Classical music of the United Kingdom
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This article is concerned with classical music in the sense elsewhere defined, of formally composed and written music of chamber, concert and church type as distinct from popular, traditional, or folk music. The term in this sense emerged in the early 19th century, not long after the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland came into existence in 1800. Composed music in these islands can be traced in musical notation back to the 13th century, with earlier origins. It has never existed in isolation from European music, but has often developed in distinctively insular ways within an international framework. Inheriting the European classical forms of the 18th century (above all, in Britain, from the example of Handel), patronage and the academy and university establishment of musical performance and training in the United Kingdom during the 19th century saw a great expansion. Similar developments occurred in the other expanding states of Europe (including Russia) and their empires. Within this international growth the traditions of composition and performance centred in the United Kingdom, including the various cultural strands drawn from its different provinces, have continued to evolve in distinctive ways through the work of many famous composers.
The United Kingdom is host to many major orchestras, Festivals and venues. The Royal Philharmonic Society (founded 1813) and "The Proms" have presented annual music programmes of international status since the early 19th century.
[edit] Music before 1500
The earliest surviving piece of composed music in the UK is the setting of the folk song "Sumer Is Icumen In" ("Summer is a-coming in"), sometimes known as the Reading rota because the manuscript comes from Reading Abbey, although it was not necessarily written there. Its composer is anonymous, possibly W. de Wycombe, and it is estimated to date from around 1260. It is notable for its elaborate six-part structure which is virtually unique for such an early piece.
In the fourteenth century, the Franciscan friar Simon Tunsted is believed to have been one of the music theorists who influenced the "Ars Nova"—the movement which freed European music from its earlier restricted styles. He is generally credited with the authorship of "Quatuor Principalia Musicae": a treatise on musical composition.
In the fifteenth century, John Dunstaple (or Dunstable, as it is sometimes spelt) was England's most celebrated composer. Nearly all his manuscript music in England was lost during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, but some of his works have been reconstructed from copies found in continental Europe, particularly in Italy. The existence of these copies is testament to his widespread fame within Europe. He may have been the first composer to provide liturgical music with an instrumental accompaniment
John Hothby (ca. 1410–1487), was an English Carmelite monk, who travelled widely and left little composed music but wrote several theoretical treatises (eg La Calliopea legale), and is credited with introducing innovations to the mediaeval pitch system. These allowed the introduction of additional chromatic pitches into the scales (what we would think of as the black notes of the piano keyboard).
Several aspects of English medieval music led to trends throughout Europe. The treatment of thirds and sixths as consonances seems to have arisen earlier in England than elsewhere, and the practice of fauxbourdon developed in England. Also, the neumatic notation of Sarum chant eventually developed into the square-note notation still used in the Liber usualis and other compendia of Gregorian chant. The earliest evidence of choral polyphony (as opposed to solo ensemble polyphony) is from the Old Hall manuscript (1420, although most of its music was composed before 1400), where there is occasional divisi.
[edit] Music of the 16th and early 17th centuries
In the early 16th century, Henry VIII was a keen patron of music. He played various instruments himself and an inventory, taken after his death in 1547, reveals that he owned a large collection, including 78 recorders. He is sometimes credited with compositions, including the part-song Passetyme With Good Companye but, although it is likely that he learnt the rudiments of composition, no music has been unequivocally attributed to him.
Very eminent in Henry VIII's reign was John Taverner (1490-1545), organist of the College founded at Oxford by Thomas Wolsey from 1526-1530. His principal works include masses, motets and magnificats. The 16th century was the period of composition of some of Europe's greatest polyphonic choral music and, in Britain, the works of Thomas Tallis stand amongst the best. His Spem in alium is a magnificent motet for 40 independent voices—an amazing polyphonic tour-de-force which is almost without parallel. His legacy also includes the harmonised versions of the plainsong responses of the English church service, still in use by the Church of England.
In the ascendancy of the Tudor dynasty, the Laws in Wales Acts 1535-1542 effectively annexed Wales to the Kingdom of England.
