two modern miracles” as he broadcast one of his educational gramophone records at varying speeds to demonstrate how it inflected his voice.122 The aim in so doing was to persuade listeners of their innate ability to appreciate music; but despite the zealous speaker and the experimental use of technology,

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Baynes found that enthusiasm for the task at hand did not come naturally. Denouncing Davies’s attempts to incite “ ‘energy’ in listening” as ill-timed and militant, he lamented: “The speaker hammered out philosophy in tabloid form, and urged our tired ears to energize themselves and our equally tired brains to assimilate his theories. I suggest that the hour and place are unsuitable for any form of forcible feeding of unmusical and wearied souls. . . . That vast audience of tired people does not desire to be talked to upon abstruse and difficult subjects, and does not wish its armchair to be turned into a school form.” Baynes’s objections were typical of a broader current of opinion that talks should not be broadcast after 7 p.m., as they demanded more concentration than an audience predominantly of working adults could give.123 However, as the discussion unfolded, it quickly turned to larger issues than the timing of instructional broadcasts. Enthusiasts for the program were quick to come to Davies’s defense. A week later the paper printed a spate of rebuttals that, despite some variation in correspondents’ backgrounds, centered on a common theme. First, a Ronald K. Denham wrote in from the rural village of Landbeach, Cambridge, asserting that “to some tired listeners there is mental refreshment in the living voice of a specialist talking about a subject which he has made his own.”124 Counting himself as “one who has had experience of long, drab streets,” he also gave the testimony of an appreciative village woman, implying that his position cut across gender and geographic boundaries. Meanwhile in a more openly paternalistic gesture, Percy Edwin Spielmann, son of the eminent art critic and member of the elitist Arts Club, took it upon himself to speak for the many working people for whom such programs were “the only opportunity available . . . of brain food of this type.”125 Adopting a more mocking tone, solicitor H. Tyrell Lewis suggested that, if “our old friend, the ‘Tired Business Man’ ” could not muster sufficient patience to switch off the radio for the program’s duration, perhaps an early night would “restore his overwrought tissues for the next day’s toil.”126 Several weeks later, the final word went to a critic at The Musical Times, who insisted that Baynes’s selfish opinion ran counter to the public good. Rest, he continued, “does not necessarily mean torpor, mental or physical.”127 On the contrary, the pursuit of “new interests and a change of occupation” promised to be a better palliative for the weary soul. Amid the colorful rhetoric of Baynes’s adversaries, what seemed to be at stake was what constituted relaxation—or, to be more precise, whether intellectual pursuits might provide deeper relief from the strains

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of modern living than the more visceral escapism offered by populist amusement. Articulated in language that reflected the era’s particular preoccupations (the talk of “listeners” and “businessmen” are exemplary), the discussion thus rehearsed the old tension between emotion and thought that had been shaping music education discourse since the late-Victorian era. What’s more, for all the paternalism behind the BBC’s efforts to educate, the rejoinders to Baynes reveal that there was a section of the public who experienced instructive programs not as an imposition, but rather as a welcome opportunity for learning. If these liberal commitments—to self-cultivation and critical thought—were widespread during this seminal period in the development of Britain’s musical middlebrow, they would continue to shape music education initiatives throughout the midcentury, as subsequent chapters will show. •

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Despite the controversy that greeted the inaugural series, Davies remained committed to this pedagogic approach throughout his broadcasting career. While he certainly did not have a monopoly on BBC music education talks, his force of personality continued to be felt throughout the interwar period. Indeed, the extended memoranda and letters from the 1930s that survive show him expressing forceful—and sometimes unsolicited—opinions about the scope and content of music talks. Conscious of his seminal role in establishing the genre, the Talks Department worked to accommodate his requests. For example, throughout the first decade of broadcast music talks, program planners repeatedly respected his desire that talks should not address matters such as “any particular phase of musical importance, individual composer, selected masterpiece or even music written for one particular instrument.”128 They also gave him special dispensation to talk for longer than other speakers. Nevertheless, by the mid-1930s, institutional wrangling began to weaken Davies’s position. This was a period of general uncertainty within the BBC, as the institution sought to negotiate the renewal of its Royal Charter, which expired at the end of 1936. For the Talks Department, a series of internal reorganizations brought further instability, including three rapid changes in leadership between August 1934 and February 1936. Richard Roy Maconachie’s appointment as director of the Talks Department (in early 1936) ended the managerial turbulence but encouraged other winds of change. His “genuine interest in promoting the work of young men” was in step with wider demands to “break with [the] ‘intellectualism’ ” and reliance on the “elite” that had

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characterized the BBC during its first decade.129 Meanwhile, the establishment of a Listener Research Department in 1936 suggested a growing openness to public opinion. Committed to a relatively highbrow version of music education and increasing in years, Davies was not naturally well positioned to weather these changes. In May 1935, Siepmann (then director of Talks) observed that the department had been “over-indulgent in our consideration and in our consultation of Walford Davies.”130 Interdepartmental politics seem to have been a factor here, as Siepmann’s remark came on the heels of perceived “interference” from the Music Advisory Committee in the Talks Department’s business. But there was also a sense that the success of Davies’s approach was waning. Head of Talks G. N. Pocock observed that the speaker seemed to be “losing his magic”: “The reports I have from listening groups,” he warned “are not encouraging.”131 Concluding the memo with a suggestion that was as elitist as it was progressive, Pocock insisted that the time had come to track down the “young and brilliant men” among the new generation of “Public School Organists and Choir Masters,” who could take over. It was two years later that the Talks Department finally overrode Davies’s ideas about what kinds of information programs should include, planning sub-series on “Instruments of the Orchestra” and “Music for Keyboard Instruments” within the 1937–38 Music and the Ordinary Listener offering.132 More popular with gramophone companies, these kinds of themes promised to improve the program’s reception. At the same time, they risked tarnishing themselves by association with the “hackneyed method” that commercially driven music appreciation enterprises supposedly employed: something that the program planners were “anxious to avoid.”133 Despite their best efforts, however, certain commentators continued to find fault on such grounds: they claimed that the accessibility of Music and the Ordinary Listener was precisely its problem. In particular, they accused Davies of traversing the boundaries of acceptable emotional engagement. One such was Harvey Grace, editor of The Musical Times, who couched his critique in derogatory language more commonly reserved for popular music. By “ladling out dope and slush,” he argued, Davies was contributing to an alarming trend for “sloppy writing and thinking” about music. Such a “sentimental” approach was not only counterproductive, but also unnecessary, since “a very large proportion of average non-professionals are becoming really intelligent and well-informed as to the fundamental principles of music and its

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performance.”134 For this writer, even a vestige of sentimentality threatened to contaminate the proper reception of art music. The protracted discussions about teaching music appreciation in midcentury Britain exposed a pervasive sense that how people listened somehow affected the value of the music. If anxiety ran deep, this was because pinpointing precisely how modes of reception and artistic status related was near impossible. Seeking to rationalize a sentimental response to music, liberal-minded music educators sought to demarcate a distinctively middlebrow mode of listening: one that promised to distinguish the reception of art music from its populist counterparts, even as it was disseminated via mass media to an enlarged, domestic audience.135 This set a precedent on which subsequent generations of middlebrow educators would build. (We will encounter an exemplary case in chapter 5, which explores Wilfrid Mellers’s advocacy of a historically informed approach to listening that went further than Davies, imagining distinctive reception modes for music from different periods.) Meanwhile, at the same time as believing that some music was categorically better than others, interwar music educators of Davies’s stripe seemingly challenged the distinction between high and low, arguing that it was more pertinent to ask whether music was “good of its kind.”136 It was perhaps because the act of listening was so intangible that their focus on reception practices could somehow sustain their paradoxical position, which at once advocated independent judgment and asserted the superiority of the Western art music canon. Facing such paradoxes, it would be easy—even tempting—to dismiss middlebrow initiatives like Music and the Ordinary Listener as yet another example of the educated classes’ problematic pursuit of social and cultural hegemony.137 As we have seen, as much as presenters generally followed Scholes and Davies in avoiding explicit value judgments, they did seek to extend their influence via another means, as they advised on what proper listening should and should not entail. While radio held unprecedented potential as a democratizing medium, then, this moment of technological possibility was also, as Lacey has it, a moment of elitist entrenchment.138 But in this chapter, I have sought to offer a more reparative reading—one that recovers music educators’ contradictory ideological commitments: to art music’s autonomy, as well as to its potential as a vehicle of societal transformation; to the ideal of a public that both exercised its freedom of opinion and adhered to a specific system of cultural hierarchies; and to broadening access to art music despite fears that doing so risked degrading it. Besides bringing to light

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the conflicted ideals driving middlebrow music education, this perspective usefully allows space for the negotiations that took place between educators and their publics. Characteristic of liberal pedagogy, the discursive dynamic between teacher and students was also a response to the practical challenges of catering sufficiently to public interests. If the middlebrow emerged from this melting pot of concerns, radio’s seminal role in its establishment was not simply a product of the new possibilities that the medium offered for disseminating art music on a mass scale. Rather, the technology’s significance stemmed from the way that music broadcasting interacted with the concept of radio as a “public service,” as music educators adapted late-Victorian ideals of cultivation to meet the cultural and political challenges of twentieth-century modernity.

Chapter 4

Music Education on Film Instruments of the Orchestra (1946)

March 1944. The war was far from over, but in Britain, the air was thick with talk of postwar reconstruction. It had been for some time. At the Ministry of Education (MoE), plans were well underway for a longawaited expansion of Britain’s state education system: final amendments were being drafted to the Education Bill that would pass into law as the Butler Education Act later that year. In the midst of this momentous activity, ministers somehow found time to contemplate a new pedagogic venture, a “series of experimental Visual Units” for use in secondary schools.1 Their initial proposal outlined five subjects that did not have commercial appeal but that they imagined would have “a direct bearing on the growth and development of present-day society”: “Beginning of History,” “Water Supply,” “Local Study,” “The House You Live In,” and “Instruments of the Orchestra.”2 Premised on the old liberal notion that good taste and responsible citizenship were intertwined, the last of these sought to accomplish the project’s lofty aims by inspiring young people’s interests in art music. Conceived against the backdrop of a widely reported boom in wartime concert attendance, its goal was to give young people “an idea of the character and purpose of the individual instruments of the orchestra, and of the way in which they can be combined to produce symphonic effects.”3 As with all the “Visual Units,” the primary teaching resource would be a short film. Having next to no experience of its own to draw on, the MoE sought to realize its innovative vision through cross-departmental collaboration. 99

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It initially asked the Ministry of Information’s (MoI) Film Division to assist with arranging production. Responsibility was quickly delegated to the Crown Film Unit, a group of specialist documentary filmmakers that had worked on many of the wartime government’s most ambitious film projects.4 Work on Britain’s first purpose-made music education film had soon begun.5 The decision to commission a music education film was a remarkable one, for which Muir Mathieson, a prominent music director and conductor in Britain’s film industry, was probably responsible.6 Previously, music education films had usually been made by cutting and pasting together clips of musicians from recent feature films, a technique that invariably resulted in a disjointed visual narrative.7 The paucity of financial and creative investment reflected the priorities of the young educational film industry, which lay elsewhere. Insofar as a precedent had been set during the interwar period, it was for scientific subjects: of the roughly 2,250 such films available in Britain in 1937, only 80 related to history and the arts.8 Mathieson, however, had made it one of his declared aims in life “to open the doors of music to children and to return to them some of the delight that it had brought to his own life.”9 He recognized that the MoE’s Visual Units initiative presented a novel opportunity to put these aspirations into practice: an educational film promised access to an unprecedentedly large and diverse audience. At the same time, appropriating a governmental channel for his mission was very much in keeping with the spirit of the era. As Richard S. Lambert, the vice chairman of the British Institute for Adult Education, observed, while “it would have been absurd forty or fifty years ago for anyone to suggest that it mattered to the rulers of the State how the people entertained themselves so long as they did it without mischief,” the present age was one in which “the State had to start thinking and legislating for the way in which the masses amused themselves.”10 Mathieson’s desire to foster a love of art music conveniently intersected with these wider calls for the government to address the “problem” of leisure time spent on popular culture.11 The Unit approached its task with characteristically grand (and expensive) aspirations; it was not long before producer Basil Wright had requested a new score from Benjamin Britten. Britten was an obvious choice of composer. For one thing, he had been known to the Unit since May 1935 (at which time it was operating as the General Post Office Unit), when he was employed to provide music for a documentary titled The King’s Stamp. By the end of the decade, he had written

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music for nearly twenty of the Unit’s films.12 His involvement with the Left-leaning Unit had also laid the foundations for a lifelong belief in the artist’s social responsibility to society, which made him sympathetic to the wider aims driving the MoE’s initiative.13 What’s more, Britten had also been developing an interest in school music for some time. In the same year that he began working for the Unit, he had composed Friday Afternoons, a collection of songs for the boys of Clive House, Prestatyn, where his brother was headmaster. Five years later, while in the United States, he published an article in Tempo exhorting American composers to write more music for schools.14 Around this time, he himself also took up this challenge with W.  H. Auden’s assistance in Paul Bunyan (1941), a rather unsuccessful work that, influenced by Aaron Copland’s school opera The Second Hurricane, began as an experiment in opera for high school students.15 More celebrated than these early efforts, Britten’s score for the MoE project—subsequently better known in its concert version, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell—put him on the public’s radar as one of the growing number of contemporary composers who were known not just for their professional works, but also for their engagement with young amateurs; Béla Bartók, Aaron Copland, and Ralph Vaughan Williams are other notable examples. In the years that followed, this aspect of his reputation was consolidated through further compositions for young people: Saint Nicolas, a cantata for students at Lancing College in 1948; The Little Sweep, a children’s opera for the second Aldeburgh Festival in 1949; and Noye’s Fludde, a setting of a medieval mystery play for children in 1957. For obvious reasons, Britten’s score for the MoE initiative has often been counted among this body of repertoire for young people. However, this categorization obscures an important distinction: Instruments of the Orchestra featured music for children to appreciate, not perform. If the slippage between the two categories was common in midcentury pedagogic literature, my starting point for this chapter is the claim that teasing these agendas apart offers a novel insight into music educators’ struggle to resolve conflicting visions for postwar British culture. While the issues educators faced were far from new, they had been amplified by trends in wartime musical culture. On the one hand, the war years had seen a heightened emphasis on amateur participation—an interest evidenced in, among other things, the state-sponsored Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts’ scheme to fund traveling musicians, who were charged with promoting and raising the standards of

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music making in the provinces.16 Besides chiming with the inclusive rhetoric of the “people’s war,” amateur music-making was also a welcome antidote to mass culture, whose allegedly mind-numbing appeal continued to provoke anxiety among many educators.17 On the other hand, however, there was a general consensus that art music could not thrive on amateur activity alone. Non-specialists’ limited abilities necessarily restricted both the standard of performance and the repertoire that could be played. What is more, in practice a relatively small percentage of the population managed to sustain a performance-based engagement with art music into adulthood. Nevertheless, public involvement in the arts continued to be seen as evidence of a culturally enlightened nation. So when planning for peacetime began, there was a renewed urgency for music educators to pursue alternative forms of participatory culture— ones that extended from practitioners to audiences. Commissioned in response to the new pedagogic needs created by the advent of mass secondary schooling, Instruments of the Orchestra offers a powerful lens onto this dilemma and imagined solutions. Britten’s part in the project offers further evidence of what Heather Wiebe describes as the composer’s “investments in British society”—a topic that Britten scholarship had previously minimized, preferring the picture of a socially alienated artist.18 More significantly for our purposes, it is also indicative of the increased proximity between artists and the state during this period.19 Indeed, the initiative reveals how educators’ greater access to governmental networks of power ensured that music education was embedded in the discourse of reconstruction that dominated the era. Specifically, these connections allowed educators a voice in discussions about the shape of mass schooling, which they imagined as a forum for cultivating well-rounded, active citizens.

Instruments of the Orchestra Once the Crown Film Unit’s plans for a film about the Instruments of the Orchestra had been mooted, Britten quickly assumed an active role in the planning: a draft scenario in the Britten Pears Library shows that a basic outline of the film—from the conductor’s opening explanation to the final fugue—was in place as early as February 1945 and that the composer was planning to write a new theme on which to base his variations.20 In the event, however, the score, which instead uses the Rondeau theme from Henry Purcell’s Abdelazer (1695), was not actually completed until New Year’s Eve of that year; in the meantime, Britten

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103

had been preoccupied with, among other things, The Rape of Lucretia. Soon after the score’s completion, on March 28, 1946, the London Symphony Orchestra gathered at Watford Town Hall to record the soundtrack under Malcolm Sargent’s baton and shooting was scheduled for May 14–17 at Denham Studios.21 It was probably between these two production sessions that a commentary for the film, which the credits attribute to Peter Grimes librettist Montagu Slater, was finalized. At the same time, a pamphlet of teachers’ notes, along with a set of gramophone records, was prepared for distribution to schools.22 The original plans for film strips showing the strings, percussion, and wind, and for “twelve wall panels on the history of the instruments of the orchestra” appear not to have been pursued at this stage: the Exhibitions Division had done almost nothing toward them and the MoE was keen not to hold up distribution.23 Although the idea of a music education film was relatively new to Britain, Instruments of the Orchestra nonetheless owed a great deal to established pedagogy. Illustrating the instruments of the orchestra was an obvious route into art music—and one of which music educators had long been making use. Since at least the early 1900s, the practice had been promoted in music appreciation manuals, which often featured descriptive guides to the orchestra.24 It was also common in educational concerts: one example has already been seen in chapter 2, where repertoire for the inaugural Robert Mayer Concert for Children was chosen to introduce strings, wind, and brass separately. With the onset of the broadcasting era, such opportunities for aural demonstrations multiplied. At the BBC, orchestral concert broadcasts for schools frequently included an introductory explanation, during which individual instruments played themes from the works about to be heard.25 In 1936, Sergei Prokofiev had also composed this teaching device into his didactic children’s work Peter and the Wolf: associating each character with an instrument, and each instrument with a frequently recurring leitmotif, the piece was designed to help children learn “to recognize the timbre of the instruments,” which was “the educational purpose of the story.”26 Released shortly after Instruments of the Orchestra, George Pal’s Puppetoon Tubby the Tuba (1947) adopted a similar approach. Continuing this pedagogic tradition, Britten composed a theme and variations, a particularly apt vehicle for showcasing a full range of orchestral instruments. He scored the seventeenth-century Purcellian theme for what might best be described as a typical mid-nineteenth-century concert orchestra. A full string section—which in the film included twelve

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first violins, ten second violins, eight violas, eight cellos and six double basses—piccolo and double wind are complemented by four horns, three trombones, a tuba, a harp, and a percussion section comprised of three timpani, xylophone, cymbals, triangle, tambourine, bass drum, and snare drum (Example 4.1). Organizing the groups of instruments along conventional lines, he opened the piece with six statements of Purcell’s theme, each slightly varied from the preceding one, which serve to highlight the sections of the orchestra: tutti, woodwind, brass, strings, percussion, tutti (Figure 4). In its instrumentation, the music thus primed the young audience for the kind of symphonic experience that in recent years had become particularly popular with the British public. Meanwhile, by repeating the theme with minimal variation, Britten helps to draw the uninitiated listener’s attention to its defining features. In the thirteen variations that follow, the instruments are then introduced individually or in small groups, as in Variation A, flutes and piccolo; Variation L, trombones and tuba; and Variation M, percussion with similar instruments. (Examples 4.2 and 4.3 show Britten presenting the oboes and violins, respectively.) For the last of these (Variation M), Britten expands the ensemble, adding castanets, a gong, a temple block, and a whip, which provide additional color. With the usual changes in mood, meter, tempo, and key, the theme-and-variation form enabled Britten to characterize each instrument distinctively. In so doing, he provided an easy way into discussions of the film for teachers and pupils alike—a facet of the piece that would have had added significance at a time when many, if not most, music teachers were non-music specialists.27 In addition, the form encouraged the stylistic eclecticism that was both typical of the composer and—more importantly for the work’s pedagogic agenda—reflective of Britain’s contemporary concert scene. From the conventional opening harmonization of the D-minor theme, through the rippling romantic clarinet motifs and the yearning, Rachmaninov-esque cello melody, the piece creates a collage of popular art music idioms of the day. The pedagogic advantages of the theme and variations did not end there: it also made it easy to intersperse the music with didactic narration. The conductor—Sargent—delivered the commentary, which used non-specialist language to introduce the various “blowing,” “scraping,” and “banging” instruments. With its factual tone, the script was notably less fanciful and creative than those delivered by many educators earlier in the century—including Sargent, who, as we also saw in chapter 2, had been at the epicenter of a protracted debate after

. . . œ- œ. œ œ œ œ. œ. #-˙ . . . œ- œ. œ œ œ œ. œ. # -˙

Allegro maestoso e largamente

° b3 & 2 ˙ ˙f a2 3 ˙ ˙Flutes 1.2 & b 2

˙-

Piccolo

˙-

f

Oboes 1.2

Clarinets in Bb 1.2

3&b2 ˙ f #3 & 2 f ˙ ˙-

˙˙ -

˙˙-

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˙ ˙˙-

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˙˙-

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3 &b2 ˙ f ? b 23 ˙˙-

∑ ˙ ˙ - ˙˙- ˙˙

? 3a2 Bassoons 1.2 ¢ b2 ˙ f ° 3 1.2 & 2 ˙ ˙Horns in F

3.4

f

f

Trumpets in C 1.2

1.2

? 3 ¢ b2 ˙ ˙°? 3 fÓ Timpani ¢ b2

Trombones

f

3 (Bass) and Tuba

Percussion

°

3 / 2

3 ¢/ 2 ˙

{

f

? b 23

˙˙ ˙

f

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˙˙˙

w w w

˙ ˙

˙ ˙

f

˙ ˙ Allegro maestoso e largamente . . . . œ ° 3 œ œ œ œ œ. Violin 1 & b 2 ˙- ˙- ˙f . . . 3 œ- œ. œ œ œ œ. Violin 2 & b 2 ˙- ˙- ˙f . œ- œ. œ ˙ 3 ˙- ˙Viola B b 2 ˙ . f œ œ. œ - ˙- ˙3 ? ˙ œ Cello b2 f ˙- ˙˙ ˙ 3 ? Double Bass 2˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ¢ bdiv. ˙˙ ˙

f

B

#˙˙ ˙ ˙ ˙

˙

˙ w

œ

>˙ ˙

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Ó œœ ˙ > œ Œ œ œ œœ Ó Xylo.

Cym. Ÿ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ w >˙ f

B.D. fp

w w w w w w w œ- œ≥ œ œ œ œ

f

˙ ˙ ˙

sf

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≤ œ- œ≥ œ œ œ œ >˙

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(fp)

Ó

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> œ œ œ œ˙ œ œ ˙˙ ˙ œ œ œ œ œ œ >˙ œ œ ˙ ˙ . ˙ w w >˙ >˙ ˙ ˙w ˙ . œ œ ˙ ˙w >˙

w˙

∑

Ó

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. . . œ œ œ #-˙ ˙ . . . œ œ œ #˙ œ ˙ .

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Ó

f

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˙˙ ˙ B

˙ w w-

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>˙ ˙

œ œ œ œ œ œ >˙ w ˙ w w

˙ >˙ >˙ ˙

w w

˙ >˙

w w

w w

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(fp)

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>˙ ˙

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B.D. fp

w w w w w w w œ-≥ œ≥ œ œ œ œ

∏∏∏∏∏∏ ∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏

Harp

∑

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>˙ œ œ œ œœ œ- marc.œ œ œ >˙ œ œ

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Example 4.1: Benjamin Britten, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, Theme A, mm.1–4. © Copyright 1947 by Hawkes & Sons (London), Ltd. Copyright for all countries. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

Figure 4: Title page to Benjamin Britten, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, op. 34. © Copyright 1947 by Hawkes & Sons (London), Ltd. Copyright for all countries. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

largamente

# ## 4 Π& # #4

Lento

ob. 1.2

timp.

va.

pp

nœ

cresc.

espress.

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œ ∑

j œ

Ϫ

nœ

Ó

∑

vc.

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-œ -œ ™ œ œ™

n -œ ™ ? #### 44 #

-œ œ™

? #### 44 #

ff

p

œ- -œ ™ œ œ™

œ- -œ ™ œ œ™

œœ

œ-œ™™

œœ- œ-œ™™

œœ- #˙ ˙

pp espress.

div.

- > > œ #œ œ œ œ œ™ œ ∑ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ÿ ˙ >

f

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œ- # œ- ™

pp espress.

∑

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œ- >˙

≤ ˙

f

pp

f

≤ ˙ Ó

f

>˙

pp

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div.

∑

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Œ

f

(a tempo) poco

p

ob. 1.2

## ˙ & # ## ‰ œ

nœ œ œ œ ™ œ ˙ œ œ œ ˙ n œ ‰ œ

œ œ nœ œ œ œ™ nœ œ n ˙ nœ poco

pp

va.

° # ## œ ™ B # # ™ -œ

œ œ™ -œ œ- ™

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p

p

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pp

? # ## Œ d.b. ¢ # #Ó

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≤ œ

n˙œ J > ‰

Œ

Example 4.2: Benjamin Britten, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, Variation B: Lento, mm.1–4. © Copyright 1947 by Hawkes & Sons (London), Ltd. Copyright for all countries. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

Brilliante alla polacca

? # 43 j ‰ œ f > ' ° ## 3 & 4‰ œ œ œ œ f stacc. #3 & #4 ‰ œ œ œ œ a2

bsn. 1.2

1.2 hn. in F 3.4

Œ

Œ

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œ œ

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œ œ œ

œ œ œ

œ œ œ

œ œ œ

œ œ œ

œ œ œ

œ œ œ

#3 & 4‰

tpt. in C 1.2

f stacc. 2.

f stacc.

1.2 tbn. 3 (b), tba.

B.D.

f stacc.

? # 43 j ‰ ¢ œ œ f ' > 3 j / 4 œ' ‰ >

∑

Œ

Œ

∑

Œ

Œ

∑

œ œ œ alla polacca # Brilliante 3 œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ ≤ œ œ & 4Œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ mf

vn. 1 vn. 2

ff con forza

= bsn. 1.2

1.2

?#

j œ ' ° ## & ‰

hn. in F

# &#‰

3.4

&

tpt. in C 1.2

?# ‰

1.2 tbn. 3 (b), tba.

B.D.

vn. 1 vn. 2

# ‰

¢

?# / &

#

j œ œ ' j œ

≥ œ™

‰ j œ œ ' j œœ ' j œ ' œÆ œ J ‰

‰

j œ ' ‰

‰ ‰ ‰ j œ œ ' j œ

‰ j œ œ ' j œœ ' j œ ' œÆ œ J

j œ ' ‰ ‰ ‰ ‰

‰ j œ œ ' j œœ ' j œ ' œÆ œ J

j œ ‰ >' ‰ #œ >œ ‰ œ >œ ‰ >œ #>œ ‰ œ

j œ œ >' j ‰ ‰ >œ # œ≤ œ œ œ œ œ # œ J ‰

j œ œ ' j œ

‰

Œ

Œ

œ œ œ œ

œ œ

œ œ

œ œ

œœ œœ

œœ

œœ

œœ

œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ

œ œ œ

œ œ œ

‰

Œ

Œ

‰

Œ

Œ

‰

>œ≥ œœ J

‰

>œ≥ œœ J

‰

Example 4.3: Benjamin Britten, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, Variation E: Brilliante: alla polacca, mm.1–4. © Copyright 1947 by Hawkes & Sons (London), Ltd. Copyright for all countries. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

Music Education on Film |

109

Figure 5: Still from the filming of Instruments of the Orchestra (1946). “Instruments of the Orchestra” is a Crown copyright and is reproduced with the permission of The British Film Institute under delegated authority from The Keeper of Public Records.

suggesting at a 1926 Robert Mayer Concert that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was about a giant and his wife. It also avoided the expansive, free-flowing prose for which the conductor had more recently become famous, through his regular appearances on the popular wartime radio program The Brains Trust, in which intellectuals debated practical and philosophical questions submitted by the audience.28 When the film was edited, the “aural close-ups” of Britten’s score and the brief verbal explanations were complemented by visual close-ups. As Hans Keller explained, viewers could watch the leader “visibly tighten his mind (and bow),” the double basses “having fun” with their glissandi, and the “pantomimical comedietta” of the tuba trying “to be selfimportant.”29 The layout of the orchestra was also stylized for the film to add clarity: each section of the strings was placed on its own raised platform, and the elevated wind and brass sections were arranged in a long line, meaning that they could be clearly distinguished from one another during aerial shots (Figures 5 and 6). If such traits drew on pedagogic techniques designed to maximize accessibility for young audiences, there was additionally scope for

110 |

Music Education on Film

Figure 6: Still from the filming of Instruments of the Orchestra (1946). “Instruments of the Orchestra” is a Crown copyright and is reproduced with the permission of The British Film Institute under delegated authority from The Keeper of Public Records.

the film to “be used for more advanced music teaching through the study of the music itself.”30 Here again, Britten’s form proved apt, as it enabled him to introduce a variety of more complicated musical elements, such as chromaticism, in suitably small quantities as the piece progressed. Another point of potential interest for the musically proficient was the tonal structure of the work, which, having begun in D minor, ventured into a number of unexpected keys, including D-flat major (Variation I) and E major (Variation L). Aligning musical knowledge with maturity, one commentator also observed that “grown-up children who already know the difference between a violin and a trombone will enjoy it for the fugue” on a theme by Britten, during which Sargent puts “the great musical box” back together again. The piece’s conclusion, in which a final statement of Purcell’s theme in the brass is set polyrhythmically against material from Britten’s fugue, provided further opportunity for advanced analysis along the lines established by the pioneers of music appreciation (Example 4.4). The potential for teachers to engage with Britten’s music on a variety of levels made it an ideal teaching resource.

Con slancio (l'istesso tempo) Æ > ° ## 3 >œ œ œ. œÆ œÆ œÆ œÆ œÆ œÆ œ œ œ œ. œÆ picc. & 4 ff Æ > > œ. œÆ œÆ œÆ œÆ œÆ œÆ œ œ œ œ. œÆ a2 œ œ ## 3 fl. 1.2 & 4

cl. in Bb 1.2

œÆ œÆ œÆ œÆ > œ œ. œ

ff

Æ > œÆ œÆ œ œ œ œ. œÆ

œÆ Æ œÆ œÆ > œ. œ œ œ

ff

Æ > œÆ œÆ œ œ œ œ. œÆ

œÆ œÆ œÆ œÆ > œ œ. œ

ff

˙- ™

˙™ -

˙- ™

˙- ™

## 3 >œ œ œ. œÆ œÆ œÆ œÆ & 4 a2

ob. 1.2

œÆ œÆ œÆ œÆ > œ œ. œ

Æ Æ a2 #### 3 >œ œ œ. œ œÆ œÆ œ & 4

? # 3 6a 2 bn. 1.2 ¢ # 4 "8 ˙™ f

° ### 3 6 a 4 unis. hn. in F 4"8 1.2.3.4 & -˙ ™ f # tpt. in C # 43 "68 1.2 & 1.2 tbn. 3(b). tba.

∑

? ## 43 68 ˙ ™ " -˙ ™

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> œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

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# 3 >œ œ œ. œ œ œ œ &# 4

> œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

# 3 &# 4

{

ff marcatiss.

Con slancio (l'istesso tempo) ° ## 3 >œ œ œ. œÆ œÆ œÆ œÆ œÆ vn. 1 & 4 ff œÆ ## 3 >œ œ œ. œÆ œÆ œÆ œÆ vn. 2 & 4 ff >œ œ œ. œÆ œÆ œÆ œÆ œÆ # 3 va. B # 4 & vc. d.b.

∑

f sost.

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f sost.

hp.

∑

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ff

˙™

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œÆ >œ œ . œ œ œÆ

œ > œ œ œ œ œ

œÆ Æ œÆ œÆ > œ. œ œ œ

œÆ >œ œ œ. œÆ œ

œÆ œÆ œÆ œÆ > œ œ. œ

> œÆ ‰ œ œ œ. œ

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ff sost.

Example 4.4: Benjamin Britten, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, L’istesso Tempo, mm.1-6. © Copyright 1947 by Hawkes & Sons (London), Ltd. Copyright for all countries. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

picc.

° ## œÆ œÆ œÆ >œ œ . œ & # &#

fl. 1.2

hn. in F 1.2.3.4

¢

# & # ˙™ f

∑

hp.

vn. 1

¢

? ## ˙ ™ ˙™ œ œ œ >œ œ œ ## &

{

>Ϫ

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° ## œÆ œÆ œ >œ œ . œ &

Ϯ

# œÆ Æ œ >œ . œ œœ &# # œÆ >œ œ œ. & # ‰ œJÆ

va.

¢

? ## ˙ ™ -

Example 4.4 (Continued)

>Ϫ

>œ ™ >œ™ ∑

œ. œ

> . œœœœœœ œ œœ œœ

™ >˙ a2

™ >˙ -˙ ™ ˙™

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œ œ œœœ œœœ > >

ææ ˙ææ

Æ œÆ œ œ œ œ. œ œ œ. > > Æ œÆ œ œ œ œ œ œ œÆ œ . . > > œÆ œÆ œ œ œ œ œ œ œÆ . . > > ˙- ™

œ.

> . œœœœœœœ œ œœ œ

˙™ ˙™

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> œœœœœ œ œœ œœ > œœœœœ œ œœ œœ œœ

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vn. 2

vc. d.b.

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tbn.

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tpt. in C 1.2

3(b). tba.

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# # œÆ Æ œÆ >œ œ . œ &## œ

cl. in Bb 1.2

bn. 1.2

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# œÆ œÆ œÆ >œ œ . œ &#

ob. 1.2

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Ϯ

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≥ . ≥ œ≤ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ ≥ ≤ œ œ œ œ≥ œ œ. œ œœ œœ > . œœœœœœ œ œ œ œ œ ˙™ -

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Aspirations for the film, however, went far beyond simply encouraging musical appreciation: envisaging its subject as “educational in the widest sense,” the initiative’s pioneers imagined that Instruments of the Orchestra would ultimately enrich society. But how exactly was a film about music supposed to achieve such ends? To answer this question, I turn now to the broader historical context in which the film was produced. My specific interest is in the significance of the film’s original target audience: the visual units were broadly conceived for secondary school children (who were typically aged eleven to fifteen), but “particularly” for those attending the new “Modern Schools.”31

“Modern” Education August 3, 1944, was widely lauded as a propitious day in British history. It marked the moment when the Butler Education Act was granted royal assent, realizing the expanded provision of state schooling that had been due to be enacted on September 1, 1939, but that had been stalled by the outbreak of war. Considered by many to be “the greatest single advancement in the development of English education,” the act promised the increased access to education that seemed fundamental to a fairer postwar Britain.32 It would supersede a school system that had divided institutions broadly into two types: those providing a basic “elementary” education, which had traditionally been delivered via rote learning methods and was compulsory up to the age of fourteen, and those offering a more academic “secondary” education, which typically implied a liberal approach that might lead to university study and which had been the privilege of a minority elite. “Elementary” and “secondary,” then, had not just denoted a difference in student age, but also a qualitative difference in the type of education. During the interwar period, ongoing governmental investigations into education had begun to inspire plans to modernize this system; the significance of the Butler Act was thus not that it proposed previously unimagined reforms, but rather that it enforced a reorganization of the system that had been brewing for some time. Most significantly, for the first time in British history, it guaranteed every child a secondary school place funded by the state. However, this did not mean that a traditional “secondary” education was now simply offered on a mass scale. Rather, the act was implemented through a hierarchized structure: grammar schools (about which more will be said in chapter 6) offered a classic liberal education to the most academically able; technical schools, of

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which only a handful were ever founded, provided a specialist scientific training; meanwhile secondary moderns were established to cater to the majority of the population, “whose future employment will not demand any measure of technical skill or knowledge.”33 The secondary modern pupil, then, was an unprecedented phenomenon—one that required a reconceptualization of “secondary” education. Encouraged by the obvious stratification of the education system along class lines, historians have tended to dismiss the new modern education as purely vocational.34 However, policy makers had higher aspirations for mass education, which they treated as part of wider conversations about political and social reforms. As historian Harry Hendrick has suggested, the idea that children were “of the Nation” began to gain currency around the turn of the century. Hand in hand with this went a recognition that schools had a societal function over and above imparting academic or vocational skills. Rather than serving “as a mere ‘factory for literacy,’ ” they should seek to lay the foundations for good citizenship, by sowing the seeds of “healthy living” during life’s most impressionable years.35 Initially, education’s contribution to the “national interest” centered on improving children’s physical state: in 1906, the Education (Provision of Meals) Act empowered LEAs to provide food for children whose education was threatened by inadequate nourishment; a year later another act was passed to enable the provision of physical and health checks for children. During the interwar years, the popularization of psychology added a further facet to the holistic vision of mass schooling emerging in Britain, as educators’ interest in children’s mental well-being heightened.36 The alliance between social welfare and education had, as the music organizer for Bournemouth Noel Hale reflected in 1947, quickly become “more or less synonymous.”37 The belief that all children should have a well-rounded education shaped the plans for mass secondary schooling from early on. Especially influential in this regard was William Henry Hadow, a man whose commitment to liberal education not only drove his career as a high-level administrator in the tertiary education sector (he was, among other things, the vice chancellor of Sheffield University 1919–1930), but also inspired his work as a musicologist, composer, champion of eurhythmics, and onetime editor of The Oxford History of Music. Between 1923 and 1933, Hadow had chaired a series of consultative committees, charged with reviewing various aspects of Britain’s education system for the government. Perhaps the most influential output of this work was a

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seminal report on The Education of the Adolescent. Published in 1926, it laid the foundations for the secondary education reform that would ultimately be realized by the Butler Act. Among other things, the report recommended the development of “modern” schools that, in addition to offering vocational training, would also develop character, teaching “boys and girls to delight in pursuits and rejoice in accomplishments— work in music and art; work in wood and metals; work in literature and the record of human history—which may become the recreations and the ornaments of leisure in maturer years.”38 Through such means, these schools would lay the foundations for a lifelong interest in learning and self-improvement. Hadow’s motives for including the arts in modern schools’ curricula stemmed from an old, liberal ideal of what good citizenship entailed. But where his report was rather vague about how studying the arts might cultivate good citizens, the later Norwood Report: Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools (1943) was more explicit. The authors of this investigation warned: “Without Art, Music or Craft, the individual may be very much the poorer as an individual; the State is the poorer which does not contain those whose power of appreciation has been trained and whose sensitiveness to beauty has been awakened.” On the other hand, they continued, if schools could raise public taste by encouraging students to see “the differences between good and bad design in architecture or pictures or chairs or ornament,” this would hasten “the replacement of ugliness by what is beautiful in all spheres of national life.”39 In other words, the report writers imagined that if young people could develop the critical faculties to appreciate beautiful things, they would continue to seek these out in their personal lives and this in turn would extend to enrich society at large. While the Norwood Report’s curriculum recommendations were targeted at grammar schools, Hadow’s report on adolescents had laid the ground for such elements of the traditional “secondary” education to feature in the planning for mass education. Indeed, Hadow’s belief that liberal pedagogy should not be an added bonus, but rather an integral part of modern schooling, was widely shared among education reformers. Many considered teaching appreciation to be particularly important where mass schooling was concerned because the demographic attending the new modern schools would include those most likely to pursue employment in industry: the kind of depressingly routine labor that, reformers insisted, made it even more crucial to find fulfilment in elevating leisure pastimes.

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By the time war broke out, a vision for mass schooling had already taken shape. Nevertheless, the practical constraints that accompanied war brought an added sense of urgency to the proposed reforms. First, while the delayed implementation of a new Education Act was accepted as necessary, it was thought far from ideal. Within a matter of days, war’s unprecedented disruption of children’s lives began. Although traditionally children fell with women into the non-combatant group, World War Two was a total war, in which the normal divisions between soldiers and civilians became blurred.40 Besides the general disruption caused by rationing, bombs, conscription, and so on, evacuation brought significant change to many children’s lives. On top of the domestic complications caused by the disorienting encounter between city and country life, attempts to adjust the school system proved disastrous.41 In overcrowded reception areas (i.e., those receiving evacuees), plans were made for schooling children in shifts, sometimes up to three a day. Meanwhile, many of those who remained in or returned to the cities found that their schools had been shut down. The chaos was reflected in reduced attendance figures: a survey carried out in early 1940 revealed that, of elementary school children, more than onequarter were “receiving no schooling at all,” while a similar percentage were being taught at home.42 The disruption heightened existing concerns about child welfare—concerns that were further antagonized by reports of a marked increase in juvenile crime. One contemporary survey suggested that the first years of the war saw a 70 percent rise in “malicious damage and petty stealing” among minors in England and a 200 percent rise of the same in Wales; meanwhile juvenile convictions increased by 30 percent.43 If such worrying statistics exacerbated what historian Colin Heywood describes as the “generalized unease . . . over the physical and moral condition of populations living in an advanced, but ‘fatigued and sensual,’ civilization,” they also heightened concern about child welfare and misspent leisure.44 More broadly, in as much as one of liberal education’s traditional goals was to encourage independent thought, the war’s politics enhanced its appeal. At a time when Britain wanted to distance itself from its fascist enemies, encouraging the public to develop critical thinking skills provided a useful contrast with the image of German brainwashed conformity. It also helped to counterbalance the unprecedented degree of state intervention in 1940s Britain—a mode of governance whose proximity to totalitarianism caused anxiety. The authorities toed a precarious line, seeking to promote positive models of citizenship without provoking

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accusations of cultural indoctrination. By keeping liberal values high on the education agenda, the government could be seen to be respecting individual freedom, while also fulfilling its perceived duties to further healthy living. When discussions began about rebuilding the nation—both literally and metaphorically—children featured prominently. The front cover of a 1943 special issue of Picture Post titled “Changing Britain” captured their imagined significance in no uncertain terms: an anonymous photo of a baby girl “who has never known peace” was presented as a symbol of “the changes that have happened and are happening, and of the opportunity that lies ahead.”45 Children, the cover implied, were the guardians of the nation’s future. If war had necessarily marred experiences of childhood for several years, when peace was restored childhood would be safeguarded as an investment. At the same time, the appropriation of the arts to the ideology of the “people’s war,” and subsequently to that of the welfare state, added force to calls to broaden access to high culture. On the one hand, educators treated this as a matter of equality: in a fairer postwar world, art would be everyone’s prerogative. Musical culture held particular promise in this regard, for public interest in art music was widely reported to have flourished during the conflict. On the other hand, since the public would have more free time when war ended, educators also saw the arts as vital to maintaining a civilized nation. Throughout this period, then, the education of children at school and the edification of public leisure remained closely intertwined in reformers’ aspirations. The strength of this association is suggested by the 1947 Clarke Report. Commissioned to investigate “the transition from school to everyday life,” it deemed schools at least partially responsible for the prevalence of leisure pursuits that seemed to reproduce, rather than compensate for, the “deadening routine of much industrial work.” “The large amount of money spent on gambling and purely passive forms of recreation by industrial workers,” the authors insisted, “implies the failure of education.”46 But if in the past schools had failed, in the postwar world an expanded program of state education would enable them to realize their vital function as a forum in which the next generation could be prepared for the rights and duties of citizenship. Early intervention remained as crucial as ever, for, as the Clarke Report noted, “Men and women seem, even to themselves, to be more and more becoming cogs in some huge impersonal machine.”47 Indeed, at a time when, as Wiebe has argued, “the idea of

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the ‘immaterial’ continued to hover around the question of material improvement,” the cultivation of children’s minds and spirit remained central to reformers’ visions for mass education.48 Vocational training alone was not in and of itself an adequate supplement for a liberal education. Reflecting broader opinion, Hale warned that if, in failing to teach “things of the heart besides those of the head,” education did not lead to “spiritual growth as well as to intellectual progress and physical fitness,” it would be “incomplete.”49 For all its momentary relevance, however, the ideal of broadening access to highbrow culture remained contentious. The widespread enthusiasm for mass cultural products, whose appeal seemed all too easy, prompted concerns about rising public inertia; critics feared that the public might listen to art music in the same, supposedly passive way, tainting it with lowbrow connotations. Among the scaremongers was T. S. Eliot, who argued that the damage threatened by contamination far outweighed any possible benefits. Furthermore, he considered hopes of education mitigating a negative outcome as naive, short-sighted, and dangerous. In an impassioned critique, he predicted the opposite: that education would exercise too much influence over the future direction of the nation’s culture. The “headlong rush to educate everybody,” he concluded, would ultimately lower standards, “destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.”50 While many education reformers shared their critics’ concerns about art being reduced to another vehicle for public escapism, they were more hopeful that schools could make a positive intervention. In particular, they imagined that studying the arts might offset the passive engagement allegedly encouraged by mass culture, by opening young people’s eyes to the more lasting pleasures of active cultural participation. However, what active participation might mean in practice was ambiguous— perhaps no more so than where music education was concerned.

