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‘Something new, strange, curiously disturbing.’
John Baxendale
‘Culture Wars’ Conference 14 June 2014
September 1912. A young man called Philip Heseltine is writing a letter to a friend. Heseltine will
later be better known as the English composer Peter Warlock, but now he’s only 17, and he’s been
to a Promenade Concert at the Queen’s Hall, conducted by the recently knighted Sir Henry Wood,
where he heard the world premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s modernist work Five Orchestral Pieces,
and he is astonished. ‘One gets now and then,’ he writes, ‘just a glimpse, as it were, of some weird,
new country, and although one can only see it from a distance, there is a strange fascination in the
idea of its future possibilities’.
Heseltine immediately dashed off an article about Schonberg, which duly appeared in the Musical
Standard the following month, hailing a new musical star, but leaving open the question whether he
was a madman, a joker or a genius. Although this was not the first performance of Schonberg’s
music in Britain, this concert heralded the arrival of modernist classical music, and established
Schonberg’s music, with its abandonment of 19th century romantic principles of tonality, harmony
and tunefulness, as the main point of reference whenever modernist music was discussed in the
press – both serious and popular – which was more often than you might imagine.
A few months later a teenager from Bradford, later known to the world as the writer J B Priestley,
was enjoying the variety bill at the Leeds Empire with his friends, when on came an American
ragtime band called Hedges Brothers and Jacobsen. Priestley wrote – not the following day like
Heseltine, but fifty years later - ‘It was as if we had been still living in the nineteenth century and
then suddenly found the twentieth glaring and screaming at us. We were yanked into our own age,
fascinating, jungle-haunted, monstrous…here was something new, strange, curiously disturbing.’
‘We had been used to being sung at in music halls in a robust and zestful fashion,’ comments
Priestley, but ragtime was something completely new and different, presaging ‘another kind of life in
which anything might happen’.
Ragtime consisted of a fast, highly syncopated melody line played over a rhythmically steady base in
2/4 march time – to oversimplify, a marriage between African rhythms and orthodox European
harmonies, with more than a touch of John Philip Sousa’s popular marches – and although it
probably had its origins in the music of black marching bands in the American south, and black
composers like Scott Joplin had tried unsuccessfully to gain recognition as ‘serious’ music, it was now
played by mainly white bands and composed by Tin Pan Alley songwriters in New York, such as Irving
Berlin.
Ragtime was not only the first international pop music phenomenon, but also the first major
incursion of music of black American origin into the commercial musical scene, and in both ways the
starting-point of modern popular music. Between about 1912 and 1914 ragtime was everywhere, a
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massive public obsession comparable with Beatlemania, and its popularity lasted until the end of the
war when it was superseded by what became known as jazz; a rather broader category than the
term implies today. Jazz had a more flexible structure than ragtime, which allowed more
inventiveness. As radio and gramophone records gave listeners greater access to actual
performance this allowed the emergence of virtuoso individual performers, most of them black.
A decade or so earlier, in 1903, a gardener was mowing the lawn of a country vicarage and singing to
himself a folk song called ‘The Seeds of Love’. A composer and music teacher called Cecil Sharp who
was staying at the house heard the song, whipped out his notebook and wrote it down, and thus
began his career as the leading exponent and collector of English folk-song.
Sharp was not the first to take an interest in collecting folk songs, but he redefined the purpose of so
doing, and some would say that in the process he redefined folk song itself. Sharp was not just
collecting pretty tunes which were in danger of being lost. He was, he felt, tapping into the last
echoes of a long oral tradition, produced and sustained by unlettered peasants untainted by
education or commerce. This music was not the work of individuals (though particular songs may
have originated that way) but ‘a communal and racial product’, and therefore the expression of
collective aims and ideals, including national ones. Folk song should have been the well-spring of a
national musical culture, as it was in other countries, but owing to early industrialisation and
urbanisation we had nearly lost that opportunity. There would now be no new folk songs, but the
reintroduction into national life of the ones that had been rescued by Sharp and others of like mind
could, he believed, foster a truly English art music for the first time since Purcell. It would improve
the musical taste of a people corrupted by commercial popular songs, and most important, ‘refine
and strengthen the national character’ itself, producing ‘Englishmen, English citizens’, rather than
the citizens of the world produced by modern education. Sharp’s project was not just musical, but
nationalist.
Three musical insurgencies: modernism, ragtime and folk, all happening at the same time: two of
them springing from ‘the people’, one from the cultural elite; two of them disdaining commercial
culture, the other emerging from it; two of them embracing modernity, the other looking backwards
to tradition; all three in their different ways challenging the prevailing musical order. Their arrival
sparked off a sustained and often bitter debate about the nature and future of music, not just in the
musical press but in the newspapers, serious and popular. The Daily Mail carried articles about
Schoenberg, while the Times ran cultural and musicological analysis of ragtime. Musics, old and
new, were passionately defended, but even more passionately condemned; even their right to be
considered music at all was questioned.
Such fervent argument about music was unusual in Britain. Although a German critic had called
England ‘a land without music’, there was a great deal of music in 19th century Britain, ranging from
the classical concert repertoire and light opera to music-hall song to the organ-grinder and the street
singer, via the hugely popular brass bands and choral movements, and the dance music of the
upper-crust ballroom and the plebeian dance-hall. But these different musical practices existed
fairly happily side by side without feeling threatened; partly because each knew its place, partly
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because of what Richard Middleton has called ‘a relative congruence of musical technique,
repertoire and practice’, a general commitment to principles of tonality and tunefulness derived
from classical and romantic music. This allowed an interchangeability of repertoire which would
have seemed startling to later generations, as brass bands played selections from Wagner, middleclass parlour songs ranged from Schubert to commercial offerings, music-halls featured operatic
overtures, and the serious composer Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote comic operas.