During this period, music printing (technically more complex than the printing of text) became possible. Although Britain was not leading the music printing revolution, a collection of songs was published in England in 1530 and A forme of Prayers (with music) was published in Edinburgh in 1564. Elizabeth I granted the monopoly of music publishing to Tallis and his pupil William Byrd which has ensured that their works were widely distributed and have survived in various editions, but arguably limited the potential for music publishing in Britain. Byrd wrote church music and instrumental music for viols and keyboard, as well as being one of the founders of madrigal composition.
The English madrigal (based on a form of music imported from Italy) reached its peak with composers such as John Farmer, Thomas Morley, John Dowland, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Campian, and Thomas Tomkins. A collection of 29 madrigals, edited by Thomas Morley and entitled The Triumphs of Oriana was published in 1603 in honour of Queen Elizabeth.
Music would have been used in the theatre of the time, including within the plays of William Shakespeare. In addition there were masques, a form of lavish musical play where the story was communicated in song but was otherwise quite different in form to an opera .
[edit] The Civil War and Commonwealth period (1642-1660)
During the Commonwealth period conditions were hard for professional musicians: the royal court was in exile, the theatres were closed, and church music was prohibited. Many church or collegiate choirs were disbanded and their organs removed or silenced.
There was however no Puritan ban on secular music. Indeed Cromwell had the organ from Magdalen College, Oxford set up at Hampton Court Palace and employed an organist and other musicians. Musical entertainment was provided at official receptions, and at the wedding of Cromwell's daughter.
Music also flourished in domestic settings during the Commonwealth, particularly in the larger private houses. The first opera performed in Britain, promoted by Sir William Davenant, was staged at Rutland House in 1656. In smaller establishments the consort of viols became a popular form whose leading composers were John Jenkins and Matthew Locke.
Since the opportunities for large scale composition and public performance were limited, music under the Protectorate became a largely private matter.
[edit] The Restoration
This period was dominated by Pelham Humfrey and Henry Purcell. Purcell composed church music, festive odes and music for the theatre.
Christopher Simpson's work, The Division Violist, first published in 1659, was for many years the leading manual on playing the viol and on the art of extemporising "divisions to a ground", in Britain and continental Europe. A facsimile edition was reprinted by Arnold Dolmetsch in the 1950s and is still used as a reference by early music revivalists.
The diary of Samuel Pepys, himself a music lover, collector of instruments, and an amateur composer, provides a rich primary source for domestic music in the Restoration period.
[edit] Music of the 18th century
By the Acts of Union 1707, the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland voted for the Union of the two Kingdoms to form the Kingdom of Great Britain.
The leading figure in British music of the early 18th century was a naturalized Englishman, George Frideric Handel. Although he was born in Germany, he played a defining role in the music of the UK. His orchestral music (such as the Water Music, and the Music for the Royal Fireworks) and his opera, sacred drama and choral music (above all, the Messiah) virtually set the British taste in music for the next 200 years. Today, they remain among the most popular concert works; still account for significant album sales; and are widely performed by amateur ensembles as well as the top professional performers.
In the same period, John Gay wrote his best-known work, The Beggar's Opera (1728), although the music was actually written by Johann Christoph Pepusch. Thomas Arne composed a notable body of work, largely for the theatre, of which his song Rule Britannia is probably the best-known. The light opera and ballad tradition of the mid and later 18th century was continued in famous style by William Shield, Charles Dibdin and his family into the early 19th, and in the same period the 'Irish Melodies' of Thomas Moore, nationalistic in sentiment, found their way into national musical consciousness and fed the Romantic movement in music and literature.
Throughout the 18th century, and into the 19th, there existed a fashionable preference for Italian and German music, and performers, over the native British. Nonetheless there were many very accomplished British performers, both amateur and professional: among singers the names of Nancy Storace, Michael Kelly and (later) John Braham are especially prominent.