Intelligent Listening If the goal of school music was to promote active participation, teaching practical musicianship might have seemed the obvious solution. What’s more, where schools had had the facilities and inclination to teach music, they had traditionally emphasized such skills. In state schools, this usually meant singing (or, as it was often described, “vocal skill”); in public schools, it also encompassed an array of instrumental

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activities. However, when, prior to finalizing his Education Act, Minister of Education R. A. Butler commissioned an investigation into the “supply, recruitment, and training of teachers and youth leaders,” a subcommittee of education (not music) specialists recommended that the primary focus of school music should be nurturing good taste. Their findings, published in the 1944 McNair Report, advised: “The function of music teaching in school should be to provide for its continuous development as a means of expression and source of enjoyment throughout life. It should furnish all children with healthy tastes, most children with simple vocal skill, and many with instrumental practice; and the exceptionally gifted should be afforded suitable facilities and teaching up to any degree of proficiency. Only so can music become a natural and welcome ingredient in adolescent and adult life and make its proper contribution to the enlightened leisure of the whole nation.”51 This position was a pragmatic one. The reality was that, despite the postwar expansion of mass education, most children would leave school unable to read a score or play an instrument. What’s more, even among students who showed exceptional aptitude, the likelihood was that few would ultimately reach a high enough standard to pursue music as a profession. As Wilfrid Mellers observed, even among music academy students, only a small minority had “talent sufficient to justify a professional career.” “The rest,” he bluntly proposed, “would be better employed in educating themselves to form a responsible and discriminating audience for the talented.”52 Even the most optimistic reformers shared Mellers’s perspective: they did not expect that the public at large would make a significant contribution to the production of high culture. The authors of the McNair Report were typical and instead prioritized the teaching of music appreciation. It was by “furnishing all children with healthy tastes” that music educators could play their part in helping children to master “the art of living.”53 The challenge, then, was to imagine music appreciation as an active process: for it was by such means that they could distinguish the reception of art music from that of popular music. The suggestion that music appreciation should form a central part of school music provision reflected wider trends in music education. For one thing, the financial outlay required to study appreciation—whose primary tools were radio, gramophone, and books—was minimal compared to the costs of taking up an instrument. In this sense, it was an apt vehicle for broadening access. In addition, it appealed to the prevailing liberal ethos among education reformers. For as Stewart McPherson

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explained, where performance entailed a high degree of specialization, appreciation training offered the “sane, all-round development” that was crucial to “a liberal mental upbringing.”54 Enumerating its benefits in opposition to current education methods, another early advocate drew attention to its positive long-term impact: “So long as we persist in teaching our boys and girls to play, without giving them this essential education in the vital facts of music, we are simply giving them a possibly useful course of finger and hand gymnastics, with, in some cases, a certain amount of emotional development; but we are not training them to become intelligent listeners, or enabling them to make in their after life any acquaintance with that great literature of music which should be open to all.”55 The emphasis on instilling a life-long appreciation for “the higher forms of music” afforded children a special place in this program from the outset. Indeed, while the music appreciation student could be of any age, “the importance of accustoming youth to the better kinds of music and weaning it from the worse,” Scholes insisted, was paramount.56 Conversely, in wartime Britain, a sense that the public’s use of leisure was “now, as never before” a matter of governmental concern furthered the possibilities for advancing the appreciation agenda via official channels.57 In promoting established cultural hierarchies, music appreciation spoke directly to contemporary citizenship ideals. Throughout this period, as David Matless has observed, “good” citizenship continued to be “bound up with assertions of cultural authority.”58 Indeed, the pursuit of cultural equality rarely extended to the notion that all cultural forms were equal. Rather, music educators for the most part subscribed to the system of hierarchies that broadly rated art above popular music. The spectrum of styles and genres provided an obvious framework for mapping musical preferences onto ideals for citizenship, even as educators simultaneously proclaimed the importance of independent, critical thought. Hale spoke for many when he asserted that the primary aim of music teaching should be “the ‘formation of taste’—the discrimination of wheat from chaff.”59 If it failed to accomplish this, the consequences would be grave: “It is plain that, unless something more profound has been instilled, this ‘amusement,’ given full rope in the adolescent and adult world of music outside, reappears in a guise which was never anticipated. Absolute non-sense is mistaken for humour, gaudy display for artistry, square and tawdry time-beats for rhythm.”60 Hale was certain that promoting “amusement” limited not just musical enjoyment but personal development more generally: “Emotional experience may

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then never reach further than weak sentiment, or music beyond mere notes.” Conversely, training in music appreciation would enable young people to approach music on more intellectual grounds, which he imagined promised a richer musical encounter. As young listeners learned to uncover the depths of a composer’s genius, they would gradually come to realize art music’s supposedly superior status. Translating such principles into teaching method, however, presented a multitude of challenges. One obstacle was uncertainty about the extent to which an ability to appreciate music could actually be acquired through study. On the one hand, the democratic mind-set of midcentury Britain had encouraged educationists to reconceptualize musicality as a universal characteristic. As early as 1926, conductor Adrian Boult had insisted: “The appreciation of these great works is not a question of a high state of culture. Many members of choral societies in our large towns have had the poorest rudimentary general education, yet they are able to get immense joy from these works. . . . The village choirs around Dorking, which, under the direction of Vaughan Williams, study and perform Bach’s B Minor Mass, know celestial heights which are denied thousands of people who go through the most lengthy of our established processes of education.”61 On the other hand, developments in psychology, a field that had burgeoned during the 1930s and 1940s, were inspiring a new emphasis on the differentiation of children according to musical ability. As education historian Stephanie Pitts has observed, this “urge to classify children” added force to the idea that musicality was not just learned but inherited, a notion that contradicted the “egalitarian philosophy” widely advocated by contemporary pedagogues.62 Either way, the fact remained that some children exhibited a greater talent for music than others. The politics of catering to a range of supposedly innate abilities were only complicated by the recent expansion in state education. The reality was that children from poor backgrounds usually displayed less of this allegedly natural skill than those from well-off families. Music educators worried that attempts to meet everyone’s needs might result in a lowering of standards. Equally problematic was the unstable place typically afforded music in schools’ curricula—as an auxiliary rather than a core subject. Music educators had been contesting its position since at least 1873, when pioneer of the tonic sol-fa movement John Curwen had published a pamphlet about The Present Crisis of Music in Schools, following the removal of music from the Educational Code.63 As the oversight of educational provision became increasingly centralized in the mid-twentieth

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century, the fight was taken up at statutory level. First, Hadow’s report on the adolescent suggested that secondary schools allocate two periods a week to music: one for practical music making and one for music appreciation. Around two decades later, the Norwood Report advised that music should be compulsory for lower secondary forms and available as one of a number of optional art subjects for higher forms.64 Picking up on this theme, the authors of the McNair Report similarly observed that music, as a latecomer to the curriculum, had too often been taught as an “extra” or “spare-time activity.” Grouping music with “the more academic studies such as history, French and science, under the heading of ‘general subjects,’ ” they proposed that music should instead be treated as a “normal” subject. But despite these repeated calls to formalize its place, music continued to have what the Norwood Report described as an “ill-defined . . . precarious and uncomfortable” position in most schools’ curricula.65 This status both reflected and perpetuated the art’s dubious associations with domestic gentility, which educators had been trying to counter for several decades. Identifying the crux of this problem, BBC employee and musicologist John Horton explained that its uncertain status reflected a common view that music was “something one does (or lets one’s womenfolk do) when one isn’t too busy fighting or making money.”66 Perhaps the most difficult problem to solve, however, was ensuring that children’s musical activities were carried out with active, rather than mindless, engagement—a problem that was especially complicated where appreciation was concerned. For all its popularity in midcentury Britain, this approach to music pedagogy sat awkwardly alongside the wartime and postwar emphasis on cultural participation. The enthusiasm with which music appreciation advocates promoted “intelligent listening” as an active process betrayed underlying anxieties that their methods might be construed as a passive form of reception—in which case they risked muddying the waters between art and popular music. Moreover, it was not just mass culture from which the pioneers of music appreciation sought distinction. The heightened emotional intensity of much late nineteenth-century art music had apparently had a knock-on effect on music teaching, encouraging an unseemly emphasis on visceral reception. Among those to diagnose this problem was music educator Leo Kestenberg, who argued that intelligent listening exercised “a healthy, sobering, and clarifying influence after the art-for-art’s sake attitude of musical instruction in the Romantic period.”67 Educators’ uneasiness about the popularity of nineteenth-century repertoire will

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be discussed at length in chapter 5. For now, suffice it to note that, if even certain kinds of highbrow music could invite mindless listening, this made it only more urgent to distance music appreciation from the rhetoric of passivity. Within the school context, this concern was reflected in the uneasy relationship that “intelligent listening” had with performance-based learning. Scholes claimed that “the foundation of musical appreciation work in school may be said to lie in the singing class, the eurhythmics class, piano lessons, the school orchestra, and similar activities.”68 He continued to place a high value on skills traditionally associated with performing, such as good intonation, rhythmic understanding, and a basic ability to read staff notation. But at the same time, he maintained that “it is an error to suppose . . . that any full appreciation necessarily comes by ‘doing,’ ” not least because children’s “capacity for enjoyment” was “always in advance of the capacity to perform.” Walford Davies’s school broadcasts exhibited a similar confusion. While giving weight to the singing and reading of music, Davies felt that “only when musical construction and design were addressed would ‘the full Hamlet’ be achieved.”69 To this end, part of his broadcast was dedicated to teaching composition—the musical equivalent to essay writing. The aim of this was expressly not to produce composers, but rather to enhance children’s ability to appreciate music. In its most extreme form, the fuzzy boundary between music appreciation and music performance paradoxically allowed education theorists to afford listeners the same status as performers. For example, working from the premise that making and listening to music were “of equal importance,” music educator Leo Kestenberg concluded that “recognition of the fact that work itself [i.e., listening or performing] may be an intense and fructifying experience relegates the passive, purely sensuous, unthinking sort of musical ‘enjoyment’ to its proper place.”70 In doing so, it allowed a new type of relationship to form between “the creator, the performer, and the listener”: one based on “active participation” through “conscious, synthetic listening.”

Music Appreciation for Modern Schools The advent of secondary moderns presented music educators with a new context in which to address these old issues around listening, citizenship and taste. They now faced the challenge of adapting traditional teaching methods to meet the perceived ability and needs of a mass

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adolescent audience. An innovative solution, the idea of a music education film presented a host of obstacles, even as it augured particularly well. For one thing, the number of schools equipped with projection technology was small. Although the use of film in schools had been possible since the 1920s, when the 16 mm projector and nonflammable film were invented, the 1930s and early 1940s were a time of austerity, during which projection equipment was prohibitively expensive for many schools.71 Indeed, a study carried out by the British Film Institute revealed that by 1937 barely more than 2 percent of schools and colleges in Britain had projectors—and of these only a minority had the facilities to play sound films.72 The contrast with Germany and the United States, where over 30 and 12 percent of schools, respectively, had projectors, was pronounced.73 Even where LEAs had projectors for hire, teachers were put off by unfamiliarity with the equipment, which was far from easy to use. Meanwhile, for many rural schools, lack of electricity prevented the use of film altogether.74 In short, practical factors significantly limited the existing audience for the MoE’s enterprise. At the same time, the decision to commission the film marked a significant change in attitude. Throughout the 1930s, the Board of Education had maintained that the creation of educational films should be the responsibility of private enterprise. This position reflected both the long-standing uneasiness in Britain about statutory involvement in the arts and, more specifically, a reluctance on the part of the British government to create a state-run cinema.75 But in the early 1940s, pressure on the government to sponsor the production of educational films began to mount: as instructional films were more widely used during the war, both producers and audiences became more aware of the medium’s potential. It was not long before the changing attitude began to make its mark in law. First, the Butler Education Act stipulated that schools must have “arrangements for film projection and the use of episcopes” (the latter were devices to project enlarged images onto a wall or screen).76 Then by January 1946, the pioneering Visual Units initiative had expanded to the point where it was deemed necessary for the MoI’s successor, the Central Office of Information (COI), to set up a Visual Unit Committee to coordinate the various governmental divisions involved.77 Before the year was out, planning had begun in earnest to develop the MoE’s own policy of visual education. In the meantime, an independent enquiry into The Factual Film published by the arts charity Dartington Hall Trust had concluded that “only Government sponsorship can make possible the production of films of real educational value for all

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teaching purposes.”78 The MoE’s interest in developing film’s potential as an educational medium was yet another indication of the growing embrace of centralized governance. Furthermore, this medium itself seemed especially suited to the educational priorities of the era. Admittedly, the precedent for film-based pedagogy was weak: to date, many of the films billed as “educational” had been shot with general cinema audiences in mind and so were of limited use in the classroom. Nevertheless, film’s popularity with the general public was firmly established and promised to satisfy contemporary desires to align culture with entertainment as well as edification. Highlighting the necessity of this, writer and cultural commentator Ivor Brown noted in his post-war “Plan for the Arts”: “It is excellent that education, a name which frightens the average Briton, should be associated with entertainment and with the performance and enjoyment of the arts as well as with the study of them.”79 With optimistic idealism, he insisted that through this, the “ugly gap in British life between schooling in the arts and their subsequent pursuit and appreciation” might be bridged. Film’s potential to bridge this gap seemed particularly strong where modern schools were concerned: pioneering research on education films in the 1930s had suggested that the medium was well suited to less academically able students—precisely those to whom secondary moderns were designed to cater.80 Despite the initiative’s timely relevance, there were, as Mathieson explained, “old-fashioned prejudices” that had to be overcome.81 First, for all its pedagogic potential, cinema also seemed, in historian Richard Weight’s words, to pose a “threat to the development of a constructive sense of citizenship.”82 With its picture-perfect people, fantastical worlds, and darkened theaters, it was the paradigm of modern leisure: a medium conceived, as Aldous Huxley put it, “to provide . . . a distraction which shall occupy the mind without demanding of it the slightest effort or the fatigue of a single thought.”83 In other words, film viewing was generally associated with the kinds of “lowbrow” enjoyment that educators were keen to replace. The cinema industry’s tendency to rate popularity above aesthetic qualities presented a further hurdle. Arts educators generally rejected this as a meaningful measure of cultural value, for it seemed to conflict with their ideal of “good” taste as discriminating. Finally, where music specifically was concerned, art music’s appropriation for film scores was a source of deep anxiety. The use of music for dramatic effect risked implicating art music in cinematic escapism, tainting it with the dubious connotations of the lowbrow.

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The prevalence of late-romantic idioms in Hollywood film scores was a particular sore point, as it seemed only to emphasize such music’s visceral appeal. In seeking a productive engagement with this new technology, the MoE found a strong ally in the Crown Film Unit. The Unit was the wartime home of leading figures in Britain’s documentary film movement, which from its outset had aimed to repurpose film as a vehicle for social improvement. Despite receiving their initial sponsorship in the late 1920s from the Conservative and National Governments, the documentary movement’s pioneers were strongly committed to the values of social democracy.84 Motivated by what filmmaker Quentin Dobson later described as a “sickness with synthetic cinema,” they had imagined documentary as a palliative to entertainment film—an alternative use of the cinematic medium that might stimulate the public to play an active part in society.85 Their aspirations were neatly encapsulated in a distinction drawn by W. H. Auden in an essay published around the time he began working as a script-writer. The essay in question— “Psychology and Art To-Day”—outlined two kinds of art: “escape-art,” which prompted people to disengage from the shortcomings of their lives; and “parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.”86 If Hollywood cinema was the paradigmatic example of the former, the documentarists aspired to create the latter. The teaching method, as Auden conceptualized it, was not dogmatic, but rather suggestive: by raising awareness of higher ideals, parable-art would encourage the public to reflect critically on their existence and, in doing so, equip them to make better life choices. In practice, this meant using film to defamiliarize modern life and, through this, to foster a critical distance between viewers and their everyday experiences. In the words of Paul Rotha, one of the movement’s foremost film makers: Our very familiarity with everyday surroundings prohibits us from forming a true estimate of them. That is why the documentary film has an important purpose to fulfil in bringing to life familiar things and people, so that their place in the scheme of things which we call society may be honestly assessed.87 The potential benefits of “general knowledge films,” Rotha continued, were particularly pronounced for children: intervention at an impressionable age increased the chances of a young person growing up to be a “thinking, reasoning and questioning member of the community.”88 As Rotha’s words suggest, the documentary film movement’s objectives intersected with many of the concerns shaping music appreciation. Not least, both were centrally preoccupied with combatting the public’s

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supposed proclivity for passive consumption. In this sense, documentary seemed a promising format for music education. But to accomplish its goal, the film’s music and visuals would need to interact in such a way as to foster a participatory relationship between film and audience. So, how exactly did the producers of Instruments of the Orchestra envisage that this film would help people to develop the right sort of listening habits?

Teaching Active Appreciation The UK premiere of Instruments of the Orchestra took place on November 29, 1946, at the Empire Theatre, Leicester Square, London.89 Although it was not uncommon for education films to be shown in cinemas, for the first screening to be afforded the status of a premiere was unusual; it suggested a level of publicity that was uncharacteristic for a film of its genre. Cinema owners were usually reluctant to show instructional films, fearing that they diminished audience satisfaction to a degree that undermined any educational benefits. Articulating this widespread opinion, one contemporary writer insisted: “It is fantastic to suppose that children can be educated or improved in the cinema by methods which they can recognize as educational. The slightest flavour of the schoolroom in an entertainment program provokes boredom or, more likely, vociferous reaction and dislike.”90 What is more, Instruments of the Orchestra had been intended “primarily for non-theatrical distribution.” It was only because MGM liked the film that it was also widely distributed as a short, not just in Britain, but also in the United States.91 The COI managed to secure a contract with MGM, giving the studio exclusive rights to theatrical distribution, while, in an exceptional case, the COI reserved the right to distribute the film “in any bona fide educational establishment, including Schools, Schools of Music, Technical Colleges, Universities, and Teachers’ Training Colleges, as part of the educational curriculum.”92 The COI’s arrangement with MGM caused some consternation at the MoE, whose employees resented the limits on nontheatrical distribution imposed by the contract, which prevented the film from being shown, for example, in youth clubs and music societies for the first nine months.93 However, the MoE’s belief that educational interests should take priority over commercial ones was not shared by the Treasury. Producing films solely for use in schools had not yet become commercially viable, so producers could only break even if they made films that could

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also be screened in cinemas. Furthermore, Instruments of the Orchestra had been exceptionally expensive to make, partly because of the personnel costs (which included a composer, conductor, and full symphony orchestra), and partly because, during the war, the Crown Film Unit had become accustomed to working on a high budget. Where this film alone cost over £22,000 to make, the total cost for the three films from the initial proposal that were contracted out—“Water Supply,” “Local Study” and “The House You Live In”—was just under £16,000.94 Given this and that the Treasury stood to gain 65 percent of profits, it is unsurprising that it insisted on negotiating a commercial deal. In the event, it proved to be an unexpectedly lucrative arrangement. Takings were higher than the COI anticipated for a film of such a “highbrow” nature: by December 1947, the film had been booked 702 times and was “still booking well.”95 As well as benefiting from a successful cinema run, the music for Instruments of the Orchestra also reached the public via another medium. The composer’s concert-hall adaptation, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, was premiered before the film on October 15, 1946, in Liverpool by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, with Sargent conducting.96 By the 1940s, it was not uncommon for film music to be transformed into concert music. In the case of this score, relatively little adaptation was necessary. To complement the alternative title, librettist and opera director Eric Crozier produced a new commentary that was similar in style and content to that used in the film. Although the score stated that the piece “should be performed” with narration—and reviews suggest that it generally was included in early performances— the composer also allowed for a version without spoken commentary to encourage performance.97 To be specific, he provided two options for the links between variations: longer ones for when the narration was used, often achieved by a “repeat ad lib.,” and shorter ones for when it was not. The work’s rapid incorporation into the standard orchestral repertoire is demonstrated by the fact that, between 1947 and 1980, it became almost an annual feature of the BBC Proms.98 Its popularity was surely aided by Columbia’s set of records of the music, which were available from early 1947.99 Quantifying the film’s distribution in schools, on the other hand, is more difficult. The MoE planned to produce just twenty copies of each unit and delegate responsibility for their circulation and appraisal to the Local Education Authorities (LEAs), which would work in partnership with Her Majesty’s Inspectorate and the MoI.100 Copies of the

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film were certainly placed in the Central Film Library, South Kensington, from where they could be borrowed by approved institutions free of charge. But exactly when the Visual Unit went into circulation is unclear: a memorandum from November 1946 predicted a release date of October 1947, but it may have been available sooner.101 Nor has any record survived of how many schools used it, although plans relating to the first unit, “Houses in History,” reveal that the MoE aimed for a geographically representative sample, encompassing schools from Northumberland to Pembrokeshire and Exeter.102 However, the fact that the MoE continued with the production of a second music education unit suggests that the circulation of the first was at least reasonable. Conceived as a scientific counterpart to Instruments of the Orchestra, “Science in the Orchestra” was released in 1950 and comprised three ten-minute films: Hearing the Orchestra, Exploring the Instruments, and Looking at Sounds.103 In between times, the British Council had also commissioned Steps of the Ballet (1948), in which Robert Helpmann explained how a ballet is produced—another likely indication of the market for arts education film. Of the MoE’s Visual Units, then, Instruments of the Orchestra was unique in the scale and methods of its distribution. The variety of outlets exposed the music to a larger and more diverse audience than it would have met in the classroom alone, which can only have helped to realize its pedagogic potential. Indeed, the dedication in the score—“To the children of John and Jean Maud: Humphrey, Pamela, Caroline and Virginia, for their edification and entertainment”—suggests that Britten not only endorsed the film’s educational agenda, but also hoped that his adaptation might serve a similar purpose (Figure 4; John Maud was the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Education from 1945 and a personal friend of the composer). Furthermore, by employing such varied methods of dissemination, the producers enacted the fluid transition between school education and edifying leisure pursuits that intellectuals had long been trying to foster. Whereas the accompanying teachers’ notes suggest how the film might have been used in the classroom, critics’ reviews of the relatively high-profile premieres provide the main insight into the score’s contemporary reception. Cinema, concert, and school audiences were guided through the performance by one or another of the commentaries. Yet as music critic Hans Keller put it, “more complete appreciation” was only possible in the classroom, where the supplementary teaching materials could facilitate extended discussion.104 (Despite Keller’s suggestion that

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instructional “leaflets on the film ought to be issued” for cinema audiences too, there is no evidence that this ever happened.) In the teachers’ notes, technical explanations of how instruments work—for example, that flautists blow across the top of their mouthpieces—were accompanied by a biography of Britten and a history of the theme-andvariations form, both of which explicitly set the music and its composer in a nationalist context. In particular, Britten’s decision to use a theme by Purcell, most likely inspired by the 250th anniversary year, enabled the writer to set Britten alongside Purcell in a lineage of great British composers.105 Where once critics had predicted that “sheer technique and ability would stultify [Britten’s] depth of thought and true inspiration,” this work “especially in the dignified treatment of Purcell’s theme [showed] the composer as a genuine and mature artist.”106 Using an analogy from art history, the teachers’ notes referred to the variations as a series of “portraits” revealing different aspects of the ancient composer. For example, “Britten lights up the music of Purcell’s tune with a glowing and fiery display of the violin’s qualities”; or “It is through the combination of martial vigour and quiet tenderness that Britten makes [the bassoons] present their picture of Purcell.” The process of performing music added vitality to this reenactment of the past—a vitality that the writer, somewhat paradoxically, felt was preserved in the film: “When we see Dr. Sargent conducting the final presentation of the great Theme in all its modern glory, we can think of Purcell’s brooding figure in the background and Britten’s portrait of him; Dr. Sargent and the London Symphony Orchestra are bringing the thoughts of these two composers to glowing life.”107 Borrowing a theme from elsewhere might have incited criticism of uninspired, derivative thought, but the author made it grounds for praise—at once a tribute to Purcell and evidence of the young master’s skill. While the complement of score, visuals, and teaching notes drew on pedagogical techniques designed to impart knowledge that intellectuals believed to be crucial to “intelligent listening,” the film’s documentaryinspired style was also fundamental to achieving its didactic aims. In particular, Instruments of the Orchestra presents the classical concert experience in such a way as to shroud it in an aura of solemnity and highbrow prestige.108 Perhaps the best illustration of this is the sequence near the start of the film that directly follows Sargent’s opening introductory spiel. As the conductor finishes speaking, the soundtrack becomes silent and the camera cuts to a close-up of the score’s front page, whose text—“Benjamin Britten * Variations & Fugue on a Theme of Purcell,

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Op. 34”—is clearly legible. The silence continues as Sargent’s fingers turn the corner of the score, the camera tracking his movement before pausing on the inside front cover, which reads “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.” The silence is momentarily broken as Sargent calls the orchestra to attention by tapping his baton assertively on the top of his stand; the camera then cuts to a mid-range shot to show him arms raised, poised to give the downbeat. A few seconds later, he drops his arms and the music commences. In and of itself, this sequence of events was not particularly remarkable for a production of the period. When films featured concerts or theatrical performances, it was common practice to include a screenshot of the printed program or publicity poster to inform viewers of what was being played; the protagonist’s climactic performance of the Warsaw Concerto in Dangerous Moonlight (1941) and the eponymous ballet in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1947) are two famous examples. Where Instruments of the Orchestra differed, however, was in its protracted use of silence: Sargent’s opening speech and downbeat are separated by almost twenty seconds of silence, a gap about twice as long as those which would be expected at comparable moments in feature films of the era. The absence of sound is further intensified by the prolonged, noisy tuning-up that dominates the film’s soundscape prior to the conductor’s arrival (rather than providing a quieter backdrop to audience dialogue, as was usual in feature films). While building on common trends in filmic representations of concerts, this sequence also performs precisely the kind of defamiliarizing function through which the documentarists sought to distance, and thereby foster critical awareness in, the audience. At the same time, it creates a heightened suspense that reinforces the gravitas of the occasion. The producers imagined that the sense of gravitas arising from the documentary style would also legitimize the musical score’s appeal to the emotions. For as Mathieson explained, where entertainment films used music to enhance escapism, in this instance music provided an important counterbalance for the intellectual nature of the film. In the absence of stars and technicolor, documentary lacked the “superficial appeal” ordinarily thought to attract audiences; as a humanizing counterpoint to the visuals, music could compensate.109 Crucially, however, it performs this task in a manner stylistically distinct from the classic Hollywood scores that dominated feature films of the era. The latter were characterized by the thick symphonic textures and sweeping melodic lines that dominated much late nineteenth-century orchestral

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music and created an emotional intensity that induced uneasiness among critics. In contrast, Britten’s use of Purcell invokes a much earlier musical style, retaining a comparative clarity and lightness of tone, even with the scoring for full symphony. Mathieson’s suggestion that the balance between visuals and music protected the documentary genre from the emotional excesses of Hollywood resonated with wider attempts to defend education films on artistic grounds. To offer just one example, a Commission on Educational and Cultural Films argued that “films used in teaching have an important and wider function than the immediately instructional. They may provide the mental and spiritual stimulation of a work of art.”110 If any education film could inspire intellectual engagement, it was surely one about a “serious” piece of music. Despite these aspirations, however, the educational experiment was not an unmitigated success. Technical limitations resulted in a recording that, in the words of one visitor to the cinema, was “muzzy and feeble in volume and so lacking in the higher frequencies that much of the individual tang and colour of each instrument was lost.”111 Keller was so concerned about this “serious obstacle in the way of adequate appreciation” that he paid multiple trips to the Curzon Cinema in an attempt to identify the source of the problem. He eventually concluded that, even on better days, the sound quality “remained filmy to a damaging extent.”112 This problem can only have been worse in schools, most of which lacked the facilities to project a 35 mm film reel. Aware of this problem, the Crown Film Unit rerecorded the soundtrack on a 16 mm negative, hoping that if good-quality projectors were used, this would compensate for the poorer sound quality of the narrower reel.113 Beyond the practical difficulties of reproducing art music in the cinema, the film’s reception also highlighted an anxiety among critics that the music was at risk of being too entertaining. Britten maintained that he had not simplified his style on account of the educational context and target audience: “I never really worried that it was too sophisticated for kids—it is difficult to be that for the little blighters!” he told Basil Wright.114 But critics displayed a clear need to defend the music against the potentially negative connotations of its production context. The BBC, for example, was reluctant to refer to the work by its full title: announcers preferred the subtitle Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Henry Purcell. Donald Mitchell suggests that this tradition was started by Sargent, who “may have thought the proper title altogether too frivolous in the context of concert performances.”115 But Britten had other ideas. The music had been “written for an educational film and was not

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meant to serve any other purpose,” and the composer was adamant that it should remain The Young Person’s Guide “so that the reference to its origin always remains preserved.”116 Coming to Britten’s defense, Erwin Stein asserted that the “brilliant” music’s “lighter vein” should not be a source of embarrassment: “It is a blessing that we have, for once,” he proclaimed, “a composer who is not always only dead serious.”117 Stein went further, adding that “it might be justified to censure the present work if it bore the pretentious title ‘Variations & Fugue on a Theme of Purcell.’ ” Meanwhile, Penguin Music Magazine’s Scott Goddard wrote that Britten’s music “combines education with entertainment in such a way that neither is weakened. To have done that is a triumph of tact and skill.”118 He went on to offer the concert version as proof of just how clever the composer was: “It is a unique example of music that is precisely suited to film uses and yet can stand alone as a consecutive and self-sufficient work of art.” Somewhat more cautiously, Keller, having remarked on the range of “serious” and “frivolous” variations, suggested that it was “the serious aspect of the work that has, I think, been a little neglected.” Attempting to redress this, he explained, “The composition is not only brilliant and witty, but also—beautiful. Needless to say, it is among the best music that has ever been written for the cinema.”119 Britten’s advocates also sought to undermine the potentially negative connotations of the target audience by underlining the film’s broad appeal. Keller asserted that the “ ‘Young Person’s Guide’ itself has, at last, produced a film that is fit for adult audiences.”120 A few years later, in Mitchell and Keller’s volume championing the composer’s music, Imogen Holst commended Britten for not thinking of “youth as a ‘problem’ demanding special measures in education: the Young Person for whom he wrote his Guide to the Orchestra,” she declared, “might just as well have been eight or eighteen or eighty.”121 The cinematic distribution of the film added credibility to these assertions. Although it was classified as a U, at least one London venue—the Curzon Cinema in Mayfair—chose to screen Instruments of the Orchestra before the A-rated feature La Symphonie pastorale.122 If the music’s accessibility was well suited to the democratic rhetoric of postwar Britain, critics used this as grounds to redeem what might otherwise have been dismissed as second-rate children’s fare. The irony behind such comments was that, although critics celebrated the new possibilities for educational music Britten’s score promised, they also diminished the prospects of other composers building on his legacy. In

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their attempts to salvage Britten’s music from the polarizing discourse of high and low, critics ended up reaffirming this divide, presenting the composer as an exception to the rule, a rule that they implicitly asserted as true. Nevertheless—and positive or otherwise—by engaging critically with the film, reviewers practiced precisely the sort of active reception the producers had hoped to inspire. One would expect no less: showing the film to critics was like preaching to the converted. To what extent Instruments of the Orchestra fostered intelligent listening habits more widely is harder to say. •

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A lesson in the active reception of art music, Instruments of the Orchestra was an attempt to resolve the ideological tensions that arose from intertwining the arts in ideals for citizenship. The producers imagined that the risks of passive engagement might be mitigated by appropriating listening as a site of cultural participation. But when discussions turned from abstract rhetoric to actual cultural products—books, films, pieces of music—precisely how the ideal of a participatory, living culture might translate into practice was far from clear; and especially when it came to questions of audiences. Perhaps it was because “active” listening was so hard to define, let alone demonstrate, that its proponents placed such emphasis on factual knowledge. Being able to name the instruments of the orchestra or describe a piece of music’s form were comparatively quantifiable measures of serious engagement. The notion that listening to such music was an acquired skill reinforced art music’s highbrow status. (That such an intellectualized approach might seem a rather strange means of uncovering the human value of the arts is a subject to which we will return in chapter 6.) Thus, Instruments of the Orchestra sought to defend art music against denigrating associations with mass culture, even as it promoted this repertoire to a broad audience. Britten’s involvement aided this agenda. Following the success of Peter Grimes (1945), he was considered by many to be the great hope of British music. Perhaps more significantly, his compositional aesthetic was well styled for navigating the uncertain middle-ground between highbrow appeal and accessibility. As we saw earlier, critics argued that his score complemented the film’s educational program by allowing listeners to engage with the music on a variety of levels, depending on their individual experience and knowledge. One might even go further and suggest that the music’s trajectory mirrored the journey on which pedagogues hoped to take the young audience: from repeated statements of a

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memorable theme, through variations introducing greater melodic and harmonic complexity, to the concluding fugue (the section that critics considered most suitable for advanced analysis), the score mapped out students’ desired progress. When politicians, educators, and intellectuals found themselves in conflict over the importance of the arts in school curricula, there was more at stake than children’s welfare. The debate spoke to broader uncertainties about the arts’ possible role in postwar Britain—about how they might shape and define the nation. The return to peace and Labour’s landslide victory gave this old concern a renewed significance: having finally secured power, it was in the Labour government’s interest to demonstrate that it could realize its promises for a better postwar life. Music education played an important part in this, for it could contribute to the holistic schooling that planners hoped would build a nation of spiritually healthy and socially productive citizens. Seeking to avoid the risks of their chosen mass medium, the film producers imagined that Instruments of the Orchestra would help to establish a modern participatory culture: one in which a broad public played an “active” role as discriminating listeners. Yet the film’s agenda reveals as much about the limits of postwar cultural reform as its accomplishments. Eager to prove the social value of mass education, reformers looked to the liberal grammar school tradition to help legitimate the new secondary moderns.123 Aside from its innovatory status as Britain’s first music education film, Instruments of the Orchestra clearly exemplified this trend. The choice of a prestigious composer, the style of the music, the ideological values of the documentary film tradition—all these betrayed a middlebrow paternalism that ran through the whole initiative. The film’s austere aesthetic seems especially pronounced when held up against another, more celebrated music appreciation film of the era: Walt Disney’s playful Fantasia (1940). The particular way in which Instruments of the Orchestra sought to guide young people’s reception of art music exposes the paradoxes of a participatory culture in which only certain types of participation and certain responses to highbrow culture were recognized. Only the high road, it seemed, could lead to “artful living.”

Chapter 5

Outside the Ivory Tower Extra-Mural Music at the University of Birmingham (1948–1964)

Late in 1942, the editors of Scrutiny received a lengthy letter about the journal’s music critic, Wilfrid Mellers. The correspondents, historian Stephen Reiss and literary critic Boris Ford, had conducted a review of Mellers’s articles, which had led them to doubt his critical authority. Their suspicions had been raised by what they described as his “disconcerting facility of expression”—an effusive style of writing littered with superlatives that they feared masked a lack of “critical rigour” and a superficial knowledge of the music under discussion.1 Mellers’s penchant for little-known composers and works compounded these anxieties. Without knowing his attitude to the “unquestionably greatest composers,” Reiss and Ford complained, they lacked any “standards of reference” against which to judge his opinions of minor figures.2 In closing, they requested a series of articles to right the situation, including an overview of common musical forms and a detailed consideration of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven: topics that, to their mind, constituted the “central problems of music appreciation.” The attack was published in the December edition of the journal, accompanied by an equally forthright riposte from Mellers.3 It was, he observed, unexpected to receive such criticism from these quarters. While the “musical public” had often charged him with elitism, he had never yet been “attacked from within the camp” for his breadth of interests. That such narrow-mindedness existed even in “highbrow places” seemed symptomatic of the state of Britain’s art music scene. As earlier 136

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chapters of this book have suggested, during the preceding decades, a “vast new public for classical orchestral music” had emerged, along with a raft of education initiatives designed to guide the public’s listening practices.4 In general, Mellers considered the expanding audience to be an encouraging sign, but he also had reservations about the shape that concert culture was taking. His particular concerns stemmed from the public’s apparent preoccupation with a small canon of composers— above all, with the likes of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. The problem, as he saw it, was that this sensational late-nineteenth-century idiom promoted a limited spectrum of emotional responses. Worse than simply hampering the public’s ability to appreciate romantic repertoire, this supposedly also rendered them unable to see the value in music whose emotional content was more subtle. Using an anecdote designed to reiterate how widespread the problem was, Mellers reported: “I once met a man in very highbrow circles who told me Mozart was a pretty enough composer but you had to go to Tchaikowsky’s symphonies for real tragedy.” Scrutiny’s founder, F. R. Leavis, would surely have deemed such ignorant members of the public a lost cause; but Mellers was cut from a different cloth. Taking up the mantle of earlier middlebrow reformers, he insisted that education could provide a solution: “to right those distortions” in value judgment was “the first and most urgent task of the musical educator.” What’s more—pace Leavis—he considered this mission to be most pressing not among “highbrows,” but among “the sort of people who come to music classes in adult education”—the aspirational middlebrow public.5 At the time of writing, Mellers—who was a mere twenty-eight years old—was between jobs at Dartington Hall and Downing College Cambridge, where he taught English literature and music. It was not until 1948 that he had a sustained opportunity to put his beliefs into practice, after he was offered the position of Staff Tutor in Music at the newly constituted Department of Extra-Mural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Established in the aftermath of the Second World War when Britain’s university sector was undergoing a rapid, largely state-funded expansion, this department was conceived to formalize and expand the outreach work in adult education that had begun in 1903—just three years after the University’s foundation. Initially, such teaching had been delivered in partnership with the Workers’ Education Association (as was common practice throughout the country) and overseen by a joint committee. Following its creation in 1945, the new department’s activities ran alongside the existing ones. Seeking to take advantage of the

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established local network of education providers and its audience, the Extra-Mural Department quickly began to supplement courses overseen by the joint committee with a more extensive, centrally organized program of learning.6 From a bureaucratic perspective, it was a rather messy arrangement, characteristically piecemeal in its approach to pedagogic reform. Nevertheless, as the department’s second director, Allen Parker, explained, the expansion reflected a timely conviction that making the University “one of the major cultural forces in the West Midlands should be an important project of post-war development.”7 The very idea of extra-mural studies as a “cultural force” with wide-ranging influence captures the high hopes that postwar adult educators placed in their work. Such optimism seemed particularly appropriate where music was concerned: for all its shortcomings, Britain’s booming art music scene was indicative of a ready-made market that extra-mural planners could tap into. It was, then, an exciting time for Mellers to join the department and with no less a brief than to inaugurate the program for extra-mural music. However, realizing such lofty visions was hardly as straightforward as Parker’s optimism might suggest. Extra-mural departments were, by their very nature, caught in a liminal position between academics and the public, which risked appeasing neither. This situation was further complicated by adult education’s historic leaning toward the arts and humanities and, more importantly, toward the liberal pedagogic ideology traditionally associated with their study. In both regards, this sector appeared to be out of step with the prevailing climate in postwar universities, where—for reasons that will be explained later—resources were overwhelmingly channeled toward scientific and technological subjects, and where an unprecedented value was placed on specialization and the kinds of vocational training that could lead to professional employment.8 If this broad-brush picture characterizes the biases of the era, it is also the image that has dominated in historical accounts of Britain’s university sector. For the most part, scholars have focused on the enhanced governmental provision for scientific and technological subjects, while sidelining the outreach programs delivered by a host of newly constituted extra-mural departments, in which the arts and humanities played a prominent role.9 In so doing, their accounts have silently reproduced the institutional politicking surrounding these departments and their struggle for recognition, instead of interrogating it. Furthermore, even where scholars have begun to recover the place of the arts in the postwar university, they have tended to do so in a

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way that leaves the notional distinction between the arts and sciences advanced in many period writings intact, rather than exploring uneasy points at which they intermixed.10 In this chapter, I pursue an alternative tack, asking how those involved in extra-mural music teaching negotiated their peripheral status within the university sphere. The tensions in their twofold mission—to diversify public interest in art music on the one hand and to provide a university-standard of tuition on the other—offer a powerful lens onto how central debates of middlebrow culture played out in the postwar landscape. The Scrutiny exchange has already hinted that the legacy of middlebrow pioneers was an uncomfortable inheritance for their postwar successors. This was true not just of the mark they had made on Britain’s concert scene, but also of their contribution to music pedagogy, in particular that which was broadly classified as music appreciation. Like adult education, music appreciation was the product of a liberal pedagogic tradition that was now going out of fashion. Besides the general difficulties that this association raised, music educators’ concerns about the concert scene presented a specific challenge: how to reimagine the broadening of taste as a process of acquiring specialized knowledge. It was a methodological dilemma, as well as an ideological one. Whether through historically decontextualized music analysis—such as that which we saw Walford Davies advocating in chapter 3—or through the historical surveys that were a common feature of music appreciation textbooks, studying music from a range of historical periods risked appearing insufficiently specialized to pass for university-level study.11 Mellers’s response was to promote an ideal of historically informed reception: listening in a historically aware fashion, he insisted, would lead to specialized affective responses, which in turn would form the basis for sound judgments of taste. In this regard, his aspirations for extra-mural music also throw light onto more far-reaching questions raised by the presence of a liberal, middlebrow initiative in the postwar university. Plagued by the conflicts between old and new pedagogic values, adult educators were acutely aware that they were caught in a battle for legitimacy. Struggling to rationalize the value of their programs in terms that were meaningful to a modernizing society, they added a new arrow to their quiver. Beyond reiterating the old arguments that liberal education would cultivate the broad-minded citizenry befitting of a democracy, they sought in both rhetoric and practice to infuse their liberal inheritance with the trappings of specialized, vocational study.

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The Concert Scene in Postwar Britain When war began in 1939, declarations that the conflict signaled the death knell of high culture—at least for the duration—had abounded.12 By the time peace returned, it was obvious that these predictions had been wildly misplaced. Far from quashing art music, the war was widely reported to have enhanced its popularity. As Rollo Myers reflected in 1947, “a most remarkable and ever-increasing appetite for good music amongst the people of Great Britain . . . seems to have been stimulated by the war.”13 Some feared that this would prove to be an “artificial boom” that was more indicative of the straitjacket that war had inevitably placed on the leisure industry than of genuine interest.14 But in general, the overriding spirit was one of optimism: the success of wartime initiatives promoting art music gave the impression that music was, as Heather Wiebe explains, “one area in which reforms actually worked.”15 With the return to peace, an array of new projects sprang up around the country that catered to the gamut of art music tastes. At the more experimental end of the spectrum, festivals—such as those in Cheltenham (founded in 1945), Edinburgh (in 1947) and Aldeburgh (in 1948)—and summer schools, most famously Dartington’s (which moved from the adjacent county’s Bryanston School in 1953), quickly became hubs for new music. Meanwhile, new professional and amateur orchestras joined established institutions in bolstering the public appetite for classic symphonic repertoire; the foundations of the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (in 1945 and 1946 respectively) and of Robert Mayer’s Youth and Music (in 1946) and Ernest Read’s Concerts for Children (in 1945) are just a few examples. The fates and fortunes of these enterprises revealed just how powerful public interest in the arts could be. While few would have gone as far as Anne Medley, who suggested that “a consensus of opinion among common listeners .  .  . provides the only objective standard we have whereby to pronounce music as ‘great,’ ” many critics openly acknowledged that culture—high and low—could blossom or wither by the public’s hand.16 “It is Everyman’s presence—multiplied over and over again,” a Musical Times contributor noted, “that justifies the demand for concert halls, the engagement of artists, the performance of music in public. . . . When his interest is strong, constant and progressive the art and craft of music prosper—subject to Government restrictions. When his interest wanes, the art and craft of music languish.”17 Nurturing

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public interest, then, was not just in keeping with the democratic spirit of the era; at a more fundamental level, it also seemed expedient for the long-term survival of the art form. As the Scrutiny debacle suggests, however, even those who were optimistic about broadening access to art music saw a dark side to the public’s interest. In particular, the apparently “conservative” nature of audiences’ tastes became a new focal point for old anxieties about how the public listened and their musical preferences. This charge of conservatism was provoked by the prevalence in concert programs of a limited canon of works by dead composers. One Musical Times critic’s list included “the Brandenburg Concertos, the Mozart G minor, the Beethoven fifth, the Unfinished, the Tchaikovsky fifth, the Brahms C minor, the Grieg concerto, the New World, the Mastersingers Overture”—the “familiar standard masterpieces,” in other words, that had become a staple of middlebrow concert programming over the preceding decades.18 This repertoire’s popularity with audiences was reinforced by concert organizers, for whom there was a financial incentive to put on programs that would reliably draw a crowd. For the most part, educators insisted that even such narrow tastes should be celebrated: “how infinitely more deplorable it would be,” the Musical Times writer pointed out, “if great music did not spellbind such people.”19 Furthermore, they recognized that, among those for whom art music was a newfound hobby, fascination with the canon might be just the beginning of a musical journey. But their optimism was tempered by a far stronger emotion: a worry that the limits of public tastes were indicative of mass culture’s pernicious influence on the reception of art music. One of those to expound this fear was Mellers—among other places, in the Introduction to his 1946 monograph Music and Society. In an account that is deeply reminiscent of Adorno, he argued that the problem stemmed from the commercialization of the popular music industry and the impact that this had on the public’s capacity for genuine emotional expression.20 The music produced by this industry, he argued, was designed to cause “a synthetic or stock-response.”21 In so doing, it supposedly fostered a kind of mass-produced emotion that was neither specific to the art object nor sincere on the part of the listener. If the ubiquity of such music was evidence of the degree to which modern society had “come to prefer the bogus and the pretentious to the honest and the decent,” it ultimately rendered the public unable to pass meaningful value judgments. “If you don’t know clearly what your feelings are,” Mellers challenged his readers, “if you confuse them with other

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feelings which your ears and eyes are all the time told you ought to feel, how can you expect to know which feelings, thoughts and modes of behaviour you consider more valuable than others?”22 What’s more, Mellers imagined that, far from being limited to the reception of commercial music, this confusion spilled over into the public’s engagement with art music. Most alarmingly, he believed that those who felt overwhelmed by commercial music’s stultifying presence had begun to “look to art as a means of escape.” They were drawn “not so much [to] the music itself” as to “the day-dreams it gives rise to,” Mellers claimed.23 Of the art music that the public favored, it was, he continued, that in a late-nineteenth-century idiom that most obviously lent itself to this end. During this period, composers had responded to the “ugliness” of the modern world by progressively “retreat[ing] from life altogether.” In the process, they had supposedly cultivated a compositional style that invited nostalgic introspection and encouraged audiences to indulge in an imaginary disconnect from the real world. Thus, Mellers read the prevalence of late-nineteenth-century music in Britain’s concert halls as an extension of mass culture’s mind-numbing impact. Mellers was far from unique in drawing associations between lateromantic music and escapism, or in considering the public’s apparent desire for the latter a pressing concern. On the contrary, contemporary commentators frequently remarked on how the recent conflict and the austerity that followed in its wake had exacerbated the public’s pursuit of alternative realities. An Observer article, for example, reflected in the middle of 1946’s particularly bleak February: “One never remembers a peace-time week more steadily depressive in its atmosphere. Naturally the public seeks escape.”24 The journalist was announcing the balletic spectacle that would mark the postwar reopening of Covent Garden—Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty. His sardonic remarks appear to have been prompted primarily by the ballet’s resplendent stage designs and magical scenario, but it is notable that its score is also in a late romantic idiom.25 Meanwhile others perceived the film industry’s recent appropriation of this repertoire to have compounded the problem. Whether through the luxurious orchestral scoring that permeated newly commissioned Hollywood soundtracks, or through the straightforward incorporation of nineteenth-century repertoire, cinema entangled these sounds in fanciful worlds. The epitome of this trend was the “concerto film” genre, which became so popular during this period; among the most famous examples are Brief Encounter (1945), which used Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto no. 2 in C Minor,

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op.18; Moonlight Sonata (1937), which included extensive footage of Ignacy Jan Paderewski performing the eponymous Beethoven work, along with music by Chopin and Liszt; and Dangerous Moonlight (1941), for which Richard Addinsell wrote the celebrated Warsaw Concerto—music whose late-romantic idiom was such an audience hit that the piece quickly developed a life of its own outside of the film. Worse than just stifling concert life, such films—in detractors’ eyes— transformed art music into another vehicle for perpetuating “public inertia.”26 In other words, any hope of this repertoire inspiring a radical, critical engagement with the world seemed to evaporate with the media moguls’ touch; in their hands, it appeared to encourage complacency and social compliance instead. Critical opinion was divided as to whether it was program builders or the public who were ultimately to blame for this situation. Either way, the sense of stagnation fueled concerns that public tastes were undermining the growth of Britain’s art music culture in two vital areas. Looking to the past, some worried that the public’s obsession with a small collection of masterworks hindered their appreciation of the rich variety of pre-eighteenth-century music that practitioners and academics were continually unearthing. A more common complaint was that audiences’ narrow interests were a central factor in the disconnect between living composers and the public. For music journalist Eric Blom, for example, the preoccupation with “nineteenth-century mawkishness” hampered audiences’ potential to appreciate modern music because it encouraged them to give blind and indiscriminate precedence to music’s visceral appeal.27 “Their fallacy,” he argued, “consists in imagining that music must be either emotional or nothing, and can be reasonably judged from no other standpoint.”28 This attitude left next-to-no space for composers to write in any other idiom, as the public supposedly expected them “to fashion a work .  .  . in the image of other works already known.”29 What’s more, where modern music in particular was concerned, visceral appeal was a dubious starting point for appreciation: if modern composers had made a deliberate effort to distance their music from late nineteenth-century idioms, Blom contended, it needed to be approached on different terms. Mellers saw these two problems—the one to do with early music, the other with modern music—as different expressions of the same fundamental issue. Challenging the grounds on which major and minor composers were most commonly distinguished, he insisted that the public’s difficulties with early and modern repertoire were not a product of

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the music’s aesthetic qualities. It was not enough, he insisted, simply to accept that the music of minor composers should remain un-played because the history books decreed that it could not provide “the same kind of satisfaction” as the music of the greats; nor should modern music’s “neglect . . . be explained away by blaming the composers for writing such nasty noises.”30 For in both cases, he maintained, the public had passed judgment on false grounds. Having grown overly accustomed to viewing music through a nineteenth-century lens, they had lost the ability to appreciate any other repertoire on its own terms. In other words, the real problem seemed to be the limits of public sensibility—and that was something that education had the potential to correct. Already in his 1942 Scrutiny letter, Mellers had identified adult education classes as a promising vehicle: they provided access to a broad, aspirational public, which had expressed a desire to learn. His appointment at Birmingham presented a prime opportunity to connect with this audience. Although universities were far from the only players in the field, around this time they were pouring a wealth of new resources into extra-mural teaching in line with the general growth of the higher education sector. It is to this trend that we now turn, for it was against the fraught backdrop of pedagogic reform that Birmingham’s extra-mural music program took shape. The ideological tensions that accompanied university expansion seemed particularly acute where adult education was concerned. Operating on the peripheries of university life, extramural departments were peculiarly caught between the conflicting commitments to broadening educational access and enhancing academic prestige that plagued the postwar higher education sector.

