Music of the Raj : a Social and Economic History of Music in Late

RAJPR 9/25/2000 5:21 PM Page i Music of the Raj RAJPR 9/25/2000 5:21 PM Page ii RAJPR 9/25/2000 5:21 PM Page iii Music of the Raj A Social and Economic History of Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Society I W 1 RAJPR 9/25/2000 5:21 PM Page iv 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing woldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Ian Woodfield The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN ––– Typeset by Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd., Guildford & Kings Lynn RAJPR 9/25/2000 5:21 PM Page v To Thérèse RAJPR 9/25/2000 5:21 PM Page vi RAJPR 9/25/2000 5:21 PM Page vii Acknowledgements During the ten years that I have worked on this book, I have benefited greatly from the advice and assistance of colleagues and friends, who have suggested many new lines of thought and who have drawn my attention to sources that I would otherwise have missed. I should like to thank Gerry Farrell, Richard Widdess, Martin Stokes, Simon McVeigh, Jan Smaczny, and Donald Burrows. An especial debt of gratitude is owed to my long-time colleague Cyril Ehrlich, who was influential in my transi- tion from the field of late medieval organology to that of the social history of music in the eighteenth century. A symposium entitled ‘The History of North Indian Music: th–th Centuries’, held at the Rotterdam Conservatorium on – December under the efficient organization of Joep Bor and Jane Harvey, provided a chance to hear presentations and thought-provoking discussions from a wide range of scholars working on the history of Indian music. The major collections of Anglo-Indian letters discussed in this study are in the National Library of Wales and the British Library. I acknowledge with gratitude the assistance of staff there. Above all the India Office Library at Blackfriars was my haunt during vacations for many years, and the efficiency of its reader services was much appreciated. Major Williams of the National Trust arranged for me to visit Powis Castle to look at a collection of music belonging to the Clive family. Other assistance was provided by the Gloucestershire Record Office, the Somerset Record Office, the Newspaper Library at Colindale, the Victoria and Albert Museum. From the inception of this project, Bruce Phillips at Oxford University Press was most supportive and encouraging, and generous financial support has been provided by the Queen’s University of Belfast. I. W. RAJPR 9/25/2000 5:21 PM Page viii RAJPR 9/25/2000 5:21 PM Page ix Preface ‘Of all kinds of musical activity the least documented is, understandably, domestic music-making. At its extent and its social spread in England during the eighteenth century we can only guess.’ Thus Stanley Sadie in Music in Britain: The Eighteenth Cen- tury.1 Notwithstanding the lack of first-hand accounts by amateur musicians, it is accepted that the growth of recreational music-making among the middle classes, now an economically powerful group, influenced profoundly the development of musical culture in eighteenth-century England. Newly affluent and with leisure time to devote to their hobby, musical amateurs influenced almost every aspect of professional and commercial musical activity: they provided the audiences for the emerging traditions of the public concert; their need for tuition increased the opportunities for music teachers, stimulating a great influx of Italian and German musicians; their appetite for new keyboard instruments led to the emergence of London as the leading centre for the technical development and the commercial retail of pianofortes; and their demand for new repertoire stimulated a phenomenal increase in the publication of easy domestic music. The growing vitality of musical life in London is easy to document, but the effects in the shires were as obvious: musical clubs and societies flourished; circulating music libraries were set up; ‘coun- try’ music retailers established businesses, acting as agents for the major London firms; systems of transport for the carriage of instruments were put in place; and an informal annual calendar of special events, effectively music festivals, came into being. All of this activity has left a wealth of evidence, mainly ‘public’ or ‘semi-public’ in character, in the form of newspaper advertisements, publishers’ catalogues, minute books of societies, and subscription lists. Material of this kind is certainly of great value in tracing the development of middle-class musical tastes. Analysis of the repertoire of provincial music societies, for example, illustrates an undiminished enthusiasm for Corelli throughout the century, and the successive phases in the reception of Haydn’s music can be followed through in newspaper advertisements of the programmes of leading concert organizations. The musical preferences of more specific groups are also amenable to study. In a recent account of the rise of ‘ancient’ music, lists of patrons of one of the main societies devoted to its promotion have been shown to reflect the influence of class and political allegiance on support 1 H. Diack Johnstone and R. Fiske, eds., Music in Britain: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, ), . RAJPR 9/25/2000 5:21 PM Page x x | Preface for the movement.2 Names on the subscription lists of individual publications appear to be useful in determining such matters as the geographical range, the gen- der balance, the social status, and even the professional occupations of the sub- scribers to particular genres. Yet useful though all these sources undoubtedly are, they relate chiefly to the ‘public’ activities of amateur musicians, as concert-goers, musical society members, and purchasers of instruments and music. It has proved much harder to gather first- hand information on the activities central to their ‘private’ musical lives, such as the music lesson, the informal domestic soirée, and the formal concert party. One result of the failure to locate accounts of these kinds of domestic music-making has been a significant imbalance in the quantity and quality of evidence relating to ‘public’ and ‘private’ musical activity, and it is arguable that this has adversely affected dis- cussion of eighteenth-century English musical culture. The problem is especially acute in provincial musical history. The growth of musical life in many towns, from Bath to Belfast, has been ably documented, using the evidence of newspapers which, during the course of the century, devoted an increasing amount of space to subscription series, individual benefit concerts, charity oratorio performances, the retail trade, and disputes involving musicians.3 In addition to the newspaper evidence, the minute books and programme records of musical societies sometimes sur- vive. The weight of ‘public’ documentation is usually impressive, and yet, to counterbalance this, the evidence of the ‘private’ musical world, which may well have been of at least equal significance in both cultural and economic terms, typ- ically consists of brief allusions in letters, sometimes only one or two for the whole century. If there is only the scantiest of documentation of the private concert series, the most formal manifestation of domestic musical activity, then it is not surprising that the less structured events, the music lessons, the morning quartet parties, the after-dinner glee singing, should remain largely hidden from view. And this phe- nomenon is by no means confined to England; the lack of hard information about the domestic musical activities of wealthy Viennese patrons has made analysis of Mozart’s declining financial position in the late s very problematic. In an important study, Richard Leppert has recently attempted to fill this void.4 In seeking evidence of music-making among the English upper classes, he first exam- ined letters and diaries, but found the material disappointingly inconsequential: ‘written references to music by contemporaneous practitioners were many but almost invariably brief (of the sort, “We had some music last night”).’ During the course of his study the point is developed: ‘We can infer a good deal about amateurs’ musical tastes and talents, but for the most part we must do so without benefit of the written comments of the practitioners themselves (whether male or female), and only occasionally from their auditors. Few accounts speak in more than one or two 2 W. Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. 3 K.

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