[edit] Music of the 19th century
With the Act of Union 1800 passed by both the Parliament of Great Britain and the Parliament of Ireland, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was formed, and it becomes possible to speak of classical music in the United Kingdom.
In the early 19th century, the Irish composer and virtuoso pianist John Field was highly influential in his style of playing which is thought to have been an inspiration to Schumann, Chopin and Liszt. He is credited with having invented the nocturne as a musical form. Between 1801 and 1810 Mrs Billington, the great operatic soprano, was back in England and performing at Drury Lane.
In 1813 the London Philharmonic Society was established, which played an important role in the development of musical life in the kingdom. Founders included Sir George Smart, Johann Baptist Cramer, Muzio Clementi, William Ayrton (musical director of the King's Theatre), William Shield, Henry Bishop, Thomas Attwood (composer and organist of St Paul's Cathedral, and teacher of John Goss), Johann Peter Salomon and Vincent Novello. Under their aegis an annual programme of concerts of international calibre was established. The Society was a commissioning patron of Beethoven's 9th Symphony.
Musical training was placed on a newly professional footing by the creation (1822) of the Royal Academy of Music, which received a royal charter in 1830. At its inception Dr William Crotch (composer of oratorios), and the pianist-composer Cipriani Potter (first London performer of Mozart and Beethoven concerti, who wrote 9 symphonies and 4 piano concerti) were among those attached to the staff. Through the Philharmonic Society Felix Mendelssohn seized the national musical taste in a craze which lasted for almost twenty years. The flavour of his choral works, especially Elijah and St Paul, and of Spohr's Last Judgement (Norwich 1830) and Calvary (1839) permanently influenced English taste. Furthermore, most British piano students of promise were sent to the Leipzig Conservatory established by Mendelssohn.
In the earlier part of the century the British singers Michael Kelly, Nancy Storace and John Braham were prominent and by their example sustained the international opera and oratorio works of Handel, Haydn, Mozart and their successors in the British arena. Braham, whose career thoroughly spanned the opera stage and concert platform, established a tradition in public recital which was continued by his successors down into the early 20th century. In particular he upheld the Charles Dibdin tradition of the declamatory ballad in his own compositions within the Ballad concert repertoire, and set the English standard in Handelian and florid singing.
Arias or ballads from the English opera became concert standards in recital. The period 1835-1865 saw the popularity of Michael Balfe, (Irish composer of The Bohemian Girl), the operas of John Pyke Hullah, and the earlier English operas of German-born Sir Julius Benedict (though his best-known, The Lily of Killarney, premiered in 1862). Maritana, most famous and ballad-rich of William Vincent Wallace's operas, was staged in 1845. In the same period composer and performer John Liptrot Hatton, famous for songs To Anthea and Simon the Cellarer, held public attention. The operas and ballads of Frederic Clay were performed with lasting popularity in the 1860s.
Among the greatest forces in British music mid-century was (Sir) William Sterndale Bennett, pianist, composer and conductor, an R.A.M. pupil (of Potter's), composer of five piano concerti, who for eleven years took control of the Philharmonic Society baton. Mrs Anderson and her pupil Arabella Goddard, with Franklin Taylor, were leading native mid-Victorian pianists. After the death of Jane Stirling in the 1850s, Chopin's other British pupils Lindsay Sloper and Brinley Richards taught in England. Oscar Beringer, Edward Dannreuther (Leipzig pupils of Ignaz Moscheles) and Ernst Pauer (a Chopin editor) settled in London in the 1850s. Agnes Zimmermann was Pauer's pupil. Dannreuther, who founded the London Wagner Society in 1873, was a great influence on Hubert Parry.
Native singers shared the dramatic stage with international stars in Italian and German opera, notably Clara Novello, Helen Lemmens-Sherrington, Sims Reeves and Charles Santley. After her USA tour accompanied by Benedict, Jenny Lind settled permanently in England in c1855 and continued to perform and teach.