The University Boom The decades after World War Two were a period of heady optimism and unsettling change for Britain’s higher education sector. As the first director of Birmingham’s Extra-Mural Department, D. R. Dudley, recalled, “Great possibilities seemed to lie ahead in every sphere of the national life, and in education perhaps most of all.”31 Among educators, politicians and civil servants concerned with national affairs, the prevailing aspirations for schools, colleges, and universities—as well as the anxieties that new developments inevitably provoked—were encapsulated in the idea of “education for democracy.” Soon a watchword of the period, the phrase loosely denoted the impulse to widen educational

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access and a vision of educational establishments as training grounds for citizenship. It was, as literary critic and Scrutiny coeditor Lionel Charles Knights observed, an ideal born of “abstractions.” Advocates talked of education imparting “enduring spiritual values” and enabling the general public to lead “ample and fruitful personal lives.”32 Meanwhile detractors feared that democratizing education equated to a rejection of standards that would ultimately rob Britain of its cultural riches. They characterized their opponents as those for whom “any concern for quality, and the consequent recognition of distinction, seems repulsively undemocratic” (to borrow Knights’s sardonic phrasing).33 Writer and academic Kingsley Amis summarized complainants’ concerns rather more bluntly, insisting: “More will mean worse.”34 Idealism and apprehension alike were fueled by the significant increase in government funding, which created the possibility of such visions becoming material realities.35 In the university sector, expansion had a visibly modern dimension: the 1960s saw a host of new “plateglass” institutions, such as The Universities of Sussex (1961), York (1963), and Kent (1965), added to the turn-of-the-century “redbricks” built by a previous generation of reformers.36 The accumulating number of universities was matched by a growing demand for student places, a product not just of the postwar baby boom, but also of a trend among young people for staying longer in education. Already by 1950, the number of students graduating with a university degree had almost doubled since 1938—from 9,311 to 17,337; by 1970, this figure was more than twice as large again, standing at 51,189.37 Change also rippled through the sphere of adult education, which, in its modern form, had hovered on the peripheries of the university for nearly a century—to be precise, since Cambridge mathematician James Stuart delivered the first series of “extension lectures” in northern England’s industrial cities in 1867 (although for our purposes, Oxford historian Arthur Johnson’s 1878 outreach lecture might offer a more apposite starting point, for it happened to take place in Birmingham).38 A relatively early response to the aspiration to broaden educational access that snowballed through late Victorian Britain, Stuart’s initiative had paved the way for similar enterprises to take root around the redbrick universities. This was not just a case of young institutions aping ancient ones: the idea behind the redbricks had been to meet the educational needs of those living and working in Britain’s industrial centers. In part, this meant offering expanded intra-mural programs of vocational and professional training. Developed with an eye to local

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industry needs, new courses ran alongside more traditional “liberal” programs of study in the Oxbridge vein. It also meant partnering with other local education providers to enhance opportunities for extramural education so that working adults could pursue ongoing personal development through lifelong learning. Although not exclusively liberal in focus, adult education retained a strong affiliation with this pedagogic tradition: it existed, as one contributor to a 1956 edition of the journal Adult Education put it, “to broaden people’s interests, to deepen their culture, and perhaps, incidentally, to turn them into better citizens.”39 Of the two agendas it was, unsurprisingly, the intramural one that tended to take priority—not least because it presented a more obvious route for redbricks to enhance their prestige. By comparison, the “low” status traditionally accorded extra-mural work was evident from the “poor pay, poor accommodation [and] little public understanding” that it attracted.40 However, the climate in 1940s Britain created new opportunities to challenge this institutional hierarchy. For one thing, the war had—in Dudley’s words—revealed that “a surprisingly high number of young people in the British forces were ready and eager for intellectual pursuits.”41 By 1950, the Ashby Committee reported, there were 162,850 students participating in adult education—around 25,000 more than in 1946—and, although not strictly year-on-year, this figure broadly continued to rise in the 1960s.42 Meanwhile, adult educators’ desire to satisfy the public’s academic interests resonated with the era’s democratizing impetus. Continuing in the footsteps of their middlebrow predecessors, they pitched the movement as offering a holistic education of the kind that would supposedly enable “individual improvement” through the cultivation of elevating pastimes. This was socially beneficial, they argued, because the “problem of leisure”—that old question about whether people were putting their spare time to good effect— remained as urgent as ever.43 “Unless we become involved in war,” Dudley explained, “the future seems to promise much more leisure to almost everyone than is now the case.”44 Rehearsing the anxieties of the interwar period, he continued to warn against the detrimental allure of a mass cultural industry that appeared determined to establish “the cultural life of the British people .  .  . on the lowest possible plane of triviality.”45 With its liberal academic roots, and with an audience keen to engage, adult education was well placed to guard against this unwelcome eventuality. Equally, universities found new cause to invest in this movement: it offered a way to justify their social importance, which

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was all the more necessary as the government increased their access to public funds.46 One of the most revealing examples of the shifting attitude toward adult education was the University of Birmingham’s decision to found a dedicated Department of Extra-Mural Studies—a step that many other redbricks had taken in the decade following World War One.47 With peacetime conditions looming on the horizon, Birmingham’s governing body began “rethinking the role which a University should play in its region” and came to see extra-mural work as newly valuable.48 This conviction was corroborated by the allocation of sufficient resources to enable rapid growth. Most significantly, a substantial body of staff had soon been hired, whose individual roles were conceived to ensure coverage both of core academic specialisms, and of a broad geographical area: by 1951, this included eight full-time, subject-specialist staff tutors, who oversaw curriculum development and core teaching at the central Birmingham base; meanwhile fourteen “resident organizing tutors” had a largely administrative role organizing suburban and regional work, which was delivered in tandem with twelve out of the thirteen West Midlands’ LEAs. At the head of the department was a director, a post “of professorial status and salary,” and a librarian managed the lending library that was created to support independent study. To encourage parity with other university departments, all full-time extra-mural staff were put on a pay scale comparable to that of their intramural colleagues.49 This infrastructure supported an expanding program. In 1944–45, the combined efforts of the Extra-Mural Department and a joint committee saw 91 courses and 1,774 enrolled students; by 1949–50, this had risen to 497 courses and 11,819 students.50 The department’s commitment to broadening educational access was reflected in the efforts to keep registration fees “low enough to be within the reach of everyone.”51 For courses running in central Birmingham, this generally meant 7s. 6d. for ten sessions, or between 12s. 6d. and 15/- for twenty-four sessions. (For comparison, tickets for London’s Prom Concerts were advertised in The Times the same year as ranging from 3s. 6d. to 8s. 6d.) Nevertheless, the makeup of Birmingham’s extra-mural student body was characteristically privileged: a report produced the same year revealed that 80 percent of students had either been to a “good” secondary school or had previously studied at university.52 The numeric expansion in students and classes was matched by a significant diversification of the subjects on offer. Many new courses dealt with topics directly related

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to modern living: cybernetics, communication, traffic engineering, and recent advances in pig husbandry were just a few of those singled out by Allen Parker in a 1959 survey of developments.53 But throughout the period in question, traditional subjects continued to dominate. Scientific subjects, from astronomy to biology and chemistry, constituted the smallest part of the program, whereas English language and literature and art and architecture were consistently the largest. Meanwhile, history, local study, archaeology, religion and music formed a second tier in popularity. By the end of its first decade, the Birmingham Extra-Mural Department could boast a “programme of work [that] is one of the largest in the country.”54

Extra- Mural Music Music’s prominence in the university’s extra-mural offering comes as no surprise. Music was, after all, an established leisure pastime—and one that had long featured in social reform agendas. What’s more, as we have already seen, there was widespread concern among music practitioners that public taste was in need of guidance. For Mellers, the appointment at Birmingham presented an opportunity to advance his ideals for music pedagogy, even as the quirks of the extra-mural system presented significant challenges. Not least, institutional affiliation brought access to resources and power that permitted the wholesale creation of a music education program for the Midlands region. Within this, his role as staff tutor entailed far more than just teaching (although he did some of this every year too). More importantly, it required him to think at a strategic level about how the various departmental activities—from lectures to concerts—could complement one another, forming a rich program of study. He was supported in this work by an advisory committee, whose members included the university’s recently appointed Peyton and Barber Professor of Music, Sir Anthony Lewis—a man who shared Mellers’s fascination with early music and had a proven commitment to the musical education of the public, as well as a regional representative of the Arts Council, which was immediately recognized as a potentially useful source of additional funds.55 Together, they determined the program’s central goals: in the words of the 1948–49 Annual Report, it was “felt that, in Music as in Fine Arts, our most valuable service will be to enlarge the horizon of public taste, and to inculcate some sense of historical development.”56 This meant diversifying the public’s ostensibly stagnating interests in late nineteenth-century repertoire and nurturing

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a deeper sensibility that would enable them to appreciate music from a broader range of periods. In many regards, there was nothing especially groundbreaking about this agenda. Although, as we will see, Mellers had his own theories about the specific role that a knowledge of music history could play in the formation of taste, he was far from the first music educator to insist on its importance; we saw some earlier examples in chapter 3. More generally, putting the broadening of public taste at the ideological heart of the department’s work was firmly in keeping both with the department’s liberal roots and with middlebrow pedagogy. If the department’s goals were acutely reminiscent of the music appreciation agenda, Mellers took up the baton from a long line of lettered educators whose attempts to broaden access to art music had cut across any divisions between the general public and the university. We have already in this chapter reencountered one of the most illustrious examples: Davies, who, around the same time that he began delivering music appreciation broadcasts for the BBC, held concurrent posts as professor of music at Aberystwyth and Gresham Professor of Music at the University of London. Donald Tovey, one-time Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University, was another such figure: although a less successful broadcaster than Davies, he was equally committed to cultivating public taste for art music—most famously through his analytical program notes. Meanwhile Stewart Macpherson, a founding father of music appreciation, conducted his pioneering public education work alongside his duties as professor of harmony and composition at the Royal Academy of Music. However, while these efforts had helped to nurture an expanded audience for art music, they had also accumulated baggage that impacted the expanding field of extra-mural music. Despite the academic credentials of these educators, the public initiatives they delivered under the banner of music appreciation were from the outset saddled with a host of negative connotations—connotations that this pedagogic movement struggled ever to shed. An inventory of charges was helpfully compiled by Percy Scholes, who devoted an entire chapter of his 1935 monograph Music: The Child and the Masterpiece to refuting the movement’s detractors.57 One set of concerns hovered around the value of its pedagogic approach, which was at once derided as “airy fantasy”—presumably because of the use of creative storytelling of the kind seen in chapter 2— and for its seeming overreliance on “technical terms.” Another school of critics, who feared its impact on more obviously participatory forms

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of musical culture, variously argued that “appreciation teachers overrate mechanical means” or that “musical appreciation endangers the singing class.” A third group dismissed all attempts to broaden access, objecting on downright elitist grounds: that “Music is for the Elect.” In short, rather than the founders’ university connections elevating music appreciation’s status by association, the opposite more often occurred: connections with the movement—real or imagined—risked tarnishing the reputation of both pedagogue and pedagogy. Music appreciation’s dubious status continued to resound through postwar music criticism, impeding those seeking to establish extra-mural music on a stable footing within the university.58 Over and above the uncomfortable associations arising from its amateur appeal, its pedagogic methods also tapped into the specific anxieties about Britain’s postwar art scene. Practitioners tended to introduce the fundamentals of music theory and history with reference to a small canon of great composers. This narrow focus seemed to replicate—perhaps even reinforce— the public’s limited tastes. Rather than joining the chorus of academics defending the movement, Mellers proclaimed himself a detractor. In rhetoric if not in practice, he was eager to distance his teaching methods from those associated with music appreciation. In the 1957–58 annual report, for instance, he implicitly dismissed the movement when he deemed “the bad old customs of potted biographies of the masters” and “uncritical attitude towards musical theory” as unsuitable for a university-level program. On other occasions, he was more explicit in disavowing any connections. After a run of particularly successful courses on Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, he insisted that these classes were “not just a stage up in academic discipline from ‘Hours with the Masters’ or ‘The Appreciation of Music,’ ” but rather “a different activity altogether.”59 The clarification sought to mask an uncomfortable reality—that these, some of the most successful courses he had delivered, dealt with composers who were foremost in the canon of “greats” that had dominated appreciation textbooks and broadcasts for decades. The prospects of protecting extra-mural work’s reputation were further complicated by the decentralized nature of its program delivery, which made it difficult to implement a coherent teaching plan. In practice, the bulk of the classes were delivered by peripatetic staff, who had a wide range of qualifications and who retained a high level of independence. Consequently, although the committee worked alongside the resident organizing tutors (who, as noted, were responsible for overseeing the department’s offering outside of the city), it was difficult to guarantee

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consistency in content or approach. The result was a music program that was typical of an extra-mural subject in its eclecticism. For one thing, it encompassed the full range of teaching formats used in the department, from those with more public appeal to those with higher prestige value. During the first season of Mellers’s tenure, for instance, over twenty tutors were employed to deliver thirty-seven courses in Birmingham and throughout the surrounding regions. This included three “tutorial classes”—three-year programs of study delivered in two-hour-long sessions. This was generally tutors’ preferred format: emulating the length of intramural degrees, it seemed to facilitate the in-depth study appropriate for a university-level program. Also included in the 1948–49 program were a host of shorter courses: nine “sessionals,” which consisted of twenty to twenty-four meetings running across a single academic year; fifteen “terminals” of ten to twelve meetings; and eight “short courses” of three to nine meetings—all of which lasted for around an hour and a half and had a scheduled start time between 7:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., making it possible for those with standard working hours to attend.60 Indeed these courses tended to be more popular with the public, perhaps because the limited duration seemed like a more manageable commitment. Finally, the department organized a residential course at Attingham Park in September 1949 (which would henceforth be an annual event), a weekend course, an extension lecture, and at least six professional concerts hosted in conjunction with the Arts Council.61 In addition, the roster of tutors set a precedent in its remarkable diversity. It featured everything from local musicians to key figures in Britain’s musical establishment and even the odd international celebrity; Aaron Copland, Carl Dolmetch, Mátyás Seiber, Alan Bush, Egon Wellesz, and pianist Franz Reizenstein were among the better-known. Class sizes were similarly variable. The smallest were three courses that had only seven participants: “Music of the Masters” taught by one H. Jan Hutchinson in the little village of Much Wenlock; “Music Appreciation,” delivered by an A. Williams in the cathedral city of Hereford; and Mellers’s “British Music Today,” which ran in the market-town of Stourbridge. At the other end of the spectrum, eighty-five students enrolled for a twelve-part series on “Modern Music,” which was cotaught from the central Birmingham base. Characteristically for an Arts and Humanities subject, the audience for extra-mural music was predominantly female. Figures on the payment slips from the year in question, which account for the attendance on just under two-thirds of the thirty-seven courses mentioned in the Annual Review, document

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234 women as compared with 93 men; subsequent records show that this trend broadly continued.62 What’s more, the handful of surviving syllabuses suggest that the spectrum of material covered in lectures and the level at which they were pitched varied considerably, particularly between the center and the suburbs, and between Mellers and the contracted tutors. In 1953– 54, for instance, several courses were offered under the heading “The Enjoyment of Music”; a glance at the surviving syllabuses reveals that, even where there was a common title, content could vary widely. At the elementary end of the spectrum, Malcolm McKelvey’s six-week series for the small village of Edgmond addressed basics such as “the first steps in listening” (week two) and “the more usual instruments of music” (week three), before culminating in a brief overview of a “typical” concert (Figure 7). Meanwhile at the advanced end, Mellers’s and Maurice Davies’s twenty-four-week course with the same billing, which ran in the outskirts of Birmingham at the Bournville and Northfield Institute of Further Education, provided a survey of “The Song and the Singer” from the troubadour to the present day, followed by an overview of “The Development of the Concerto” from the seventeenth century through to the twentieth (Figure 8). We could hazard a guess that the two courses were also conceived with rather different audiences in mind: covering the very basic tenets of music appreciation, McKelvey’s assumed next to no prior knowledge of art music culture, whereas the Mellers-Davies collaboration, with its detailed historical overview of two specific genres, seems to have been targeted at a more knowledgeable public. In part, such differences might have reflected an unequal distribution of interest in high cultural pursuits across urban and rural regions. Dudley implied as much when he observed that, while “cultural poverty” was prevalent throughout the Midlands, it was especially pronounced in rural communities, where “a triumphant philistinism” fostered a deep-seated resistance to change.63 This disparity between center and suburbs was especially uncomfortable because it embodied a tension that lay at the heart of extra-mural studies: between accessibility and academic prestige. If the baseline of music education was lower in rural communities, then foundation courses would best suit the needs of students in these areas; but such courses were unlikely to live up to the benchmark set by university-level teaching. The range of students’ prior musical experience compounded attempts to set extra-mural music on a firmer academic footing. But the question still remains as to why Mellers advocated for a historical approach in

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Figure 7: Malcolm McKelvey, “Short Class: The Enjoyment of Music,” 1953. UA22P: Extra-Mural Studies 6: Pilgrim, Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham.

particular. What was it about studying music history that, to his mind, promised to elevate the extra-mural offering to a level commensurate with university study? To answer this question, I want to turn once more to the wider context of postwar education reform. In particular, I want to explore the clash in value systems precipitated by the increasing emphasis on specialization that accompanied the professionalization

Figure 8: Wilfrid Mellers and Maurice Davies, “The Enjoyment of Music.” UA22P: Extra-Mural Studies 6: Lilley, Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham.

Figure 8 (Continued)

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of British society. This new pedagogic ideal presented an acute challenge to extra-mural departments, for it put pressure on the values associated with liberal education.

Specializing the Academy As the 1950s neared an end—and when a decade and a half had passed since the foundation of Birmingham’s Department of Extra-Mural Studies—adult educators from around the country gathered at the University to reflect on their achievements and the challenges that lay ahead. Expansion had happened apace, so there was much to celebrate. At the same time, however, teething problems remained, and the sector was riven with contentious debates over the shape and status of extramural studies. In his conference address, Parker, who had recently taken over as the director of Birmingham’s department, cut to the heart of the problem: “It is a specialist world,” he proclaimed, and lecturers and policy makers had not yet come to terms with the implications that this had for education.64 The problem was an old one that stemmed from the nineteenth century when, as historian Harold Perkin has argued, British society began a gradual process of professionalization.65 The increasing value afforded “specialized expertise” played a pivotal role in this process: as expert knowledge was ever more highly prized, it became a central tenet around which society was structured.66 Institutions as diverse as public sector health services and private sector corporations invested significant power in those who could articulate their labor in terms of an expertise. Meanwhile, educational bodies acquired an additional, modern function: as the purveyors of the ever-expanding fields of specialist, vocational knowledge that accompanied professionalization. The process of postwar planning amplified these trends: the successful governance of a heavily centralized welfare state depended on what German sociologist Adolf Lowe termed “enlightened experts” or a “democratic ruling class” equipped to manage society in its newfangled complexity.67 The impact of this emerging pedagogic paradigm was particularly acute where universities and colleges were concerned. “The task of preserving, handing on, and increasing essential knowledge has become more and more exacting in modern communities,” explained adult educator Robert Peers. Since statutory schooling alone was no longer sufficient to pass on “this burden of knowledge,” anyone who could was required to “enter thereafter upon a period of intensive specialization in

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those studies which are designed to fit them for the service of the community.”68 Those institutions designated as “colleges” were well placed to meet this modern need, for the term was generally understood to denote specialist vocational training. Where universities were concerned, however, the ideological challenges were significantly greater. Britain’s educated class had historically placed the highest value on liberal, academic study. As Guy Hunter, warden of the residential adult education college Urchfont Manor, clarified, this did not straightforwardly equate to the pursuit of “knowledge for its own sake.” In practice, students who pursued a liberal education often viewed it as a stepping-stone to a career in state governance whether in Britain or abroad in the colonies.69 Nevertheless, courses were clearly geared toward broad-minded, scholarly study—an activity that, in the eyes of the pedagogic tradition’s advocates, was ultimately a vehicle for the holistic development of character. With its seemingly narrow focus on the acquisition of a specific set of useful skills, “vocational” study appeared fundamentally at odds with this. Indeed, many educators viewed the difference as categorical. As Norman Fisher, the chief education officer for Manchester, explained, “English educational thought [had been] hag-ridden by a morbid fear of vocationalism” to such an extent that it had become the norm to “regard the terms ‘vocational’ and ‘non-vocational’ as mutually exclusive.”70 If, as he went on to suggest, this was a reaction against the “highly utilitarian” nature of public education, the conditions of modern working life only exacerbated the issue: “vocational” now also conjured up the additional negative connotations of monotonous, unfulfilling, atomized labor.71 Conversely, however, as the requisite level of knowledge to enter any given profession grew ever larger, pursuing more liberally oriented studies could seem like an unaffordable luxury. Whereas in the past the broad knowledge base cultivated by the liberal approach had been welcomed as the mark of a civilized person, now, in the specialized postwar climate, it risked appearing out of step—or worse, unprofessional. These tensions between liberal and vocational ideals were further compounded by disciplinary politics. Contemporary commentators often framed the perceived dichotomy as a conflict between the arts and humanities on the one hand, and scientific or technological subjects on the other.72 One such was Kingsley Amis, who in a letter to the Observer described the “ever-more-widely accepted view of the humanities as behind the times, vague, decorative, marginal, contemplative, postponable,” in contrast to that of sciences as “up with the

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times, precise, essential, central, active, urgent.”73 As his characterization suggests, the potential for applying scientific and technological knowledge was more obvious, meaning that these subjects naturally fared better in an educational climate increasingly dominated by professional values. By 1960 the situation had become so acute that such value judgments were even being cast at an institutional level. The BBC Searchlight documentary on Oxford that precipitated Amis’s public outcry, for instance, painted a picture of the historic institution as “behind the times” because there was relatively “more Latin, and less science (or technology)” here than at the younger generations of redbrick and plateglass universities.74 Such polarized perspectives were further encouraged by the uneven distribution of government funding that was in part a response to Cold War politics. Britain may finally have become a welfare state, but it was also—as David Egerton has famously argued—a “warfare state.”75 Those in government with an eye on international affairs feared that, in producing fewer “graduates per head,” Britain was lagging behind America and Russia, the new global superpowers at the head of the arms race.76 Seeking to enhance the nation’s standing on the global political stage, Parliament showed a consistent preference for investing in technological subjects. Since their financial stake in universities was reaching an unprecedented height, this preference created tangible differences in access to resources that exacerbated interdisciplinary discord.77 Arts and humanities advocates responded with a variety of tacks. Some sought to make their case on pedagogic grounds, arguing that the degree of specialization fostered a narrowness of outlook that left students unable to draw the crucial links between subjects that might lead to a deeper understanding. This seems to have been what Knights had in mind when he paraphrased a common critique of the current system’s “atomistic teaching of subjects,” which, especially at the secondary level, resulted in “a meaningless and congested conglomeration” of exam-oriented study that failed to realize any of the higher purposes of education.78 Meanwhile others sought to defend the liberal tradition on the grounds that it promised to make a more direct appeal to policy makers and politicians outside the institutions’ walls, notably by invoking current political concerns. Peers offers a poignant example. “Extreme specialization in higher education,” he insisted, “is itself inimical to the qualities needed in a democratic society: breadth of vision, balanced judgment, tolerance of the beliefs and opinions of others, and a broad understanding of the problems and purposes of society as a

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whole.”79 Made against the backdrop of a recently established welfare state, in which the public’s rights as citizens were at the forefront of many minds, such arguments resonated strongly with current concerns. Perhaps the most intriguing line of argument, however, came from those who maintained that a middle ground was possible: that universities could cultivate in the public both professional knowledge and the holistic development of character. This progressive ideological standpoint was promoted by scholars in the sciences and humanities who were keen to combat disciplinary isolationism. Beyond simply creating a balance of vocational and liberal elements in any given degree program, it entailed a wholesale realignment of pedagogic values. On the one hand, specialized study had to be reimagined as a vehicle for broadening horizons. Sir Eric Ashby the botanist and master of Clare College, Cambridge, proposed as much when he insisted: “the path to culture should be through a man’s specialism, not by by-passing it.”80 Invoking the concept of culture, he sought to appropriate traditional ideals of the civilized man to technological learning. On the other hand, breadth of study had also to be associated with furthering specialist knowledge. Parker’s claim that pursuing liberally oriented studies could “provide the means by which one specialist can understand how his particular specialism fits in to a wider background” was a typical attempt to reposition this pedagogic tradition to more vocational ends.81 The hopes placed in this new perspective were particularly strong at plate-glass universities, where attempts to implement it took a variety of different forms. At the University College of North Staffordshire (which became the University of Keele in 1962), for example, all science students took a module in the arts or social studies and vice versa.82 Meanwhile the University of Sussex experimented with a more integrated approach, trying to organize its programs at the level of “the multi-subject School” rather than “the single subject Department.” The hope, as the first dean of the School of Social Studies and celebrated BBC historian Asa Briggs explained, was that “specialized knowledge [would] be acquired in such a way that the boundaries of subjects were to be explored—and crossed—as well as the central territories.”83 Of course, this cross-departmental setup risked having the opposite effect: students taking courses in a variety of disciplines might end up with no more than a superficial knowledge of many areas. To guard against this, lecturers were encouraged to focus their teaching on discipline-specific methodologies: “It was agreed,” Briggs continued, “that there was to be as little reliance as possible on sweeping survey work and as much as

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possible on learning ‘in depth’ how to use the skills of the specialist.”84 By reimagining course content along such lines, the academic leadership sought to promote education in its broadest sense, as well as specialist learning. The impetus to move beyond traditional divisions between vocational and liberal ideals was stronger still in the extra-mural community. The extra-mural setup—with its mixture of permanent academic staff and part-time peripatetic teachers, unbarred student entry, and courses of wildly varying levels—already struggled to conform to the professional standards that were becoming the norm in universities. Even where departments could be confident that they were delivering “universityquality” teaching, their inability to conform to “university standards,” such as the three-year degree program, undermined their reputation.85 The continuing importance of voluntary bodies in the sector only increased its chances of appearing amateurish.86 Although in general adult educators remained invested in the tradition’s liberal roots, they also recognized that promoting this model to the exclusion of all other pedagogic ends would only reinforce their already marginalized position within the university sphere. In addition, framing course content in relation to vocational specialisms promised to attract students. As Hunter admonished, “We must approach people through their primary interests; and in the case of the great majority of people a primary interest is in fact their job, their actual social positioning.”87 Eager to establish extra-mural teaching on a securer footing, adult educators sought to reposition their work as a vital response to the challenges facing contemporary society. Dudley voiced a widely held opinion when he suggested that “one of the central problems of modern culture” to which extra-mural departments were uniquely positioned to respond was that of “communication between the expert and the general intelligent public.”88 Broadly speaking, this entailed imagining ways to expand the horizons of public knowledge through the development of specialist rather than generalist interests. Where music in particular was concerned, it meant diversifying public interest: beyond popular music; beyond the limited canon of nineteenth-century works; and beyond the stock emotional responses that these narrow musical interests supposedly invited. This was, as the accumulated evidence from earlier chapters demonstrates, the mission that music appreciation advocates had been pursuing for several decades. But given the movement’s dubious associations with amateurism, perhaps the most urgent question facing extra-mural music was how to present a more professional front, even

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as it sought to harness the energy and interest that earlier educators had already nurtured. Mellers imagined that studying music history could provide one solution, by training the public to practice a kind of historically informed reception—a way of listening that he imagined would enable audiences to appreciate music of any period with the historical sympathies of a specialist. At once specialized and broad, this promised to redress the issues that he perceived with art music culture in a way that was in step with current educational values.

Historically Informed Reception At the start of his second year in Birmingham, Mellers launched what was perhaps his boldest initiative to expand the limits of public sensibility: a series on “The History of European Music.” Nowadays, it would be described as a survey course—albeit one, by Mellers’ own admission, of “mammoth” proportions.89 Commencing with a twenty-foursession exploration of “Music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance” delivered by seven different tutors, it was envisaged as a four-year program of study. It was initially offered at the central Birmingham base, but Mellers hoped that it would subsequently be rolled out throughout the region. Of all the courses that he would oversee during his time at Birmingham, it was the most ambitious in breadth and duration. What’s more, as the 1949 Annual Report makes clear, it was imagined as an exemplary response to the Advisory Committee’s twofold aims. For it was conceived to “enlarge the horizons of public taste” through the study of music history. Again, none of the syllabuses survive, making it impossible to reconstruct its content with any factual precision. However, the course’s title, “The History of European Music,” references a theme that appears repeatedly throughout Mellers’s 1940s writings— from his Scrutiny criticism through to Music and Society, which set out “to describe the evolution of English musical styles in relation to the European tradition.”90 By reading this body of work alongside the idealized extra-mural course and the extra-curricular departmental activities organized in conjunction with it, we can gain a deeper insight into what Mellers hoped to accomplish and can speculate as to how he might have sought to realize his goals. The bedrock of Mellers’s pedagogy was what, in a 1942 Scrutiny article, he described as “the inculcation of the Historical Perspective.”91 By this he meant something much deeper than simply a knowledge of history. The phrase encompassed a rather convoluted set of ideas about

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the reciprocal relationship between taste, the emotions, and the various kinds of musical knowledge, from the theoretical to the social-historical. As he put it: “Neither the ability to play an instrument, nor a knowledge of the grammar of the music, is, by itself, a contribution towards musical education: the simplest, and yet apparently the most difficult, lesson for a musician to learn is that one cannot be ‘musically’ educated without being emotionally educated as well. Indeed, it is difficult to understand how, without some general, humane, musical education it is possible to train a satisfactory interpreter at all.”92 His was, in other words, a holistic view. In keeping with the liberal values that underpinned both extramural teaching and middlebrow pedagogy, Mellers believed that for music education to be effective, it had to go hand in hand with developing the whole person. Moreover, he imagined that historical knowledge had a central part to play: it could serve as a vehicle for disciplining the emotions. The theory was that cultivating a sensitivity to each period’s musical conventions and “emotional climate” would allow audiences to appreciate its repertoire on its own terms: “for its own sake, with reference to its own inherent values.”93 In ideal practice, this amounted to a kind of historically informed reception. As with historically informed performance, the authenticity ideal lurked just below the surface of this discourse. But here, it was to be found neither in musical expression nor in performance practice, but rather in the emotional response that music provoked in the listener or performer. He hoped that, by studying music history, audiences would realize that not all music was conceived to make the same emotional impact. This opened up the possibility of being able clearly to identify, articulate and ultimately appreciate the range of emotional responses that music from different periods might provoke. Combatting the “emotional mushiness, incompetence and dishonesty” that mass culture had supposedly fostered and that “the nineteenth century approach” to art music had exacerbated, audiences would thus be equipped to pass the sound judgments that were indicative of good taste.94 In his monographs for non-specialists, these aspirations translated into sweeping historical surveys in which he sought to draw links between developments in musical style, contemporaneous trends in social history and composers’ personal reaction to their society. In this written work, close analysis was eschewed in favor of generalizations about stylistic trends, made with passing references to a multitude of composers and works. However, we can speculate from the scattered evidence that his classroom teaching placed more weight on the detailed

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discussion of a few musical excerpts by, at most, a handful of composers. This was certainly how courses offered toward the end of his time at Birmingham were advertised. In the 1959–60 publicity brochure, for instance, a series on Handel was marketed as assessing the composer’s “position in British and in European music by way of a commentary on comparatively few representative works.”95 The blurb for another course in the same brochure, “Landmarks in Twentieth Century [sic] Opera and Ballet,” was more explicit still, noting that this was “not a comprehensive survey.” Rather, it was “an investigation into the nature of music in the theatre” conducted over twenty weeks with reference to just fourteen exemplary works, ranging from Strauss’s Elektra to Weill’s The Threepennybit Opera [sic] and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Meanwhile, his earlier “Music of the Viennese Classics” syllabus—a twentyfour-week course offered in 1953–54—narrowed its focus not by genre (it promised to cover everything from string quartets to opera buffa) but by composer: sessions were fairly evenly divided between Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert (Figure 9). The names mentioned thus far suggest that canonical figures retained a prominent place even in Mellers’s curricula—which comes as no surprise, since these were more likely to attract the students needed to run the program. Indeed, it seems that the aim of extending the public’s musical horizons was perhaps more directly and persistently addressed through the practical music making that the department facilitated. Motivated by Mellers’s feeling that it was “absurd” to “lecture about music which no one had a chance of hearing,” the department soon began to organize and promote professional concerts featuring “music which is not heard in the normal run of concert-giving” and that had “some (maybe tenuous) connection with our courses.”96 This enterprise was assisted by the Arts Council, whose supplementary funding made possible an annual program of performances. Unsurprisingly given the subsection of the “History of European Music” course running the same year, the 1949 season foregrounded early music. Highlights included a series by a consort of viols from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, which played in Hereford, Coventry, and Evesham; another series by Safford Cape’s Pro Musica Antiqua, who were hosted in Birmingham, Coventry, and Wolverhampton; and performances by the Amadeus Quartet and Bernard Rose’s Bodley Singers, who traveled up from the nearby University of Oxford.97 This turned out to have set a precedent: in 1950– 51, by which point the historical survey had moved on to “The Age of the Baroque,” department-funded concerts continued to have an early

Figure 9: Wilfrid Mellers, “Music of the Viennese Classics.” UA22P: Extra-Mural Studies 6: Lilley, Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham.

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music focus. Included in this season’s offering were a concert of “Tudor English Church Music” in Worcester and another in Birmingham from a group called Alma Musica, neither of which obviously correlate with any of the courses recorded to be on offer that year.98 In staging repertory that was largely unrecorded and unprogrammed, these concerts promised to forge a new space in the public imagination for composers who were routinely dismissed as second rate. In part, they would do so simply by creating opportunities for audiences to make their own assessments based on actually hearing the music, rather than just accepting critics’ dismissals of it as unworthy of performance. Where concerts directly tied in with the extra-mural program, Mellers could support this process by challenging the prevailing viewpoint more explicitly. One such intervention suggested by his published writings was to appeal to composers’ historical significance as a corrective to presentday attitudes, in particular by demonstrating how those now thought of as minor figures were often held in higher regard by their contemporaries. His defense of Lully was typical. He complained: “Amateurs and academic musicians alike all know—they can read it in any of the history books—that . . . his music is of antiquarian interest only, being artificial, superficial, frigid and altogether devoid of aesthetic import, as indeed one can only expect from the product of a decadent state of society.”99 Such judgments, he continued, stemmed from an “idiotic” belief that Lully’s music should provide a similar kind of enjoyment to that of Purcell—a belief that showed no awareness of the cultural riches produced by Lully’s society more broadly (he offered Racine as an example), nor of the esteem in which French critics held him. Studying the social context in which Lully lived and composed, in conjunction with hearing his music, promised to allow the public to reappraise his output for themselves. However, it was not just dead composers who stood to gain from redrawing the map of music history. On the contrary, Mellers appeared to hold his teaching to the same bar that he held the growing public interest in art music: it was only worth its weight in gold “if it act[ed] as a stepping stone to the creative music of our own time.”100 Indeed, the particular narrative of history that he adopted—which included the widely recycled account of British music’s decline following Purcell—also served as a kind of theory of cultural production: it ultimately sought to explain the marginalized place of contemporary British composers with a view to reintegrating them into society.101 What’s more, it was here, in historicizing the values of the present moment, that Mellers made his

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most open appeals to professionalism: “The idea of the composer as craftsman is of essential importance today. It is his own safeguard as preserver of his professional standards and efficiency—if he does not make music competently no amount of prefunding or inspiration will save him; and it is his assurance that a responsible public would accept him as a responsible member of the community, with a job to do, like other men. I am inclined to think that this matter of efficiency is the fundamental issue because efficiency and emotional health are inseparable.”102 Given this chapter’s concerns, the slippage from the “professional standards” and “efficiency” expected of composers to the “emotional health” of the public seems especially telling. It implicitly embeds the ideal of historically informed reception in the discourse of professionalization, as if it were a kind of “professional” emotional response. In this way, Mellers was able to make his lofty claim that the “historical perspective” was “an indispensable basis for a true musical culture.”103 For by fostering an audience who could appreciate the professional standards employed by living composers, the study of music history promised nothing less than to solve the contemporary art music scene’s problems. Again, the department thought that practical music making had a crucial role to play in realizing this vision. Convinced of the value of “providing contact between composers and public,” Mellers oversaw the establishment of an annual residential summer school, which ran from 1949 to 1960 at a Shropshire country house named Attingham Park.104 Varying in length from one to two weeks, the courses interspersed lectures and solo or chamber recitals by professionals with choral rehearsals, thereby affording participants the opportunity both to study and to perform music relating to a given theme. The themes seem to have been conceived to maximize the potential for interaction. While the 1952 course focused exclusively on “British Music in the Twentieth Century,” the 1956 one investigated similarities and differences between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Even on those occasions when the central theme was restricted to an “old” topic, recent or newly composed works were included both in the amateur choir’s repertory and in the concerts. In 1953, for example, when the lectures focused predominantly on music of the Renaissance and seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the list of choral works included Edmund Rubbra’s Missa in Honorem Sancti Dominici. In addition, three new works were commissioned for the recitals—“three Shelley Songs by Berthold Goldschmidt”; a “Duo specially composed by Robin Orr” for violin and cello; and “a new work by Wilfrid Mellers, Carmina Felium for soprano and six

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instruments.”105 What’s more, and as the composers listed here suggest, year-on-year, Mellers secured the participation of influential figures in the British music establishment. Besides those already mentioned, Alfred Deller and Alan Bush were among the best-known contributors.106 From the high-profile musicians invited to participate in the concerts and summer schools, through to his utopian belief in the potential to transform contemporary concert culture, it is clear that Mellers had far-reaching aspirations both for Extra-Mural Music in general and for his “historical perspective” in particular. But was the result of his efforts really that different from his predecessors’? Or was this simply music appreciation redefined on terms that were more acceptable to the professionalizing university sphere?

Middlebrow Musicology In the conclusion to the Scrutiny letter with which this chapter opened, Ford and Reiss, you may recall, had specifically requested a series of articles on Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Mellers’s response was to double down on the value of studying less celebrated figures: “In the course of it [i.e., studying minor composers],” he stated, “Ford and Reiss will learn what I think about Bach and Mozart and Beethoven; but I want them to see them in relation to the broader issues which involve many other composers, rightly and wrongly designated ‘minor,’ and not the other way round.”107 Fifteen years later—after a decade of overseeing Birmingham’s extra-mural music program—his perspective appeared to have altered somewhat. When he reported to Dudley in 1958 that the department was finally “beginning to see what a university course in music should be,” he was referring to the aforementioned series of terminal courses on the three composers he had previously resisted discussing.108 In each case, students had spent the twelve weeks analyzing a handful of works, with a view to assessing each composer’s broader significance.109 Mellers went on to explain how these activities promised to realize his ultimate aims: “As the course has developed the music has been studied in ever greater detail, or perhaps it would be truer to say that the class has come to see something of the infinite relevance of the great works of human genius.” Such claims for musical greatness were common among music educators. Whether because of the efforts of the previous generation of middlebrow pioneers, or because of the mass media’s complicity in promoting these ideals, they remained generally accepted tenets of the art music world both inside and outside the

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academy. (It would be a few more years before the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies began to lay deconstructive siege to such ideologies.)110 Nevertheless, it is ironic that they rehearsed tropes of the composer-genius that had their roots in the romantic era. Even Mellers, it seems, was not immune from the nineteenth-century’s hegemonic legacy. Then again, Mellers’s inconsistency might suggest something other than a fundamental change of heart. Perhaps his disagreement with Ford and Reiss over which composers were worth studying had masked what was more fundamentally at stake—which was not so much what the public listened to as the way in which they supposedly listened. Over and above broadening the public’s taste, Mellers had hoped to promote a specific methodological approach to the study of music, an approach that he believed was fundamental to musical understanding. Mellers’s 1959 report to Dudley implied that this was the real issue: “It is not so much that the students are conservative—many of them are quite ready to study Schonberg or the later Stravinsky—as that they resent the fact that music should make any but technical or aesthetic demands; whereas a deep understanding of any music, whether old or new is only possible against a wide cultural background.”111 Read against the broad backdrop of Mellers’s pedagogy, it is clear that this was not a disavowal of the long-standing highbrow ideals of musical autonomy and transcendence. Inasmuch as Mellers understood his ultimate goal as “much more purely musical” than historical, he remained deeply invested in these old ideals.112 Rather, his advocacy of the cultural study of music was an attempt to categorize different kinds of musical knowledge so as to demarcate an “academically sounder” approach.113 In rhetorical terms, this served as a gatekeeping strategy: it safeguarded his work from the negative connotations both of music appreciation and of the middlebrow milieu more broadly. On occasion, he even distanced himself from the middlebrow explicitly. For instance, he used the term to deride the general public with its nineteenth-century preoccupation, invoking all its negative connotations of high art selling out to commercialized public interests.114 Yet as was often the case where critiques of middlebrow culture were concerned, the loudest objections frequently came from those whose work seemed most likely to fall within its fold. This was certainly true of Mellers. As we have seen, he was firmly committed to the quintessentially middlebrow agenda of expanding public taste. What’s more, although he drew a distinction between his teaching and that of many

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of the part-time tutors, traces of the appreciation movement can easily be seen in his contributions to the program. Most notably, his syllabuses reveal that he recommended precisely the kinds of reading materials that traditionally furnished the shelves of music appreciation devotees. For example, the list for his “Music of the Viennese Classics,” which ran in 1953 in the Midlands village of Rubery, refers students to the “Master Musicians” books on Mozart and Beethoven—a series of affordable life and works studies published by J.M. Dent (a firm whose middlebrow credentials are yet more clearly illustrated by its “Everyman’s Library” series of literary classics). We can hazard a guess that such staple textbooks of music appreciation continued to be used because they were tried and tested teaching resources known to have a broad public appeal. The same might be said of the survey course, a format that had long been used by middlebrow educators—and had equally long aroused detractors’ suspicion for the way it broke music history up into chunks that seemed all too easy for the amateur to digest. While Mellers railed against the tendency to divide contemporary culture “into watertight compartments”—the likes of Britten and Tippett in one, nineteenthcentury symphonic music in another, and so on—he also sought to appropriate the old pedagogic vehicle that was perhaps most closely associated with this outlook.115 But even where the goal was to advance specialized knowledge, the survey course by its broad nature risked replicating the reductive view of musical history as a series of discrete periods and movements that he was eager to combat. Finally, if, as Peter Franklin has noted, subsequent scholars ultimately denounced Mellers’s publications for a non-specialist audience as amateurish, his contemporaries equally struggled to buy into the narrative that they were something entirely other than music appreciation.116 Director of the University of London’s Extra-Mural Department Geoffrey Bush made a particularly telling comment in his review of the multivolume Man and His Music. Although he praised Mellers’s books for “provid[ing] such an admirable and astringent corrective to conventional teaching formulas,” it was nevertheless “classes in music appreciation” that they promised to improve.117 The contradictions between Mellers’s claims to pedagogic distinction on the one hand and his ties to music appreciation on the other shed light on larger questions than simply the content of Birmingham’s extra-mural music program. For one thing, they draw attention to the ongoing process of negotiation between educators and their audiences that shaped the middlebrow milieu. For all Mellers’s commitment to

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propagating a particular approach to music history, the public would engage with it on their own terms—even where educators considered those terms less valuable. To offer one last example from the Annual Reports: in 1960 Mellers complained that, despite his efforts, many still “seem[ed] to regard music as essentially consolatory, soothing troubled breasts.”118 At the same time, he was baffled by the popularity of courses on Bach and Mozart and remarked positively on the “vigorous musical life” of the city as a whole. In other words, although critical of what he perceived to be the prevailing attitude among extra-mural students, he could not deny that the public played an important role both in creating and sustaining Birmingham’s vibrant art music scene. What’s more, his conclusion—that “tact and patience” were crucial tools for the adult educator—seemed tacitly to acknowledge that a stubborn attempt to implement his ideological convictions was not in practice an option anyway. As was invariably the case with initiatives aimed at the adult public, the viability of extra-mural departments was contingent on there being an audience. Even though state funding meant that these departments did not have to be financially self-sufficient, they still had to demonstrate value-for-money and cultural impact to the university. Consequently, the pursuit of any academic agenda was always necessarily in tension with the need to put on classes that people actually wanted to attend. This created a double bind: the methods that seemed most likely to appeal to the public were precisely those that would perpetuate extra-mural music’s uncertain standing within the university; but they also promised to attract students in sufficient numbers to justify the department’s continuing existence. More broadly still, this conundrum nuances our understanding of the shifting politics of knowledge in postwar Britain. Never fully within nor fully outside of the academy’s walls, extra-mural studies were a sphere in which the arts’ and humanities’ struggle for legitimacy in an increasingly professionalized university environment was acutely evident. On the simplest level, acknowledging these disciplines’ centrality within extra-mural departments complicates the prevailing characterization of postwar Britain as a period overwhelmingly preoccupied with science, highlighting one area in which liberally oriented pedagogy remained strong. But beyond proving the mere coexistence of old and new teaching traditions, adult educators’ attempts to negotiate between the two draw attention to the points at which they intersected. In attempting to broaden the public’s supposedly limited musical interests, Mellers had to navigate a path between the liberal values that continued to

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underpin adult education on the one hand, and the emphasis on expert knowledge that accompanied professionalization on the other. His advocacy of a kind of historically aware emotional response shows how technocratic notions of specialization infiltrated arts and humanities pedagogy, even where practitioners remained committed to their liberal roots.

