Abstract
The year 2015 marked the thirtieth anniversary of Cyril Ehrlich’s landmark book, The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (1986). A conference was organized, and this volume of essays has resulted from it. Professor Cyril Ehrlich (1925–2004) was primarily an economic historian of Africa. In the course of the 1960s, he switched his research to music. He realized that while the social history of music had begun to receive attention, its economic history had been virtually ignored. His first book in this field was The Piano: A History (1976) in which he focused upon industrial production and the growth of a market. Ehrlich’s influence has been considerable, as evident in a series of essays published in his honor in 2000, Music and British Culture 1785–1914 (Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley, eds.). As far as music education history is concerned, David Wright’s notable social and cultural history The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (2013) is clearly influenced by Ehrlich’s work. In the Introduction, Rosemary Golding outlines the main themes under consideration. Her dilemma lies in the impossibility of describing a single ‘music profession’ because of music’s protean nature. She quotes the sociologist Julia Evetts’s writing about professions: “Most researchers have accepted definitional uncertainty and moved on” (p. 2). In this volume, the contributors positively engage with such incertitude. Rebecca Gribble’s opening chapter considers the finances, estates, and social status of musicians in the late eighteenth century. She challenges the commonly held view that musicians occupied a low social status as artisans. In fact, they could gain patronage and improve their own social status through teaching socially superior young women to play an instrument or sing. Other artisans lacked this contact. Gribble concludes that while allocating ‘artisan’ status can be helpful, in some ways the musical profession worked outside standard categories and very differently from trades or manufacturing. To illustrate the lack of homogeneity between the disparate groups that made up the music profession in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, I focus upon the closed musical world of the military explored by Helen Barlow, and the early career development of young professional musicians documented by Simon McVeigh. In the British military, the supply of army musicians came to depend upon the recruitment of working-class men and boys, many of whom were ab initio players. The defining action with regard to their professional education was the founding in 1857 of the Military Music Class that eventually became in 1887 the Royal Military School of Music at Kneller Hall. Thousands of men who entered the regimental bands as beginners owed their professional identity and status to the intervention of the military with its offer of a way into the music profession. In the young professional classically trained musicians had to make their own ways in a highly competitive environment in Edwardian London. They had to rely upon a number of networks: family connections, conservatoire teachers linked with the profession, conductors, promoters, and agents. McVeigh relates tales of struggle, sometimes desperation, and very often disillusionment within a highly competitive environment. Such experience required “dedicated patience and an unswerving determination to succeed” (p. 216). Certainly, those young musicians had a greater degree of independence than their forebears. The decline of patronage coincided with an upsurge of professional bodies, unions, and mutual societies. Three chapters deal specifically with the impact of these associations. In his chapter, dealing with professionalization and the female musician in early-Victorian Britain, David Kennerley outlines the development of The Royal Society of Musicians (RSM) that had been founded in 1738 as a “Fund for the Support of Decayed Musicians.” However, RSM refused membership to women in their own right. A group of prominent female musicians decided to establish their own parallel organization in 1839, which became the Royal Society of Female Musicians (RSFM). In 1866 the RSM eagerly accepted a merger with the RSFM, allowing women onto its membership books. But this move also enabled the RSM to take control of the RSFM’s superior financial resources. There were other stings: women were not allowed to attend or vote at any meeting or take part in the administration of the Society.
The frequent hostile relations between competing professional bodies emerge in Rosemary Golding’s focus upon the Union of Graduates in Music (UGM) and the Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM). Both were involved in a response to government plans to register secondary school teachers, including music teachers. Their joint attempt to work together in the 1890s held the promise of uniting the music profession behind a parliamentary bill. However, the UGM and the ISM were very different associations. The UGM argued for a measure of exclusiveness so that its membership was only open to those who possessed recognized university degrees or diplomas from chartered schools of music or conservatoires. By February 1894 the UGM had a membership of 368 (later increasing to 600), with the majority from Oxford or Cambridge. In contrast, the ISM boasted a membership approaching 2000, including a number without formal musical qualifications. The attempts of the two bodies to unite the music profession exposed fractures between them. The Teachers of Music Registration Bill was dropped in July 1900. Golding concludes that the ultimate failure to secure registration for music teachers “was due to the lack of recognised accreditation, as well as the problems of identifying bona fide professionals among the mass of part-time and unqualified practitioners” (p. 145). The subjects of John Mullen’s essay are music hall performers, very different socially from the previously discussed professional young musicians and school music teachers. More specifically, Mullen concentrates on their unionization. Music hall was the cheapest and most popular genre of musical entertainment in Britain at that time. The late-Victorian popular music industry was based on the concentration of capital leading to the domination of large companies and the development of a national market for entertainment. There was a general push to develop formal collective organizations to defend working conditions and to take industrial action. The year 1907 marked a turning point with strike action in London musical halls aimed at unfair employment practices. Organized by the Variety Artistes Federation (VAF), the action was considered a victory for the strikers. The VAF had maintained working conditions at an acceptable level, the employers gave concessions, and the government provided arbitration awards in the interests of industrial peace. In this review, I have selected particular chapters that have been helpful in identifying both the multiplicity of sectors and identities that characterized the profession of music and the development of professional organizations that might have helped to unite the disparate groups. There are further chapters that provide coverage of other aspects of the music profession including composers and publishers (Rowland), church musicians (Clarke), professional music critics (Watt), and women musicians (Fuller). Considering such diversity, a further concluding chapter would have strengthened the book by tying the threads more tightly together. There is much value in this study for historians of music education. It extends the work of Cyril Ehrlich and challenges us to consider the importance of economic history in tandem with social history in researching music and education. Fundamentally, the book represents, in Rebecca Gribble’s resonant phrase, a “move away from the idea of the ‘average’ musician, showing that multiple narratives exist, and all are equally as important” (pp. 26–27).