This century saw the trend towards larger orchestras and correspondingly larger musical venues, permitting public concerts for mass audiences. The Crystal Palace concerts were inaugurated in 1855, with August Manns as the principal conductor. The Handel Triennial Festival, an older institution involving massed choirs before vast audiences, was transferred there.Covent Garden's Royal Opera House was opened in 1858, on the site of an earlier theatre; the Royal Albert Hall was built in 1878.
Orchestras which were founded in this period include the Hallé Orchestra (at Manchester under Sir Charles Hallé), the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. The rich vein of Irish musicianship was fostered through the Royal Irish Academy of Music, the Instrumental Music Club of Dublin and (later) the Royal Dublin Society, under such figures as Sir Robert Stewart
The increasing scale of operatic and dramatic productions, and the increasing taste for Sacred drama, oratorio and cantata, marked the later 19th century and characterised the provincial Festivals. Sterndale Bennett in The May Queen (1858), the harmonist Ebenezer Prout (in his Hereward and King Alfred), George Alexander Macfarren in his Robin Hood (1860), John Francis Barnett's Ancient Mariner cantata (1867), Frederick Hymen Cowen (The Rose Maiden, 1870; Harold 1895) and Sir Arthur Sullivan, in his works with Chorley libretti such as The Sapphire Necklace or The Masque at Kenilworth, or later in his Ivanhoe (1891) developed national mythic, literary and historical subjects. The operas of Arthur Goring Thomas, including Esmeralda and Nadeshda, possessed distinctive lyrical and dramatic qualities.
The religious drama (controlled by censorship) found expression on the concert platform. The Handel, Mendelssohn and Spohr repertoire had become integral to British musical life. Sir Michael Costa's Eli (1855) and Naaman set the pace for the later development in the works of Sullivan (e.g. The Martyr of Antioch, The Light of the World, and The Golden Legend (1886)), Hatton's Hezekiah (1877), Alfred R. Gaul's The Holy City, the Gideon of William George Cusins, the Rebekah of Joseph Barnby, the incensed religiosity of Gounod's Redemption (1882) and Mors et Vita (1885) (produced expressly for the British public), and Sir John Stainer’s The Crucifixion.
Sullivan, pupil of Goss, won fame in the 1860s with Shakespeare incidental music (The Tempest (1862), Merchant of Venice (1871), his 'Irish' Symphony (1863-66) and the In Memoriam). His later Savoy opera collaborations with W. S. Gilbert began in 1875, reached their heyday in the 1880s (e.g. Pirates of Penzance (1880), The Gondoliers (1889)), and concluded in 1896. In the British light opera tradition with spoken dialogue, airs like 'Take a pair of sparkling eyes' entered the concert repertoire. These works formed a distinctive group, but had rivals in Alfred Cellier's Dorothy and The Mountebanks.
Between 1880 and 1887 the London Guildhall School of Music was established. The Royal College of Music, originating in a Training school under Arthur Sullivan, was founded (1882-83) under Sir George Grove, and became home to the genius of C Hubert H Parry (1848-1918). His reformation of British music progressed along several fronts, not least in anthems, cantatas (e.g. Prometheus Unbound, Gloucester 1880, King Saul 1894), in four symphonies (including the English, 1889), in chamber music and in composed song.
His great contemporary in this revival was the Irish-born Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924), who from Cambridge University extended his influence throughout the national musical life. Frederick Delius, Arthur Somervell and Edward Elgar were joining Stanford and Parry in the renewal of English song in the 1890s, and Delius and Walford Davies were also taking their lead in chamber composition. Tobias Matthay became a leading teacher of English pianoforte method and interpretation.
The last of the great English Victorian composers to emerge was Edward Elgar, who during the 1890s, produced his Caractacus and King Olaf cantatas, the Enigma variations in 1899, and the revolutionary Dream of Gerontius in 1900. The prolific composer Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie celebrated his native Scotland in three Scottish Rhapsodies for orchestra (1880-81, 1911), and in various concerted works for piano or violin and orchestra composed during the 1880s and 1890s.