Chapter 6

The Avant-Garde Goes to School O Magnum Mysterium (1960)

At 7:00 p.m. on January 25, 1964, a small audience gathered at the Royal College of Music for a special event hosted by the Education Department of the London Co-operative Society. Consisting of a concert by school children from across the capital city followed by a discussion, the soirée offered an opportunity to reflect on the state of “Music in Education.” The organizers hoped not only to air their grievances with the status quo, but also to explore radical solutions. The problems that they perceived with school music were epitomized by two repertoires that tended to form a basis for teaching. As critic Arthur Jacobs explained, this included folksongs “with gentlemanly 19thcentury words” and simplified arrangements of classical symphonies for school orchestras.1 While generations of educators had formerly turned to these repertoires in their pursuit of a national musical renaissance, in a post–atom bomb world the reliance on music of another era seemed untenable: it bore little relevance to the modern child, who faced life in an “amorphous, eclectic, industrialized world.”2 The disconnect, Jacobs argued, meant that school music lessons were in vain, as they failed to instill a real interest either in contemporary music, which remained unfamiliar, or in the classics, which were dismissed as “kids’ stuff” as pupils began to mature.3 That January concert showcased two contrasting responses to this predicament, responses that reflected the seemingly polarizing impetuses in contemporary British musical culture. Representing the highbrow end 172

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of the spectrum, Graham Treacher conducted the London Co-operative Children’s Choir and Instrumental Ensemble in works by avant-garde composers. In addition to Hans Werner Henze’s Slumber Songs of the Mother of God (1948), they performed works by two leading figures of the “Manchester Group,” which were spearheading Britain’s musical avant-garde. The concert began with excerpts from Peter Maxwell Davies’s O Magnum Mysterium (1960) and ended with the world premiere of Alexander Goehr’s 1963 cantata Virtutes, for which they were joined by the Middlesex Youth Choir.4 In between, making the lowbrow case, Eric Stephenson directed pupils from Kingsdale Comprehensive in a selection of popular numbers, including arrangements of “Fly Me to the Moon” and “Bill Bailey,” as well as Brian Bonsor’s “Second Beguine” and Stephenson’s own “Two Spanish Folk Tunes.” In both instances, the choice of repertoire was innovative; but equally remarkable was the standard of performance, which critics unanimously praised. On the one hand, the Kingsdale contribution, which included both a jazz group and an eclectic orchestra of “mouth-organs, recorders, ‘educational’ percussion and normal instruments,” was deemed inspirational for achieving such musical competence alongside broad participation.5 On the other hand, Treacher’s group had mastered works that, although admittedly conceived for young performers, were in a relatively advanced idiom. Their efforts were especially laudable given that both O Magnum Mysterium and Virtutes had been written for comparatively privileged educational establishments, the former for the selective, state-funded Cirencester Grammar School, at which the composer had been teaching, the latter for the fee-paying King Edward’s School, Witley (located southwest of London) on commission from the Countess of Munster’s Musical Trust. As one commentator had made clear after an earlier performance of Davies’s work, the London Co-operative players thus proved that “any young people, sympathetically trained,” could equal the composer’s own pupils.6 For some in the audience, the young performers raised hope of a broader transformation that might finally bridge the gap between contemporary composers and audiences. Jacobs, for one, contended that such initiatives might make “the child of today the modern-minded music-lover of tomorrow.”7 His provocative review for the Musical Times went so far as to suggest that the “modest yet potentially revolutionary proceedings” were an event of equivalent historical significance to the creation of Arnold Dolmetsch’s clavichord. Seeking to fan the flames of anarchy, Jacobs ended with a call to arms: “Down with school

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music! Up with music in schools!” Yet behind the revolutionary fervor, fault lines had already begun to appear. During the post-concert discussion, a pupil of Kingsdale School had criticized Goehr’s cantata for its lack of tune—an opinion that many of the young performers reportedly shared. For Jacobs, this was evidence that the two musical traditions were incompatible: it was unrealistic, he implied, to believe that enthusiasm for “dangerously banal” popular songs would develop into a love for music of aesthetic worth. There was doubtless a hint of class snobbery here. Although renowned for its progressive policy that all students should become musically literate and learn an instrument, Kingsdale was a comprehensive school—a relatively new genre of educational establishment conceived as a non-selective alternative to the tripartite system of grammar, secondary technical, and secondary modern schools through which the government had initially sought to realize the Butler Education Act (1944).8 Two months later, George Self, head of music at Holloway School (a former grammar that had recently turned comprehensive), and composer David Bedford wrote into the Musical Times accusing Jacobs of foul play. They claimed that mapping the aesthetic division between “very modern” and “semi-pop” onto the social division between “the elite and the remainder” was “artificial.”9 Their own experience of bringing “aleatoric and new conducting techniques” into the classroom had shown that contemporary music could be accessible to all children, regardless of ability. As captured by these critics, the “Music in Education” evening presents the usual image of the early 1960s as a time of cultural upheaval.10 Graced with a familiar cast of characters, the scene depicts a group of “angry young men” railing against a banal status quo and proffering utopian hopes in the avant-garde’s potential to realize a fairer world, a world that the postwar welfare state had failed to deliver. Less explicitly, it also seems to uphold confidence in what one music educator evocatively described as the “Technological Age, or Space Age, or Nuclear Age.”11 For despite a growing perception—already remarked in the previous chapter—of the arts and sciences as somehow opposed, the musical avant-garde’s scientific sympathies did not go unremarked. As Philip Rupprecht notes in his study of the Manchester Group, many midcentury commentators viewed serialism as “an obvious case of scientific rationalism invading the artist’s atelier.”12 If serial music’s complexity and abstraction seemed to invite such a reading, it is no surprise that subsequent scholarship has tended to reinforce this narrative. Dai Griffith’s disdaining caricature of “grammar schoolboy music” provides

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one conspicuous example. Citing the Manchester Group as “classic exponents,” he describes their music as devoid of any humane value. In his words, it is the “uncompromising” music of “emotional wrecks.”13 Yet if we fix upon Griffiths’s framing of this genre as “schoolboy music,” we might cast our opening scene in a rather different light: as the latest in the long line of attempts to purvey highbrow music to a broad audience. Although rarely the exclusive focus of middlebrow educators, modern music had been a source of ongoing concern among them—most commonly because of the chasm that it created between living composers and audiences. As early as 1921, education reformer Henry Hadow was lamenting: “Music has become to us an unknown tongue. . . . For a very large number of people, to go to a concert, and especially a concert of modern music, is exactly like going to see a play in a language they do not understand. You cannot expect appreciation; it is not reasonable to expect it, in these circumstances.”14 Redressing this impasse had, by Percy Scholes’s account, been part of the “business” of the music appreciation movement. However, it was an area in which success had been limited. “A large-scale modern work,” school music teacher Alan Fluck observed in 1955, “will almost certainly be a guarantee of an empty hall while even a small one, slyly popped in, will reduce attendances.”15 In postwar Britain, this failure was made all the more apparent by the otherwise booming concert scene: the comparative popularity of nineteenth-century symphonic works (discussed at length in the previous chapter) brought the depths of public disinterest in contemporary music into sharper focus. In short, when Britain’s musical avant-garde sprung to prominence in the mid-1950s, the inaccessibility of their work only added fuel to a fire that had long been ablaze. This recast scene serves as a starting point for the goal of this chapter: a deeper investigation into the middlebrow investments of Britain’s postwar musical avant-garde. For even as this emerging generation drew inspiration from complex idioms, they seemed remarkably “uneasy” about the way this cut them off from the general public. This “uneasiness,” detected by Observer critic and champion of modern music Peter Heyworth, was demonstrated in the array of outreach initiatives in which young composers became involved.16 As the “Music for Education” concert has already suggested, schools continued to be an important (though far from the only) forum for such work.17 Efforts to put young people in touch with contemporary composers’ compositional methods and music ranged from the individual classroom teaching practices developed by the likes of Davies and Harrison Birtwistle (who

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served as head of music at Cranborne Chase Girls’ School in Dorset from 1962 to 1965), through to the televised series of music lessons for schools broadcast nationally on the BBC, with which Gordon Crosse and Richard Rodney Bennett were involved.18 Such initiatives offer a revealing lens onto the impact that an old commitment to broadening cultural access exerted on Britain’s musical avant-garde in its germinal phase. To be more specific, these pedagogic commitments reveal an alternative vision of what it meant to be “modern” to that which has dominated in scholarly accounts. For if avant-garde formalism seemed an apt musical accompaniment to a technocratic age, educators sought to justify its value to school children on the opposite grounds: they insisted, pace Griffiths, on its humanistic rather than its scientific credentials. The role that they envisaged for the arts in the postwar, modern world continued, in other words, to be founded on liberal values, such as those encapsulated by novelist Angus Wilson as a “desire to . . . ‘extend a variety of richness of life to more people.’ ”19 In contrast to the more overtly politicized stance taken by many continental composers around this time, it was by such liberal means that Britain’s musical avant-garde and their advocates ultimately hoped to bring about social transformation. But how exactly could music as cerebral as that produced by the avant-garde redress the shortcomings of a technological age, or help to build sentient, creative citizens? In what follows, I explore this question using as a case study one of the works performed at the “Music in Education” concert, O Magnum Mysterium. Its composer, Davies, had been among the first of his contemporaries to respond to classroom teachers’ requests for “real modern composers” to write music for schools.20 Considered at its time of composition (1960) to be Davies’s “most ambitious work for young people,” O Magnum Mysterium was also the most widely performed and discussed. What is more, it quickly came to be seen as a turning point in his compositional approach.21 In it the composer sought a balance between the challenging and the accessible, hoping to remain true to his own modernist idiom, even as he appealed to a broad young audience. Britten’s Young Person’s Guide had pursued a similar goal, as it mapped a route from easy to advanced, “active” listening. Responding to the challenges of a slightly later era, Davies explored an alternative solution: to broaden access to modern music through performance. The fullest outgrowth of this educational philosophy, O Magnum Mysterium was designed to take children on a journey from performance to appreciation.

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Modern Music for Modern Children For Davies, the appointment as director of music at Cirencester Grammar School in January 1959 was initially driven more by necessity than any high-minded commitment to education. A recent graduate of the Royal Manchester College of Music and Manchester University, he had spent the previous two years in Rome on a scholarship from the Italian government to study under Goffredo Petrassi. A strong advocate of advanced technical procedures, Petrassi encouraged his young apprentice to hone his compositional skills through a handful of highly complex compositions. On returning to England, two of these—St Michael (1957), a sonata for seventeen wind instruments, and Prolation (1958), a work for orchestra—received high-profile premieres. While a handful of critics proclaimed him to be “one of the most important” of the new generation, his “first ‘public image,’ ” as an article in BBC magazine The Listener put it, “was of a composer so out of touch with ordinary performers and audiences that many doubted his competence and sincerity.”22 If earning a living from writing music was a challenge for even the most established composers, it was impossible for a young one whose compositional style was so inaccessible. Davies soon turned to school teaching, which promised an easy and regular source of income.23 At the same time, since school music generally attracted all the negative connotations of amateur music making, such employment also posed professional risks to an aspiring avant-gardist. Aware of this, Davies was “determined to preserve at all costs what musical integrity [he] had,” committing to “deal throughout only with the music [he] could believe in.”24 Of all the schools at which Davies might have taught, the prospects at Cirencester Grammar augured unusually well. Founded in 1457, it was proud to have a well-established choral tradition, which in recent years had been sustained by an impressive lineage of directors of music.25 As a selective, non-fee-paying grammar, it drew its students from those who had scored in the top 25 percent of the County Secondary Schools Selection Examination. While academic performance was not necessarily tied to social privilege, and while many grammar school students were the first in their families to receive secondary education, in practice such institutions remained—to borrow historian Roy Lowe’s words—an “enclave of the middle classes.”26 The current headmaster of the school, a Mr. J. V.  Barnett, had also done much to strengthen academic standards; between his appointment in 1954 and 1961 the

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number of students staying on to study for A-Levels increased by more than a third.27 This meant that the school also presented a broader cross-section of ages than many other establishments. Finally, in keeping with the grammar school tradition of emulating elite, fee-paying public schools, Cirencester set Tuesday afternoons aside for activities, which ranged from carpentry to needlework, rugby to music.28 Besides providing students with an ideological foundation and practical training for productive leisure, this period also allowed for additional music making to take place during school hours. All of these factors combined, Cirencester Grammar was especially well positioned to benefit from the postwar drive to expand practical music making in schools, which was brought about by the current emphasis on equal opportunities and facilitated by the general rise in disposable income.29 Despite such promise, however, Davies found the state of musical affairs to be less than satisfactory. This was particularly the case where orchestral activities were concerned. Prior to his arrival, Cirencester Grammar did not have an orchestra. An even more fundamental problem was that what instrumental playing did occur in the school was severely limited both in standard and in scope: until 1958, the only tuition offered to pupils was on the violin, a situation that epitomized a general trend in British schools at this time.30 Undeterred by the prospect of working with highly inexperienced players, Davies founded an orchestra—only to encounter another hurdle, as he quickly discovered that the standard school repertory was not at all to his liking. His concerns centered on the prevalent place afforded to musical classics, which were usually presented in adaptation to make them playable by amateur ensembles. In line with many critics, he viewed this genre of educational music demeaning to the original. What’s more, he insisted that classical orchestration did not play to young musicians’ strengths because it tended to put the “burden of the work” on the string section.31 In so doing, it made no concessions for the fact that string instruments took longer to learn than wind and percussion, not least because of the challenges posed by intonation. Given that school orchestras and choirs were invariably extracurricular activities, they ideally needed repertoire that could be learned to a respectable standard on relatively few rehearsals. This was true even at Cirencester Grammar, where the amount of time set aside for music was unusually high: the choir rehearsed for ninety minutes each week, and the orchestra for “a little over two hours, partly in school time, and partly out.”32 Besides the classical style’s limitations as a pedagogic tool, Davies also believed that

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the public were already sufficiently—if not overly—familiar with this repertoire. Whereas familiarity was usually seen as an advantage, in this instance, he argued, it would more likely have a disheartening effect, as children would be unable to replicate the professional standards to which they had become accustomed through gramophone and radio. Having decided that the repertoire available for school ensembles was “tasteless and useless,” it was not long before Davies began to produce his own music for Cirencester students.33 His decision to start composing music for school children seems to have surprised even him: “I am producing a school concert with an Uraufführung of an (educational!) work of my own for school orchestra,” he exclaimed to Hans Keller in January 1960.34 With characteristic productivity, during his three years in post he made over thirty arrangements based on both medieval carols and works by contemporary composers. This provided an opportunity for detailed study of the scores, which in turn inspired almost a dozen new works composed specifically for the Cirencester choir and orchestra.35 Of these, O Magnum Mysterium was perhaps the fullest expression to date of Davies’s emerging educational philosophies. It reveals how the composer sought to redress the shortcomings of school music, taking an approach whose stylistic eclecticism and flexibility were as quintessentially middlebrow as the anxiety these same qualities seemed to induce. Conceived as “a meditation . . . on the wonder and promise of the Nativity,” the work comprised four carols for a cappella SATB, two instrumental sonatas, and an organ fantasia.36 The genre, which was more highbrow than much of the children’s music being produced even by contemporary composers, immediately marked it out as different: drawing a comparison with Britten, Colin Mason, a critic who used journalism as a platform to promote new music, noted that O  Magnum Mysterium was closer to The Turn of the Screw and Canticle no.  3 than works like Let’s Make an Opera or Noye’s Fludde, which were “conceived as essentially school entertainments.”37 At the same time, however, in a similar vein to Britten’s most celebrated works for amateurs—notably the Ceremony of Carols (1942) and Noye’s Fludde (1958)—O Magnum was also rooted in an ancient cultural past. Davies lifted the texts for the carols from Latin and medieval English sources (in both cases, the original language was retained). The first carol, “O Magnum Mysterium,” uses the opening of a Latin responsorial typically sung at Christmas and included in the Liber Usualis, with which he had become familiar during his time in Rome.38 Meanwhile the third,

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“Alleluia, pro Virgine Maria,” appears to be a setting of a text from the Selden Manuscript.39 The words for the second and final carols, on the other hand, were taken from the end of The Second Shepherd’s Play, a medieval drama that formed part of the so-called Wakefield Mystery cycle. The vocal music complemented the texts through sonorities that evoked the British choral tradition. Besides using a four-part SATB texture that in and of itself was reminiscent of much choral music, the composer included passages for solo treble in the first and third carols, and for treble and alto duo in the final one. These isolated vocal lines promised to highlight the distinctive timbre associated with child choristers, especially in the first carol, where these resonances were underscored by the “plainsong-like” nature of the “O Magnum Mysterium” chant.40 Since this was the first time that Davies had written for children’s voices, finding an appropriate musical language was an unprecedented challenge. He looked to the medieval heritage for inspiration, which appealed on several grounds. First, he had to find a way of accommodating a range of abilities such that children would not “be embarrassed by music beyond their technical capability” nor bored by the simplicity of their part.41 At the same time, anxious not to be accused of compromise, he needed to find a style that was “simple,” but not a “watereddown” version of that used in compositions for adults—that “put the truth across,” without trying to “ape the music children write naturally.” Medieval music promised a solution: it offered a means to root the composition in a respected musical tradition that, with its shorter and simpler forms, was well suited to the “limitations imposed by amateur voices.”42 Besides such practical considerations, there were also ideological motivations for invoking the medieval period. Idealized as a time when art and life had been seamlessly integrated, the middle ages had attracted the interest of various avant-garde and reformist movements in Britain since at least the late nineteenth century. As Michael Saler has suggested, the period held a peculiar appeal for a country “schooled in Evangelical and utilitarian values”—values that encouraged ambivalence toward the idea of art for art’s sake that had gained force in nineteenth-century Continental Europe.43 Davies bought into this idealized vision of the past: professing “a certain nostalgia” for the medieval period, he waxed lyrical about the practical role its artists had supposedly played in society.44 What is more, for the musical world in particular, taking a longer historical view enabled an alternative account of the evolution of art music, crucially, one that undermined the hegemony of the eighteenthand nineteenth-century German masters. Reviving a strategy employed

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by earlier generations of modernists, Davies thus employed the medieval heritage to create a distance from the legacies of the classical and romantic eras.45 Finally, the appeal to this ancient music also (and somewhat paradoxically) aided the composer in forging an identity that was distinct from the contemporary European avant-garde—both because it invoked the British choral tradition, and because of its utilitarian application within an educational context. Nevertheless, while Davies claimed to have no qualms about musical borrowing, he was evidently aware that this compositional procedure might undermine his claim to originality, a quality that was then widely considered to be fundamental to artistic greatness. To mitigate against this, he justified his borrowings by arguing that they were simply a means to “liberate” his own personality.46 The medieval origins of the sources were supposedly crucial to this: drawing another comparison with the nineteenth century, he insisted that “those earlier works have enough individuality to make it worthwhile basing one’s work on something taken from them, but not the overpowering individuality of, say, a Romantic work, which is a very specialized thing.”47 Seeking to “consume” his sources by his own creative practice, in O Magnum Mysterium he fused the medieval and early modern material with techniques and aesthetics associated with the contemporary musical avant-garde. For example, the composer intended the carols to be “openly melodic, the harmony attractive, and the rhythm easy to feel,” qualities that he considered vital for enticing young singers. Nevertheless, the modernist influence is detectable in the harmony, whose “pungent simplicity,” as one commentator described it, is particularly evident in the fourth carol with its sparse texture (Example 6.1).48 It is also apparent in the frequent rhythmic changes: within a single stanza, for example, “Haylle, Comly and Clene” changes time signature ten times, while the final phrase of “Alleluia, pro Virgine Maria” changes seven times in nine bars. Significantly more radical, the two instrumental sonatas disguise their eponymous nativity plainchants behind a pointillist “post-Webernish language,” whose fragmentary style critics acknowledged as “common to much serial music” (Example 6.2).49 Scored for flute, oboe, B-flat clarinet, bassoon, horn, viola, ’cello, glockenspiel / xylophone / vibraphone and six additional percussion players, the sonatas were also forward thinking in their wind- and percussion-heavy instrumentation. At the same time, the composer’s self-consciously technical approach to composition helped to elevate O Magnum above the banalities typically associated with school music. Indeed, if his works for Cirencester

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Example 6.1: Peter Maxwell Davies, O Magnum Mysterium, “The Fader of Heven.” ©1961 by Schott & Co. Ltd. (London). Reproduced by permission of Schott Music Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Example 6.2: Peter Maxwell Davies, O Magnum Mysterium, “Sonata I: Puer Natus,” mm.1–14. ©1962 by Schott & Co. Ltd. (London). Reproduced by permission of Schott Music Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Grammar were of necessity less technically demanding than his noneducational music, he insisted that this did not make the compositional process easy. On the contrary, their comparable simplicity was paradoxically a source of difficulty: “When you have written a lot of complicated music, like I have,” he claimed, “it takes quite a lot of courage to write something extremely simple, as in Magnum Mysterium, but this sort of simplicity one can’t achieve right away, one has to earn it the hard way.”50 Furthermore, while his educational works reportedly involved a lesser degree of planning than his non-educational ones, the “hard way” appeared to mean recourse to methods similar to those used in his noneducational works. To be specific, having—like many of his modernist continental predecessors—rejected tonality, the young Davies tended to rely on “number-working” as the basis of musical form.51 His methods were as much a product of his interests in the medieval period as of his continental modernist training. O Magnum Mysterium was exemplary: the few surviving sketches include a chart allocating numbers to various major and minor intervals, as well as sketches of note clusters, which were ultimately ordered on isorhythmic principles drawn from the Ars Nova period.52 The composer’s program notes drew attention to these compositional methods. In one, for example, he explained how the seminal chant melody was built from alternating major seconds and minor seconds, or their inversions. This provided the basis for a more detailed account of the core structuring principle: “This three-note sequence is combined with mensural proportions whereby the first note is equal to the combined duration of the other two, which in turn have a variable proportion based on 5-3. (These are proportions, not fixed lengths, and apply to section lengths on isorhythmic principles, and to filigree decoration.)”53 By foregrounding his compositional method, Davies imbued the work with a sort of deep structural complexity, a trait that he sought further to enhance through mystic appeals. Asserting—somewhat paradoxically—that technique was merely a “superficial” concern, he claimed that the real problem facing the composer was “to do with the whole nature of his existence and the adequate expression of his being on the deeper level of consciousness.”54 Combining ancient and modern in this way, Davies hoped to find a style that was relevant and accessible, but that did not compromise the work’s status as art. As he explained in a Listener article in 1959, “New development of older modes of expression may well offer us an opportunity to utilize our natural conservatism within the identifiable mainstream of the music of our time.”55 The resulting melee of styles

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and genres in this work is aptly captured in the words of a Guardian critic, who described it as “a modernistic reflection of medieval mysticism.”56 In less utopian moments, however, the composer remained self-conscious about O Magnum Mysterium not being avant-garde enough. For example, he felt it necessary to point out that he had “not tried to avoid octaves, but [had] used them structurally,” even though some critics considered such gestures to tonality “as immoral.”57 In short, the challenge Davies faced was to find what music critic Robert Henderson termed a “valid contemporary idiom”—that is, an idiom true to himself and sufficiently modern—that was at once “within [students’] grasp emotionally, intellectually and technically.”58 There was, however, more than the composer’s own musical integrity at stake. For Davies’s dilemma was emblematic of a wider debate about the place of modernist idioms within postwar British society. The questions at the heart of this debate had plagued modernism for decades: did modernist art have anything to say to the public? Could it be made broadly accessible without compromising its highbrow status? Could it contribute to the realization of a better world? At the turn of the 1960s, these old concerns acquired a heightened relevance, becoming the subject of one of the most high-profile intellectual battles of the era: a battle that came to be known as the “two cultures.” Its protagonists were physicist-turned-popular-novelist C. P. Snow and literary critic and Cambridge fellow F. R. Leavis. Styled as a disciplinary conflict between the arts and sciences, it was at root, as historian Guy Ortolano has decisively shown, an ideological disagreement about the changing face of British society that was catalyzed by governmental education reform and the emergence of the postwar avant-garde.59 As we will now see, the highly polemical tone of the debate quickly pushed its key protagonists into two polarized camps. Their vehement rhetoric not only obscured the real stakes of the debate, but also drowned out more moderate voices pursuing a middle ground between the two extremes. Situating the contemporaneous move to teach modern music in schools within this broader debate brings to light alternative perspectives on modern society—perspectives that were more optimistic, but no less anxious, about the relevance that the avant-garde held for the modern world.

The “Two Cultures” The event that kick-started the “two cultures” controversy took place on May 7, 1959—around five months after Davies had joined

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Cirencester—when Snow gave his provocative Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge.60 He used the public platform to deliver a cutting critique of modern Britain, alleging that a pervasive lack of support for the sciences among the ruling class was hindering the progress of civilization. The picture that he painted was, as numerous scholars have shown, largely inaccurate. Far from being in a state of technological decline, postwar Britain was marked by a strong commitment to scientific advance.61 However, it fairly represented the prevailing attitude among Snow’s primary targets: the literary modernists who had been particularly outspoken in their dismissals of industrialization as a destructive force on British society. As writer Stephen Spender succinctly explained in his contribution to the debate, “The ‘moderns’ on the whole, distrust, or even detest, the idea of progress, and view the results of science as a catastrophe to the values of past civilization.”62 To be more specific, their objections stemmed from deep-seated misgivings about the mass society that had been created by industrialization, a society in which mechanization had supposedly become so prevalent that it was dehumanizing the public. Pitted against this negative image of contemporary Britain was a nostalgia for an idealized, preindustrial past, that had supposedly facilitated a continuous, enriching interchange between art and life. One of the staunchest adherents of this position, Leavis had been developing this line of reasoning since the 1930s—the decade that saw the publication of his coauthored volume Culture and the Environment. This text set out his beliefs about what modern British society had lost and, crucially, the role that literary criticism could play in salvaging what little remained of the preindustrial era’s values. Lamenting the “organic community” that had characterized rural village life, he imagined that the people had once played an active role in the construction of culture: “Folk-songs, folk-dances, Cotswold cottages and handicraft products,” he mused, “are signs and expressions of something more: an art of life, a way of living, ordered and patterned . . . growing out of immemorial experience.”63 This ideal of a “lived” national culture was no longer attainable, for the conditions that enabled it could never be reproduced in an industrial, urbanized society. The central thesis of the book, however, was that literary criticism could go some way toward preserving “a worthy idea of satisfactory living.” By training a minority elite “to discriminate and to resist,” universities could ensure the continuation of a true culture. Leavis built on these ideas in his response to Snow’s Rede Lecture, which he initially articulated two and a half years later

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in his 1962 Richmond Lecture. During the course of this paper, he also spoke out strongly in favor of contemporary writers who shared his hostility to modern society, which largely meant modernists working in experimental literary styles that promoted the ideal of social alienation. Indeed, he took the elitism of such literature as a mark of true value. That the public failed to appreciate it, he insisted, was not down to artistic flaws. Rather, it reflected the fundamental shortcoming of a society whose preoccupation with technological advance had led to a disconnect between art and life. Leavis’s inflated rhetoric conveniently illustrated the resistance to science that Snow had alleged was broadly characteristic of the era. Indeed, the outspoken literary critic embodied all that Snow found problematic about modernist attitudes toward scientific advance. Worse than dismissing modernists and their literature as simply irrelevant, Snow charged them with being immoral. For one thing, their idealized perspective of the past was rooted in a totally unrealistic image of preindustrial life, which, he argued, blinded them to the material and immaterial benefits that industrialization had brought to the public at large. For another, their elitist mind-set prevented them from realizing the potential of modern institutions to extend these benefits further, for example through broadening educational and employment opportunities. Leavis and all who supported his position were thus guilty of denying the public the chance of a better, more equal world. With its inaccessible style, modernist literature—epitomized by what Snow called the “anti-novels” of James Joyce and Ezra Pound—was symptomatic of these elitist prejudices.64 Writers, he insisted, had a social responsibility to return to more accessible, pre-modernist styles of writing and narratives that promoted, rather than denounced, technological advance. Citing Anthony Powell, Doris Lessing, and Graham Greene as exemplary, he postulated in a Times Literary Supplement article: “There is a particular fusion of the investigatory, reflective and moral intelligences that specially fits the novel and which is still the only way open to us of exploring certain aspects, including the most important aspects, of the individual and social condition. That is the task which a number of us . . . saw some time ago, more or less consciously, as the one we ought to have shot at.” The impact of the Rede and Richmond lectures was such that following the debate, as Ortolano puts it, “it became impossible to discuss the arts and the sciences except through the prism of the ‘two cultures.’ ”65 There were a number of practical factors that surely contributed to the

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exchange becoming a defining discourse of the era, including the high levels of publicity that accompanied the two lectures and subsequent publications, as well as the profile of its protagonists. Perhaps more significant, however, was the fact that the “two cultures” controversy shone a spotlight on ideas that had been circulating among government officials and intellectuals (as well as in public culture more widely) in relation to education policy for some time.66 Schools and universities were widely recognized to be training grounds for future generations; and in an era when governmental reforms were driving a rapid expansion in the provision of state-funded tuition, the shape of secondary and tertiary education appeared to have a direct bearing on the sort of future that Britain was building. Opinions were strongly divided on the prospects—and not just at the university level, the context in which Snow and Leavis penned their critiques. As far as secondary education was concerned (which is our principal interest here), it had not taken long for the expanded provision of schooling realized by the Butler Education Act in 1944 to become the subject of criticism. Concerns about the impact of mass schooling on public well-being were aggravated by the direction of governmental reforms, which seemed increasingly to favor the sciences—a focus that diverged from the liberal, humanistic education historically provided for the minority elite. Already in 1948, Conservative politician Florence Horsburgh delivered a damning indictment of the educational experience that was being offered to the public at large, describing comprehensive schools as “a monster of mass education, with children on the assembly-line.”67 Far from building a nation of enlightened citizens, she protested, the specialized, vocational focus of mass schooling made these institutions little more than another cog in the industrial machine. Contrary to received historical wisdom, the Ministry of Education (MoE) remained ideologically committed to delivering a balanced education across the schooling spectrum, as we saw in chapter 4. Nevertheless, attempts to realize this commitment were often premised on putting the arts in service of the sciences, rather than treating them as equals. This tendency was especially notable where “technical schools” were concerned, a category of secondary school promoted in the wake of the Butler Education Act as a counterpart to grammar schools (for the most academically able students) and secondary moderns (for the rest). From the outset, financial constraints severely limited the number of such establishments that were developed; but the MoE continued to back them in principle. For Viscount David Eccles, who held the post

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of minister of education from 1959 to 1962, they were the most likely solution to “the opposition between the technical society . . . and the human personality” that seemed so troubling.68 His rationale was that, since the technical revolution was inescapable, the only option was to embrace it and then try to carve out a space for the humanities within it—and Technical Schools seemed a promising forum for so doing. Eccles’s optimism was shared by Sir Edward Boyle, parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Education from 1957 to 1959, who insisted not only that the primary aim of education was always “the development of human personality,” but also that this could go hand in hand with scientific learning.69 Gesturing again to the long-running concern that mechanization was incompatible with human autonomy, he told the Teachers’ Association of Devon: “I do not believe that this emphasis on individuality is in any way inconsistent with industrial efficiency. On the contrary we are frequently assured that it is the children with the best background of general education in the schools who very often make the most rapid progress at a technical college.” As his line of reasoning suggests, the inclusion of the arts on schools’ curricula continued to be justified through a mixture of holistic ideals and capitalist logic: their value stemmed as much from their capacity to foster a positive work ethic as it did from their contribution to spiritual development. For detractors, however, the situation vis-à-vis Technical Schools was only one extreme of a wider set of problems. For one thing, the longstanding battle to secure a less peripheral place for the arts within British schooling was far from over. For instance, although a pamphlet on the state of music in schools commissioned by the Ministry of Education in 1956 reported that music making had increased across the board, it also noted that provision continued to vary significantly between institutions.70 Music educators’ concerns did not stop at the extent to which their subject featured in schools’ curricula. Yet more alarming was the impression that a technocratic mind-set was beginning to infiltrate the teaching of the arts. Among those to discern a detrimental impact was composer Eric Chisholm. During a paper delivered at the 1962 Symposium of the Colston Research Society (an organization dedicated to the advancement of knowledge in any discipline), he described the increasing segregation of composers from performers and listeners as a largely lamentable instance of “specialization.”71 This had, he conceded, been to the benefit of composition in that it had allowed aspiring composers more space to develop their art. However, these gains had come at a cost: for in addition, specialization had allegedly created a

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subclass of “recreative musicians whose sole function in the art of music is the almost mechanical one of bringing again to life the ideas, musical thoughts and sound patterns of the creators.” As Chisholm’s choice of wording reveals, music educators continued to draw links between industrial mechanization and passive modes of cultural participation—a discourse whose roots earlier in the century were discussed in chapter 2. In 1940s and 1950s Britain, the fraught climate surrounding contemporary education reforms added a new dimension to these long-standing concerns. Advocates of the arts predicted ever more disastrous consequences for society as a whole should the sciences continue to predominate. A famous voice in this debate was the prominent modernist critic, Herbert Read. In his Education Through Art, Read warned that the current emphasis on “logical modes of thought” was stunting children’s long-term emotional development. With characteristically apocalyptic rhetoric, he continued: The price we pay for this distortion of the adolescent mind is mounting up: a civilization of hideous objects and misshapen human beings, of sick minds and unhappy households, of divided societies and a world seized with destructive madness. We feed these processes of dissolution with our knowledge and science, with our inventions and discoveries, and our educational system tries to keep pace with the holocaust; but the creative activities which could heal the mind and make beautiful our environment, unite man with nature and nation with nation—these we dismiss as idle, irrelevant and inane.72

Only by putting aesthetic awakening at the heart of education, he contended, could the dehumanizing impact of a technologized society be abated. What is more, Read believed that contemporary art had a crucial part to play here, for its free-form style encouraged (rather than repressed) spontaneous expression. His monograph even featured a series of artworks by children of various ages, which were reproduced to illustrate the emotional force with which children could communicate through modern styles. If Read’s pedagogic ideals were somewhat ahead of their time when his book was first published (in 1943), by the late 1950s (when it was into its third edition) he was far from a lone voice in promoting the educational value of the avant-garde. Contrary to what the “two cultures” polemic might suggest, his aspirations were shared by a growing number of educators, whose attitudes toward modern art and society were distinct from both Snow’s and Leavis’s. Instead, they aligned with another strand of modernism, whose proponents—in Spender’s words—hoped that “instead of progress enlisting art, artists might convert scientists to

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a modern aesthetic vision which would transform the external appearances of our whole civilization.”73 Theirs was not, in other words, a vision of the modern world in which modernist art was the preserve of a minority elite; nor did they accept technological progress as the sine qua non of a modern society. Rather, they imagined a world in which modernist artists worked with and through modern institutions to build a more equal, more humane future. The coterie of music educators that sought to bring postwar Britain’s emerging musical avant-garde into the classroom provides a powerful lens onto this alternative perspective on what it meant to be modern. They were, on the one hand, more optimistic about the public’s potential to appreciate modernism than the likes of Leavis: they hoped that, if they could find a way to make contemporary music familiar, the public—or, at least, the expanding middle class, which had already been won over to Britten’s music—would come to love it, just as they had the classics.74 On the other hand, and unlike Snow, they held a strong belief that modernist art was not only relevant to the contemporary world, but also that it offered a solution to one of the most urgent problems facing educators: how to protect young people against the mechanizing influence of industrialized society. Indeed, the notion that modernists had a unique contribution to make to society was partly rooted in a general belief about the human value of music. For music was, as Mellers suggested at the start of a three-part series for the Musical Times on “Music for 20th-Century Children,” “the most directly physical and emotional of all the arts,” and consequently promised a way to reconnect with “the most inarticulate needs of our bodies and senses.”75 But the benefits of incorporating avant-garde music into education supposedly went further. Since these young composers were not constrained by the rules of common practice tonality, their methods offered young people a richer opportunity to cultivate one of the things that made them human: their creative faculties. O Magnum Mysterium exemplified this potential in that it was conceived to introduce the most modern music through performance.

Introducing Modern Music through Performance The idea that performance might encourage a broader appreciation of music was neither new to the 1960s nor specific to modern repertory. Alongside the calls to teach listening skills that had gained force

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through the first half of the twentieth century, many music education reformers had continued to advocate practical music making.76 Not only did the process of learning a piece of music bring the familiarity that many considered fundamental to appreciation, but it arguably also provided a closer encounter than could be achieved through listening alone. As one commentator explained, through singing rounds, children might learn the value of counterpoint; through rehearsing orchestral arrangements of the classics, they might come to appreciate accompanimental as well as melodic lines.77 The postwar period saw this aspect of music education expand, fueled by what education historian Stephanie Pitts describes as “a growing determination to include performance amongst school opportunities.” 78 The possibilities for increasing performance opportunities were enhanced by improving economic prosperity: as Britain moved out of austerity and toward affluence, real wages once again began to rise, and with them standards of living and consumer expenditure.79 Extracurricular activities and ancillary expenses (such as uniforms) that had previously been the privilege of the educated class now came within financial reach of a growing proportion of the public. While the pedagogic benefits of making music applied to all repertoires, they were especially pertinent when it came to avant-garde music. At the most basic level, the old mantra that familiarity aided appreciation held particular weight where less accessible repertoire was concerned. Indeed, audience reactions to date had shown that, on a single hearing alone, many found avant-garde aesthetics impenetrable: they tended either to preclude a meaningful musical experience even when listeners looked for one, or simply to put them off altogether. Furthermore, teaching appreciation through performance seemed directly to challenge the public’s supposed proclivity for passive listening, making the music familiar through active involvement, as students studied and rehearsed the score. This benefit was acknowledged by Davies, who argued that making music well demanded a level of engagement that could counteract the “complete insensitivity” induced by excessive exposure to background music. What is more, he insisted that listening training alone could not accomplish this: “Only when making music will many children actually listen to it and learn to ‘appreciate’ it. They are incapable of listening to others play, particularly if the sound comes out of a radio or gramophone, with no ‘visual aid’ to attention.”80 Children, he implied, inevitably associated such media with music “designed . . . not to be listened to at all”; if they

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were to break the habit, practical involvement was necessary to realize an alternative response. In O Magnum Mysterium, the composer sought to accomplish this by writing music that could accommodate the technical limitations of young performers and practical constraints of school music, even as it remained stylistically complex. In particular, he sought to maximize the opportunity for participation by designing a score that catered to a range of abilities and expertise. At one end of the spectrum were the six percussion parts for the two instrumental sonatas—for (1) side drums with and without snares; (2) wood block and bass drum; (3) maracas and tam-tam; (4) tambourine and 4 temple blocks; (5) Indian cymbals, castanets and small gong; and (6) suspended cymbal and hand bell— which were designed for beginners. Parts 1, 2, 3, and 6 featured in both movements and were fractionally more advanced: their interjections in “Puer Natus” were few in number and rhythmically straightforward, but nevertheless required an understanding of rhythmic notation. In contrast, parts 4 and 5 could potentially have been realized without knowledge of how to read a score. They play just twice—during the improvisatory passages at the start and end of “Lux Fulgebit,” where they join the strings, wind, and other percussion players in creating “a simple and graphic representation of the spread and intensification of the light of the Nativity.”81 Only the first of these passages dictates a specific rhythm for each part: a dotted crochet plus a quaver triplet in 6/8 for player 4 on tambourine, and a quaver followed by two semiquavers in 2/8 for player 5 on the Indian cymbals. Having played their simple rhythms once, the performers can “improvise freely, within the given pattern of beats . . . each player set[ting] his own tempo” (Example 6.3). In the second passage, they have to “make rhythmically interesting patterns within the metronome marks and tempo indications”; the only other instructions pertain to dynamics and which percussion instrument to use (Example 6.4). Such improvisatory sections are common in the composer’s educational music from this period.82 Mitigating the need for the specialized training ordinarily required to perform an instrument, the use of improvisation helped to demonstrate how the avantgarde might contribute to a liberal education. Besides increasing the scope for the participation of non-musicliterate students, these passages also served a broader didactic purpose: to encourage young people to compose in line with current avant-garde practices. In treating composition as an important pedagogic tool, Davies built on an established trend. A notable earlier advocate of this

Lento q = c.72

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* The players improvise freely, within the given pattern of beats between the dotted barlines; each player sets his own tempo. (The metronome indications in the improvising sections are to be taken as an approximate guide only-two players with the same indication do not have exactly the same tempo.) The conductor brings in Perc. VI, beating 4; the rest prepare to finish.

Example 6.3: Peter Maxwell Davies, O Magnum Mysterium, “Sonata II: Lux Fulgebit,” mm.1–3. ©Copyright 1962 by Schott & Co. Ltd. (London). Reproduced by permission of Schott Music Ltd. All rights reserved.

E SENZA MISURA* ° lento q=c.72 bœ Fl. & œ bœ

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moderato q=c.116 pp

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lentiss. q=c.40 pp

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f

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allegro q=c.152 p

mf

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* The players improvise freely on the given notes, using them in any order. They must make rhythmically interesting patterns within the metronome marks and tempo indications, taking the given unit as the beat and using any number of beats to the bar. The players enter in succession, the exact order of entry to be determined by the conductor.

Example 6.4: Peter Maxwell Davies, O Magnum Mysterium, “Sonata II: Lux Fulgebit,” mm.18–22. © Copyright 1962 by Schott & Co. Ltd. (London). Reproduced by permission of Schott Music Ltd. All rights reserved.

p

p

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belief, Walford Davies had not only encouraged the public to compose on his educational gramophone records, but also dedicated part of his weekly schools’ broadcast to this end.83 Where the younger composer was concerned, however, compositional training took a somewhat unorthodox form. Keen to encourage as unselfconscious and natural a response as possible, he “resist[ed] any temptation to ‘correct’ ” errors such as consecutive fifths, instead leaving the technicalities of harmony and counterpoint to be learned at a later date.84 The risks attached to such a method were numerous. One was that it left the composer open to charges of passing his responsibilities off onto performers. Since Davies had publicly criticized aleatoric methods on these grounds, he sought to distinguish his own use of improvisation, arguing that it was “always on given material” and that he used rehearsal time to “encourage the players towards coherent expression”—an approach that he claimed ultimately allowed him to retain control.85 Other critics feared that latent talent might be stirred “without being given the means for its full realization,” or that young people might be led to believe they could compose when in fact they could not.86 Such concerns point to a broader critical uneasiness with discerning the value of contemporary music—something that presented a challenge, since traditional assessment criteria could not readily be applied. As allegations of leg pulling abounded, the apparent ability of untrained adolescents to replicate the efforts of professional composers through “do-it-yourself” composers’ kits hardly helped the cause of modern music.87 The more open minded sought to justify youthful improvisation by invoking a distinction between “creators,” whose timeless works of art continued “to yield fresh truth and beauty after hundreds of performances” and “artisans,” whose compositions, primarily functional in purpose, were designed to give more immediate, but consequently limited, satisfaction.88 If the line between the two categories proved slippery, asserting its existence enabled enthusiasts to promote such practices as a way of broadening access, even as they preserved the superior status of “real” composers. In practice, however, the improvisatory sections proved to be among the least accessible. For although they made comparatively few technical demands, coordinating the staggered entries and creating a unified atmosphere presented significant challenges. Initially, the composer had planned to manage these difficult processes through some lengthy instructions; just how abstruse they were can only be appreciated when they are read in full. The draft manuscript states at Figure E:

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FL. OB. CL. BN. HN. VLA. VCL. play the notes given in each breve cluster in any order, improvising a rhythm within the given tempo and dynamic directions, ad lib. They may enter at any point within the “downbeat” (i.e., within the free duration indicated for convenience by a breve), in any order, except the FLUTE, who enters with the conductor’s downbeat each time. The first perc. enters as soon as he HEARS the flute, the second as soon as he hears the oboe, the third, the clarinet, the fourth, the bassoon, the fifth, the horn. The percussion players (exc. No. VI) improvise rhythmic figures within the given tempo and dynamic indications. ALL PLAYERS so far concerned STOP at each “upbeat,” which will not be indicated by the conductor until all players concerned have entered. At this upbeat, the glockenspiel and perc IV enter [The glockenspiel tempi are ad placitum, and are NOT governed by the indications for every other part.] The conductor indicates the next downbeat in the middle of the glockenspiel figuration, while perc. VI only stops his roll upon hearing the OBOE enter in the next breve-cluster group. At the repeat the percussion lead, the others entering when they hear the corresponding instrument. (see above). The Glock figures are played RETROGRADE at the rpt.  (A♭ G♭ F; G A♭ F A etc).89

It is unclear whether it was ultimately the publisher or the composer who decided to simplify matters by replacing the bewildering paragraph with more succinct instructions (also reproduced in Figure 6.4): The players improvise freely on the given notes, using them in any order. They must make rhythmically interesting patterns within the metronome marks and tempo indications, taking the given unit as the beat and using any number of beats to the bar. The players enter in succession, the exact order of entry to be determined by the conductor.90

Even with this concession, however, performers struggled to realize the passages effectively. Denis Redston, an oboist from Tiffin School, for example, described how he had expected the improvisatory passages to be the easiest but in rehearsal found that “the straightforward passages fell into place quite easily, but in the ‘easy’ parts we even had to adapt our methods of improvisation to fit in with the other players’ interpretation.”91 Elsewhere in the sonatas, the apparent simplicity of the wind and string parts is similarly deceptive. The pointillist texture is created by dividing the melodic line between instruments, meaning that, at any given moment, each player had only to deliver an isolated note or a short, fragmentary phrase. However, even with the lento speed marking, which promises performers time to process successive entries, the dovetailing of entries requires significant skill. In addition to this, music teacher Denis Bloodworth identified a number of specific “technical problems,”

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including two instances where instrumentalists were required to play notes whose tessitura and dynamic marking seemed at odds: in the final bar of “Lux Fulgebit,” the flute has a low middle C marked fff; and in “Puer Natus” the oboe is required to play a piano B at the bottom of its register (figure J in the printed score).92 Meanwhile the xylophone part featured a number of chromatic flourishes that would obviously be a stretch for the average young percussionist. The inaccessible musical idiom only compounded matters. As Bloodworth tactfully explained, “musical pointillism is not every day diet in a school and Webern is not automatically the most popular composer. . . . The final rehearsal and performance helped a great deal, for it was then that the orchestra heard the carols which are musically much easier to appreciate and yet are based on the same musical material.”93 The uneasy tension between the composer’s desire to facilitate young performers and his musical ideals for the work was also evident from the contradictory instructions about providing singers with instrumental support during the carols. Having consented that the parts could be “discreetly doubled by a string quartet, woodwind quartet, or very quiet pipeorgan if this is absolutely necessary,” the composer immediately qualified this, asserting that doubling was not appropriate for the first two renditions of “O Magnum Mysterium” or “The Fader of Heven.” Likewise, the detailed suggestions for substitute percussion instruments—for example, “(b) Maracas: a good baby’s rattle will suffice,” or “(d) Temple Blocks: coconut shells of distinct pitches will suffice”—are at once permissive and restrictive. On the one hand, they show the composer’s awareness of limited school resources, a reality confirmed by Bloodworth, who noted that obtaining the necessary instruments was the “first difficulty” that the piece posed.94 On the other hand, by couching the suggestions in the language of “compromise,” the composer implied that such creative solutions were ideally to be avoided.95 With its fraught complexity, O Magnum Mysterium afforded a rare opportunity for young people to express themselves creatively through performing avant-garde music. However, the composer hoped that the impact of the performing experience would go beyond this. If O Magnum Mysterium was designed to introduce children to the mechanics of modern music, its ultimate aim was to serve as a route into appreciation, instilling an interest that would guarantee concert audiences for the future. Indeed, although the young Davies had exhibited a typical high-modernist disregard for audiences, his experience as a schoolteacher quickly softened his brazen youthful attitude. By 1963, he would

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claim not only that he wanted “to communicate with the audience right away,” but also that “if larger audiences were to interest themselves in my music I should be delighted.”96 Embracing the perspective of music educators more broadly, he suggested that the public’s struggle with his music could be put down to deeply ingrained prejudices—prejudices that young people might not form, given an appropriate and sufficiently early intervention. It was precisely such an intervention that the composer sought to stage through O Magnum Mysterium. To be clear, the transition from performer to appreciative audience member was not imagined as one from active to passive involvement. As I have argued throughout this book, concerns that patterns of mass cultural consumption were proving harmful for society were not held by aloof high modernists alone: from the 1920s onward, these same anxieties drove middlebrow education initiatives and infused music pedagogy with the related discourse about active versus passive modes of cultural engagement. The musical circles in which the young Davies moved retained these misgivings about mass entertainment, which in turn shaped his own outlook. Popular music, he argued in a 1959 Listener article, “is not meant to awaken the listener, to make him feel deeply and think and increase his awareness—it is meant to soothe him and make money. It is a drug.”97 At best, it offered superficial amusement; at worst, it might induce total apathy. In 1950s Britain, a rapidly expanding youth culture, in which new forms of popular music played an important role, stoked these old concerns. Meanwhile, educators continued to imagine that formal education could play a “key part” in guiding youthful taste: as the 1963 Newsom Report noted, schools had a responsibility to help “ensur[e] that this new leisure is the source of enjoyment and benefit it ought to be, and not of demoralizing boredom.”98 We have already seen—in chapter 4—that one of the prevalent responses to the “problems” of mass culture was to imagine listening as a site of cultural participation. Continuing in this tradition, O Magnum Mysterium staged the journey that many educators hoped school children might make: from one type of active participation (performance) to another (listening). For “actually” listening—as the composer put it—required close attention and concentration comparable to that demanded of performers.99

From Performers to Appreciators Fundamental to realizing this aim was the organ fantasia that stands at the apex of the work. For this comparatively long and fiendishly difficult

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movement, Davies chose what he considered “music’s most complex and developed instrument.”100 Composed with the organist of Manchester Cathedral Allan Wicks in mind, he made no concessions here for amateur performers.101 On the contrary, those on stage effectively became part of the audience, as the organist undertook what one critic described as a “feat of concentration and endurance.”102 A series of variations structured around six statements of an “isorhythmic ground,” the fantasia followed an arch-shaped trajectory that showcased the full range of the instrument: beginning with a quiet and slow statement of the chant in the bass, the music gradually ascended in volume, tessitura, and speed, subjecting the melody to increasingly elaborate ornamentation, before rapidly reversing the process to close. To maximize the chances of the work providing an incremental introduction to complexity, the composer included in the score a detailed outline that authenticated the “complete work:”103 Carol: O Magnum Mysterium (treble only, solo if preferred) Carol: Haylle, comly and clene Sonata 1: Puer Natus Carol: O Magnum Mysterium (treble and alto only) Carol: Alleluia, pro Virgine Maria Sonata 2: Lux Fulgebit Carol: The Fader of Heven Carol: O Magnum Mysterium Organ Fantasia on “O Magnum Mysterium” This sequence received a further stamp of approval by its use on the first recording of the work, which featured pupils of Cirencester, conducted by the composer, with Simon Preston on the organ. Released in October 1963, the record was produced under the auspices of the British Council on Argo, a label dedicated (among other things) to niche avant-garde and choral music. Performing the movements in this order enhanced the work’s didactic potential on several counts. First, the repetition of the opening chant allowed its four-part texture to be built up gradually. That this rehearsed the learning process was useful for performers and audiences alike. As Treacher explained, the chant, while “of haunting beauty,” was also “difficult to sing in tune”; given its awkward melody, it was “best heard first as a soprano solo.”104 Second, variety—which helps to sustain youthful attention—is created by interspersing the instrumental

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movements between the carols, and by juxtaposing carols with differing vocal forces (note that, while “Haylle” and “Alleluia” are scored for full SATB, “The Fader,” which is paired with the tutti rendition of the opening chant, is scored for soprano and alto). Finally, the most difficult music is left until last: it is only after the main chant has been introduced in various supposedly more accessible guises that the composer seeks to take the audience to another “deeper” and “more searching” level. More than just another movement, he contended, the unforgiving and virtuosic fantasia was the point at which the meaning of the entire work should become apparent: “the music heard so far only becomes really comprehensible in relation to the concluding organ fantasia, to which it forms, as it were, a huge ‘upbeat.’ ”105 From the outset, however, the work’s potential to provide a training ground for appreciating modern music was compromised by the composer’s typically modernist ambivalence about relinquishing versus retaining control over the work, which manifested itself in the conflicting messages about the relationship between parts and whole. At the same time as he set out a definitive order for the complete work, Davies sought to accommodate the limitations that inevitably attended work with amateurs: the explanatory spiel printed in the score indicated that the constituent parts of O Magnum Mysterium could also be “performed separately, or as a small group together, in any combination.” Elsewhere he gave specific directions for an alternative way of programming the organ fantasia, stating that it “would ideally be played in conjunction with the set of Christmas motets of the same name.”106 Insofar as they increased performances, the uneasy concessions made in the interests of adaptability worked to the composer’s advantage. The organ fantasia was programmed twice before the complete work was premiered—first as a stand-alone item on October 27, 1960, by Wicks in Manchester Cathedral, and again as part of an all-modern program at the Royal Festival Hall, London, on November 30, 1960, this time preceded by a rendition of the opening “O Magnum Mysterium” sung by four choristers from the school.107 The first complete premiere took place around a week later on December, 8 1960, in the less auspicious venue of Cirencester Parish Church in a concert that also featured compositions by several little-known sixteenth-century composers, J. S. Bach, Rosemary Hammond (another music teacher at the school), and five school pupils.108 Almost a year later to the day, the first complete London performance was given on Saturday December 9, 1961, largely thanks to the efforts of Graham Treacher, who

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coordinated students from Ealing Boys’ Grammar School, London CoOperative Society and Tiffin School. The problem, of course, was that such flexibility undermined the intricate structural logic on which the composer had supposedly built the work. What is more—and somewhat ironically—the success of O Magnum Mysterium as a lesson in appreciation seemed least certain when it was performed in its entirety. For one thing, there was a pervasive sense that the movements did not really hang together. The unifying factor was supposedly the “O Magnum Mysterium” chant, which, as noted earlier, provided a structural basis for the entire work. However, even when accompanied by detailed explanatory program notes, the chant’s reworking was too subtle to be discernible. The overall impression was more of unconvincing idiomatic eclecticism: “It is not,” an Observer critic remarked, “at first hearing easy to find its point of stylistic equilibrium, for the connection between the post-Webernian instrumental interludes and the vocal movements, which have their origin in medieval music harmonized with pungent simplicity, is not readily perceived. Nor is the relationship in style between the fragmentary interludes and the piled-up sonorities of the organ fantasia.”109 Indeed, despite the composer’s protestations to the contrary, his compositional method tended to give the “aural impression” of a stream of a-thematic musical cells. As Schafer pointed out, the seeming “lack of repetition and therefore lack of memorability” made the music hard to process.110 With charges of inconsistency abounding, the carols and sonatas proved to be poor preparation for the fantasia. Perhaps the strongest evidence that the work had only partially achieved its didactic goals was that, rather than providing the pinnacle of the experience, the fantasia seemed more often than not to have been the least-well-received part. Students from Ealing Grammar School for Boys (which provided tenors and basses for the December 1961 performance) gave an array of negative feedback, which centered on the final movement: “Reactions to the work tended to be rather gloomy, if impertinent,” director of music John Railton reported. “All found the organ conclusion most disappointing. ‘Far too long and apparently unrelated.’ ‘Not organ music.’ ‘Distressing.’ ‘Why so difficult?’ ‘Silly.’ ”111 The consensus among the young performers seems to have been that the music was too removed from their normal experiences to be accessible and that a single performance was insufficient to resolve this. Furthermore, disappointment was not confined to the general public. Despite unanimously praising organist Simon Preston’s playing, reviewers of the

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record expressed similar frustrations. One complained that the fantasia was “not so illuminating as I had hoped,” the music’s complexity paradoxically obscuring its depth.112 Meanwhile, having been sufficiently convinced by the carols and sonatas, Desmond Shawe-Taylor suggested that, if the fantasia was a struggle, it was one worth undertaking: listeners were advised to “push ahead and persevere with this daunting conclusion,” in search of an understanding that had proved elusive even to the writer.113 Others suspected that the difficult surface was simply a case of style over substance. Guardian critic Edward Greenfield, for example, suggested that the bombast of this “more extended, more solemn, louder” movement was a superficial cover, a failed attempt to mask the absence of the “searching” simplicity that characterized the carols and sonatas.114 Another lambasted the composer for his “disastrously self-conscious avant-gardism,” which belied a paucity of musical invention.115 Among critics too, then, the problematic equation of “complexity with profundity” was met with at best ambiguity, at worst dismissal.116 Such a reception was perhaps inevitable: it reflected the dismay that had greeted all of Davies’s difficult compositions to date. At the Cirencester premiere, the program notes even set the audience up for such a reaction, ending with the admonishment: “This Fantasia will probably be the most problematic part of the work at first hearing. It attempts to take the ‘O Magnum Mysterium’ music to another level of experience—more intense, more austere but still basically meditative.”117 Yet even in the less austere movements the unfamiliar idiom hindered the young performers from discerning the metaphysical depths that the composer had perceived in the work. Rather than experiencing a sense of transcendental enlightenment, the bemused children were instead left wondering: “Why should a sequence of carols be so intense?”118 We could easily take such difficulties in comprehending the work as evidence of the avant-garde’s limited potential to perform the humanistic role for which the arts had traditionally been valued. However, a less categorical reading might suggest that it was the ideal of teaching appreciation through performance that was flawed. In a rare admission, educator Noel Long pointed out that participating in music making might have the opposite effect: “The very preoccupation with performance,” he warned, “may even inhibit appreciation.”119 This risk seems especially high in relation to works like O Magnum Mysterium, which, as we have seen, was far from easy to perform. Whether the negative responses indicated success or failure of course depended on one’s perspective. For those modern-minded critics parodied by a Times journalist as the “upside-down arbiters of musical

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fashion who devote their time . . . to the depreciation of music they don’t admire as fashionable and therefore bad, and the propagation of their own favorites as unfashionable and therefore good,” such unpopularity might have been a mark of true value.120 More conservative members of the general public refused to be taken in. Rejecting “the ‘composer’s’ cleverness” as false pretense, a disgruntled Mr. Frank Hayward implied that anyone who took such music seriously was encouraging societal decay. In a strongly worded letter to the BBC, he emphasized the barbarous— almost inhuman—nature of the musical avant-garde, suggesting that the best place for the likes of Davies was a mental institution, where he would be unable to “warp” young minds. “School-children,” the spokesman concluded, “should certainly not be fed on such rot.”121 To his mind, modern music was incompatible with the cultural betterment agenda: such “unharmonious abhortions” held insufficient aesthetic appeal to offer any hope of moral or social elevation. The composer, for his part, told an altogether different story: one celebrating how young minds had been opened to modern music. “I was very encouraged,” he reported, “by the way the children got inside the music and performed it with instinctive understanding and gusto.”122 Many reviewers followed his lead.123 Taking the performance in and of itself as evidence of musical enjoyment, one critic remarked upon the ease with which this generation “move in a sound world that their elders find strange and outre, while their fresh, uncramped ideas revealed what can emerge when ears are not forced into pre-existing moulds.”124 For such claims to hold any water, however, the music had to be deemed sufficiently radical—and this was a quality that its pedagogical associations put at stake. Enthusiastic reviewers invoked a range of rhetorical strategies to put the work in a favorable light. Some simply supported the composer in taking seriously the instrumental and choral sections, which they subjected to the same sort of extended analysis and language used of the composer’s “adult” works.125 Others sought to mitigate the potentially problematic aspects of the work by drawing strategic comparisons with established composers. For example, in case the use of rich chromatic harmony in the carols seemed closer to late-nineteenth-century than midtwentieth-century idioms, one reviewer suggested that it had an older precedent: “the principle of Bach’s chorale settings.”126 Another took an alternative tack, reinforcing the music’s avant-garde credentials by arguing that Schoenberg’s Variations on a Recitative were “plain sailing” in comparison to the fantasia.127 Asserting that the music was of “real” rather than “educational” value was necessary to substantiate accounts

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of a musical awakening; that these comments so obviously jarred with the young performers’ own accounts cited above went unremarked. There were, however, a few critics who questioned how “modern” O Magnum Mysterium really was. The most cutting remarks came from rival school music teachers Bedford and Self, who contended that anyone who claimed this music was progressive was guilty of hindering educational advance. “[S]ubtle attempts are being made by critics and others to maintain the rigid conservatism of school music,” they warned.128 “The prevalent trend of writing pieces in which fairly advanced instrumental sections alternate with pseudo-medieval or pseudo-folksong choral sections is at best an uneasy compromise with that conservatism.” Given that their bar for novelty was the serial and post-serial work being produced by the likes of Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Berio and Penderecki, it is unsurprising that they already considered Davies’s efforts “dated.”129 The talk of conspiracy theory, albeit characteristic of the provocative rhetoric so often deployed by the avant-garde, was, of course, little more than hyperbole. Nevertheless, the charge of conservativism was, in another sense, perhaps justified. For the preoccupation with aesthetic concerns masked what was arguably the greatest compromise of all: for all that this music claimed to be new, it ultimately furthered a conservative educational agenda. With welfare as a watchword of the postwar era, school reform remained a priority, as successive governments sought to deliver “education for all.” Although the idea of mass education was progressive, more often than not it was realized by extending the pedagogic culture historically associated with academically elite institutions. This was particularly true where grammar schools were concerned: faced with a student body more diverse than ever before, these institutions fell back on tradition (and striving for recognition, the new secondary moderns imitated them).130 In this context, even the most avant-garde school music was in another sense culturally compliant, its claim to innovation at odds with the underlying values of the education system within which it was produced. •

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Davies’s time as a school master turned out to be short-lived. In 1962, he resigned from the post after winning a Harkness Fellowship, which funded three years of graduate study at Princeton. Despite his short tenure at Cirencester Grammar, however, both his compositional style and his public image were altered by his time there. With regard to the former, the composer came to see this as a formative period in his musical

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development more generally. “Far from hindering my work as a composer,” he mused, “school work perhaps even helped.”131 It prompted him to soften the avant-garde edge that had made his pre-Cirencester compositions so unpopular and instilled a social conscience that chimed with the interest in broadening cultural access that had long preoccupied Britain’s musical establishment. This in turn shaped a new reputation. The former iconoclast, as one reporter put it, had transformed into an “inspired teacher and sensitive medieval revivalist.”132 Detractors and admirers alike readily accepted this narrative: whether framed as stylistic compromise or consolidation, the change seemed as certain as the composer’s growing popularity with the public. However, the significance of Davies’s Cirencester years stretched far beyond the mark they left on his own musical life. Catapulted to national prominence in February 1961 by a BBC Monitor documentary Two Composers—Two Worlds that contrasted his life as a schoolteacher and composer with that of jazz pianist and comedian Dudley Moore, Davies’s experimental music lessons became a barometer for the social relevance of the avant-garde more broadly. For some commentators, such instances of avant-garde composers seeking to broaden access provided a way of distinguishing Britain’s emerging avant-garde from its continental counterpart. The deep commitment to cultural accessibility, they argued, was a peculiarly British trait. One such was Heyworth, who claimed that composers relished the opportunity to “regain the feeling of having a function to fulfil.”133 If Benjamin Britten was anything to go by, Heyworth was right: two years earlier, the composer had used his Aspen speech to reflect on why he felt that contributing to society was so important, even going so far as to call musicians “civil servants.”134 What is more, in coming out of the ivory tower, composers had supposedly helped to create a more enlightened musical public. Celebrating the country’s progressive approach, another critic observed: “Our young ‘central’ composers who have the general (as opposed to inner circles’) ear are far less conservative than those in most European countries.”135 Casting the net optimistically wide, he listed in their number Davies and his Manchester contemporaries Birtwistle and Goehr, along with Rodney Bennett, Nicholas Maw, Thea Musgrave, and Malcolm Williamson. Nevertheless, even the strongest endorsements frequently betrayed an underlying uneasiness about the possibility of marrying artistic integrity and popular appeal. Where a choice had to be made, the decision was clear: the “serious” composer, as one Times critic put it, would put his “duty to his art” before any duty to the audience.136

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For others, debates about how modern O Magnum Mysterium actually was, or to what extent the young performers appreciated the music, were frames for negotiating broader questions about the shape of modern Britain and the avant-garde’s place within it. School music proved a fertile ground for discussion in no small part because schools were seen as a training ground for citizenship. Here, composers, commentators and educators could test the limits of modern music in the confidence that their young subjects, while embodying the future, were not yet set in their cultural ways. One of the first of his generation to respond to the calls for more educational music, Davies provided a sort of test case as to how readily avant-garde aesthetics and techniques could be adapted to meet the demands of the classroom. The approach espoused in O Magnum Mysterium—that performance might ultimately serve as a route into appreciation—was in keeping with the postwar emphasis on increasing instrumental opportunities in schools and on the humanistic value of the arts. More specifically, it was also an experimental solution to the particular pedagogic problems that arose from the inaccessibility of avant-garde music. The composer’s experimental choice of repertoire and pioneering use of improvisatory techniques in the classroom anticipated the trend for more creative teaching practices that would gather force during the late 1960s and early 1970s.137 O Magnum Mysterium brings to light the ongoing impact of the middlebrow aspiration to broaden access to art music, as well as the anxieties about levelling down that continued to plague educational initiatives. In the early 1960s, these concerns remained sufficiently prevalent to shape the compositional aesthetics and reception of a new generation of composers. In a climate where critical attitudes toward continental modernism tended to be equivocal, many welcomed not only the commitment to accessibility, but also the stylistic concessions that this entailed. Using contemporary idioms to expand performance opportunities for young people helped to counterbalance the impetus toward aesthetic inaccessibility that sat so uncomfortably with British values. In a country that had long been suspicious of artistic indulgence, appealing to utilitarian education agendas was a way of justifying the avant-garde’s existence: it helped the music to seem socially relevant and its composers socially engaged. Grammar schools were perhaps the ideal venue. Their liberal approach to education could celebrate the academicism exhibited in such music, even as educators justified its inclusion in school curricula on humanistic grounds.

Chapter 7

Epilogue The Middlebrow in an Age of Cultural Pluralism

The BBC Proms is perhaps Britain’s longest-standing middlebrow musical institution. Founded in 1895 by the conductor Henry Wood, the concert series was designed “to bring the best in classical music to the widest possible audience.” This vision was the product of an era in which music educators had a shared understanding of what constituted the “best”— something that may seem insolent from today’s perspective, although the mission statement has been retained.1 Moreover, just as Wood made a point of including “novelties” to encourage appreciation of a broader repertoire, so Proms programmers continue to include a host of new works each season, whose “novel” status—be it world premiere, Proms premiere, or simply an unexpected characteristic—is trumpeted in the publicity. In the 2011 season, the orchestral concerto that won the prize for the most unusual was Gabriel Prokofiev’s Concerto for Turntable and Orchestra.2 Performed on August 6 by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain with DJ Switch as soloist and Vladimir Jurowski conducting, the work marked the first occasion on which a turntable had featured in the Proms. The Concerto’s educational value was subsequently milked through an array of ancillary activities. Most notably, in 2016 the fifth movement was included in one of the BBC’s “Ten Pieces” Proms, an annual feature of the season in which ten works are chosen to “open up the world of classical music to 7–14 year-olds.”3 Streamed live from the Albert Hall and later available on catch-up, the performances are accompanied by lesson plans for school use—in 208

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this instance, involving the kinds of listening exercises that a previous generation might have associated with the NBC Music Appreciation Hour, as well as the creation of new compositions using contemporary media. On the surface, the legacy of the midcentury middlebrow is readily apparent. At the same time, however, this event was a world away from earlier music education initiatives. For one thing, the Concerto for Turntable was far from straightforwardly situated within the classical high art tradition. To be sure, it had its “great composer” touchstones: the comparisons drawn by commentators ranged from “a Handel organ concerto” and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1.4 Meanwhile another critic described the fourth movement flute melody (of which more later) as “a cosmic message from Olivier Messiaen (via ondes martenot, what else).”5 But it was equally inspired by the world of hip hop, in which the composer had started his professional life—as a DJ and producer. On a general level, the attentive listener would hear “traces of hip-hop drum patterns, a Reggaeton beat, Grime, and even disco-house.”6 For those embedded in the hip hop scene, an “ahhh” sound featured in the third movement mimicked a classic sample of the DJ repertoire taken from Fab Freddy Five’s “Change the Beat.” More broadly, the piece was structured in such a way as to showcase all the classic turntable techniques, with each of the first four movements homing in on one in particular. The “Introduction (‘Grim Eye’—140  bpm)” explored the most basic technique—play back; next, an “Adagietto (‘Irreguluv’—75  bpm)” focused on mixing, after which a “Largo pesante—Allegro—Largo (‘Malmo’—62/125 bpm)” demonstrated scratching. The fourth movement, “Andante (‘Meditnow’—95 bpm)” went further, creating an eerie melody from flute samples by varying their playback speed. (After this, the fifth and final movement, “Allegro Gavotte (‘Snow Time’— 107 bpm)” brought the piece to a jovial conclusion.) This plan for the work was detailed in the composer’s Program Note—information that would have aided appreciation by those unfamiliar with hip hop’s musical practices. Although no one drew the comparison, the systematic introduction to the turntable as instrument seems reminiscent of Britten’s introduction to the orchestra in his Young Person’s Guide. In the Proms context, the Concerto might even be seen as providing a crash course in turntabling. Besides reflecting his diverse musical training, the “polystylistic” approach was central to the composer’s attempt to broaden the appeal

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of art music.7 He explained to the Telegraph: “What really bothered me [about the classical world] was the disconnect between the young people who were doing the playing and composing, and the audience, which was so much older.”8 But where midcentury educators aimed to reinforce the boundaries of high art even as they broadened access to it, Prokofiev had a more postmodern agenda: to break down the boundaries around high art altogether. Prior to his Proms debut, he had sought to achieve this by taking classical music out of the concert hall. His record label and events company “nonclassical” organizes club nights, where modern classical music is played alongside electronic music in untraditional venues. The world premiere of the Concerto had taken place four years earlier at such an event—with DJ Yoda and the Heritage Orchestra at Scala nightclub in King’s Cross, where it was billed as “classical music for the hoodie generation.”9 Having now secured a platform in one of Britain’s most prestigious art music venues, Prokofiev had the opportunity to combat its elitism from within. The battle was fought partly on musical grounds: as one enthusiast put it, he had brought “echoes of club nights, dance floor beats and remixes into the concert hall.”10 But the composer also appeared eager to challenge art music’s traditions directly. To this end, the Concerto for Turntable’s score included directions for the performers to disrupt the alienating concert hall environment. After the second movement, members of the orchestra use exaggerated gestures to perform relaxation: one yawns loudly and does an enormous stretch; another opens a fizzy drink can, takes a sip and then exhales with a satisfied “ah.” Samples of similar sounds are then mixed into the third movement. Compared to the disruptions staged by the early twentiethcentury Italian Futurists, these actions seem to exhibit a peculiarly British restraint.11 Nevertheless, they served their purpose: the atmosphere palpably lightened as the audience responded with laughter. The largely positive reception of this performance points to crucial changes that have taken place in Britain’s cultural landscape since the midcentury. The desire to broaden access to art music remains strong; but more often than not, its advocates seek to do this by undermining its “elitist” image, appealing instead to a cool factor. In other words, high culture is no longer marketed for its exclusivity. It is not just outside rebels like the “genre-bending” Prokofiev who take this tack.12 Citing his Concerto as an example, a 2015 Guardian article explained: “The classical music establishment has never been more desperate to shake its elitist image. The Proms is especially conscious of making space for fresh musical combinations to entice people who might feel alienated by the

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repertoire.”13 The new approach is indicative of a fundamental shift in the power dynamics between highbrow and lowbrow, art and entertainment. It reflects what cultural historian Bernard Gendron has described as the “cultural empowerment of popular music,” a process that to his mind is intertwined with a shift from modernism to postmodernism.14 In short, where the former derived cultural prestige exclusively from the highbrow, the latter views populist values—such as being cool, attracting a wide audience, or having commercial success—as a more powerful source of cultural capital. Evidence of this upending of traditional hierarchies also pervaded the Concerto’s reception. A review in Bonafide magazine put hip hop and classical on a par, describing them as “two very respectable musical genres.”15 Another commentator has even suggested that Prokofiev’s Concerto stages the loosening of cultural hierarchies: “The bleak and barren texture of the opening movement,” writes Philip Hately, “that perhaps symbolised the composer’s reflections upon the contemporary western classical tradition during his maturation as an artist, has, by the end, been transformed in to a rich and diverse, multi-cultural landscape and a celebration of intercontinental musical diversity.”16 He upholds the Concerto’s music as exemplary of today’s pluralist climate—a musical ideal that is complicated by the racial politics of its performance history to date. At both its premier and the prom, most of the orchestra and even the DJs were white; we could hazard a guess that the majority of the audience were too. The decline of the old system of cultural hierarchies has been the subject of several recent studies. Some have gone as far as to proclaim it altogether dead. In his semi-autobiographical account of contemporary American culture, for example, New Yorker journalist John Seabrook describes the new status quo as “nobrow” because, he argues, it “exist[s] outside the old taste hierarchy altogether.”17 Others have argued that, despite popular culture’s ever-increasing hegemony, traditional highbrow values continue to make a mark. For one thing, as Gendron among others has shown, the dichotomy between art and entertainment is one of the primary grounds on which the popular music sphere is delineated. He goes on to distinguish two forms of highbrow taste: one rooted in traditional values; the other, the “hip highbrow,” committed to pluralist values, an outlook that has elsewhere been characterized as “cultural omnivory.”18 As I have already shown, Prokofiev’s Concerto could be viewed as an example of the latter. In bringing together classical and hip hop traditions on ostensibly equal terms, it appears to

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exemplify the elevated status of popular music as a source of cultural capital and the triumph of pluralist values. According to this reading, the work might also be presented as evidence that the conditions on which the midcentury middlebrow thrived no longer exist. But by way of conclusion to this book, I want to explore the possibility of reading this piece and its surrounding discourse in the opposite way: as a testament to the endurance of middlebrow values. Doing so will prompt some final reflections on how the middlebrow legacy fits into our contemporary cultural terrain and what it might mean for such a category to exist in a self-consciously pluralist age. •

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The story of the work’s genesis is an obvious and easy place to start. The Concerto was commissioned by producer Will Dutta, whose company Chimera Productions seeks to “connect the dots between modern dance music and contemporary classical and experimental art music.”19 Prokofiev was candid about his concerns: he feared that trying to bridge the gap between the classical and the popular in this way might result in a score that was “kitschy.”20 His anxieties about cross-contamination cut both ways. On the one hand, he worried that the artistic value of the composition would be compromised if it appeared to be just “another PR exercise” for classical music.21 On the other, he did not want his attempt at being cool to appear “gimmicky.” If he was more transparent than his midcentury middlebrow predecessors about his desire to marry “the pleasures of the low and the prestige of the high,” the need to appease both camps seemed only to heighten the stakes.22 Nevertheless, in the event, acceptance by the high art world seemed to be the more pressing issue to resolve: both the composer and the press focused on his highbrow aspirations. The Telegraph reported that, although he had started out life as a DJ and producer, Prokofiev had always “hankered after being a ‘proper’ composer.”23 His Proms debut carried all the usual cultural cachet that accompanies the invitation to contribute to a world-renowned concert series in a prestigious venue. Understandably eager to succeed, the composer went to some lengths in his program note to articulate how he had realized the “serious artistic potential” of the project, which Dutta had initially recognized. In particular, he explained how he had pursued an ideal of musical purity, even as he sought to mix genres: since using preexisting musical samples risked undermining his chances of producing “the organic composition I was striving for,” he decided to make new records so that the DJ soloist

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could work exclusively with the orchestra’s music. That way, “no foreign sounds would ever enter the piece.” In the hands of the most highbrow critics, this approach was welcome evidence of the composer’s distance from commercial concerns. As the Arizona-based composer Jeffrey Ouper put it: “By restricting the origin of the orchestral sounds, Prokofiev avoids any sense of artificial gimmicks brought in from outside commercial recordings, resulting in a higher continuity between DJ and orchestra.”24 While narratives about the creation of the work emphasized its highbrow accomplishments, detractors on both sides rehearsed the old antimiddlebrow allegation: of a detrimental compromise. In the classical music camp, Telegraph critic Ivan Hewett complained that the sharing of musical material between soloist and orchestra meant that neither had the opportunity to realize its full musical potential. “Neither side was able to speak in a truly natural way,” he concluded. “It was like the wedding reception where the groom’s death-metal-enthusiast father has to make polite conversation with the bride’s string-quartet-loving mother.”25 Meanwhile, Bonafide magazine reviewer Alex Nagshineh looked at an early recording of the work through the hip hop lens and found it equally wanting. Having expressed a healthy anti-elitist skepticism about the degree of “conceptualism afoot,” he went on to describe the Concerto as “a hit and hope attempt at hybridisation of classical and contemporary, some of which strikes out and some of which hits, well maybe not a home-run, but at least second base.” Perhaps his most revealing comment came at the end of the article. Drawing a belittling comparison with the kind of short-lived, superficial pleasure in which pet dogs revel, he stated: “This is fundamentally classical music laying on its side having its belly scratched by a world class turntablist.”26 Any claims to a space within the hip hop world were thus roundly dismissed. Besides suspicions that the composer had struck a Faustian pact with the entertainment industry, the other central question preoccupying commentators had to do with the work’s originality. For fans, the Concerto’s perceived innovations were the most common grounds for praise. “Big up pushing boundaries!,” “that’s fresh!,” and “Haha this is so cool! Respect for trying new things out!” were among the positive affirmations in the YouTube comments.27 More frequent, however, were challenges designed to debunk such overblown claims. Whether from the classical or hip-hop side, critics found a wide range of precedents to substantiate their case. “I saw detroit musicians such as Carl Craig and Jeff Mills performs [sic] with orchestra and that was much more

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interesting than this pretentious stuff,” wrote one YouTube detractor, implicitly invoking hip hop’s racial politics.28 Another recommended Japanese composer Taku Iwasaki’s work as a better example of “how to mix classical and electronic together.”29 Meanwhile a third observed that the “instrument” might have been new to the classical context at least, but “[t]he actual compositional techniques are old hat. There’s nothing here that hadn’t already been done by 1920.”30 To their mind, Prokofiev had come down on the wrong side of the fine line between drawing inspiration from earlier artists and appearing derivative. For the most part, commentators did not explicitly tie such objections to the composer’s broadening access mission, as might have happened in the midcentury. But it is clear that members of both groups felt that their musical tradition had been sold short, woefully misrepresented by its association with the other. These uneasy attempts to negotiate the crossing of cultural boundaries have all sorts of resonances with the midcentury middlebrow, commentators often resorting to the same old rhetorical tactics. Most tellingly, many journalists still practice the acts of “erasure” that Christopher Chowrimootoo has shown to be central the mechanism of middlebrow discourse: that of naming a potentially negative characteristic only to deny it, and in the process shielding those parts of the work that exhibit it.31 The most prevalent examples in the discourse surrounding Prokofiev’s Concerto were the attempts to defend it against the charge of gimmickry, typically by emphasizing qualities associated with musical art. According to one Guardian reviewer, “While the title . . . might suggest something gimmicky, the reality is a lot more rewarding. Each of the five movements highlights a different turntabling technique; in the fourth, the varied speeds of a single sampled flute note finds the turntables becoming a melodic instrument. With all the samples coming from the orchestra, the DJ is an organic part of the ensemble, whether supporting it or subverting it.”32 Where “gimmicky” suggests something of fleeting, superficial interest, the ancient ideals of structure and organicism promise a deeper, more sustaining satisfaction. At the same time, however, the writer draws attention to the flute melody—the part of the work that was repeatedly singled out by critics presumably because it invites such easy attention. Unlike the subtly ambivalent tone of the press, contributors to online forums tended to adopt a blunter approach. Here, explicit charges of illegitimacy abounded. In the YouTube comments thread, for instance, DjiMMa implied that the creative team behind the Proms performance

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had lacked the expertise to pick the right kind of DJ. “DJ switch is battle dj,” the commentator noted, “and is quite sloppy at times there are far more musical and well timed Turntablists out there.” But by far the strongest attacks were leveled by those with high art allegiances. Some dismissed the Concerto as a fake, offering sarcastic suggestions for other solo instruments, such as a “Harley Davidson” or a “reversing garbage truck.”33 Others accused the composer of being a phony— worse still, one who shamelessly used his grandfather Sergei’s name as a cover-up. As one blogger put it, he “tried to make art from debatable mechanical novelty and [his] surname.”34 Still others denied the entire premise of the concerto, insisting that classical and popular traditions should not be mixed. The staunchest expression of this sentiment came from YouTube member Jennifer86010, who, in the course of a prolific contribution to the comments thread, rehearsed the old concern about dumbing down: “When Art lowers itself to accommodate the muse of the masses, it no longer is art. It is entertainment.” With a vitriol to match F. R. Leavis, she continued by offering an Arnoldian defense of the arts, with its characteristic mix of aspiration and bigotry: “True art does not need to lower itself to anyone to be accepted. It is the ignorant observer who needs to extend himself or herself in an attempt to understand and appreciate art. When this happens, it raises the intellect and the awareness of the observer, and even nourishes the soul.”35 The post’s language brings to mind the aggressive policing of cultural boundaries associated with modernist critiques of the middlebrow since the days of Virginia Woolf. At the same time, the vision of high art as a source of spiritual and moral elevation is typical of the midcentury utterances that have provoked recent scholarly reactions against middlebrow paternalism.36 Without conducting a dedicated study, it is, of course, impossible to make a demographic assessment of online posting. Nevertheless, it appears that traditionally anxious and aspirational attitudes to the cultural middle persist outside of the academy, if not within it. New media are surely a contributing factor. On the one hand, the internet, computers, and mobile devices have given a new impetus and breadth to ideals of democratizing access to culture. On the other, by creating a space for cross-cultural dialogue far beyond the reach of traditional print media and their target audiences, online forums seem to exacerbate the polarization of opinion. Or yet again, the persistence of old values might reflect the extent of the ideological impact made by the pioneers of middlebrow culture, who were so deeply embedded in the midcentury institutions that shaped the nation’s music education.

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In an ideological sense as well as an institutional one, it seems that the middlebrow has retained a space in this age of cultural pluralism. Although the term itself was not used on this occasion, the discourses that surround Prokofiev’s Concerto rehearse precisely the same problems with delineating cultural boundaries as those exposed in this book’s central case studies from the midcentury. (To appease those to whom it matters, there are also many examples of the term’s continued currency in publications as varied as The Guardian and The Daily Mail.37) Attending to the historical middlebrow has revealed, among other things, that the distinction between art and entertainment was never as clear-cut in practice as it was in modernist rhetoric. It is similarly apparent that today’s cultural mediators—which include the plethora of anonymous voices on the internet—remain more invested in cultural hierarchies than the prevailing pluralist and populist discourses let on. To close, then, I want to throw one final question at Prokofiev’s Concerto: Was it really conceived to break down high art boundaries at all? In asking this, my aim is not so much to challenge the composer’s proclaimed intentions as to reflect on the work that the middlebrow continues to do in today’s cultural discourse. The question is partly motivated by my own response to the Concerto’s musical style. For all that the composer drew inspiration from hip hop, the piece seems to be far closer to “modern classical music.” The prevalence of irregular rhythmic meters and syncopation, the use of dense chromaticism and the sparsity of tonal melodies all situate it within this tradition. The turntablist is also subjected to a typically classical kind of disciplining. For one thing, the soloist has to follow a score in which the solo line is transcribed using “traditional western notation . . . that generally resembles a percussion part.”38 For another, even during the cadenzas, which feature in every movement, he has to use the prepared analogue samples of the orchestra’s music specified by the composer. At the same time, insofar as the Concerto pays tribute to hip hop, its strongest debts seem to be to “battle DJing”—a sub-scene that constitutes one of the “highest” points in the hip hop world. The virtuosic and fragmented style of the solo line is evocative of the music produced in turntablist competitions, such as the prestigious DMC Championships. As Mark Katz has explained, the prioritization of “artistry” over musical accessibility at these events has led to the battle scene becoming a “closed world” that operates outside the mainstream

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of hip hop.39 In other words, even the hip hop aspects of the Concerto might be counted as high art. But beyond the sound-world of the music, the aspiration to undermine cultural boundaries is also premised on a paradox: access to classical music can only be broadened if classical music exists—at the very least as an idea, if not also as a cultural scene with all the material incarnations that entails. By the same token, other musical genres can only be appropriated as markers of diversity if they retain some of their distinctive identity. To put this another way, the categories provide Prokofiev with the language to express inclusion. In this regard, they are crucial to realizing his personal goal of sharing his love of modern classical music and inspiring the same in a new, younger audience. More broadly, such categories help to justify the classical music tradition’s ongoing relevance and value to society. In a climate where it has to compete with an ever more diverse and empowered popular-music sphere for audiences, funding, airtime, and so on, such “outreach” initiatives demonstrate a commitment in principle to the advancement of social equality. Art music might have lost its Arnoldian cachet, but its value is still frequently articulated in terms of its imagined capacity to ameliorate deprivation, whether by facilitating participatory community building and personal development or by creating employment opportunities.40 While the composer’s agenda ultimately depended on the existence of cultural boundaries, the performers and commentators also more or less intentionally reinforced them. With regard to the former, DJ Switch’s casual clothing appeared out of place against the all-black worn by the National Youth Orchestra—a disparity that was remarked. Yet more countercultural in the Proms context was the large sticker on the back of the soloist’s laptop reading “Your mum rang.” Thus, the attempts to perform inclusivity paradoxically drew attention to the exclusivity both of the concert series and of the hip-hop world. The commentary on the performance served a similar role. As the responses already cited show, advocates rehearsed genre distinctions only in order to praise their collapse; meanwhile detractors tended to make their identification with one or other of the two genres known, as they defended their own cultural territory. On a small scale, the often fraught exchanges between the two groups draw attention to a defining premise of pluralism: the necessary coexistence of distinct categories. Misreading this particular characteristic of contemporary culture encouraged Seabrook, among others, to celebrate the flattening out of midcentury cultural hierarchies. But if the act of categorization is necessarily a “will to power” in the

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Foucauldian sense—a rhetorical strategy for making sense of and ultimately succeeding in the world—then this new, more variegated cultural terrain is arguably no freer of hierarchies than its midcentury counterpart.41 On the contrary, as the Concerto’s reception illustrates, there are an even greater number of measures by which artists and their work can be comparatively or competitively assessed. Besides the modernistinfluenced emphasis on innovation, there is the “hip” factor (or “hierarchy of hotness,” as Seabrook has it), as well as the kudos that can come simply from winning a mass audience—to mention just three sources of potential prestige that were within Prokofiev’s reach.42 As we have seen, commentators still use these measures to help stake out the boundaries of their particular niche. In the process, they often valorize the extremes, whether explicitly or implicitly through acts of erasure. If pluralism is encouraging a proliferation of hierarchies, as well as proliferation of genres, it also creates evermore spaces that could be called “middlebrow.” This is in some senses a rather different vision of the middlebrow than that presented in the main body of the book. No longer wedded to a belief in art music as intrinsically superior, this contemporary middlebrow is harder to locate: even more than earlier incarnations, it depends on where you are looking from. But while the middlebrow’s contours have been reconfigured in the light of the shifting power relations between art and popular music, the artists, institutions, and art works that do not straightforwardly fit into one or other box continue to raise concerns about cultural legitimacy. Indeed, the “betwixt and between” frequently provokes a similar discomfort—a discomfort manifested in similar attempts to reassert cultural distinctions, even where artists and audiences are simultaneously invested in undermining them. To put this another way, behind contemporary culture’s populist and pluralist veneer, middlebrow anxieties and aspirations live on. Beyond its usefulness for approaching mid-twentieth-century Britain’s music on its own terms, then, the idea of a middlebrow promises a powerful lens onto the in-between spaces that permeate today’s pluralist landscape. Just as in the midcentury, these messy spaces serve as forums for policing cultural boundaries. That they do so is indicative of the extent to which hierarchies—old and new—remain constitutive of Britain’s musical culture, even in our pluralist age.

Notes

Chapter 1. The Art of Appreciation 1. Humphrey Burton, “Memo: Bernstein: Young People’s Concerts,” January 16, 1967. BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC), Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, T13/273/1. 2. For a full history, see Alicia Kopfstein-Penk, Leonard Bernstein and His Young People’s Concerts (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). 3. Newton Minow, “The Vast Wasteland,” address to the National Association of Broadcasters, May 9, 1961, Washington DC, in How Vast the Wasteland Now? (New York: Gannett Foundation, 1991), 27. 4. Kopfstein-Penk, Leonard Bernstein and His Young People’s Concerts, 2–3. 5. A pertinent example is his description of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert as the “holy forefathers” and “patron saints” of Viennese music: Leonard Bernstein, transcript of “A Toast to Vienna in 3/4 Time,” CBS Television Network Broadcast (December 25, 1967). https://leonardbernstein.com /lectures/television-scripts/young-peoples-concerts/a-toast-to-vienna. 6. Walter Todds, “Memo: Bernstein—Impressionism,” February 9, 1967, BBC WAC, T13/273/1. 7. Burton, “Memo.” 8. The precise timings were: 3:35–4:25 p.m. on December 4; 2:50–3:40 p.m. on December 10; and 2:40–3:35 p.m. on December 17. Despite CBS’s persistent efforts, it seems that they failed to negotiate a British broadcast of the opening concert of the eleventh season, which began airing in the United States on Christmas Day the same year; however, a later talk, “Bach Transmogrified,” was aired on the BBC—on October 19, 1969 at 8:15 p.m. 9. Keith Spence, “Television,” Musical Times 109 (February 1968): 163.