The emergence of a 'national' style in late nineteenth century classical music in the United Kingdom paralleled similar developments in most European countries, for instance in the music of Smetana, Dvořák, Grieg, Franz Liszt, Wagner, Carl Nielsen and Sibelius. English folk-music connections were more widely rediscovered and reinfused into the classical materials mainly after 1900, though the work of Sabine Baring-Gould and Cecil Sharp had already borne fruit before the end of the century.
[edit] Music of the 20th century
In the early 20th century Britain produced some notable composers: William Wallace, Frederick Delius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and John Ireland, for example. A feature of the music of several of the composers of this era was an interest in the use of British folk music as source material. Examples include Vaughan Williams' English Folk Song Suite for brass band and Delius' Brigg Fair as well as subtler references to folk themes in other works.
Under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, 26 of Ireland's 32 counties, including the city of Dublin, were formally separated from the United Kingdom.
In the second half of the century, William Walton and Benjamin Britten are of especial note as composers, although there are strong contrasts between their individual approaches to music and its part in the national identity. Walton's work featured fanfares and patriotic themes: for instance he composed the ceremonial marches Crown Imperial, written for the coronation of George VI, and Orb and Sceptre, for that of Elizabeth II. Britten, on the other hand, made a conscious effort to set himself apart from the English musical mainstream, which he regarded as complacent, insular and amateurish. However, his works, such as the operas Peter Grimes (1945), and Billy Budd (1951), as well as his instrumental compositions, including his Nocturnal after John Dowland for guitar (1964), place him amongst the most accomplished composers of the century.
The century continued and developed the concert tradition. Sir Henry Wood's name will forever be associated with The Proms, which started life in 1895 as the Queen's Hall Promenade Concerts, but transferred in 1941 to the Albert Hall, where they are still held. The Aldeburgh Festival, founded by Benjamin Britten is another annual musical event of international status.
The advent of broadcasting and recording technologies have opened the possibility of classical music to larger audiences—without the need for ever larger orchestras. It is arguable that this trend may have contributed to the revival of interest in early music which has been led, in Britain, by such figures as Arnold Dolmetsch and David Munrow.
The late 20th century is often characterised as a period dominated by the Cult of personality and this has affected classical music along with the rest of the arts. This has tended to focus British public attention on virtuoso performers such as James Galway (flautist), John Williams (guitarist), Aled Jones (vocalist) and others. This elevation of a relative few to "superstar" status has arguably been at the cost of reducing the "ordinary" orchestral instrumentalist to a poorly-paid and under-rated role.
[edit] Music of the 21st century
In the present era, classical music in Britain must contend and co-exist with a dominant culture of popular music. Specialist music education at establishments such as the Royal Academy of Music, Royal College of Music, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Royal Northern College of Music and Guildhall School of Music provide world-class music teaching to gifted classical musicians, though the general level of classical music education in Britain is somewhat limited.
In this century, music, like most other aspects of society, has become globalized, and it is increasingly difficult to speak of "music of the UK" as a separate entity. Gifted UK musicians train and perform all over the world: conversely, many of the places in UK music schools are taken up by overseas musicians, and most concerts are international in their content and their performers.
Composition is alive and well: Peter Maxwell Davies, Julian Anderson, Harrison Birtwistle, George Benjamin, Thomas Ades, Jonny Greenwood, Oliver Knussen and to a lesser extent, Andrew Lloyd Webber represent very different strands of composition within UK classical music.
[edit] Timeline
[edit] References
This article draws heavily on (and to some extent summarises) other articles from the category of classical music in the United Kingdom. In addition, it references the following sources:
- ^ The Encyclopedia of Classical Music edited by Peter Gammond, Salamander Books, ISBN 0-86101-400-6
- ^ Ibid.
- Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, Tenth Edition, Oxford University press, 1970
- Latham, R (1983) The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Volume X — Companion, Bell & Hyman, London. ISBN 0-7135-1993-2. See the entry under "Music" by Richard Luckett, for both the Commonwealth and Restoration periods.