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10. Percy A. Scholes, “Appreciation of Music,” in The Oxford Companion to Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 48. 11. Scholes, “Appreciation of Music,” 46. 12. For a fuller explanation of why these features of music appreciation have led to its occlusion from history, see Christopher Chowrimootoo and Kate Guthrie, introduction to “Colloquy: Musicology and the Middlebrow,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 73, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 327–34. 13. Noël Annan, “Annexe: The Intellectual Aristocracy,” in The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 304–41; and Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London: Weidenfeld, 1990). For a similar perspective on American cultural reformers, see Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), xix–xx. 14. For example, see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). See also Stefan Collini’s astute critique thereof: “With Friends Like These: John Carey and Noel Annan,” in Stefan Collini, English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 289–304. For a critical account of equivalent American initiatives, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 15. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht expounds the difference between simultaneous and narrative historical writing in In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 16. For the relationship between tradition, innovation, and British modernity, see Becky Conekin, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters, “Introduction,” in Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–1964, ed. Becky Conekin, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), 1–21. For a broader account of how technology’s strong association with the future has obscured the interaction between tradition and innovation, see David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (London: Profile Books, 2006). For musicological studies that touch on these issues, see Kate Guthrie, “Marconi’s Phoney Future Puccini, ‘Addio’ (Mimì), La Bohème, Act III,” Cambridge Opera Journal 28, no. 2 (July 2016): 247–49; Laura Tunbridge, “Frieda Hempel and the Historical Imagination,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 437–74. 17. One of the most influential seminal texts was Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (London: Faber and Faber, 1976). Despite the efforts of those working in the New Modernist Studies to complicate this narrative, these divisions continue to underpin much scholarly discourse, as Benjamin Kohlmann has shown: Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2–15. 18. The prevalence of this narrative in musicological studies is remarked in Philip Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and Their Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 20. Of late, it has also begun to appear in studies by historians and literary scholars:

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Andrew Blake, The Land without Music: Music, Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). Robert Mackay, “Safe and Sound: New Music in Wartime Britain,” in “Millions Like Us”? British Culture in the Second World War, ed. Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 179–208. Robert Stradling and Meirion Hughes, The English Musical Renaissance, 1840–1940, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 19. George Orwell, “The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda,” The Listener, May 29, 1941. Laura Tunbridge similarly observes that the sense of the 1920s and 1930s as an “interwar” period was felt at the time: Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in London and New York between the World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 4. 20. For a critique of this scholarly commitment, see Amanda Anderson, “The Liberal Aesthetic,” in Theory After “Theory,” ed. Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 2011), 249–62. 21. The status of metanarrative approaches has recently become a subject of heated debate among historians: see Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler, “The History Manifesto: A Critique,” The American Historical Review 120, no. 2 (April 2015): 530–42. 22. Benjamin Kohlmann, “Slow Politics: Towards a Literary Prehistory of the Welfare State” (public lecture, University of Durham, May 4, 2017), https:// www.dur.ac.uk/english.studies/events/?eventno=34354. 23. For welfare states as broadly characteristic of modern industrialized societies, see Derek Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy Since the Industrial Revolution, 4th ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 9. See also Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). Linda Dowling traces the ideology that underpinned culture’s role in the welfare state back as far as 1688—to the justification of the new, more democratic Whig rule developed by Lord Shaftesbury in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution: Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 15. Nick Mathew identified similar concerns in postrevolutionary Germany’s “projects of aesthetic education” in “Aesthetic Education and Beethoven’s Middlebrow Sublime” (conference paper presented at Music and the Middlebrow, London, June 2017). 24. Richard Sheppard, “The Problematics of European Modernism,” in Theorizing Modernism: Essays in Critical Theory, ed. Steve Giles (London: Routledge, 1993), 6–9. 25. Anderson, “The Liberal Aesthetic,” 249. For a recent restatement of the problem, see Alain Frogley, “Modernism and Its Discontents: Reclaiming the Major Minor British Composer,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 143, no. 1 (2018): 243–54. 26. The prevalence of composer-works studies reflects the conservative voice that still holds considerable sway within the British musical establishment,

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remarked in Heather Wiebe, “Review: The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, Edited by Daniel M. Grimley, Julian Rushton; Edward Elgar and His World, Edited by Byron Adams; Edward Elgar and the Nostalgic Imagination, by Matthew Riley; Edward Elgar, Modernist, by J. P. E. Harper-Scott,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 62, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 232–33. Two recent publications in the field illustrate this continuing trend: Phillip A. Cooke and David Maw, eds., The Music of Herbert Howells (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2013); and Fabian Huss, The Music of Frank Bridge (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2015). Notable exceptions include Jennifer Ruth Doctor, The BBC and UltraModern Music, 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation’s Tastes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Jenny Doctor, David Wright, and Nicholas Kenyon, eds., The Proms: A New History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007). Heather Wiebe’s work on postwar British musical culture is methodologically distinctive in its cultural-historical approach: Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 27. Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music; Matthew Riley, British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2010). Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism, 20–21. 28. Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 59–77. A notable example of this approach in British Music Studies is Jenny Doctor, “The Parataxis of ‘British Musical Modernism,’ ” Musical Quarterly 91, nos. 1–2 (2008): 110. See also Arnold Whittall, “British Music in the Modern World,” in Music in Britain: The Twentieth Century, ed. Stephen Banfield (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 9–26. 29. For example, see Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Elgar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10–14. 30. This critique is advanced in Christopher Chowrimootoo, “Reviving the Middlebrow; or, Deconstructing Modernism from the Inside,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139, no. 1 (2014): 189. An extreme example of the slippage between “modernism” and “modernity” occurs in Julian Johnson’s Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), in which he argues, “The category of Modernism thus begins to flow back across Romanticism into Classicism itself, and in doing so it dissolves its own boundaries as anything specific to the twentieth century” (8). 31. Nicholas Mathew charts the origins of the ideological divide between autonomous and occasional music in Political Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 32. In reinstituting a distinction between “modernity” and “modernism,” the “modern” and the “modernist,” this book contributes to a growing body of literature on non-modernist strains in early and mid-twentieth-century British culture, including: Lisa Tickner, Modern Life & Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); and John Baxendale, Priestley’s England: J.  B. Priestley and English Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

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33. The field’s seminal text was Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Other landmark publications include: Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middlebrow Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Lawrence Napper, British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009); and Sophie Blanch and Melissa Sullivan, eds., “The Middlebrow: Within or Without Modernism,” special issue of Modernist Cultures 6, no. 1 (May 2011). 34. Christopher Macdonald, Rush, Rock and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); John Howland, “Reconsidering Ellingtonia,” in Duke Ellington Studies, ed. John Howland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). See also the most recent contribution to popular music scholarship on the middlebrow: Howland, Hearing Luxe Pop: Glorification, Glamour, and the Middlebrow in American Popular Music (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021). 35. For example, see Joan Rubin, Cultural Considerations (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). An earlier example that discusses music appreciation initiatives but without explicit reference to the middlebrow is Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini (London: Faber and Faber, 1987). This aspect of scholarship on the musical middlebrow reflects a trend that has been equally prevalent in its literary counterpart. 36. Alexandra Wilson, Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 16. 37. Christopher Chowrimootoo, Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). 38. The late nineteenth-century roots of the American middlebrow are documented in Rubin’s The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Its post-1960s afterlife is discussed in my epilogue. 39. For the former, see Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 3. For the latter, see “Middlebrow,” Punch, December 23, 1925, 673. 40. J. B. Priestley, “High, Low, Broad,” in Open House: A Book of Essays (London: William Heinemann, 1927), 162. The popularization of the term happened later in America—from the late 1940s when Russell Lynes’s famous cartoon was published: “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” Harper’s (February 1949): 23, 25. See also David Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 3–4. 41. This heterogeneity has been reflected in scholarly literature, which has approached the middlebrow from the perspective of its consumers: Tunbridge, “Frieda Hempel and the Historical Imagination,” and Radway, A Feeling for Books; as a mode of reception: Nicola Humble, “Sitting Forward or Sitting Back: Highbrow v. Middlebrow Reading,” Modernist Cultures 6, no. 1 (2011): 41–59; and Tunbridge, “Frieda Hempel”; or as an aesthetic or stylistic marker: Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and

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Tom Perrin, The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction: Popular US Novels, Modernism, and Form, 1945–75 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 42. For “light classics,” see Christina Baade, “Radio Symphonies: The BBC, Everyday Listening and the Popular Classics Debate during the People’s War,” in Ubiquitous Musics: The Everyday Sounds That We Don’t Always Notice, ed. Elena Boschi, Anahid Kassabian, and Marta Garcia Quinones (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 65; and E. D. Mackerness, A Social History of English Music (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), 272. 43. Founded in 1895 by impresario Robert Newman and conductor Henry Wood, and taken over by the BBC in 1927, the Proms is one of London’s longest running and most celebrated concert series. Its founding mission, which its organizers still pursue today, was to promote classical music to a broader audience. For a full history, see Doctor, Wright and Kenyon, eds., The Proms. 44. Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 270, 273. 45. Andrew Porter, “Some New British Composers,” The Musical Quarterly 51, no. 1 (January 1965): 12. 46. Robert Newman, cited in Henry J. Wood, My Life of Music (London: Gollancz, 1938), 91–92. 47. Stewart Macpherson, The Musical Education of the Child: Some Thoughts and Suggestions for Teachers, Parents and Schools (London: Joseph Williams, 1915), 28; W. J. Barry, Letter to Walford Davies, February 5, 1937, RCM Walford Davies Archive; Leonard Grugeon, Letter to Walford Davies, February 15, 1937, RCM Walford Davies Archive. 48. Theodor W. Adorno, “Analytical Study of the NBC ‘Music Appreciation Hour,’ ” The Musical Quarterly 78, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 328. 49. Ernest Fowles, “Musical Appreciation,” The Musical Times 72, no. 1063 (September 1931): 830. 50. Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), 225. 51. For intersections between cultural and political agendas, see Jeff Hill, “ ‘When Work Is Over’: Labour, Leisure and Culture in Wartime Britain,” in “Millions Like Us”? British Culture in the Second World War (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 236–60. 52. Even staunch highbrow Leonard Woolf admitted that highbrow culture could be thus abused—by those whom he labeled “pseudo highbrows”: Leonard Woolf, Hunting the Highbrow (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 10–11. 53. Priestley, “High, Low, Broad,” 163. 54. Andreas Huyssen was among the first to blow the modernist cover in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). Subsequent contributions to the discussion include: Rainey, Institutions of Modernism; Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–8; and Chowrimootoo, Middlebrow Modernism, 27–29. 55. Virginia Woolf, “Middlebrow,” in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1942). Russell Lynes’s equally famous

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account subsequently developed Woolf’s definition, dividing her middlebrow into two: the “upper”—the “principal purveyors of highbrow ideas”—and “lower”—the “principal consumers.” The Tastemakers (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1954), 320–33. 56. Adorno, “Analytical Study,’ ” 368. 57. Percy Scholes shows British critics objecting on similar grounds in an inventory of charges in his 1935 monograph Music: The Child and the Masterpiece (London: Oxford University Press & Humphrey Milford, 1935), 31–76. Meanwhile, Q. D. Leavis leveled a similar criticism at literary equivalents in her 1932 volume Fiction and the Reading Public: 223–24. 58. Huyssen, After the Great Divide, vii. 59. It was also broadly shared by the cultural theorists of the Frankfurt School. 60. Tunbridge, “Frieda Hempel and the Historical Imagination,” 462. Genevieve Abravanel argues that the distinctions were more “ideological” than “material”: Americanizing Britain: The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 17. 61. For an example of the confusion, see Hilda Matheson, “Broadcasting: High-Brows and Low-Brows,” The Observer, January 19, 1936, 1. 62. Julius Harrison, cited in “Sayings of the Week,” The Observer, March 8, 1931, 11. See also J. G., “Points from Lectures,” The Musical Times 72 (March 1931): 234. 63. C. E. M. Joad, “The People’s Claim,” in Britain and the Beast, ed. Clough Williams-Ellis (London: Dent, 1937), 64. 64. Joad, “The People’s Claim,” 65. 65. David Wayne Thomas, Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), x. 66. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 5. For the genesis of Arnold’s ideas, see Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art, 1–24. The impact of Arnoldian thought on the American middlebrow is detailed in Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, 45–55. 67. Charles McGuire, Music and Victorian Philanthropy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 39–40. 68. For liberalism as a cross-party system of beliefs that from the midcentury was ubiquitous among the ruling classes, see Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 12. 69. For interwar concerns about America’s growing presence in Britain, see Abravanel, Americanizing Britain. 70. D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 71. For a broad overview of these changes, see Janet Minihan, The Nationalization of Culture: The Development of State Subsidies to the Arts in Great Britain (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977). 72. Christopher Lawrence and Anna-K. Mayer, “Regenerating England: An Introduction,” in Regenerating England: Science, Medicine and Culture in

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Inter-War Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 14. See also LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy, 146–47. 73. Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 119. Christopher Hilliard has argued that public hostility toward literary modernism in early twentieth-century Britain can be explained by the wide diffusion in the late nineteenth century of romantic aesthetics, which came to define working- and middle-class understandings of “literature”: “Modernism and the Common Writer,” The Historical Journal 48, no. 3 (2005): 769–87. 74. G[eorge] M[alcom] Young, “The New Cortegiano,” in Victorian Essays, ed. W. D. Handcock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 208. He made a similar case a few years later in “Eclipse of the Highbrow,” The Times, April 9, 1941. 75. Young, “The New Cortegiano,” 210–11. For how the idea of curiosity acquired a new cultural significance during the Victorian era, see Brenda Assael, The Circus and Victorian Society (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 62–84. 76. H. Lowery, “Music and Liberal Studies; or Challenges in Musical Education,” in Music in Education, ed. Willis Grant (London: Butterworths, 1963), 4. 77. For schooling’s role in the reproduction of state ideology see Geoffrey Whitty, “Education, Economy and National Culture,” in Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity, ed. Robert Bocock and Kenneth Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 267–320. 78. More detailed accounts are given in Harry Hendrick, “Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: An Interpretative Survey, 1800 to the Present,” in Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, ed. Allison James and Alan Prout (London: Falmer Press, 1997), 34–62; and Harry Hendrick, Child Welfare: England 1872–1928 (London: Routledge, 1994). 79. Stephen Kline, “Toys, Socialization, and the Commodification of Play,” in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 342. 80. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-End: A Social History of Britain 1918–1939 (London: Penguin Books, 1971), 205. 81. Ernest Newman, cited in John E. Borland, “Education, Music and Medicine,” The School Music Review, no. 389 (October 15, 1924): 131. 82. Percy A. Scholes, “Orpheus as Educationist,” in Music Supervisors National Conference 1928, ed. Paul J. Weaver (Durham, NC: Seeman Printery, 1928), 172–80. 83. This phrase is used to describe Britain’s “intellectual class” in Stefan Collini, “British Exceptionalism Reconsidered: Annan, Anderson and Other Accounts,” in Anglo-French Attitudes: Comparisons and Transfers between English and French Intellectuals since the Eighteenth Century, ed. Christophe Charle, Julien Vincent, and Jay Winter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 49.

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84. Baxendale, Priestley’s England, 13. In their social standing, music educators were typical of the broader network of people committed to cultural uplift: LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy, 139–40. 85. In the most extreme cases, this led to a repeated shifting of allegiances. Affiliations of politician and author Harold Nicolson, for example, ranged from Oswald Mosley to “Liberal Socialism.” Peter Mandler and Susan Pedersen, “Introduction: The British Intelligentsia after the Victorians,” in After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain, ed. Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler (London: Routledge, 1994), 25–26. 86. Jeff Hill, “ ‘When Work Is Over’: Labour, Leisure, and Culture in Wartime Britain,” in “Millions Like Us?,” ed. Hayes and Hill, 239. 87. For an attempt to reconstruct the far Right’s attitude toward the arts, see Roger Griffin, “ ‘This Fortress Built against Infection:’ The BUF Vision of Britain’s Theatrical and Musical Renaissance,” in The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right in Britain, ed. Julie Gottlieb and Thomas P. Linehan (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 45–65. 88. Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), x. In terms of his individual relationship to this network, Robert Mayer—a key figure in chapter 1—was to some extent an exception: not only did he have a temper that brought an element of forcefulness to many of his interactions, but he also bought his way into this circle through philanthropic gestures. 89. Mandler and Pedersen, “Introduction,” 19. Acknowledging these links complicates Richard Weight’s claim that before the foundation of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts in late 1939, “the overwhelming view had been that the state had no right to interfere in the production and consumption of the arts”: “ ‘Building a New British Culture’: The Arts Centre Movement, 1945–53,” in The Right to Belong: Citizenship and National Identity in Britain, 1930–1960, ed. Richard Weight and Abigail Beach (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 157. 90. Otter, The Victorian Eye, 14. 91. Daniel T. Rodgers reflects on how ideas become political issues in Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 5–6. For the role of institutions in translating artistic ideologies into cultural practice, see Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 4–5. 92. Carolyn Abbate, “Sound Object Lessons,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 69, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 799. 93. Daniel T. Rodgers, “An Age of Social Politics,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 254–55. 94. For a critique of scholarly failure to acknowledge the “respectable working class,” see Rita Felski, “Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle Class,” PMLA 115, no. 1 (January 2000): 35. 95. Alan Fluck, “Invitation or Challenge?,” Tempo 38 (Winter 1955): 21. 96. Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism, 11–12.

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97. Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1–2.

Chapter 2. “Audiences of the Future” 1. Percy A. Scholes, “Five Thousand Music Teachers,” The School Music Review 37, no. 433 (June 1928): 5–7. 2. Alan L. Spurgeon, “MSNC Comes of Age: George Oscar Bowen and the 1928 Conference,” Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 27, no. 1 (October 2005): 3–20. 3. Percy A. Scholes, “Orpheus as Educationist,” in Music Supervisors National Conference 1928, ed. Paul J. Weaver (Durham, NC: Seeman Printery, 1928), 173. 4. Scholes, “Five Thousand Music Teachers,” 5–6. 5. Scholes, “Orpheus as Educationist,” 172–73. 6. Scholes, “Orpheus as Educationist,” 175. 7. For an overview of recent scholarship on this period, see Christina Bashford, “Introduction: The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World,” in The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800–1930, ed. Christina Bashford and Roberta Montemorra Marvin (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2016), 1–17. 8. Scholes, “Orpheus as Educationist,” 176. 9. Scholes, “Orpheus as Educationist,” 176. 10. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 3. See also Daniel T. Rodgers, “An Age of Social Politics,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 250–73. 11. Rodgers, “An Age of Social Politics,” 250. 12. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 25–27. 13. For how transatlantic connections shaped late-Victorian liberalism, see Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). For lateVictorian liberalism’s impact on middlebrow culture, see my chapter3. 14. Scholes, “Orpheus as Educationist,” 175. 15. The field day took place on July 7. W. H. Hadow and Walter Damrosch, “First Anglo-American Summer Holiday Music Conference, 1929,” The Musical Times 70 (February 1929): 154. 16. Edwin Evans, “The Anglo-American Musicians’ Conference at Lausanne,” The Musical Times 70 (September 1929): 827–31. The initiative was ultimately short-lived: following poor attendance in 1932, which was attributed to the economic downturn, it appears to have collapsed. 17. For example, Gumbrecht suggests that the European attitude toward Americans was largely dismissive: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 16–18. For art as ornament, see Wyndham Lewis, Men without Art (London: Cassell, 1934), 291; Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans.

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and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75–88. Nineteenth-century historians, on the other hand, have presented a more complex picture of how Europe imagined America. See Axel Körner, Nicola Miller, and Adam I. P. Smith, eds., America Imagined: Explaining the United States in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 18. Genevieve Abravanel, Americanizing Britain: The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1. Even in Abravanel’s nuanced account, America is equated with Hollywood and jazz. 19. This perspective has also shaped social histories: “conspir[ing]”— consciously or otherwise—“to render consumption almost invisible,” historians have asked how people in Britain made money but have shown comparatively little interest in how they spent it. See John Benson, The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, 1880–1980 (London: Longman, 1994), 1. 20. Mayer was among those present at the 1929 Lausanne conference: Evans, “The Anglo-American Musicians’ Conference at Lausanne.” 21. His previous firm had been dissolved at the end of World War One. For a fuller account of Mayer’s life up to the foundation of the Concerts for Children, see his My First Hundred Years, 2nd ed. (Gerrards Cross, UK: Van Duren, 1979), 9–17. 22. For German immigrants’ defining impact on the American symphonic tradition, see Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 27–42. 23. Prior to founding the New York series in 1909, Walter had run a one-off series for young people in 1891–92, as well as including such concerts on his tours. For a detailed account, see Elaine Goodell, “Walter Damrosch and His Contributions to Music Education” (Washington, DC, The Catholic University of America, 1972), 196–248. See also Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 200–202. 24. Mayer, My First Hundred Years, 18. 25. Mayer, My First Hundred Years, 47. 26. For example, see “Music,” The Times, March 22, 1909, 13; “Music,” The Times, January 20, 1912, 10. For evidence of similar initiatives in Manchester see Walter Carroll, “Concerts for Children,” The Musical Times 67 (April 1926): 352; and in Birmingham, “An Example to Follow,” The Observer, January 18, 1925, 12. 27. Newspaper reports show that such concerts did feature orchestral music. However, Huxley’s request—made in 1922—that “the directors of our symphony orchestras should .  .  . arrange some of their programs with a view to instruction as well as entertainment” suggests that symphonic educational concerts were less common in Britain than America. Aldous Huxley, “Instruction with Pleasure,” in Aldous Huxley Complete Essays, vol. I, 1920–1925, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 235. 28. W.R.A.[nderson], “Music for Children: South London Society’s Enterprise,” The Observer, May 25, 1924.

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29. “French Decorate Walter Damrosch,” New York Times, June 4, 1924, 25. Damrosch’s profile had been significantly raised by his services to French music during the war. For example, see “Damrosch to Lead in Camps in France,” New York Times, May 30, 1918. 30. The visit was announced two months in advance in a long Times article: “Children’s Concerts: An Example from New York,” March 15, 1924, 8; and again a week before: “Visit of Mr. Walter Damrosch,” The Times, May 12, 1924, 17. The performance also received what for a children’s concert were lengthy reviews in several major papers: “Mr. Damrosch and the Children,” The Times, May 19, 1924, 20; W.R.A.[nderson], “ ‘Uncle Walter’: Mr. Damrosch Gives a Concert for Children,” The Observer, May 18, 1924, 7; “Children’s Concerts,” The Daily Telegraph, May 19, 1924, 6. For the report to colonial India, see “Teaching Young Idea to ‘Toot’: Famous Conductor’s Children’s Concert,” The Times of India, June 12, 1924, 5. 31. “An Example from New York.” 32. (From our special correspondent), “Orchestral Music in New York: Programmes and Conductors,” The Times, November 24, 1923, 10. See also W. J. Henderson, “Musical Life in America: II. Importation of Celebrities,” The Times, November 9, 1929, 10. 33. “An Example from New York.” This was a recurrent trope in the writing of Henry Colles, music critic of The Times. After a three-month sojourn in New York, for example, he reported that audiences were “exceedingly sensitive to qualities of performance, far more so than the average audience at Queen’s Hall.” (By our music critic), “Music in America: Perfect Instruments,” The Times, January 19, 1924, 8. Critic Ernest Fowles passed a similarly complimentary judgment in his “Notes on an American Lecture Tour,” The Musical Times 70 (March 1929): 250–52. 34. Ivor Brown, Art and Everyman (London: Ernest Benn, 1929), 6. Mayer similarly criticized school music teaching for its “uninspiring dull” methods (Mayer, My First Hundred Years, 18). 35. “An Example from New York.” 36. The first concert unfolded as follows: the strings performed Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, after which Beethoven’s Rondino in E showcased the winds; next, the Introduction to Act III of Die Meistersinger “display[ed] strings and brass in combination;” and finally the Scherzo from Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony “play[ed] off strings, woodwind and brass, first in separate groups, then together.” “An Example from New York.” 37. While his concerts for children, which targeted those aged between six and twelve, tended to rely on excerpts, his concerts for young people often featured multi-movement works (but even here, only when they were short enough in duration to not take up the entire program). Sample programs are presented in Ernest La Prade, Alice in Orchestralia (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1930), 166–71. 38. “Mr. Damrosch and the Children.” 39. W.R.A.[nderson], “ ‘Uncle Walter.’ ” 40. “Mr. Damrosch and the Children.” 41. W.R.A.[nderson], “ ‘Uncle Walter.’ ”

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42. C.C., “Orchestral Concert for Children, Central Hall, Westminster (Conductor, Walter Damrosch),” The School Music Review 33, no. 385 (June 15, 1924): 26. 43. H. E. Wortham, “Orchestral Concerts for Children,” The Music Teacher 5, no. 5 (May 1926): 297. 44. J. H. Elliot, “The Children’s Music,” The Musical Times 67 (September 1926): 811. 45. Robert Mayer, “Robert Mayer Concerts for Children 1923–1935 [Booklet],” 1935, 3–4, LCC EO PS 1/68, London Metropolitan Archive; Charles Reid, Fifty Years of Robert Mayer Concerts, 1923–1973 (Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1972), 23. The latter volume was sanctioned by Mayer, who annotated the manuscript prior to publication: F4 and F5, Box 4, Robert Mayer Archive. 46. For the Birmingham scheme, see “Municipal Music,” The Observer, January 18, 1925, 9. 47. Sargent had experience teaching music appreciation at a school in the Midlands town of Melton Mowbray, although the extent to which this influenced his appointment is unclear. Charles Reid, Malcolm Sargent, 2nd ed. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973), 169–82. 48. Mayer, My First Hundred Years, 18. 49. Central Hall, Westminster: Summary of Programmes, A1, Box 6, Robert Mayer Archive. 50. Jenny Doctor, “A New Dimension: The BBC Takes on the Proms 1920– 44,” in The Proms: A New History, ed. Jenny Doctor, David Wright, and Nicholas Kenyon (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007), 101–2. 51. For more on the middlebrow’s uneasy relationship with late nineteenthcentury romantic music, see chapters 3 and 5. 52. Reid, Fifty Years, 11. 53. Malcolm Sargent, “The New ‘Pied Piper,’ ” The Manchester Guardian, October 12, 1925, 16. C.D.G., “Children’s Concert,” The Daily Telegraph, March 18, 1929, 8. 54. Michael T. Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 55. The London County Council’s progressive attitude toward state education is noted in Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England, 140–41. 56. Mayer, My First Hundred Years, 22. 57. Memo: Outside Employment of BBC Northern Orchestra, October 18, 1934, BBC WAC, N3/42 North Region Robert Mayer Concerts for Children 1934–1937. 58. Exactly when negotiations began is unclear. Mayer’s personal account conflicts with the BBC archival evidence that has survived: he claimed that Reith offered the services of the BBC Symphony Orchestra shortly after his concerts began, but the BBC SO was not founded until 1930. Robert Mayer, “The Anatomy of a Miracle: Campbell-Orde Memorial Lecture 1972,” in My First Hundred Years, 67–69. The discussions around Children’s Hour are documented in the BBC Written Archive Centre: R. S. Thatcher, “Record of Interview with Mr.  Robert Mayer on the Subject of Concerts in Children’s Hour,” June 9, 1937, BBC WAC; M. E. Jenkin, “Record of Interview with Mr. Robert Mayer

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on the Subject of Concerts in Children’s Hour,” October 1, 1937, R11/33 Children’s Hour, Robert Mayer Concerts, 1934–1939, BBC WAC. 59. Mayer, “The Anatomy of a Miracle,” 71. In 1937, locations (and the year in which concerts began there) included: Westminster (1923), Tottenham (1928), Wembley (1929), Bethnal Green (1930), Leeds (1930), Derby (1931), Kingston (1931), Reading (1932), Bradford (1933), Enfield (1933), Huddersfield (1933), Stepney (1933), Newcastle-on-Tyne (1934), Heston & Isleworth (1934), Barnsley (1935), Doncaster (1935), Grimsby (1935), Wakefield (1935), Stoke-on-Trent (1935), Coventry (1936), York (1936), Ealing (1937) and Sunderland (1937). 60. “Concerts for Children: Habits of Listening,” The Times, March 23, 1935, 10. See also Reid, Fifty Years, 21. 61. Mayer, “Robert Mayer Concerts for Children 1923–1935 [Booklet],” 3–4. 62. Robert Mayer, “Robert Mayer Concerts for Children 1938–1939,” 1938, Malcolm Sargent Archive, British Library. 63. Reid, Fifty Years, 5. 64. Despite Mayer’s ruling that adults should not be admitted unless accompanied by a child, reviews suggest that there were “a good proportion of adults” in the audience, including some “without attendant bantlings.” Feste, “Ad Libitum,” The Musical Times 67 (March 1926): 217. “Feste” was Harvey Grace’s pen name. See also “Orchestral Concerts for Children,” The Times, October 20, 1924, 12. 65. Mayer, “Robert Mayer Concerts for Children 1923–1935 [Booklet],” 5. 66. Henry Durant, The Problem of Leisure (London: Routledge, 1938), 2. 67. John Stevenson and Chris Cook, The Slump: Britain in the Great Depression, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2013), 13. See also Benson, The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain. 68. Stevenson and Cook, The Slump, 13. 69. Benson, The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, 14. 70. Ida Craven, cited in Durant, The Problem of Leisure, 1. 71. C. E. M. Joad, Diogenes; or, The Future of Leisure (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1928), 14–15. Aldous Huxley made a similar claim in a 1927 article published in Harper’s magazine, predicting that “the future of America is the future of the world.” See “The Outlook for American Culture: Some Reflections in a Machine Age,” in Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, vol.  3, 1930–1935, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 185. 72. Abravanel, Americanizing Britain, 4. 73. Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 79–80. 74. Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain, 14–18. 75. Durant, The Problem of Leisure, 21–22. 76. Durant, The Problem of Leisure, 5. 77. Education Department, “City of Wakefield Education Committee: Report on Education for the Year Ended July 31st, 1933,” October 1933, 3, Box 6, A 16, Robert Mayer.

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78. The essay was first published in Huxley’s volume On the Margin. Aldous Huxley, “Pleasures,” in Aldous Huxley Complete Essays, 1: 356. 79. Durant, The Problem of Leisure, 21–22. 80. Joad, Diogenes, 19. Joad reiterated this idea in his “The People’s Claim,” in Britain and the Beast, ed. Clough Williams-Ellis (London: Dent, 1937), 65–66. 81. Joad, Diogenes, 53. For a longer discussion of how anxieties about passive leisure related to ideals for a participatory culture, see chapter 4. 82. Aldous Huxley, “Pleasures,” 1: 356. 83. Aldous Huxley, Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1925), 235. 84. D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 7. 85. Aldous Huxley, “The Problem of Leisure,” in Aldous Huxley’s Hearst Essays, ed. James Sexton (New York: Garland, 1994), 102. 86. Feste, “Ad Libitum,” The Musical Times 66 (May 1925): 409. 87. “Forty Years of Planning Concerts for Children,” The Times, May 22, 1963, 5. 88. Mayer, “Robert Mayer Concerts for Children 1923–1935 [Booklet],” 4. 89. (By our music critic), “Music in America,” 8. 90. Education Department, “City of Wakefield Education Committee,” 3. 91. Mayer, “Robert Mayer Concerts for Children 1923–1935 [Booklet],” 4. 92. Stephen Kline, “Toys, Socialization, and the Commodification of Play,” in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 342. 93. Durant, The Problem of Leisure, 22. 94. Brown, Art and Everyman, 3. 95. Education Department, “City of Wakefield Education Committee,” 3. 96. For the emergence of youth-oriented marketing in Britain, see Benson, The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, 17–18, 46. 97. Filson Young, Shall I Listen: Studies in the Adventure and Technique of Broadcasting (London: Constable, 1933), 71–72. 98. Feste, “Ad Libitum,” May 1925, 408. 99. “Denying Music Its Thrill,” The Manchester Guardian, August 2, 1930, 8; “Music and Youth: Ideals of the Children’s Concert Movement,” The Times, December 7, 1937, 9. 100. For a history of the Entertainments Tax, which was introduced during World War One, see A. P. Herbert, “No Fine on Fun”: The Commercial History of the Entertainments Duty (London: Methuen & Co., 1957), 1–34. 101. Mayer, “Robert Mayer Concerts for Children 1923–1935 [Booklet],” 3–4. 102. Reid, Fifty Years, 3. 103. One by-product of this was the foundation of the Amalgamated Musicians’ Union in 1893, which merged with the National Orchestral Association

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in 1921 to form the Musicians’ Union. The history of this organization is told in John Williamson and Martin Cloonan, Player’s Work Time: A History of the Musicians’ Union, 1893–2013 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). 104. “Orchestras and Celebrities: The Experiment of Birmingham,” The Times, February 28, 1925, 10. 105. Robert Mayer, “The Growth of Concerts for Children,” Music in Schools 1, no. 1 (March 1937): 6. 106. “Concerts for Children: Habits of Listening,” 10. 107. Reid, Fifty Years, 13. 108. For comparison, in 1924 the South London Philharmonic Society charged children 4d. for entry to its dress rehearsals, which Anderson described as “a wonderful bargain.” See W. R. A.[nderson], “Music for Children: South London Society’s Enterprise.” 109. Reid, Fifty Years, 4. 110. “Concerts, &c.,” The Times, August 11, 1930, 8. Charges for seeing an opera or a play at the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells—theaters that were geographically less central and constitutionally bound to fulfill a cultural uplift agenda—were lower: there, a seat in the stalls could be reserved for 6/-, and an unreserved seat acquired for as little as sixpence. 111. David Fowler, The First Teenagers: The Lifestyle of Young WageEarners in Interwar Britain (London: The Woburn Press, 1995), 117. 112. “Britain’s Bread,” The Economist, December 20, 1930, 1159. 113. Robert Mayer Concerts for Children, Season 1930–1931. Robert Mayer Archive, Box 6, A15. 114. Reid, Malcolm Sargent, 169. Sargent’s exhortation that children of wealthy families “need just as much instruction and encouragement to love music as the poorer children” suggests that Mayer was reluctant to make his concerts accessible to the highest echelons of Society. Malcolm Sargent, “Letter from Malcolm Sargent to Robert Mayer,” May 10, 1935, Malcolm Sargent Archive, British Library. 115. P. M. B. Macpherson, “Letter from P. M. B. Macpherson to Dr. Sargent,” December 17, 1934, Malcolm Sargent Archive, British Library. 116. Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 206–11. 117. Reid, Fifty Years, 20. To my knowledge, Mayer never tried to make a record series out of his own concerts. 118. “Children’s Concerts: An Example from New York.” 119. (By our music critic), “Music in America,” 8. Around a decade later, another Times article predicted that Mayer’s concerts were similarly helping to build “a fairly large body of young ratepayers who have grown up thinking of an orchestra as something well worth having and therefore worth paying to have” See “Concerts for Children: Habits of Listening.” 120. Elliot, “The Children’s Music,” 812. 121. For a critique of the modernist attitude, see Susan McClary, “Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition,” Cultural Critique 12 (Spring 1989): 57–81. This attitude became more pronounced as the century wore on. See chapter 6.

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122. The Book-of-the-Month Club adopted a similar strategy for advertising literature: Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 165–67. 123. Feste, “Ad Libitum,” (March 1926), 217. 124. George Grove, Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies (London: Novello, 1896), 177. 125. Grove, 140, 173. 126. Feste, “Ad Libitum,” (March 1926), 217. 127. Feste, 218. Maine expressed a similar opinion in Basil Maine, “Editorial: Children’s Concerts Again,” The Music Bulletin 8, no. 7 (July 1926): 196–97. 128. Feste, “Ad Libitum,” The Musical Times 68 (May 1927): 408. 129. Feste, “Ad Libitum” (May 1927), 406. 130. Feste, “Ad Libitum” (May 1927), 408. 131. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), vii. 132. “Occasional Notes,” The Musical Times 67 (February 1926): 138. See also Feste, “Ad Libitum,” March 1926, 217. For more on the supreme place afforded musical form in middlebrow pedagogy see chapters 3 and 5. 133. Elliot, “The Children’s Music,” 811. 134. Eva Mary Grew, “The Music Teacher’s Bookshelf,” The School Music Review 32, no. 374 (July 15, 1923): 51. See also Arthur Reade, “Editorial,” The Music Bulletin 7, no. 4 (April 1925): 107–8; and “Forty Years of Planning Concerts for Children,” 5. 135. “Orchestral Concerts for Children,” The Times, February 2, 1925, 17. 136. Basil Maine, “Editorial: Children’s Concerts,” The Music Bulletin 8, no. 3 (March 1926): 72. 137. Alec Robertson, “ ‘The Children’s Music,’ ” The Musical Times 67 (October 1926): 934. 138. Wortham, “Orchestral Concerts for Children,” 297. 139. Maine, “Editorial,” 72. 140. “British and U.S. Broadcasting: Sir John Reith’s Comparison,” The Times, May 25, 1931, 9. 141. W. R. Anderson, “Children and Orchestral Music,” The Music Teacher 5, no. 8 (August 1926): 481. 142. Feste, “Ad Libitum” (May 1927), 408. Over a decade later, Adorno would make a similar assertion in his essay “The Radio Symphony,” Theodor  W. Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 252. 143. Feste, “Ad Libitum” (March 1926), 218. 144. For example, see Wortham, “Orchestral Concerts for Children,” 297; and “British and American Musicians,” The Times, July 7, 1928, 15. As Horowitz points out, even “the term ‘symphony orchestra’ was itself an expensive American coinage, first used in 1878 by Leopold Damrosch” (Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 34, 199). 145. “Concerts for Children: Habits of Listening.”

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146. For example, see Huyssen, After the Great Divide; and Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–8.

Chapter 3. Victorians on Radio 1. Unfortunately, little official documentation from the early years of this series survives, so this account is constructed from the transcripts of broadcasts (in draft or final form) held in the Walford Davies Archive at the Royal College of Music, London, and from early texts on broadcasting more generally. 2. Davies had produced a series of Melody Lectures for HMV in 1922, copies of which are held in the British Library Sound Archive. His attitude to sound reproduction technologies was relatively forward-thinking: other music educators—perhaps most notably Stewart Macpherson—remained reluctant to embrace emerging technologies. Catherine Dale, Music Analysis in Britain in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 33. 3. “Broadcast Brevities,” Lancashire Evening Post, December 30, 1925, 8. 4. Letter from Walford Davies to Mr. Hutchinson, January 22, 1933, BBC WAC, R27/666. 5. Jennifer Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation’s Tastes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 61–62, 67. 6. Between April 1927 and December 1929, Davies broadcast a further eight series, before handing the baton over to composer George Dyson, who continued for two years with the alternative title The Progress of Music. (During this time, Davies also delivered four talks under the old title in October and November 1930.) The talks were dropped altogether in summer 1931, only to be revived in September 1933, initially with a new billing of Keyboard Talks but reverting to the original title in October 1936, which it retained until June 1939. The last series of broadcast music education talks with which Davies was involved, Everyman’s Music, ran from July 1940 to December 1941; Davies died on March 11, 1941. 7. Sieveking detailed his aspirations for broadcasting practice in Lancelot de Giberne Sieveking, The Stuff of Radio (London: Cassell, 1934). See also David Hendy, “Painting with Sound: The Kaleidoscopic World of Lance Sieveking, a British Radio Modernist,” Twentieth Century British History 24, no. 2 (2013): 169–200; and for a broader account of BBC productions that used sound experimentally, Louis Niebur, Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 8. Oxford graduate Scholes worked as the BBC Music Critic from 1923 to 1928 and subsequently as music editor of the Radio Times (from 1926 to 1928), in which capacities he contributed to both broadcast and printed media: Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 66–67; John Owen Ward, “Scholes, Percy A(lfred),” in Oxford Music Online. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com /subscriber/article/grove/music/25033. 9. For the origins of the movement, see Catherine Dale, “Britain’s ‘Armies of Trained Listeners’: Building a Nation of “Intelligent Hearers,” NineteenthCentury Music Review 2, no. 1 (June 2005): 93–114.

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10. Walford Davies, Music and the Ordinary Listener, Series 1, no. ix: “On Rhythm,” September 21, 1926, RCM Walford Davies Archive. 11. “The Listener: The First Ten Year,” The Listener 8, no. 201 (November 16, 1932): 692. 12. For example, see Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 11–33; and D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 141–54. 13. David Wayne Thomas, Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 3. 14. John Reith, Broadcast over Britain (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1924), 184. 15. David Goodman, Radio’s Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). The 1927 Charter is available online: Broadcasting Committee, Royal Charter, http:// downloads .bbc.co .uk/bbctrust /assets /files /pdf/regulatory_framework /charter _agreement/archive/1927.pdf. Despite the BBC’s independence, some saw this as a move toward “State Socialism.” See, for example, Basil Maine, “Editorial: State Music,” The Music Bulletin 8, no. 12 (December 1926): 355–56. 16. Kate Lacey, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), 5. 17. Peter Mandler and Susan Pedersen, “Introduction: The British Intelligentsia after the Victorians,” in After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain, ed. Pedersen and Mandler (London: Routledge, 1994), 22. 18. Hendy, “Painting with Sound,” 172–73. 19. Avery, Radio Modernism, 26–27. 20. Reith was so named by the director of the BBC’s Board of Governors: Avery, Radio Modernism, 17. 21. Thomas has made a persuasive case for a more sympathetic reading of late-Victorian liberalism—one that does not simply dismiss it as narrowly individualist and reliant on a falsely idealistic belief in its universal appeal, but rather explores the tensions that arose from its vision of a “many-sided” liberal agency. Thomas, Cultivating Victorians. 22. A clear example is Jenny Doctor, “The Parataxis of ‘British Musical Modernism,’ ” Musical Quarterly 91, nos. 1–2 (2008): 89–115. 23. Lacey, Listening Publics, 123, 125. 24. Stewart Macpherson, The Musical Education of the Child: Some Thoughts and Suggestions for Teachers, Parents and Schools (London: Joseph Williams, 1915), 19. 25. Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 39–42. 26. Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 84–89. 27. Doctor’s seminal investigation into The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music documents the place that modernist composers occupied in the broadcasting schedule. 28. Walford Davies, “Memorandum of Evidence Offered to Lord Ullswater’s Committee,” June 26, 1935, 1–2, RCM Walford Davies Archive. Such

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statements have provided useful fodder for those seeking to emphasize radio’s innovative aspects. To offer one example, Doctor, reproduces this kind of language when she writes that radio “entirely changed the way [music] functioned and was perceived.” See Doctor, “Broadcasting—Concerts,” in Music and the Broadcast Experience: Performance, Production, and Audiences, ed. Christina Baade and James A. Deaville (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 50. 29. James J. Nott, Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 59. See also Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 19–21. 30. For example, see: New Ventures in Broadcasting: A Study in Adult Education (London: The British Broadcasting Corporation, 1928), 47; Music and the Community: The Cambridgeshire Report on the Teaching of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 112. Elsewhere, Davies also gave a frank appraisal of radio’s limitations. For example, see Davies, Music and the Ordinary Listener I, ix: “On Rhythm” and Music and the Ordinary Listener, Series I, no. xii: “Thought in Music Itself [Typescript—Edited],” October 12, 1926, RCM Walford Davies Archive. 31. Davies made a similar case during the Crawford Inquiry in 1926: “Broadcasting and Music,” The Times, January 28, 1926, 7. See also: Lacey, Listening Publics, 7; David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (London: Profile Books, 2006), ix–xvii; Kate Guthrie, “Marconi’s Phoney Future Puccini, ‘Addio’ (Mimì), La Bohème, Act III,” Cambridge Opera Journal 28, no. 2 (July 2016): 247–49. 32. Gustav Holst, cited in Percy A. Scholes, Music: The Child and The Masterpiece (London: Oxford University Press & Humphrey Milford, 1935), 35. 33. Gramophone companies similarly had to negotiate concert-hall discourse: Colin Symes, Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004). 34. Walford Davies, “Seeing and Hearing,” The Times, August 19, 1933. 35. Filson Young, Shall I Listen: Studies in the Adventure and Technique of Broadcasting (London: Constable, 1933), 71–72. 36. Filson Young, “The Art of Listening,” in BBC Handbook, 1928, 349. 37. Young, Shall I Listen, 71. 38. Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 39–42. For an extensive account of the BBC’s attitude toward popular music during its first two decades, see: Christina L. Baade, Victory through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 39. This “anxiety of contamination” also became a defining feature of modernism, as Andreas Huyssen has shown: After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986), vii. 40. Walford Davies, The Pursuit of Music (London: Thomas Nelson, 1935), 3–4. For Davies’s upbringing, see H. C. Colles, Walford Davies: A Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), 11–14. 41. The two exceptions in 1926 were the broadcasts on June 15, which went out at 8:45 p.m., and November 9, which went out at 10:15 p.m. From 1933,

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music talks tended to be scheduled earlier, usually starting sometime between 6:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. 42. Walford Davies, Music and the Ordinary Listener, Series I, no. i: “On Mere Listening,” January 5, 1926, 7951a (i), RCM Walford Davies Archive. 43. Davies, Music and the Ordinary Listener I, i: “On Mere Listening.” 44. Davies, Music and the Ordinary Listener I, i: “On Mere Listening.” 45. The recording is reproduced on the album Walford Davies: Solemn Melody (Dutton, 2001). 46. Asa Briggs, The Golden Age of Wireless, vol. 2, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 126. It was under the influence of the previous director of Talks, Hilda Matheson, that theories about the “ ‘art’ of the talk” had first begun to coalesce into formal guidance for presenters (125). 47. Another more extreme example was the 1928 series on “Music in Double Harness,” which was supposed to explore how music intersected with a variety of other arts, including poetry, dancing, drama, and worship. In the event, he never made it past the first topic. 48. “Broadcasting and Music,” 7. 49. New Ventures in Broadcasting, 46. 50. Julian Herbage, “Memo: ‘The Foundations of Music,’ ” November 16, 1934, BBC WAC, R27/106. 51. Reith, Broadcast over Britain, 173. 52. Walford Davies, Keyboard Talks: “Keyboard Photography 1,” [April 27, no year], RCM Walford Davies Archive. Davies often used visual metaphors to describe aural phenomena. 53. For the limerick incident, see Walford Davies, Music and the Ordinary Listener, Series III (2), no. iii: “The Unexpected in Music,” January 15, 1937, RCM Walford Davies Archive. 54. G. R. Barnes, “Memo on Musical Talks: October 1936 to June 1937,” May 26, 1936, BBC WAC, RCONT 1: Davies, Sir Walford. 55. Percy A. Scholes, Learning to Listen by Means of the Gramophone: A Course in the Appreciation of Music for Use in Schools (London: The Gramophone Education Department, 1921). 56. Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 202–3; 234. 57. Francis Toye, “The Enjoyment of Music” (January 9, 1939), RCM Walford Davies Archive. 58. Adorno expounds this critique at great length in his posthumously published “Analytical Study of the NBC ‘Music Appreciation Hour,’ ” The Musical Quarterly 78, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 328. For similar concerns about the reading public and middlebrow literary culture, see Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 245–46. 59. Adorno imagined that a direct experience could be gained by what he termed “structural listening.” For an explanation and critique of this practice, see Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “Toward a Deconstruction of Structural

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Listening: A Critique of Schoenberg, Adorno and Stravinsky,” in Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 148–76. 60. Walford Davies, Music and the Ordinary Listener, Series VII, no.i: “Audible Form No. 1,” September 25, 1928, 2, RCM Walford Davies Archive. 61. Memo: Proposed Talks Programme (1936), BBC WAC, R51/335/2 Talks: Music and Music Interval Talks File 1b June 1936–1942. 62. New Ventures in Broadcasting, 7. 63. The Adult Education Section was headed by R. S Lambert. He worked under former H. M. Inspector of Schools J. C. Stobart, who had been appointed as the BBC’s first director of education a year earlier. 64. To offer just two examples, schools’ broadcasts and Children’s Hour were reportedly also popular with adults, and on occasion there were requests for supplementary materials to be produced for Talks Department programs: Hilda Jennings and Winifred Gill, “Broadcasting in Everyday Life: A Survey of the Social Effects of the Coming of Broadcasting” (BBC, July 1939), 23. For the gap between the intended and actual use of mass cultural objects, see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkley: University of California Press, 2011). 65. J. M. Rose-Troup, Memo: Music Talks, March 4, 1936, BBC WAC, RCONT 1: Davies, Sir Walford, Talks, 1936–1942. The two departments’ evolutions are documented more fully in Briggs, The Golden Age of Wireless, 122–52. 66. Lacey, Listening Publics, 125. 67. Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 110–19. 68. Young, Shall I Listen, 281. 69. New Ventures in Broadcasting, 1. See also Reith, Broadcast over Britain, 182–83. 70. Young, Shall I Listen, 281. 71. Frank Taylor, “Concerts for School Children,” The Manchester Guardian, February 12, 1925, 16. 72. Howard D. McKinney, “More about Appreciation,” The Musical Times 72 (August 1931): 714. 73. Charles William Eliot, cited in Scholes, Learning to Listen, ix. 74. For Kant’s dismissive attitude toward music, see Richard Taruskin, “Is There a Baby in the Bathwater? (Part 1),” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 63, no. 3 (2006): 164–65. 75. Thomas, Cultivating Victorians, 27. 76. Thomas, Cultivating Victorians, 28–33. 77. Corissa Gould, “Aspiring to Manliness: Edward Elgar and the Pressure of Hegemonic Masculinity,” in Masculinity and Western Musical Practice, ed. Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 161–82. Guy Ortolano observes that from the 1870s there was a similar move to professionalize history through appeals to science: The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 144.

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78. Gould, “Aspiring to Manliness,” 170. David Gramit, “Constructing a Victorian Schubert: Music, Biography, and Cultural Values,” 19th-Century Music 17, no. 1 (Summer 1993): 65–78. 79. Scholars have also argued that this was reflected in a move toward a more analytical, less sentimental tone in critical writings: Gould, “Aspiring to Manliness,” 170–71. 80. Macpherson, The Musical Education of the Child, 19. 81. Music and the Community, 3–4. 82. John Stainer, Music and Its Relation to the Intellect and the Emotions (London: Novello & Ewer, 1892), 14–15. 83. W. G. Whittaker, “The Place of Music in Education,” Report of the Fourteenth Annual Conference of Educational Associations Held at the University College, London, January 1926, 379. 84. Scholes, Music: The Child and The Masterpiece, 24–25. 85. Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, vol. 4, The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5–6. 86. Eric Blom, “Of Sentiment and Sentimentality,” in A Musical Postbag (London: Dent, 1941), 147. The essay was first published in February 1932. 87. Blom, “The Bugbear of Modernism,” in A Musical Postbag, 155. This essay was first published in September 1937. 88. Hadow, cited in Scholes, Learning to Listen, xi. 89. “Denying Music Its Thrill: Attack on the ‘Moderns’ Attitude,” The Manchester Guardian, August 2, 1930, 8. There was a similar resistance to modernist literature’s ostensible prioritization of form over content among adherents to the “Whig interpretation of English literature”: Christopher Hilliard, “Modernism and the Common Writer,” The Historical Journal 48, no. 3 (2005): 785–86. 90. Davies, The Pursuit of Music, 3–4. 91. Davies, The Pursuit of Music, 4–5. 92. Jennings and Gill, “Broadcasting in Everyday Life,” 40. 93. Reith, Broadcast over Britain, 19. 94. Reith, Broadcast over Britain, 181. 95. Young, cited in Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 85. 96. Scholes delivered four lectures on the topic of “Modern Music,” which constituted the first half of the October 1938–June 1939 series of Music and the Ordinary Listener. He made explicit reference to the “every man his own critic” mantra in the first of his lectures: “ ‘Modern’ Music—How Does It Strike You? 1,” October 10, 1938, RCM Walford Davies Archive. 97. Percy A. Scholes, “Criticism of Music,” in The Oxford Companion to Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 268. 98. John Owen Ward, “Scholes, Percy A(lfred),” Oxford Music Online. www.oxfordmusiconline.com. 99. Scholes, “Criticism of Music,” 266. 100. Scholes, “ ‘Modern’ Music.” 101. H.[enry] C.[ope] C.[olles], “The People’s Music,” The Times, January 7, 1922. His closing exhortation was inspired by a paper delivered by Armstrong Gibbs.

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102. Music and the Community, 102. A veritable who’s who of Britain’s art music world, the committee included: scholar Edward Dent, Royal College of Music director Sir Hugh P. Allen, conductor Adrian Boult, education reformer Henry Hadow, H. M. principal inspector of music in London schools Geoffrey Shaw, and director of music at Harrow Dr. R. S. Thatcher—to give just a few of the more famous names. Meanwhile Scholes and the music advisor to the London County Council, John Borland, were among those consulted. 103. “Middlebrow,” Punch, December 23, 1925. 104. Walford Davies, Music and the Ordinary Listener, Series I, no. ii: “Energy, Mastery, Wonderment,” January 12, 1926, RCM Walford Davies Archive. 105. Davies, Music and the Ordinary Listener I, ii: “Energy, Mastery, Wonderment.” Similarly, he opened a later series, “I’m not a lecturer! I’m not going to talk like a book! . . . We are just listeners.” Davies, “Keyboard Photography 1.” 106. While most of the letters are lost, a handful dating from 1935–1937 survive in the Walford Davies Archive, files 7916 and 7917. For a discussion of this correspondence, see Kate Guthrie, “For the Love of Music,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 73, no. 2 (2020): 343–48. 107. Davies, Music and the Ordinary Listener I, xii: “Thought in Music Itself,” 2–3. This attitude was also underpinned by a problematic Western colonial mind-set. For more on the relationship between liberalism and imperialism, see Thomas, Cultivating Victorians, 16–22. 108. Davies, Music and the Ordinary Listener I, ii: “Energy, Mastery Wonderment.” 109. Walford Davies, Music and the Ordinary Listener, Series I, no. xviii: [untitled], November 30, 1926, RCM Walford Davies Archive. 110. Davies, “Keyboard Photography 1.” 111. J. B. Priestley, “High, Low, Broad,” in Open House: A Book of Essays (London: William Heinemann, 1927), 162–68. 112. New Ventures in Broadcasting, 85. 113. Reith, Broadcast over Britain, 185. 114. Young, cited in Feste, “Ad Libitum,” Musical Times 72 (June 1931): 503. 115. Walford Davies, “Memorandum for Discussion on Ratio and Quality of Musical Output,” December 18, 1935, RCM Walford Davies Archive. 116. Davies, Music and the Ordinary Listener, I: xii: “Thought in Music Itself.” 117. Scholes, Learning to Listen, xii. 118. Scholes, Music: The Child and the Masterpiece, 227. 119. Eustace Baynes, “Tired Listeners,” The Times, January 19, 1926. Although there is insufficient evidence to say conclusively, it is possible that Baynes is the music theatre lyricist. 120. Davies, Music and the Ordinary Listener, I: “On Mere Listening.” 121. Davies, Music and the Ordinary Listener, I, ii: “Energy, Mastery Wonderment.” 122. Ariel, “Wireless Notes,” The Musical Times 67 (February 1926): 150.

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123. The Wireless League was a strong advocate of this position: New Ventures in Broadcasting, 19–20. 124. Ronald K. Denham, “To the Editor of the Times,” The Times, January 25, 1926, 18. 125. Percy Edwin Spielmann, “Tired Listeners,” The Times, January 25, 1926, 18. 126. H. Tyrrell Lewis, “Tired Listeners,” The Times, January 26, 1926, 18. 127. Ariel, “Wireless Notes,” 151. 128. For example, see G. R. Barnes, “Memo of Meeting between C. (P.) D.M., D.T. and Mr. Barnes,” March 26, 1936, BBC WAC, R51/335/1. 129. Briggs, The Golden Age of Wireless, 139. 130. D.T., “Memo on Keyboard Talks for the Autumn,” May 20, 1935, BBC WAC, R51/335/1. 131. G. N. Pocock, “Untitled Memo,” May 17, 1935, BBC WAC. 132. A.D.T., “Music and the Ordinary Listener Autumn 1937–June 1938,” April 29, 1937, BBC WAC., April 29, 1937, BBC WAC, R51/335/2. 133. A.D.T., “Music and the Ordinary Listener Autumn 1937–June 1938.” 134. Feste, “Ad Libitum,” 505–6. 135. Feste, “Ad Libitum,” 506. 136. This attitude persisted into the postwar period; for example, see “What’s the Point of Music?,” What’s the Point Of . . . ? (London: Home Service, June 11, 1945), BBC WAC, Radio Talk Scripts. 137. This critique has often been leveled at the late-Victorian ideal of cultivation, as Thomas has recently explained: Cultivating Victorians, 6–7. 138. Lacey, Listening Publics, 32–33.

Chapter 4. Music Education on Film 1. H. de M., untitled draft of August 27, 1946, National Archives, ED121/547, Board of Education Film Program 1945–46, Suggestions for Subjects, Financial Arrangements. 2. MoE, draft of letter to Local Education Authorities (n.d.), National Archives, ED121/549. By August 1945, plans had been developed for an additional five units addressing the “History of Writing,” “Development of Printing,” “Ships and Seafaring,” “History of the English Wool Trade,” and “Science in the Orchestra.” 3. Nicolas Bentley to Malcolm Sargent, January 8, 1946, British Library, Malcolm Sargent Archive, MS Mus 1784. Like many in Britain’s literary scene, author and illustrator Bentley found employment with the Ministry of Information during the Second World War. Britain’s concert scene in the 1940s and the anxieties it provoked are discussed in more detail in chapter 5. 4. The Crown Film Unit also produced Beginning of History; the other films were contracted out. COI, Budget, ED121/547. 5. This claim is supported by listings in a handbook produced in 1952 for the American Music Educators National Conference, which includes fewer than fifteen British films on music and ballet, all of which were produced after 1946.

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Lilla Belle Pitts, Handbook on 16mm Films for Music Education, BFI Special Collections, BFI Reuben Library, London. 6. Mathieson’s first industry post, which he secured in 1933, was deputy musical director of Alexander Korda’s London Film Productions. In their biography Muir Mathieson: A Life in Film Music (Dalkeith: Scottish Cultural Press, 2006), S. J. Hetherington and Mark Brownrigg suggest that the inspiration for the project came from Mathieson: 32–42, 80–89, 97–98. 7. For example, three ten-minute films were reportedly made from Lothar Mendes’s 1937 feature Moonlight Sonata. Kurtz Myers, “Audio-Visual Matters,” Notes 4, no. 2 (March 1947): 244–50. 8. Arts Enquiry, The Factual Film: A Survey Sponsored by the Dartington Hall Trustees (London: G. Cumberlege and Oxford University Press, 1947), 107–8. 9. Hetherington and Brownrigg, Muir Mathieson, 97–98. 10. Richard S. Lambert, cited in “A Cultural Leisure,” Middlesex Advertiser & County Gazette, April 30, 1937, Sadler’s Wells Archive, Islington Local History Centre. 11. The “problem of leisure” was discussed at length in chapter 2. 12. During this time, Britten also produced around ten scores for various collateral organizations, such as Strand Films and the Realist Film Unit. Paul Kildea, Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 2013), 101–18; Donald Mitchell, “Sound-Tracks,” in Britten and Auden in the Thirties: The Year 1936 (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 57–102. 13. For the composer’s continuing interest in the social uses of art, see Britten, “The Artist—to the People (1963),” in Britten on Music, ed. Kildea, 233– 35; and in the same volume, “The Moral Responsibility of the Artist towards His Fellow Man (1968),” 311–12. 14. Britten, “An English Composer Sees America,” Tempo 1, no. 2 (April 1940), cited in Britten on Music, ed. Paul Kildea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 24–27. 15. Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed, eds., Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, 1913–1976, Volume 2, 1939–1945 (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 707–8, 711–12. The operetta was commissioned by Max Winkler of Boosey & Hawkes in October 1939. 16. F. M. Leventhal, “ ‘The Best for the Most’: CEMA and State Sponsorship for the Arts in Wartime, 1939–1945,” 20th Century British History 1, no. 3 (1990): 293–94. 17. For the impact of the “people’s war” discourse on the arts, see Christina L. Baade, “ ‘Sincerely Yours, Vera Lynn’: Performing Class, Sentiment, and Femininity in the ‘People’s War,’ ” Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal 30, no. 2 (2006): 36–49, and her Victory through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), especially 3–14; and Nick Hayes, “More Than ‘Music-While-You-Eat’? Factory and Hostel Concerts, ‘Good Culture’ and the Workers,” in “Millions Like Us?” British Culture in the Second World War, ed. Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999) 209–35. 18. Heather Wiebe, Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 10.

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19. For the relationship between artists and the state, see also R. Weight, “State, Intelligentsia and the Promotion of National Culture in Britain, 1939– 45,” Historical Research 69 (1996): 83–101. 20. Donald Mitchell, Philip Reed, and Mervyn Cooke, eds., Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, 1913–1976, Volume 3: 1946– 1951 (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 172–74. 21. Mitchell, Reed, and Cooke, Letters from a Life, 3: 174; Basil Wright, “Britten and Documentary,” The Musical Times 104 (November 1963): 779–80. 22. Copies of the teachers’ notes can be found in the British Film Institute (BFI) Special Collections: “Teachers’ Notes for ‘Instruments of the Orchestra’ (Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell) by Benjamin Britten,” in Technique of Film Music Collection, Items 2–6; and in the National Archives, INF6/380, Instruments of the Orchestra, 1946. 23. National Archives Minute Paper 81/312 [n.d.], ED121/548. A letter from Jacquetta Hawkes to Mr. Gibbs Smith, October 8, 1948, suggests that even at this later stage, the supplementary materials for Instruments of the Orchestra had not yet been made (ED121/ 559). 24. For example, see Harold C. Hind, The Orchestra and Its Instruments (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1936); Percy Scholes, Everybody’s Guide to Radio Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926); Stewart MacPherson, Music and Its Appreciation; or, The Foundations of True Listening (London: Joseph Williams, 1910), 136–47. 25. “Report on School Music Broadcasts,” 1941–42, BBC WAC, R16/438/2, Education, General, Schools Programmes, Music, File 2, 1941–42. 26. Edward Morgan, “Recollections of a Collaboration: Natalia Sats and Sergei Prokofiev,” Three Oranges Journal 12 (November 2006), 10. Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf was available on record in Britain from 1939. Philip Miller, “Quarterly Record-List,” Musical Quarterly 25, no. 4 (October 1939): 528–33. 27. Concern about the shortage of specialist music teachers was raised in both the Norwood Report and the McNair Report. Noel Hale, Education for Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 213, 217–20. 28. Britten to Basil Wright (April 1, 1946), in Mitchell, Reed, and Cooke, Letters from a Life, 3: 171; see also the reference to “Note of a Meeting held in Mr Slater’s Room, M.O.I. at 5.30 p.m. on March 8, 1946 to discuss details of the C.F.U. Film ‘Orchestra,’ ” III: 174. For Sargent’s involvement in the Brains Trust, see Charles Reid, Malcolm Sargent (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973), 309–31. 29. Hans Keller, “A Film Analysis,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 61 (Spring 1947): 30–31. 30. “Teachers’ Notes.” 31. MoE, untitled and undated draft, National Archives, ED121/547. The school leaving age was raised from fourteen to fifteen in April 1947—two years later than initially planned, due to shortages of teachers and facilities. S. J. Curtis, History of Education in Great Britain (London: University Tutorial Press, 1953), 382. 32. Curtis, History of Education, 386. Whether it was in fact such a “great” achievement or a begrudging Tory concession that ultimately protected elitist

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interests remains a contentious subject. The arguments for and against each of these perspectives are recounted in Brian Simon, Education and the Social Order: British Education Since 1944, 2nd ed. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999), 73–91. 33. David Kynaston, Austerity Britain: 1945–1951 (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 152. For a more extended discussion of grammar and technical schools, see chapter 6. 34. For a recent critique of this trend, see Laura Carter, “ ‘Experimental’ Secondary Modern Education in Britain, 1948–1958,” Cultural and Social History 13, no. 1 (2016): 23–41. 35. Central Advisory Council for Education (England), Clarke Report: School and Life (London: Central Advisory Council for Education (England), 1947), 11, http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/clarke1947/clarke 1947.html. 36. Harry Hendrick, “Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: An Interpretative Survey, 1800 to the Present,” in Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, ed. James Allison and Alan Prout (London: Falmer Press, 1997), 49. For the growing interest in psychology, see Brian Foss, War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity in Britain, 1939–1945 (New Haven. CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 65–67; Denise Riley, War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (London: Virago Press, 1983). 37. Hale, Education for Music, 8. 38. The Education of the Adolescent, cited in Curtis, History of Education, 349. 39. Committee of the Secondary School Examinations Council, Norwood Report: Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools (London: Board of Education, 1943), 69, http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/norwood /norwood1943.html. 40. Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig argue that British children consequently expected to play a more active role in war than previous generations ever had, a trend reflected in children’s wartime literature. Cadogan and Craig, Women and Children First: The Fiction of Two World Wars (London: Victor Gollancz, 1978), 213. 41. Historians have debated the relationship between evacuation and the 1944 Education Act. Some argue that evacuation, by making the public more aware of the diversity of living standards, played a crucial role in the advancement of the social welfare state; others suggest that it ultimately encouraged the entrenchment of conservative opinion. Roy Lowe, Education and the Second World War: Studies in Schooling and Social Change (London: Falmer, 1992), 4–8. 42. Lowe, Education and the Second World War, 9. Hendrick provides a useful summary of changes to educational provision during World War Two in Child Welfare: England 1872–1928 (London: Routledge, 1994), 194–207. 43. Foss, War Paint, 68. 44. Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (London: Polity Press, 2001), 29. 45. Picture Post 18, no. 1 (January 1943), 3.

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46. Central Advisory Council for Education (England), Clarke Report, 49. 47. Central Advisory Council for Education (England), Clarke Report, 82. 48. Wiebe, Britten’s Unquiet Pasts, 2. 49. Hale, Education for Music, 8. 50. T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), 108. 51. Committee to Consider the Supply, Recruitment and Training of Teachers and Youth Leaders, McNair Report: Teachers and Youth Leaders (London: Board of Education, 1944), available at http://www.educationengland.org.uk /documents /mcnair/mcnair1944.html. 52. W. H. Mellers, “Towards a Musical Academy,” Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review 10, no. 1 (June 1941): 5. 53. This phrase was in general circulation during the interwar period. For instance, see the title of chapter 1 in C. E. M. Joad, Diogenes; or, The Future of Leisure (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1928); and Aldous Huxley’s 1932 essay titled the same, reproduced in James Sexton, ed., Aldous Huxley’s Hearst Essays (New York and London: Garland, 1994), 99–100. 54. Stewart Macpherson, The Musical Education of the Child: Some Thoughts and Suggestions for Teachers, Parents and Schools (London: Joseph Williams, 1915), 17–18. 55. Mary Agnes Langdale, writing for the Catholic magazine the Crucible (1908); cited in Macpherson, 24. 56. Percy A. Scholes, “Appreciation of Music,” in The Oxford Companion to Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 47. 57. Hale, Education for Music, 8. 58. David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 251. 59. Hale, Education for Music 17. A similar argument about the need to “correct taste” was made by T. S. Eliot in “The Function of Criticism” (1923), in Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975). 60. Hale, Education for Music, 17. 61. Adrian Boult, cited in Dr. W. G. Whittaker, “The Place of Music in Education,” Report of the Fourteenth Annual Conference of Educational Associations Held at the University College, London, January 1926, 366. 62. Stephanie Pitts, A Century of Change in Music Education: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Practice in British Secondary School Music (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 44. 63. Gordon Cox, Living Music in Schools, 1923–1999 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 1. 64. Although the report focused exclusively on secondary education, its recommendation that music be compulsory for lower forms was taken to imply that music should also be compulsory for the duration of primary school. Herbert Wiseman, “The Future of Music in Education,” Tempo 11 (June 1945): 9–10. 65. Committee of the Secondary School Examinations Council, Norwood Report, 69.

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66. John Horton, “Mr. Palmer’s Memorandum,” September 16, 1943, BBC WAC, R16/438/3, Education, General, Schools Programmes–Music, File 3, 1943. 67. Leo Kestenberg and Arthur Mendel, “Music Education Goes Its Own Way,” The Musical Quarterly 25, no. 4 (October 1, 1939): 445. 68. Scholes, “Appreciation of Music,” 43. 69. Walford Davies, cited in Gordon Cox, Living Music in Schools 1923– 1999 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 34. 70. Kestenberg and Mendel, “Music Education,” 445. 71. Arts Enquiry, The Factual Film, 105. 72. Rachael Low, The History of British Film 1929–1939: Documentary and Educational Films of the 1930s (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1997), 40. 73. Low, The History of British Film 1929–1939, 40. 74. Commission on Educational and Cultural Films, The Film in National Life (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1932), 58–69. 75. Arts Enquiry, The Factual Film, 115. Despite this attitude, the potential for using film, particularly documentary, for official ends had been recognized early on by the Department of Overseas Trade and the Travel and Industrial Development Association, which provided a source of patronage for documentary filmmakers, initially under the auspices of Empire Marketing Board (EMB). The EMB was replaced by the General Post Office Film Unit in 1933. 76. Curtis, History of Education in Great Britain, 390. 77. Joan Yates to Mrs. J. Hawkes, February 11, 1946, National Archives, ED121/548, Correspondence with Ministry of Information Visual Units Committee. 78. Arts Enquiry, The Factual Film, 117. 79. Ivor Brown, “A Plan for the Arts,” in Homes, Towns and Countryside: A Practical Plan for Britain, ed. Gilbert McAllister and Elizabeth Glen (London: Batsford, 1945), 141–42. 80. Commission on Educational and Cultural Films, The Film in National Life, 68. 81. Mathieson, cited in Cox, Living Music in Schools, 16. 82. Weight, “ ‘Building a New British Culture’: The Arts Centre Movement, 1945–53,” in The Right to Belong: Citizenship and National Identity in Britain, ed. Richard Weight and Abigail Beach (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), 164. 83. Aldous Huxley, “Pleasures,” in Aldous Huxley Complete Essays, vol. I, 1920–1925, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 356. 84. John Grierson describes the political forces behind the movement in his preface to Paul Rotha, Documentary Film, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 16–17. 85. Dobson, cited in Rotha, 15. For a broader critique of how documentarists imagined that film might encourage the general public to play a more active role in British society, see Lara Feigel, Literature, Cinema and Politics, 1930–1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 17–62. 86. W. H. Auden, “Psychology and Art To-Day,” in The Arts To-Day, ed. Geoffrey Grigson (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1935), 18–19. Britten

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and Auden’s relationship also had its roots in this era: following their initial connection while working on Coal Face, they collaborated on several GPO Film Unit productions, including God’s Chillun (1935), Night Mail (1936), and The Way to the Sea (1936). The partnership subsequently inspired a significant number of radio, theater, and concert productions, the most notable including Our Hunting Fathers (1936) and The Ascent of F6 (1937). As is well known, by the end of the decade, Auden had become completely disillusioned with such lofty ideals. 87. Rotha, Documentary Film, 26. 88. Rotha, Documentary Film, 27. 89. An article by John Huntley records that, prior to this, Instruments of the Orchestra had been entered for the September 1946 Cannes Film Festival as one of the Crown Film Unit’s education films. “British Film Music and World Markets,” Sight and Sound 15, no. 60 (Winter 1946/1947): 135. 90. Richard Ford, Children in the Cinema (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939), 197. See also Paul Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 166. 91. Bentley to Sargent, January 8, 1946. See also Muir Mathieson, “Music for the Crown,” Hollywood Quarterly 3, no. 3 (April 1948): 325; and Thomas F. Cohen, “Music, Science and Education Film in Post-war Britain,” in Music and Sound in Documentary Film, ed. Holly Rogers (New York: Routledge, 2015), 76. 92. C. A. Maitland to C. Bussey, November 1, 1946, National Archives, INF12/97, Production of COI Shorts and Features, “Instruments of the Orchestra.” 93. W. R. Richardson to B. C. Sendall, October 22, 1946, INF12/97. 94. Central Office of Information (COI), Budget, October 21, 1946, ED121/547. 95. Mr. Bussey to Mr. Watson, January 9, 1948, INF12/97. 96. Mitchell and Reed, Letters from a Life, 2: 1289–90. 97. A few weeks after the world premiere, Britten himself delivered the commentary in a performance by the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Mitchell, Reed, and Cooke, Letters from a Life, 3: 245–53. 98. There were only three years in which it was not played: 1960, 1961, and 1979. Performances are listed in the BBC Proms Archive: http://www.bbc .co.uk/programmes/articles/3SsklRvCSPvfHr13wgz6HCJ/proms-performance -archive. 99. Columbia D.X. 1307, 1308, and 1309. John Huntley, “ ‘Instruments of the Orchestra’: An Account of an Educational Film,” Music in Education 120–21 (March–April 1947), 8. 100. MoE, draft of letter to Local Education Authorities, National Archives, ED121/549. Arrangements for distribution and loan of Ministry of Education visual units. 101. Ministry of Education, “Memorandum on the Distribution of Visual Material for Experimental Use,” November 16, 1946, National Archives, ED121/549. See also Huntley, “ ‘Instruments of the Orchestra,’ ” 8. 102. Ministry of Education, “Memorandum on the Distribution of Visual Material for Experimental Use.”

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103. The films were produced by the Realist Film Unit and released in 1950. For a discussion of these films and their relationship to Instruments of the Orchestra, see Cohen, “Music, Science and Education Film in Post-war Britain,” 74–85. 104. Keller, “A Film Analysis,” 30–31. 105. The 250th anniversary of Purcell’s death was in 1945. Britten regarded Purcell as “the last important international figure of English music.” Prior to composing The Young Person’s Guide, he had already arranged two Purcell concerts at the Wigmore Hall and another at the National Gallery, as well as composing his String Quartet No. 2 and The Holy Sonnets of John Donne in Purcell’s honor. Britten, “250th Anniversary of the Death of Henry Purcell,” in Kildea, ed., Britten on Music, 52. See also Kildea, Benjamin Britten, 260–62. 106. “Teachers’ Notes,” 1. 107. “Teachers’ Notes,” 14. 108. For a discussion of how American educators similarly sought to win a popular audience for art music by appealing to “great music’s aura of exclusivity,” see Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 202–4. 109. Muir Mathieson, “Music for Crown,” Hollywood Quarterly 3, no. 3 (April 1, 1948): 325. 110. Commission on Educational and Cultural Films, The Film in National Life: Being a Report of an Enquiry Conducted by the Commission on Educational and Cultural Films into the Service Which the Cinematograph May Render to Education and Social Progress. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1932), 58. Arts Enquiry, The Factual Film, 105. 111. Desmond Shawe-Taylor, “The Arts and Entertainment: Music,” The New Statesman and Nation, February 1, 1947, 92–93. 112. Keller, “A Film Analysis,” 30–31. 113. J. R. Williams to Jacquetta Hawkes, December 16, 1946, ED121/549. 114. Britten to Basil Wright, April 1, 1946, BFI Special Collections, BCW/5/1/1. 115. Mitchell and Reed, Letters from a Life, 2:1290. 116. Erwin Stein to K. A. Wright, December 10, 1946, BBC WAC, RCONT 1, Composer, Benjamin Britten, File 1b, 1945–50. 117. Stein to K. A. Wright. 118. Scott Goddard, “Music on Film,” Penguin Music Magazine 3 (1947): 64. 119. Keller, “A Film Analysis,” 30–31. 120. Keller, “A Film Analysis,” 30–31. 121. Imogen Holst, “Britten and the Young,” in Benjamin Britten: A Commentary on his Works from a Group of Specialists, ed. Hans Keller and Donald Mitchell (London: Rockliff, 1952), 276. 122. Contrary to what its title might suggest, the feature-film was not about music. La Symphonie, based on André Gide’s novel, told the story of a blind orphan who is taken in by a pastor. The film had won three prizes at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival, one of which was for Georges Auric’s score, which perhaps explains why it was paired with Instruments of the Orchestra. BFI Special Collections, Curzon Cinema Program, January 1947. 123. Lowe, Education in the Post-War Years, 106–7.

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Chapter 5. Outside the Ivory Tower 1. Boris Ford and Stephen Reiss, “A Letter on the Music Criticism of W. H. Mellers,” Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review 11, no. 2 (December 1942): 109. 2. Ford and Reiss, “A Letter on the Music Criticism,” 110. 3. Wilfrid Mellers, “A Reply,” Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review 11, no. 2 (December 1942): 116–24. 4. Wilfrid Mellers, Music and Society (London: Dennis Dobson, 1946), 22. 5. Mellers, “A Reply,” 119. 6. The multitude of organizations involved had been a characteristic feature of adult education from the outset: Lawrence Goldman, Dons and Workers: Oxford and Adult Education since 1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5. 7. Allen Parker, “Memorandum: From the University of Birmingham to the Advisory Committee on Adult Education,” October 1953, 1, UA22P: Extra Mural Studies 7, Cadbury Research Library. 8. To offer just one piece of evidence, in his extensive history of Britain’s “redbrick” civic universities, historian William Whyte notes that by the early 1960s, science and technology courses had seen a national increase in student numbers twice the size of humanities programs. William Whyte, Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 240. 9. For example, see: E. W. Ives, L. D. Schwarz and Diane K. Drummond, The First Civic University: Birmingham, 1880–1980, An Introductory History (Birmingham: Birmingham University Press, 2000); Thomas Kelly, For Advancement of Learning: The University of Liverpool, 1881–1981 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1981); and Whyte, Redbrick. Notable exceptions to this trend include: Goldman, Dons and Workers. and Beau Woodbury, “Progressive Ideals and the Promotion of ‘High’ Culture: Classical Music in British Adult Education, c. 1945–1965,” doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 2018. The latter notes that the historical lacuna was reinforced by the “radical narrative” that accompanied the Open University’s foundation in 1971: 26–27. 10. For example, Woodbury’s observation that “technocratic middle-class identities” could “find . . . artistic outlets” by attending arts and humanities courses is arguably framed in terms of coexistence rather than intermixing. Woodbury, “Progressive Ideals and the Promotion of ‘High’ Culture,” 295. 11. For both examples of earlier music appreciation textbooks that included historical surveys and Davies’ dismissal thereof, see chapter 3. 12. The Daily Express’s proclamation that “there is no such thing as culture in war-time” was typical: Untitled, April 13, 1940. 13. Rollo H. Myers et al., Since 1939 (London: Phoenix House, 1948), 109. This collection of essays had initially been published in 1946–47 by Longmans Green as individual booklets in the series “The Arts in Britain,” which was the brainchild of the British Council. 14. L. D. Gibbin, “Music in the World of Tomorrow,” The Musical Times 88 (August 1947): 249. 15. Heather Wiebe, Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 8. Nick Hayes

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questions how widespread this reform actually was in Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill, eds., “More Than ‘Music-While-You-Eat’? Factory and Hostel Concerts, ‘Good Culture’ and the Workers,” in “Millions Like Us”? British Culture in the Second World War (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 209–35. 16. Anne Medley, “ ‘Musical Appreciation’ and the Common Listener,” Musical Times 85 (April 1944): 105. 17. Gibbin, “Music in the World of Tomorrow,” 249. 18. Robert L. Jacobs, “The Conservatism of the Public,” The Musical Times 92 (November 1951): 506. 19. Jacobs, “The Conservatism of the Public,” 507. 20. Indeed, Adorno is probably the most famous exponent of this anxiety. His critique of music appreciation was discussed in chapter 1. See also Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 437–69. 21. Mellers, Music and Society, 19. 22. Mellers, Music and Society, 20. 23. Mellers, Music and Society, 21. 24. “Comment,” The Observer, February 17, 1946, 4. 25. Ballet seemed particularly susceptible to such critiques on account of its spectacular appeal. For another example, see A. V. Coton, A Prejudice for Ballet (London: Methuen, 1938), xiii. 26. Jacobs, “The Conservatism of the Public,” 506. 27. Eric Blom, A Musical Postbag (London: Dent, 1941), 146. 28. Blom A Musical Postbag, 155. 29. Blom A Musical Postbag, 157. 30. For the former, see W.  H. Mellers, “Towards a Musical Academy,” Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review 10, no. 1 (June 1941): 7–8. For the latter, see Mellers, Music and Society, 17. 31. D. R. Dudley, “A Survey of New Developments, 1945–1955” (The Department of Extra-mural Studies of the University of Birmingham, 1956), 3, UA31/25, Cadbury Research Library. 32. L. C. Knights, “Education for Democracy,” Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review 11, no. 3 (Spring 1943): 225. 33. Knights, “Education for Democracy,” 228. 34. Kingsley Amis, “Lone Voices: View of the ’Fifties,” Encounter, July 1960, 8. 35. Whyte, Redbrick, 227. 36. Michael Beloff coined the former term in response to the prevalence of plate-glass and concrete or steel construction methods in the new institutions: The Plateglass Universities (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968). The earlier term, which was popularized by Bruce Truscot’s Redbrick University (London: Faber, 1943), similarly reflected an architectural preference. 37. Paul Bolton, “Education: Historical Statistics,” House of Commons Library, updated November 27, 2012, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk /research-briefings/sn04252/. 38. For an account of the legislative reforms and changes in social attitude that led up to Stuart’s tour, see Bill Jones, “The University and Rural

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Community Outreach: From Cambridge Beginnings to a National System,” in Beyond the Lecture Hall: Universities and Community Engagement from the Middle Ages to the Present Day, ed. Peter Cunningham, Susan Oosthuizen, and Richard Taylor (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education, 2009), 19–30. Hosted in partnership with the Birmingham Higher Education Association, Johnson’s lecture on seventeenth-century England took place at the King Edward VI School. 39. N. J. N. Horsburgh, “Adult Education and Vocational Frustration,” Adult Education 29, no. 2 (Autumn 1956): 98. Horsburgh was a research fellow in social philosophy at the Australian National University. 40. Guy Hunter, “Vocation and Culture—A Suggestion,” Adult Education 25, no. 1 (Summer 1952): 7. 41. Dudley, “A Survey,” 3. 42. Ministry of Education, The Organisation and Finance of Adult Education in England and Wales: Report of the Ashby Committee (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1954), 57. In Birmingham’s Extra-Mural Department, 1952–54 saw a significant reduction in courses and enrolments, in response to a freeze on statutory funding; but figures for both had recovered by 1954–55. See also A. H. Halsey, Trends in British Society since 1900: A Guide to the Changing Social Structure of Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1972), 571. 43. The “problem of leisure” is discussed at length in chapter 2. 44. Dudley, “A Survey,” 19. 45. D. R. Dudley, “Annual Report of the Director of Extra-Mural Studies” (University of Birmingham, Board of Adult Education, 1949), 9, Cadbury Research Library. This view of adult education’s social role was shared by others: Robert Peers, “The Future of Adult Education,” Adult Education 25, no. 2 (Autumn 1952): 92. 46. This went hand in hand with a prevailing belief that the government had a responsibility to encourage personal growth, even beyond formal schooling: Woodbury, “Progressive Ideals and the Promotion of ‘High’ Culture,” 101–2. See also my chapter 4. 47. For example, University College, Nottingham (later the University of Nottingham) and the Victoria University of Manchester (later the University of Manchester) opened departments in 1920; the University of Liverpool followed suit in 1936. 48. Dudley, “A Survey,” 3. 49. Parker, “Memorandum,” 1. 50. For 1944–45 enrolment figures, see appendix A of Parker, “Memorandum”; for 1949–50 figures, see Dudley, “A Survey,” 21. The payment slips created for music courses suggest that the number of students who enrolled on a given course was invariably higher than the number who actually showed up. These records are filed in UA22P: Extra Mural Studies 1–6, Cadbury Research Library. Besides the number of students who enrolled (by gender) and the actual number in attendance, slips also detailed some or all of the course title, the time and place, the course duration, the tutor, the course fee, and how much the tutor was paid. 51. Parker, “Memorandum,” 3.

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52. Parker, “Memorandum,” 2. 53. Allen Parker, “Growing Pains and Growing Points in Adult Education,” May 30, 1959, 2, UA22P: Extra Mural Studies 7, Cadbury Research Library. 54. Dudley, “A Survey,” 4. 55. Lewis had previously worked for the BBC, where he had pioneered the Foundations of Music series and helped with planning the Third Programme. See David Scott, “Lewis, Sir Anthony (Carey),” Oxford Music Online. https:// www.oxfordmusiconline.com. 56. Dudley, “Annual Report,” 1949, 9. 57. Percy A. Scholes, Music: The Child and The Masterpiece (London: Oxford University Press & Humphrey Milford, 1935), 31–76. 58. For example, see: Alexander Brent-Smith, “Top-Knottery,” The Musical Times 89 (June 1948): 171–72. 59. Mellers, cited in D. R. Dudley, “Annual Report of the Director of ExtraMural Studies” (University of Birmingham, Board of Adult Education, 1958), 24, UA31/25, Cadbury Research Library. 60. Ministry of Education (1946), cited in Woodbury, “Progressive Ideals and the Promotion of ‘High’ Culture,” 101. 61. Dudley, “Annual Report,” 1949, 19. 62. Payment slips for 1948–49, UA22P: Extra-Mural Studies 1, Cadbury Research Library. 63. Dudley, “Annual Report,” 1949, 17–18. 64. Parker, “Growing Pains,” 5. 65. Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989). 66. Perkin, xii. 67. Lowe advanced these claims in his 1941 volume The Universities in Transformation (London: Sheldon Press), which was widely discussed by British educators. For example, see Knights, “Education for Democracy.” 68. Peers, “The Future of Adult Education,” 91. 69. Hunter, “Vocation and Culture,” 11. 70. Norman Fisher, “Vocational Education,” Adult Education 27, no. 1 (Summer 1954): 32. 71. For a fuller discussion, see chapter 2. 72. The most famous example of this is the “Two Cultures” debate, which is discussed in detail in chapter 6. 73. Kingsley Amis, “Letters to the Editor: Oxford on TV,” The Observer, March 27, 1960, 8. 74. Amis, “Letters to the Editor,” 8. 75. David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 76. Amis, “Lone Voices,” 8. 77. Whyte notes that, where in 1946 the government had provided around 50 percent of university income, by the early 1960s it was responsible for over 90 percent. Whyte, Redbrick, 227. 78. Knights, “Education for Democracy,” 225. The second phrase is a citation from H. C. Dent’s A New Order in English Education.

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79. Peers, “The Future of Adult Education,” 92. 80. Eric Ashby, cited in Asa Briggs, “Drawing a New Map of Learning,” in The Idea of a New University: An Experiment in Sussex, ed. David Daiches (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964), 69. 81. Parker, “Growing Pains,” 10–11. 82. Briggs, “Drawing a New Map,” 76. 83. Briggs, “Drawing a New Map,” 61. 84. Briggs, “Drawing a New Map,” 64. 85. The relationship between “quality” and “standards” was so widely discussed that, among adult educators, it became known as “The Great Debate.” See, for example, R. D. Waller, “The Great Debate,” Adult Education 25, no. 4 (Spring 1953): 250–63. 86. The relative merits of “voluntaryism” versus professionalism was a central theme in the Ashby Committee’s report. See also Parker, “Growing Pains,” 3. 87. Hunter, “Vocation and Culture,” 13–14. 88. Dudley, “A Survey,” 18. 89. Mellers, cited in Dudley, “A Survey,” 10. 90. Mellers, Music and Society, 11. 91. Mellers, “Towards a Musical Academy,” 6. 92. Mellers, “Towards a Musical Academy,” 6. 93. Mellers, “A Reply,” 118. 94. Mellers, Music and Society, 20. 95. University of Birmingham Department of Extra-Mural Studies, Session 1959–60: Music. Cadbury Archive, UA22P, Extra Mural Studies 7, Cadbury Research Library. 96. Mellers, cited in Dudley, “A Survey,” 10. 97. Details of concerts are included in the payment slips. For the 1949–50 season, see UA22P: Extra Mural Studies 2, Cadbury Research Library. 98. Of course, there were other instances where the early music focus still provided a direct complement to classroom learning. In 1950–51, for example, two “Consort of Viols” concerts were hosted—one in Wolverhampton, where a ten-part series on “The Music of the Renaissance” was also running; and another in Worcester, which complemented the ten-part course on “Elizabethan and Jacobean Music.” Payment slips for 1950–51, UA22P: Extra Mural Studies 3, Cadbury Research Library. 99 Mellers, “Towards a Musical Academy,” 7. 100. Mellers, Music and Society, 22. 101. To be clear, his perspective was somewhat different from Leavis’s fetishization of the past: he openly dismissed as “sentimental” idealizations of the Elizabethan era as a time when “music education [was] a participating activity, part and parcel of everyday life.” Instead, he argued that contemporary society had its own unique set of problems that were “not incapable of solution.” Mellers, “Towards a Musical Academy,” 4. 102. Mellers, Music and Society, 22–23. 103. Mellers, “Towards a Musical Academy,” 10. 104. D. R. Dudley, “Annual Report of the Director of Extra-Mural Studies” (University of Birmingham, Board of Adult Education, 1952), UA31/25,

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Cadbury Research Library. For a detailed overview of the summer school, see Woodbury, “Progressive Ideals and the Promotion of ‘High’ Culture,” 221–26. From 1952 onward, the establishment of an Extra-Mural Music Club enabled this summertime activity to be supplemented by an informal program of student music making throughout the year. 105. University of Birmingham Department of Extra-Mural Studies, “Fifth Annual Music Summer School at Attingham Park” (1953), UA22P: Extra Mural Studies 6. 106. Dudley, “A Survey,” 11. 107. Mellers, “A Reply,” 119. 108. Dudley, “Annual Report,” 1958, 24. 109. None of these syllabuses survive. However, the marketing spiel in the 1955–56 publicity brochure offers a general impression of the planned program of study for the Bach course: University of Birmingham Department of ExtraMural Studies, Courses in Birmingham (1955–56), 7. UA22P: Extra Mural Studies 7. 110. Birmingham’s influential Centre was founded in 1964. Its first director was Richard Hoggart. 111. D. R. Dudley, “Annual Report of the Director of Extra-Mural Studies” (University of Birmingham, Board of Adult Education, 1959), 21, UA31/25, Cadbury Research Library. 112. Mellers, “A Reply,” 120. 113. D. R. Dudley, “Annual Report of the Director of Extra-Mural Studies” (University of Birmingham, Board of Adult Education, 1960), 25, UA31/25, Cadbury Research Library. 114. Mellers, Music and Society, 22–23. 115. Mellers, Music and Society, 18. 116. Peter Franklin, “Mellers and the Middlebrow” (Music and the Middlebrow Conference, London, June 2017). Franklin was explicitly referring to Man and His Music, but the same is true of Music and Society, whose prefatory note made it clear that the volume was not for “specialists,” 11. 117. Geoffrey Bush, “A Musical Corrective,” The Highway 49 (March 1958): 142 (a review of Wilfrid Mellers, The Sonata Principle and Romanticism and the 20th Century, volumes 3 and 4 of Man and His Music: The Story of Musical Experience in the West [London: Rockliff, 1957]). 118. Dudley, “Annual Report of the Director of Extra-Mural Studies,” 25.

Chapter 6. The Avant- Garde Goes to School 1. Arthur Jacobs, “Down with School Music!” The Musical Times 105 (March 1964): 182. 2. Wilfrid Mellers, “Music for 20th-Century Children. 3: The Teenager’s World,” The Musical Times 105 (July 1964): 500. 3. Jacobs, “Down with School Music!” 182. 4. A copy of the program survives in the Henschel Collection “Music in Education,” January 25, 1964, British Library. Henze’s Wiegenlied der Mutter Gottes is more commonly translated as Lullaby of the Blessed Virgin.

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5. Jacobs, “Down with School Music!” 182. 6. “Modern Music for Young People to Perform,” The Times, December 11, 1961, 5. 7. Jacobs, “Down with School Music!” 182. 8. Kingsdale Comprehensive opened in 1958 under the auspices of the London County Council. 9. George Self and David Bedford, “Down with School Music!” The Musical Times 105 (May 1964): 362. 10. For example, see Robert Hewison, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War 1945–60 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981). 11. H. Lowery, “Music and Liberal Studies; or, Challenges in Musical Education,” in Music in Education, ed. Willis Grant (London: Butterworths, 1963), 1. 12. Philip Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and Their Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 187. 13. Dai Griffiths, “On Grammar Schoolboy Music” (1995), in Music, Culture and Society: A Reader, ed. Derek Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 143–45. 14. Hadow, cited in Percy A. Scholes, Learning to Listen by Means of the Gramophone: A Course in the Appreciation of Music for Use in Schools (London: The Gramophone Education Department, 1921), xi. 15. Alan Fluck, “Invitation or Challenge?” Tempo 38 (Winter 1955): 21. 16. Peter Heyworth, “Writing for Children,” The Observer, June 19, 1966, 24. 17. Initiatives targeting amateur adult audiences included the updated monthly sheet music supplements in the Musical Times, which began featuring “go-ahead composers” in October 1961 under the auspices of the newly appointed editor Andrew Porter, and the modernizing of the BBC Proms at the hand of William Glock following his appointment as the corporation’s controller of music in 1959. For the former, see: From our music critic, “Getting Through to the Audience,” The Times, October 6, 1961, 20. For the latter, Neil Edmunds, “William Glock and the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Music Policy, 1959-73,” Contemporary British History 20, no. 2 (2006): 242. 18. Prior to this (from 1960), Birtwistle had worked as a peripatetic instrumental teacher at the same school. For Birtwistle’s teaching, see David Beard, “ ‘The Life of My Music’: What the Sketches Tell Us,” in Harrison Birtwistle Studies, ed. David Beard, Kenneth Gloag, and Nicholas Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 146; Fiona Maddocks, Harrison Birtwistle: Wild Tracks—A Conversation Diary with Fiona Maddocks (London: Faber and Faber, 2014), 85–94. For Crosse and Bennett’s work on the BBC’s Making Music series, see Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism, 216–17. 19. Angus Wilson, cited in Hewison, In Anger, 181. 20. Fluck, “Invitation or Challenge?” 21. The emphasis is original. 21. Peter Maxwell Davies, “Composing Music for School Use,” Making Music, Summer 1961, 8. 22. John C. G. Waterhouse, “Peter Maxwell Davies and His Public Image,” The Listener, May 7, 1964, 773.

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23. Paul Griffiths, Peter Maxwell Davies (London: Robson Books, 1982), 16. 24. Peter Maxwell Davies, “In Classes Where They Sing and Play,” Times Educational Supplement, February 10, 1961, sec. 245–46, 245. 25. Prior to Davies’s appointment, the position had been held by Herbert Byard, who had continued to Bristol University; Lionel Nutley, who had gone on to become the music adviser for Cumberland; and William Lugg, who had taken over as director of music at the International School of Geneva. Cirencester Grammar School Music Club Program, “Recital,” December 8, 1960, BBC WAC, T32/993/1. 26. Roy Lowe, Education in the Post-War Years: A Social History (London: Routledge, 1988), 107–8. 27. Nesta Roberts, “The Art of Normality,” The Guardian, March 25, 1961, 5. 28. For a detailed account of the extracurricular activities on offer at the school, see Roberts, 5. 29. Stephanie Pitts, A Century of Change in Music Education: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Practice in British Secondary School Music (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 41. 30. “Recital.” A survey carried out in 1958 found that around 80 percent of instrumental tuition was on stringed instruments. Pauline Adams, “Post-War Developments in Music Education: An Investigation of Music Education Policy and Practice, as Implemented within Three Local Education Authorities during the Period, 1944–1988,” doctoral thesis, Institute of Education, University of London, 2013, 131. This trend has its roots in the 1880s: Christina Bashford, “Art, Commerce and Artisanship: Violin Culture in Britain, c. 1880–1920,” in The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800–1930, ed. Christina Bashford and Roberta Montemorra Marvin (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016), 178–99. Davies, “Composing Music for School Use,” 7. 31. Davies, “In Classes,” 245. 32. Peter Maxwell Davies, “Record Sleeve Note,” October 1963, Argo SRG 5327. 33. Davies, “In Classes,” 245. 34. Peter Maxwell Davies, “Letter to Hans Keller,” January 1, 1960, BBC WAC, RCONT 1 (Peter) Maxwell Davies, Contributors-Artists, File 1, 1959– 62. The German word means “premiere.” 35. Davies, “In Classes,” 245. 36. Davies, “Record Sleeve Note.” 37. Colin Mason, “Record Guide,” Tempo 68 (Spring 1964): 40–41. 38. Richard McGregor, “Peter Maxwell Davies’s Sources,” in Peter Maxwell Davies Studies, ed. Kenneth Gloag and Nicholas Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 153, 243. 39. This may have been known to the composer from Richard Terry’s A Medieval Carol Book: The Melodies Chiefly from MMS. In the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1932) or the same’s Two Hundred Folk Carols (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1933), both of which include a setting of the text. 40. “Modern Music for Young People to Perform,” 5.

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41. Davies, “In Classes,” 245. 42. Davies, “Composing Music for School Use,” 8. See also Heather Wiebe, Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 34. 43. Michael T. Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9. 44. Peter Maxwell Davies, cited in Murray Schafer, “British Composers in Interview” (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 173. 45. To offer two earlier examples, Anton Webern’s use of counterpoint was inspired by his study of early Flemish composers; meanwhile, studies of Purcell inspired Elizabeth Lutyens’s move to serialism. Kathryn Bailey, The TwelveNote Music of Anton Webern: Old Forms in a New Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 148; Laurel Parsons, “Early Music and the Ambivalent Origins of Elisabeth Lutyens’s Modernism,” in British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960, ed. Matthew Riley (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 269–92. 46. Davies, cited in Schafer, “British Composers in Interview,” 178. 47. Peter Maxwell Davies, Composer’s Portrait (BBC broadcast). Transcribed in Nicholas Jones, ed., Peter Maxwell Davies, Selected Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 53–55. 48. Davies, “Composing Music for School Use,” 8. P.H., “Maxwell Davies,” The Observer, December 17, 1961, 20. 49. Robert Henderson, “Peter Maxwell Davies,” The Musical Times 102 (October 1961): 625. The plainchants are taken from the Liber Usualis: McGregor, “Peter Maxwell Davies’s Sources,” 156, 243. 50. From the transcript of Two Composers—Two Worlds, BBC WAC, T32/993/1, 10. 51. Schafer, “British Composers in Interview,” 175. 52. Peter Maxwell Davies, “O Magnum Mysterium” (n.d.), British Library. For an overview of the British Library collection and compositional procedures often used by the composer, see Richard McGregor, “The Maxwell Davies Sketch Material in the British Library,” Tempo, no. 196 (April 1996): 9–19. For a more detailed discussion of Davies’s neo-medieval approach, see Schafer, “British Composers in Interview,” 173–76. 53. “Allan Wicks in an Organ Recital,” November 30, 1960, BBC WAC, T32/993/1. 54. Draft Sequence Sheet for Two Composers, December 1961, BBC WAC, T32/993/1, 7. 55. Peter Maxwell Davies, “Problems of a British Composer Today,” The Listener, October 8, 1959, 564. This article derived from the script for a broadcast talk, in which Hans Keller also had a hand: Keller, Memo: Peter Maxwell Davies, September 14, 1959. BBC WAC, RCONT 1 (Peter) Maxwell Davies, Contributors-Artists, File 1, 1959–62. 56. “[Untitled],” The Guardian, June 18, 1962, 7. 57. Davies, “Composing Music for School Use,” 8. 58. Henderson, “Peter Maxwell Davies,” 626.

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59. Guy Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 60. Snow had sketched an earlier version of his ideas in a 1956 New Statesman article: Ortolano, 52–53. 61. The government’s generous funding for universities’ technological programs, as I discussed in chapter 5, is evidence of this. David Edgerton explores the significance of declinist narratives in “Science and the Nation: Towards New Histories of Twentieth-Century Britain,” Historical Research 78, no. 199 (February 2005): 96–112. See also his Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy, 12–16. 62. Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), x. 63. F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (London: Chatto & Windus, 1933), 1. 64. C. P. Snow, “Challenge to the Intellect,” Times Literary Supplement, August 15, 1958, 464. 65. Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy, 62. 66. In many regards, the “two cultures” controversy was an apex in the longrunning debate about liberal versus vocational educational models described in chapter 5. 67. Florence Horsburgh, cited in Lowe, Education in the Post-War Years, 88. 68. David Eccles, cited in Lowe, Education in the Post-War Years, 114. 69. Edward Boyle, cited in “Reform of the Century,” The Times Educational Supplement, July 18, 1958, 1177. 70. Ministry of Education Pamphlet No. 27, “Music in Schools” (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1960), 1. 71. Erik Chisholm, “Creative Education in Music,” in Grant, Music in Education, 195. This was the Society’s first symposium dedicated to music. 72. Here, Read used “holocaust” in its broadest sense to mean widespread destruction, rather than in reference to the mass murder of Jews during World War Two. Herbert Read, Education through Art, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 168. See also Herbert Read, The Redemption of the Robot: My Encounter with Education through Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 144–72. 73. Spender, The Struggle of the Modern, x. 74. Mellers touches on the relationship between modern music and class in Mellers, ““Music for 20th-Century Children. 3: The Teenager’s World,” 500–501. For the imagined benefits of the public’s familiarity with Britten’s music, see Fluck, “Invitation or Challenge?” 75. Wilfrid Mellers, “Music for 20th-Century Children. 1: Magic and Ritual in the Junior School,” The Musical Times 105 (May 1964): 342. 76. For example, see Stewart Macpherson, “The Question of Musical Appreciation,” The Musical Times 72 (October 1931): 912. 77. (From our music critic), “The Young Person’s Musical Appetite,” The Times, December 15, 1961, 16. See also Mabel Chamberlain, “Class and Group Activities,” Music Teacher & Piano Student, February 1961, 77.

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78. Stephanie Pitts, A Century of Change in Music Education: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Practice in British Secondary School Music (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 41. This period also saw an expansion in extra-curricular music making, perhaps the most notable example of which was the foundation of the National Youth Orchestra in 1948. 79. Historian Roy Lowe records a 20 percent increase in real wages between 1951 and 1958: Lowe, Education in the Post-War Years, 75. 80. Davies, “In Classes,” 245. 81. Davies, “Record Sleeve Note.” 82. Other notable examples include his Four Tonal Canons (unpublished, 1959), which he reported as having had “a disastrous first airing at an afternoon concert for the old folk, when everything went horribly wrong, and the players were very put off,” and Five Klee Pictures (original unpublished version, 1959): Davies, “Composing Music for School Use,” 8. 83. Gordon Cox, Living Music in Schools, 1923–1999 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 36–42. 84. Davies, “In Classes,” 245. 85. Schafer, “British Composers in Interview,” 181. See also the composer’s defense of his methods in “Where Our Colleges Fail,” The Times Educational Supplement, February 10, 1967, 463. He offered a similar critique and solution during a radio discussion program: “New Comment: Indeterminacy,” January 25, 1962, BBC WAC, Radio Talk Scripts Pre 1970: New–B–New–C T358. Davies was far from unique in struggling to balance his use of improvisatory techniques with the lingering nineteenth-century ideal of the composer as creative genius: see also Beate Kutschke, “New ‘Old Leftist’ Aesthetics in the West German Contemporary Music Scene: The Cantata Streik Bei Mannesmann (1973),” in Red Strains: Music and Communism Outside the Communist Bloc, ed. Robert Adlington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 263–64. Even when composers advocated creative freedom for performers, they often paradoxically retained a tight control on how their scores were realized: for example, see Martin Iddon, “The Haus That Karlheinz Built: Composition, Authority, and Control at the 1968 Darmstadt Ferienkurse,” Musical Quarterly 87: 1 (2004): 87–118. 86. “Accomplished Music of Pupils,” The Times, December 8, 1961, 17. 87. “Accomplished Music of Pupils,” 17. Around 1961, underlying concerns were compounded by the so-called “Zak Affair,” when the BBC broadcast a spoof composition by Hans Keller and Susan Bradshaw that reportedly left the general public with the impression that critics had been fooled by it: “Editorial,” The Musical Times 102 (October 1961): 618. 88. From our music critic, “The False Mystery of Composition,” The Times, June 22, 1962, 22. 89. The full draft score is held in the British Library, London, Music E Add.71419. 90. Peter Maxwell Davies, Instrumental Sonatas from O Magnum Mysterium (London: Schott, 1962), 10. 91. “Trial by Jury,” Making Music 53 (Autumn 1963): 9. 92. “Trial by Jury,” 8. Bloodworth worked at Tiffin School in Surrey, which provided the instrumentalists for the first London performance.

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93. “Trial by Jury,” 8. 94. “Trial by Jury,” 8. 95. The 1963 recording complicated matters further: highlighting the collaborative element of the compositional process, the composer reported in the record sleeve note that the work “gradually took shape during rehearsal” and that the recorded instrumentation was different from that of the published version: Davies, “Record Sleeve Note.” 96. Schafer, “British Composers in Interview,” 182. 97. Davies, “Problems of a British Composer Today,” 563. 98. Central Advisory Council for Education (England), “The Newsom Report: Half Our Future” (London, 1963), http://www.educationengland.org .uk/documents/newsom/newsom1963.html. 99. Davies, “In Classes,” 245. 100. Davies, “Record Sleeve Note.” 101. Griffiths, Peter Maxwell Davies, 136. 102. J. H. Elliot, “Music in a Cathedral,” The Guardian, October 27, 1960, 48. 103. Davies, Instrumental Sonatas. 104. “Trial by Jury,” 8. 105. Davies, “Record Sleeve Note.” 106. “Allan Wicks in an Organ Recital.” 107. The Manchester concert opened with the Davies, which was followed by Bach’s Musical Offering arranged for string sextet, bassoon, flute, and harpsichord, and finally Schoenberg’s Variations on a Recitative for organ: Elliot, “Music in a Cathedral,” 9. With joint sponsorship from the London County Council and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the London program consisted entirely of music by living composers: Iain Hamilton’s Fanfare and Variants and Malcolm Williamson’s Resurgence du feu pasqual preceded O Magnum Mysterium, and the concert ended with Messiaen’s Cinq rechants and Dieu parmi nous. The exclusively contemporary focus was deemed “sufficiently rare as to justify an introduction”: program note writer Felix Aprahamian could recall only six such concerts in London in the past three decades. “Allan Wicks in an Organ Recital.” Carolyn J. Smith mistakenly lists the London performance as the premier: Peter Maxwell Davies: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 48. 108. Cirencester Grammar School Music Club Program, “Recital.” 109. P.H., “Maxwell Davies,” 20. 110. Schafer, “British Composers in Interview,” 180. 111. “Trial by Jury,” 9. 112. A.R., “Analytical Notes and First Reviews: Choral and Song: Davies,” The Gramophone, November 1963, 231. 113. Desmond Shawe-Taylor, “Quarterly Review: The Gramophone and the Voice,” The Gramophone, April 1964, 455. 114. Edward Greenfield, “New Gramophone Recordings,” The Guardian, January 6, 1964, 7. 115. E. EE, “Davis: Magnum Mysterium,” The Monthly Letter: A Critical Review of Recent Recordings 32, no. 11 (November 1963): 10–11. 116. Greenfield, “New Gramophone Recordings,” 7.

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117. “Recital.” 118. “Trial by Jury,” 9. 119. Noel Long, Listening to Music in Secondary Schools (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1963), 1–2. 120. (From our music critic), “Worst and Best of Musical Fashion,” The Times, February 2, 1962, 13. 121. Frank Hayward, Letter to Mr. Wheldon, February 27, 1961. T32/993/1. 122. Davies, “In Classes,” 245. 123. The composer’s own narrative has also dominated biographies. Mike Seabrook, for example, reports that it was “a favourite theme of his, that young people, without a gradually accumulated stock of prejudices, find far less difficulty than their elders in assimilating his music. Max is at pains to emphasize that young people enjoy his music, and his former pupils enthusiastically endorse his view”: Mike Seabrook, Max: The Life and Music of Peter Maxwell Davies (London: Victor Gollancz, 1994), 59–60. 124. P.H., “Maxwell Davies,” 20. 125. For example, see Henderson, “Peter Maxwell Davies,” 624–26. 126. “Modern Music for Young People to Perform.” 127. Elliot, “Music in a Cathedral.” 128. Self and Bedford, “Down with School Music!” 362. 129. Colin Mason similarly described the composer’s idiom as “not at all that advanced”: Mason, “Record Guide,” 40–41. 130. Lowe, Education in the Post-War Years, 106–7. 131. Davies, “In Classes,” 425. 132. Waterhouse, “Peter Maxwell Davies and his Public Image,” 771. 133. Heyworth, “Writing for Children,” 24. 134. Benjamin Britten, “On Receiving the First Aspen Award (1964),” in Britten on Music, ed. Paul Kildea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 255–63. 135. Andrew Porter, “Some New British Composers,” The Musical Quarterly 51, no. 1 (January 1965): 20. The emphasis is original. 136. (From our music critic), “Getting Through to the Audience,” The Times, October 6, 1961, 20. 137. Among those to pioneer more creative pedagogy in the mid-1960s were David Bedford and George Self at Holloway Boys’ School and Brian Dennis at Shoreditch School: Adams, “Post-War Developments in Music Education,” 75–80. From the 1970s, John Paynter became highly influential in this regard: Gordon Cox, Living Music in Schools 1923–1999 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 84–90.

Epilogue 1. BBC, “The BBC Proms, What’s It All About?,” https://www.bbc.co.uk /programmes/articles/2kSNxH9Cj9PT62ZzTnvWpYZ/the-bbc-proms-whats-it -all-about. 2. “Most unusual” according to the picture board advertising the prom in the Royal Albert Hall, shown in: Ellen Lavelle, An Interview with DJ Switch &

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Gabriel Prokofiev, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnRV70qQauo&t=157s. The performance can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJzVjN _KLZQ&t=713s. 3. BBC, “Ten Pieces: Concerto for Turntable (5th Movement) by Gabriel Prokofiev,” https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1SxcJK8NnWbKkVK ZQCt95m5/concerto-for-turntables-and-orchestra-5th-movement-by-gabriel -prokofiev. 4. Harry Blake, “Hoodies Fail to Embrace Classical Music,” The Guardian, July 27, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2007/jul /27/hoodiesfailtoembraceclassi; Jeffrey Ouper, “From Machine to Instrument” (DMus, Arizona State University, 2014), 42. 5. Edward Seckerson, “Proms 30 & 31: National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain / Jurowski / Nigel Kennedy,” Independent, August 7, 2011, https://www .independent .co .uk /arts -entertainment /classical /reviews /proms -30 -amp -31 -national -youth -orchestra -of -great -britain -jurowski -nigel -kennedy -2333460 .html. 6. Gabriel Prokofiev, Programme Note, reproduced in Ouper, “From Machine to Instrument,” 155–58; quote at 158. 7. Prokofiev, cited in Chris Caspell, “Proms 2011—National Youth Orchestra / Vladimir Jurowski DJ Switch Benjamin Grosvenor,” Classical Source, August 6, 2011, 2019, http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_prom _review.php?id=9436. 8. Ivan Hewett, “BBC Proms 2011: Gabriel Prokofiev Interview for ‘Concerto for Turntable and Orchestra,” The Telegraph, August 3, 2011, https:// www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/proms/8679983/BBC-Proms-2011-Gabriel -Prokofiev-interview-for-Concerto-for-Turntables-and-Orchestra.html. 9. Blake, “Hoodies Fail to Embrace Classical Music.” 10. Alex Constandinou, descriptive text for YouTube video “bbc proms 2011 concerto for turntables and orchestra performed by dj switch (full),” published August 19, 2011 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJzVjN_KLZQ&t =713s. 11. For Italian futurism, see Harriet Boyd, “Futurism in Venice, Crisis and ‘la musica dell’avvenire,’ 1924,” Journal of California Italian Studies 4, no. 1. 12. Hewett, “BBC Proms 2011.” 13. Jonathan McAloon, “Are Young People Scared of the Proms—or the Audience?” The Telegraph, August 19, 2015, https://www.telegraph.co.uk /music/classical-music/are-young-people-scared-of-the-proms/. 14. Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 4–5. 15. Alex Nagshineh, “Review: DJ Yoda & The Herigate Orchestra,” Bondafide, March 24, 2010, http://www.bonafidemag.com/review-dj-yoda-the -heritage-orchestra/. 16. Philip Hateley, “Gabriel Prokofiev and Nonclassical: The Development of a New Musical Ecosystem, 2004–2014,” (MA thesis, University of Keele, 2018), 46.

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17. John Seabrook, Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing and the Marketing of Culture (London: Methuen, 2000), 12. The same term has been used rather differently by Peter Swirski: to defend a body of twentieth-century genre fiction by writers who drew inspiration from highbrow literature. Peter Swirski, From Lowbrow to Nobrow (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005). 18. Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club, 325–27. In one of the seminal texts on cultural hierarches, Lawrence W. Levine made a similar argument about the persistence of old values—although in much stronger terms, reflecting his earlier historical moment: Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 249–56. For the rise of omnivory, see: Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern, “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (October 1996): 900–907. 19. PRS Foundation, “Chimera Productions,” https://prsfoundation.com /grantees/chimera-productions/. 20. Hewett, “BBC Proms 2011.” For the middlebrow’s association with kitsch, see Tom Perrin, The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction: Popular US Novels, Modernism, and Form, 1945–75 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 5–6. 21. Gabriel Prokofiev, “Programme Note,” cited in Ouper, “From Machine to Instrument,” 157–58. 22. Christopher Chowrimootoo, “The Timely Traditions of Albert Herring,” The Opera Quarterly 25, 4 (2012): 409. 23. Hewett, “BBC Proms 2011.” 24. Ouper, “From Machine to Instrument,” 44. 25. Ivan Hewett, “BBC Proms 2011: Prom 30 & 31: National Youth Orchestra, Nigel Kennedy, Albert Hall, review,” The Telegraph, August 9, 2011, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/proms/8690676/BBC-Proms -2011-Prom-30-and-31-National-Youth-Orchestra-Nigel-Kennedy-Albert-Hall -review.html. 26. Nagshineh, “Review.” 27. Comments posted by Dullbedsitblogger, Tibi Micusca, and JaeChongMusic under Constandinou, “bbc proms 2011.” For an account of how another subgenre of hip hop was presented as highbrow on the grounds of its imagined authenticity, see Justin Williams, “The Construction of Jazz Rap as High Art in Hip-Hop Music,” The Journal of Musicology 27, no. 4 (Fall, 2010): 435–59. 28. Comment posted by Федя Тео under Constandinou. 29. Comment posted by Gas Station under Constandinou. 30. Comment posted by 1984ekul under BBC, “BBC Proms 2011: Gabriel Prokofiev—Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra,” published August 6, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38atRejUORM. 31. Christopher Chowrimootoo, “Sentimentality under Erasure in Peter Grimes,” in Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 30–62. 32. Erica Jeal, “Prom 30: NYO / Jurowski / DJ Switch / Grosvenor,” Guardian, August 7, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/aug/07/prom -30-jurowski-switch-review.

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33. Comments posted by David A. and 1984ekul under BBC. 34. Will Benton, “Disappointing Musical Texture Stunt,” August 4, 2011, http://blog.willbenton.com/tag/music/. 35. Comment posted by Jennifer86010 under BBC. 36. For example, Richard Taruskin, “Which Way Is Up?,” keynote paper at Music and the Middlebrow Conference, London, 2017. 37. To offer just a few examples, chosen because the word features in the title: Claire Coleman, “Middlebrow and Proud: Experts Say It’s Time to Embrace Middle-of-the-road Tastes (So You Can Stop Pretending to Love Opera!),” Mail on Sunday, August 1, 2011, https://www.dailymail.co.uk /femail/article-2020891/Middlebrow-proud-Experts-say-time-embrace-middle -road-tastes-stop-pretending-love-opera.html; Meredith Jaffe, “Middlebrow? What’s So Shameful about Writing a Book and Hoping It Sells?” The Guardian, November  5, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/05 /middlebrow-whats-so-shameful-about-writing-a-book-and-hoping-it-sells-well; Simon Reynolds, “Stuck in the Middle with You: Between Pop and Pretension,” The Guardian, February 6, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/music /musicblog/2009/feb/06/simon-reynolds-animal-collective. 38. “Foreword to Gabriel Prokofiev’s Concerto Score,” reproduced in Ouper, “From Machine to Instrument,” 156–57. 39. Mark Katz, Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 177–78. 40. Robert Hewison provides a detailed account of economic and social justifications for the arts under New Labour (1997–2010) in “The Many Not Just the Few,” Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain (London: Verso, 2014), 63–92. For evidence that instrumentalizing the arts for social ends continues to provoke concerns about “a debasement of the currency,” see François Matarasso, Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts (Stroud, UK: Comedia, 1997). 41. Foucault borrowed the phrase from Nietzsche: The Will to Power, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2006). 42. Seabrook, Nobrow, 28.

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Index

Addinsell, Richard, 143 Adorno, Theodor: on the NBC Music Appreciation Hour, 13, 15, 80–81 adult education: at the BBC, 81–82; liberal education and, 138–39, 146, 156–61, 170–71; postwar expansion of, 137, 138; 145–48, 157; universities and, 137–38, 145–48; vocational training and, 147–48, 156–61 Aldeburgh Festival, 101, 140 Annan, Noël: “intellectual aristocracy,” 4 anti-intellectualism, 17, 19, 82 Argo Records, 200 Arnold, Matthew, 18, 55, 215, 217 Auden, W. H.: on “parable-art,” 126 audiences: in America, 37, 38, 39–40, 57–58, 230n33; aspirational, 11, 17, 90, 137, 144, 146; behavior of, 2, 74–75; “conservative” tastes of, 137, 141–44; marketing to, 44–47, 66; music educators’ relationship with, 24–25, 59, 90–91, 152, 169–70; role within high culture of, 119, 134, 140–41, 165–66; wartime growth of, 27, 140 autonomy: and the marketing of highbrow culture, 59, 66; music analysis as a means of demonstrating, 14, 70, 80; of the musical work as a middlebrow ideal, 3, 9–10, 30, 59, 64, 70, 80–81 avant-garde: for amateurs, 257n17; British perceptions of the European, 206;

humanistic appeal of the, 176, 191, 203, 207; impact on music pedagogy, 5, 28, 31, 207; as middlebrow, 12, 175, 179; the public’s relationship with the, 173, 175, 177, 192, 207; rise in Britain of the musical, 6, 175–76; social responsibilities of the, 175–76, 206; for young people, 175–76, 179–85, 191–99 Bach, J. S.: highbrow appeal of, 43, 87, 121, 150, 204, 209; pedagogic approaches to 60–61, 77–78, 80, 136, 150, 167; popularity of, 43, 57, 62–63, 136, 150, 170 Bartók, Béla, 101 BBC: attempts to balance education and entertainment at the, 81–83; Children’s Hour, 46, 240n64; as a middlebrow institution, 11, 90; modernism and the, 71, 74; music education broadcasts for children, 69, 103, 176; music programming at the, 73–74, 75, 91–92; music talks policy, 69, 81, 88, 89; paternalism of the, 70–72, 95; Royal Charter, 70; talks policy, 78, 79, 81–82, 88, 95. See also Proms; radio BBC-TV: children’s concerts on, 1–3 Bedford, David, 174, 205, 263n137 Beethoven, Ludwig van: in music pedagogy, 41, 59–63, 80, 87, 136, 150, 163–64, 167; popularity with audiences of, 43,

287

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Index

Beethoven, Ludwig van (continued) 59–61, 141. Works: Symphony No. 5, 59–63, 141; Moonlight Sonata, 143 Bernstein, Leonard: Young People’s Concerts, 1–4 Birtwistle, Harrison, 12, 175, 206, 257n18 Board of Education, 21, 124. See also Ministry of Education Borland, John, 45, 242n102 Boult, Adrian, 34, 43, 121, 242n102 Brains Trust, 109 Brief Encounter, 142–43 British musical avant-garde. See avant-garde Britten, Benjamin: as an establishment figure, 102, 130, 134; Crown / General Post Office Film Unit and, 100; on Purcell, 250n105; popularity with concert audiences of, 101, 134, 191; on the social responsibilities of the artist, 206; W. H. Auden and, 101, 248n86. Works: Friday Afternoons, 101; Let’s Make an Opera, 179; The Little Sweep, 101; Noye’s Fludde, 101, 179; Paul Bunyan, 101; Peter Grimes, 103, 134; Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell: commentary of, 104, 109, 128, 249n97; composition of, 102–3; concert performances of, 128, 249n97; pedagogic methods in, 102–10, 129–32, 134–35; reception of, 132–34; as a vehicle for music appreciation, 103–4, 129–30, 134–35 Burton, Humphrey, 1 Butler Education Act, 99, 113, 124, 174, 188–89 Cheltenham Festival, 140 childhood: changing ideas about, 20–21; consumerism and, 53–54; postwar reconstruction and, 21, 117; as a training for citizenship, 21, 27, 88, 99, 114–18, 120–21, 134–35 Chisholm, Eric, 189–90 cinemas: ticket prices in, 56; as venues for music appreciation classes, 42, 127, 132. See also film citizenship: breadth of outlook as fundamental to, 29, 88, 158; consumerism and, 50; cultural participation and, 27, 29, 101–2, 134–35, 190; education for, 84, 102, 114–18, 139; 144–45, 146, 158–59, 207; independent thought and, 72, 84, 87–88, 116–17, 139, 158–59,

188; mass culture and, 91, 93, 125–26; social responsibilities of, 21; taste and, 4, 21, 29, 84, 91–93, 119–21, 123. See also childhood; radio commercialism: and art music, 9, 13, 34, 54, 55–58, 63, 213; in the leisure industry, 51–54; mass culture and, 3, 14, 26, 37, 40, 53–54, 141–42; as a measure of cultural worth, 15, 30, 34, 52–53; middlebrow culture and, 2, 13, 15–16, 66–67, 168; modernist resistance to, 9, 16, 52–53, 58–59, 66 concert industry: BBC and the, 74; British versus American, 39–40, 57–58; cinematic representations of the, 130–32; critiques of the, 141–43; financing of the, 40, 55–58, 141; public taste and the, 12–13, 140–41, 175; wartime boom in the, 99, 140 concerts for children: as an American phenomenon 2, 26, 38–42, 65–66, 229n27; audience participation in, 41, 60–62; on BBC radio, 45–46, 103; charitable status of, 55; demographic of audience at, 48, 57, 232n64; Ernest Read’s, 140; marketing of, 44–47, 56; partnerships with schools, 44–45; programming of, 39, 41, 43–44, 57; rapid expansion of, 47–48. See also Bernstein, Leonard; Mayer, Robert Columbia Broadcasting System, 1 Copland, Aaron: The Second Hurricane, 101 Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, 101, 227n89 cultural hierarchy: citizenship and, 120; end of, 11, 30–31, 211; independent thought and, 27, 83, 88, 97; in music appreciation, 3, 16, 83; pluralism and, 212–17; processes of negotiating, 30, 217–18; recent scholarship on, 4–5, 10–11, 211. See also “highbrow”; “middlebrow”; “lowbrow” Crown Film Unit, 100, 102, 126, 128, 132 cultivation, 18, 70, 83–84, 88, 95, 118, 146 Curwen, John, 121 Damrosch, Walter: critical reception of, 41, 65; pedagogic methods of, 41–2, 80; Symphony Concerts for Young People and, 41, 58, 229n23. See also NBC Music Appreciation Hour Dangerous Moonlight, 131, 143 Dartington International Summer School, 140

Index | Davies, Peter Maxwell: Cirencester years, 176–79, 206; on communicating with the audience, 198–99; on composing for children, 180, 184; on improvisation, 196; on the medieval period, 180, 184; on popular music, 199; on school music, 177–79. Works: O Magnum Mysterium: accessibility of, 176, 180, 193–98; composers’ views on, 204; critical reception of, 202–5; medievalism in, 179–85, 200; performances of, 173, 201–2; performers’ views on, 198; Prolation, 177; St Michael, 177 Davies, Walford: broadcasting career, 68–69, 95–96, 123, 236n5; broadcasting style, 78–79; embrace of radio as an educational medium, 68–69, 76; on “good” listening, 70, 72, 76; investment in “highbrow” ideals, 70, 79, 80–81, 96; on modern music, 87; on musical form, 79, 81, 123; on radio’s cultural impact, 74, 238n31; on romantic music, 87; pedagogic methods of, 77– 82, 89–91, 196, 239n52; purported rejection of the “highbrow,” 72; relationship with his audience, 90–91; use of musical analysis, 76–80; on the value of independent thought, 90–92. Broadcast series: Everyman’s Music, 236n6; Keyboard Talks, 236n6; Progress of Music, 236n6. See also Music and the Ordinary Listener declinist narratives: as a recurrent trope in Western modernity, 5; science and, 186 democracy: culture’s role in, 4, 19, 29, 71, 146, 221n23; consumerism and, 50; education’s role in, 139, 144–45, 158–59; freedom of thought and, 89; musicality and, 121; as a political ideal, 7, 10, 18–19, 70, 156. See also radio Dobson, Quentin, 126 documentary film: in cinemas, 127; commercial viability of, 127–28; music and, 125–27, 130–32; as a palliative to Hollywood, 126, 131–32; as a vehicle for cultural participation, 126, 129–32, 134 Durant, Henry, 49, 50–51, 53 Edinburgh Festival, 140 education. See Butler Education Act; leisure; music appreciation; schools; universities Eliot, Charles William, 83 Eliot, T. S., 118 emotions: documentary film and the, 131–32; impact of technology on the,

289

190; intellect versus, 17, 63, 83–87, 93; mass culture and the, 3, 82, 95, 120–21, 141–42, 160; modern music and the, 86–87, 143, 191; in music appreciation, 63, 64, 83–86, 95, 96, 120–21, 162, 166; romantic music and the, 86–87, 122, 126, 131, 137, 142–43, 160 Fantasia, 135 feeling. See emotions film: British government’s use of, 124–25, 248n75; as an educational tool, 124–27; Hollywood, 126, 131, 142; lowbrow appeal of, 50, 91, 125–26; musical romanticism and, 125–26, 131–32, 142–43; music appreciation and, 100, 125–27, 131–32, 135. See also cinemas; documentary film Fordism, 34, 51–52. See also industrialization Forster, E. M.: Howard’s End, 61 General Post Office Unit. See Crown Film Unit Goehr, Alexander: Virtutes, 173 gramophone: listening habits and the, 26, 75, 192–93; marketing of classical music and, 57, 96; music appreciation and the, 44, 68, 80, 93, 96, 103, 119, 196 Greene, Graham, 187 Grove, George, 60–61 Hadow, Henry, 86–87, 114–15, 175, 242n102; and The Education of the Adolescent, 115, 122 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 41, 43, 80, 163–64, 219n5 Henze, Hans Werner: Slumber Songs of the Mother of God, 173 “highbrow”: anxieties of contamination, 63, 75–76, 118, 141–42; complicity in the marketplace, 54, 59, 66; critiques of the, 14, 19–20, 52, 136–37, 244n52; ideology of the, 3 9, 15, 30, 52; relationship to mass culture, 14–15, 48, 63, 66, 211; views on musical romanticism, 43 hip hop, 209, 213–14; as an art, 211, 216–17 Holst, Gustav, 44, 75 Holst, Imogen, 133 Huxley, Aldous: on leisure, 51–52, 125 industrialization: British modernity and, 7, 35, 49, 145–46, 221n23; celebration

290 |

Index

industrialization (continued) of, 186; critiques of, 51–52, 186–87; impact on education, 188–89; impact on humankind, 18–19, 117, 186, 189–90. See also leisure Jacobs, Arthur: on school music, 172–74 Joad, Cyril: on education, 17–18; on leisure, 50, 51 Joyce, James, 187 Keller, Hans: on Britten, 109, 129, 132, 133 Kestenberg, Leo: on listening, 122–23 Leavis, F. R.: contribution to the “Two Cultures” debate, 185, 186–88; on industrialization 186–87; on the middlebrow, 16; on public education, 137, 190–91 Leavis, Q. D.: on the middlebrow, 16, 225n57 leisure: Americanization of, 19, 26, 35–38, 50–54, 65, 225n60; as an antidote to industrialized society, 117–18, 191; commercialization of, 51–54; education for, 17–18, 20, 48, 114–18, 199; as escapism, 19, 27, 50–51, 95, 125–26, 131; mechanization of, 51–52; “the problem of,” 36, 49–54, 100, 146; the state’s responsibility for, 27, 100, 146–47, 199, 253n46 Lessing, Doris, 187 liberal education: aims of, 17–18, 56, 87, 90, 116, 146; grammar schools and, 113, 135, 177–78, 188; modern schools and, 20, 114–18; the musical avantgarde and, 176, 192–93, 207; music appreciation as, 20, 22, 119–20, 139, 162; relationship to vocational education, 156–61; universities and, 20, 138, 139, 146, 157–60 liberalism: breadth of outlook as a value of, 29, 84, 87; as a cultural project, 70–71; middlebrow culture and, 29, 83–84, 88; music pedagogy and, 84–85, 87; as a political project, 23, 70, 225n68; selfcultivation and, 83–84, 88; significance of independent thought in, 83–84; societal improvement and, 83–84; transatlantic nature of, 228n13; Victorian legacy of, 29, 83–84, 88 Lincoln Center, 1 listening: as an acquired skill, 134; “active,” 13, 119, 122–23, 135, 176, 199; as an

art, 3; concert hall discourse and, 66, 74–75, 130–31; as a form of cultural participation, 102, 118–19, 123, 126, 134, 199; habit of “good,” 70, 87, 93, 97, 127; historically informed, 139, 161–62; at home, 70, 73–76; “intelligent,” 13, 118–23, 130; middlebrow, 97; “passive,” 26, 118, 122, 192; relationship of performing to, 42, 123, 176, 192, 199; as a site of cultural negotiation, 92; “structural,” 81, 239n59; technologized, 75. See also radio Local Education Authority (LEA): partnerships formed with, 128, 147; progressive ethos of London’s, 44–45; social provision through, 114; support for educational films 124, 128 London Symphony Orchestra, 103, 130 “lowbrow”: American connotations of the, 36–37, commercialism, 3; inertia, 118; public preference for the 55; relationship to “highbrow,” 3, 12, 14, 16, 30, 36, 211 MacPherson, Stewart, 149: on music education, 73, 84; resistance to sound reproduction technologies, 236n2 mass culture: as an American phenomenon, 26, 36; easy appeal of, 14, 22–23, 36, 91; escapist appeal of, 82, 91, 102, 141; “good” taste and, 14, 92–93; “passive” consumption of, 14, 26, 118, 127, 192; postmodernism and, 30; proximity to high culture, 15–16, 63, 66, 91. See also emotions Mathieson, Muir: on educational films, 100, 125, 132, 244n6 Manchester Group, 173, 174–75 Mayer, Robert: on financing orchestral concerts, 55–56, 58–59; on music and leisure, 53, 55, 56; musical proclivities of, 38, 43; Youth and Music, 140 McNair Report, 119, 122 Mellers, Wilfrid: on the canon, 136, 150, 152, 154, 163–67; on children’s music, 191; on the concert industry, 136–37, 141–42; on the emotions, 141, 162; on historically-informed listening, 97, 139, 161–67; on modern music, 143–44, 165–66, 191; on musical romanticism, 142, 144; on music education, 119, 144, 148–49, 162, 165; pedagogic practice of, 148–49, 152–67; on professionalism, 165–66; relationship with music appreciation, 137, 149–50, 167–70

Index | MGM, 127 “middlebrow”: as an aesthetic category, 12; America and the, 1–2, 10, 30, 38–40, 57–58, 80, 220nn12–14, 223nn38,40, 225n66, 250n108; anti-intellectualism and, 17, 19, 72, 85–86; art versus commerce and the, 37, 55–58, 66–67; audiences, 11–12, 90; the avant-garde and the, 175, 179; BBC as, 11, 90; breadth of taste and, 29, 91; children and the, 20–21; citizenship and, 3, 29; commitment to musical autonomy and, 3, 9–10, 30, 59, 64, 70, 80–81; compromise and the, 11, 133, 180, 184, 198, 205, 207, 212–13; concert programming and, 2, 38, 44, 137, 141; cultural elevation and the, 11, 13, 17; critiques of the, 10, 80, 168; decline of, 30–31, 211–12, 216–18; eclecticism of the, 41, 44, 91, 104, 179, 202; education and the, 17–18, 137; embrace of “highbrow” ideologies, 9–10, 16, 83, 92–93, 97; fraught relationship with romanticism, 86–87, 122–23, 142–43, 162; fuzzy boundaries of the, 16; independent thought and the, 71–72, 83; liberalism and the, 29, 83–84, 88; as a mode of reception, 12, 14, 97; modernism and the, 15, 19, 86–87; modernity and the, 16–20, 25–26, 29, 98; music appreciation’s contribution to the, 13–15, 29; musical style and the, 12, 25, 28, 29; musicology and the, 4, 10–11, 31, 167–71; paternalism, 4, 24–25, 55, 71, 94, 135, 215; pluralism and the, 212–18; popular music and the, 10, 91–92, 119–20, 122; as a term of derision, 10, 15–16; the term’s origins, 9; as a threat to critics’ authority, 92; as a transatlantic phenomenon, 4, 35–38; rejection of the “highbrow,” 72, 85–86; the role of public taste in, 12, 16, 24–25, 140–41, 169–70; self-cultivation and the, 70, 84, 95, 146; self-disavowal and the, 81, 168–69; Victorian roots of the, 4, 11, 20, 22, 35, 83–88, 145–46; Western art music canon and, 2, 38, 44, 74, 79, 80, 88, 137, 141, 150, 163; young people and the, 20–21. See also cultural hierarchy Mill, John Stuart, 84 Ministry of Education, 99, 188–89. See also Board of Education Ministry of Information: educational films and the, 100, 124, 128

291

Minow, Newton, 1 modernism: as an arbiter of value, 8, 71; British ambivalence towards, 19, 207; British musical, 7–11; complicity in the marketplace, 16, 54, 59, 66; as a reigning paradigm in academia, 7–9, 31; relationship to modernity, 8, 186–87, 222nn30,32. See also avant-garde; “middlebrow” modernity: BBC and, 72–73; Britain’s experience of 7, 10, 16–20, 29, 72–73; progress narratives and, 5. See also “middlebrow”; modernism Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: highbrow appeal of, 87, 219n5; pedagogic approaches to, 80, 163–64, 167, 169; popularity of, 43, 136, 137, 141, 150 170 Music and the Ordinary Listener: audience demographic of, 76, 93–95; durability of, 69, 236n6; pedagogic method in, 77– 82, 89–91; promotion of independent thought in, 89–91; reception of, 93–95, 96; repertoire used in, 80, 87; the series’ aims, 68–70, 76–77, 91 music appreciation: as an academic exercise, 13, 84–85, 168; as an active process, 118–19, 122, 123, 134, 176, 199; for adults, 68, 76–82, 94–95, 144, 148–56; for children, 1–3, 38–48, 103–9, 120, 123–25, 191–204; citizenship and, 71–72, 84–93, 99; as a commercial enterprise, 24–25, 55–58, 96, 140–41, 170; in concert halls, 1–3, 41–44, 59–64; critiques of, 15–16, 40, 80–81, 149–50; demographic of audience for, 151–52; education versus entertainment in, 40, 42–43, 58–59, 82, 125, 127; familiarity as an aid to, 57, 79, 172, 175, 179, 191–92, 203, 260n74; on film, 100, 125–27, 131–32, 135; historical knowledge as a vehicle for, 160–65; historical surveys and, 80, 139, 152, 161, 162–63, 169; instruments of the orchestra within, 2, 41, 99, 103–9, 130, 134; liberal education and, 20, 22, 119–20, 139, 162; manuals, 24–25, 68, 80, 103; melodic recognition and, 44, 63, 65, 79, 192; musicology and, 4, 31, 167–71; musical style and, 87, 161, 162; natural ability and, 121; pioneers of, 3, 21–23, 149; the place of biographies in, 80–81, 130, 150; the place of modern music in, 86–87 151, 175; the place of popular music in, 91–92, 119–20, 122,

292 |

Index

music appreciation (continued) 160; as preparation for adulthood, 44, 56, 102, 119–20; public attitudes towards, 3, 54, 93–95; on radio, 68–70, 119; relationship of musical performance to, 120, 123, 198–202; in schools, 3, 39, 118–27, 129, 148; self-study and, 24–25, 83–84, 88–89; sound quality and, 2, 74, 132; the status of musical form in, 63, 79–81, 85; as a transatlantic phenomenon, 4, 33, 35–42; the use of music analysis in, 77–80, 110, 135, 162–63; the use of symphony orchestras in, 2, 65–66, 103–4, 128, 229n27; words to music in, 60–63, 78, 80. See also emotions; gramophone music education: composition training and, 123, 193–94; effeminate associations of, 73, 84; governmental policy on, 21, 45, 115, 119, 122; “natural” ability and 121; peripheral place in schools’ curricula of, 121–22; postwar reconstruction and, 102, 117, 190; at school, 113–23; transatlantic dialogue on, 33–37 Music Supervisors’ National Conference, 33 NBC Music Appreciation Hour, 13, 15, 80, New York Philharmonic Orchestra, 1 “nobrow,” 211, 265n17 Norwood Report, 115, 122 Paderewski, Ignacy Jan, 143 Pal, George: Tubby the Tuba, 103 participatory culture, 27, 102, 122, 135. See also listening Peacock, Michael, 2 Petrassi, Goffredo, 177 Philharmonia Orchestra, 140 pluralism, 30–31, 71, 211–12, 216–18. See also “nobrow” popular music: broadcasting of, 75–76, 92; 92–93, 120, 141–42, 199; cultural status of, 10, 11, 120, 211–12, 217, 218; easy appeal of, 14, 22, 63, 75, 141–42. See also music appreciation Pound, Ezra, 187 Powell, Anthony, 187 Priestley, J. B.: on the middlebrow, 11, 14, 91 professionalization: of the art music world, 84–85, 89, 119, 140, 166; of British society, 27–28, 138, 154–56; impact on education, 145–46, 156–61, 165–66, 240n77; of music criticism, 89, 92

programming: of concerts, 13, 141, 143; of concerts for children, 39, 41, 43–44, 57. See also Proms program notes, 85–86, 149, 203 Prokofiev, Gabriel: on classical music, 210, 212 Prokofiev, Serge: Peter and the Wolf, 103 Proms: as a middlebrow institution, 12, 13, 43, 208, 212; foundation of the 34, 208, 224n43; programming of the, 12, 13, 43, 128, 208, 210–11; ticket pricing of the 56 Protestantism, 83 Purcell, Henry, 102, 103, 130, 132, 165, 250n105, 259n45 radio: accidental listeners and, 75; citizenship and, 70, 72, 73, 88, 91; commodification of art music on the, 75; demographic of audience for, 240n64; the domestic environment and, 26, 73–76, 77, 97; as an educational medium, 81–82, 88; group listening and, 79, 96; intimacy and, 79; listening habits and, 26, 70, 73–76, 192–93; mixing of highbrow and lowbrow on the, 26, 75–76, 89, 91; modernism on the, 69, 71; music appreciation and, 68–70, 119; popularization of the, 69, 74; as a social service, 70–71, 81, 88, 98; sound quality on the, 74; as a vehicle for democratizing highbrow culture, 68, 73–74, 97, 179. See also BBC Read, Herbert: on education, 190 Red Shoes, The, 131 Reith, John: paternalist attitudes of, 70–71, 88, 91; on music, 79 romanticism: emotional appeal of, 86, 122, 137, 143; in Hollywood film scores, 131–32, 142–43; impact on music education, 122; prevalent place within Britain’s concert industry, 27, 43, 142, 149, 160, 168, 175, 180–81; as a vehicle for escapism, 125–26, 131, 137, 142; Rotha, Paul, 126 Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, 140 Sargent, Malcolm: as conductor of Instruments of the Orchestra, 103, 104, 130–31; as conductor of the Robert Mayer Concerts for Children, 43, 44, 57, 60–65; as schoolteacher, 231n47 Scholes, Percy: as autodidact, 22, 89; as BBC music critic, 69, 89; on “every man

Index | his own critic,” 89; on modern music, 175; Music and the Ordinary Listener and, 89; on music appreciation, 3, 85–86, 92, 120, 123, 149–50, 175; The Oxford Companion to Music, 3, 24–25, 89; philosophy of music education, 34–35, 83, 85–86, 89 School Music Review, 39 schools: comprehensive, 174, 188; elementary, 57, 113, 116; grammar, 57, 113, 115, 135, 177–78, 205, 207; provision of meals in, 114; secondary modern, 114, 123, 125, 135, 174, 205; technical, 113, 174, 188–89; World War Two’s impact on, 116. See also liberal education; specialization; vocationalism Schubert, Franz, 43, 163, 219n5 Self, George, 174, 205 Sieveking, Lance, 69, 71 Slater, Montagu, 103 Snow, C. P., 185, 186–88, 190, 191 specialization: critiques of, 19, 157, 188; impact on arts education of, 139, 169, 171, 189–90; relationship to liberal education, 156–61; of schooling, 188; as a trend in British society, 19, 156–57; of universities, 138, 156–61. See also vocationalism Stainer, John, 85 Stokowski, Leopold, 40, 58 Stravinsky, Igor, 3, 44, 168, 209 taste: conservative nature of public, 141, 143, 150; education’s role in elevating, 13, 90, 115, 119, 120, 199; enlarging the horizons of public, 27, 139, 149, 161, 168; formation of, 48, 90, 149; “good,” 14, 21, 90, 99, 125, 162; initiatives to cultivate public, 28, 38, 48, 81, 148. See also citizenship

293

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Il’yich: popularity of, 137, 141; romanticism and, 43, 142; The Sleeping Beauty, 142 television: music education on, 1–3 Todds, Walter, 2 Tovey, Donald, 9, 149 “Two Cultures” debate, 185–91; origins of the, 157–59, 260n66; schooling and the, 188–91 universities: plate glass, 145, 158, 159, 252n36; postwar expansion of British, 144–46; prevalence of scientific subjects in, 138, 157–58; redbrick, 145–47, 158; status of extra-mural initiatives within, 145–48, 150, 152. See also adult education; liberal education; specialization; vocationalism utilitarianism, 157, 180–81, 207 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 8, 44, 101, 121 Victorians: legacy of, 17, 18, 23, 29, 83–85, 87–88, 145–46; liberal reform and the, 35, 70, 72, 84; paternalist outlook of the, 70–71, 237n21 vocationalism: fraught relationship with liberal education, 156–61; limits of, 118, 157, 188; in schools, 114–15, 118; in universities, 138, 145–46, 156–57, 159–61. See also specialization Warsaw Concerto, 131, 143 Whittaker, W. G., 22, 85–86 Wicks, Allan, 28, 200, 201 Wood, Henry, 13, 34, 39, 56, 208, 224n43 Woolf, Virginia, 15, 215, 224n55 Wright, Basil, 100 Young, Filson: on listening, 54, 75, 82

California Studies in 20th- Century Music Richard Taruskin, General Editor 1. Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater, by W. Anthony Sheppard 2. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, by Simon Morrison 3. German Modernism: Music and the Arts, by Walter Frisch 4. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification, by Amy Beal 5. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality, by David E. Schneider 6. Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism, by Mary E. Davis 7. Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier 8. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Art Music, by Klára Móricz 9. Brecht at the Opera, by Joy H. Calico 10. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media, by Michael Long 11. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, by Benjamin Piekut 12. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981, by Eric Drott 13. Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, by Leta E. Miller 14. Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West, by Beth E. Levy 15. In Search of a Concrete Music, by Pierre Schaeffer, translated by Christine North and John Dack 16. The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, by Leslie A. Sprout 17. Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe, by Joy H. Calico 18. Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier 19. Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968, by Lisa Jakelski 20. Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay across Disciplines, by Pierre Schaeffer, translated by Christine North and John Dack 21. Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono’s Selected Writings and Interviews, edited by Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi 22. The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930–1951, edited by E. Randol Schoenberg, with an introduction by Adrian Daub

23. Stravinsky in the Americas: Transatlantic Tours and Domestic Excursions from Wartime Los Angeles (1925–1945), by H. Colin Slim, with a foreword by Richard Taruskin 24. Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide, by Christopher Chowrimootoo 25. A Wayfaring Stranger: Ernst von Dohnányi’s American Years, 1949–1960, by Veronika Kusz, translated by Viktória Kusz and Brian McLean 26. In Stravinsky’s Orbit: Responses to Modernism in Russian Paris, by Klára Móricz 27. Zoltán Kodály’s World of Music, by Anna Dalos 28. Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music, by Lisa Cooper Vest 29. Magician of Sound: Ravel and the Aesthetics of Illusion, by Jessie Fillerup 30. The Art of Appreciation: Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain, by Kate Guthrie

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