In their different ways our three musical insurgencies all challenged this musical consensus:
modernism with its atonality, ragtime with its emphasis on rhythm and excitement, folk with its
rejection not just of prevailing music taste, but of the way both commercial and classical music was
made. The musical culture wars raged on into the 1920s and 30s, and in some ways anticipated and
paralleled the 1920s literary ‘Battle of the Brows’, as rival genres and practices were seen not just as
different, or even inferior, but a threat, and even a danger to society. Since music, unlike literature,
is a largely abstract form, the proverbial man (or woman) from Mars, arriving on our planet, and
listening to these different kinds of music, which don’t really sound all that different from each
other, might wonder what all the fuss was about. What follows is my tentative attempt to find out.
Sir Thomas Beecham is reported to have said that the English don’t care much for music, but they
quite like the way it sounds. They certainly didn’t like the way Schonberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra
sounded – even people who thought he might be on to something. The premiere audience was
divided into those who laughed (including, apparently, some of the orchestra), those who hissed,
and those who remained silent. Critics were divided between the openly hostile, and those arguing
that it was too early to judge. The Morning Post recommended as the key to understanding this
music ‘an acquaintance with open-air life, preferably in that part of the world where there are large
quantities of livestock.’. The Referee suggested that ‘the composer was endeavouring to illustrate
the various sounds heard at feeding time at the Zoological Gardens’, while for the Globe, ‘The music
resembled the dismal wailings of a tortured soul, and suggested nothing so much as the disordered
fancies of delirium or the fearsome imaginary terrors of a highly nervous infant’. A correspondent to
the Musical Standard, in reply to Philip Heseltine’s fence-sitting article declared it ‘essentially ugly,
brutally ugly…Schonberg’s music is cacophony, or else there is no cacophony’ – a widely held view.
Heseltine replied that he didn’t like the way it sounded either, but that wasn’t necessarily any reason
to dismiss it out of hand.
In laughing and hissing, breaking the sacred rule of the concert-hall which distinguished it from low
music-halls, that the audience should listen silently and respectfully, the audience were suggesting
that Schonberg’s music did not belong in the concert hall at all. The critics’ references to animals
and mental illness were in effect saying that it didn’t even belong in culture, but in the natural world
that culture was supposedly rising above. Some suggested that Schonberg was breaking the rules
for the sake of it, just showing off, or even that he was a hoaxer. Others went in completely the
opposite direction: Schonberg was too abstract and cerebral, appealling only to ‘a mere handful of
theorists or highbrows’.
Less dismissive critics advised caution. were caught in a dilemma. An important aspect of high art is
the construction of a canon, the nurturing of a tradition which is always developing. As the Musical
Times put it, ‘Past generations of critics unhesitatingly condemned the new and strange and
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unintelligible, and are now held up to pity and ridicule.’ Beethoven and Wagner were frequently
mentioned in this context. ‘If we pour scorn on our “Futurist” school, are we preparing the same
fate for ourselves?’ Another defining principle of art music was the high level of skill of its
practitioners, and nobody who knew what they were talking about could deny the sheer technical
skill of Schonberg’s orchestration. Finally, art was supposed to be about expressing the artist’s inner
vision rather than merely pleasing the audience: that way lies the dreaded, as yet unnamed,
middlebrow. The Musical Times concluded that ‘At present we have no critical means to take the
true measure of “Futurist” music. All that we know is that it gives us no pleasure, and there is no
harm in saying so’. But what did pleasure have to do with art?
Pleasure was what ragtime was all about, but not for everyone. ‘Like an evil odour from a defective
drain “rag-time” is spreading itself over the land’, declared John F Runciman in the Saturday Review
in June 1913. The ragtime craze then at its height provoked a wave of virulent criticism of a sort
which had rarely before been directed at popular music. After ragtime was displaced by jazz the
controversy continued, indeed intensified, as ‘jazz’ because the umbrella label for the new
Americanised forms of popular music which had became ubiquitous and dominant. As a writer in
the Sackbutt magazine put it in 1925 ‘The outstanding achievement of jazz is that everybody has, or
had, an opinion about it. Like the ‘Irish Question’, ‘Tariff Reform’, the length of skirts of the female
and the width of the trousers of the male.’
The three main accusations against ragtime and jazz were that it was commercial, it was sexy, and it
was black. It thus became the focus for multiple anxieties about the commodification of culture, the
role of women, and the future of the white European races.
The ideology of the art music culture held that music was a semi-sacred object, above the marketplace and disdaining popular appeal. Now, it was feared, with the aid of clever marketing in an
increasingly consumerist age, bad music would drive out good. ‘There was nothing so infectious as
bad music’ declared Sir Hugh Allen, Principal of the Royal College of Music, in 1921. ‘Atrocities of
style were becoming more and more universal and aggressive,’ as commercialism sought to
‘accommodate artistic products to the largest number.’ But exactly what was ‘atrocious’ about this
music?
Ironically, just as Schonberg had been accused of taking music, which was supposed to lift us above
the worst excesses of our animal nature, back ino the nautral world of animal noises, so ragtime and
jazz were accused of dragging music back into a primitive, pre-cultural world. There were two
prongs to this attack. First, the sensuality and rhythm of ragtime and jazz brought a new sexuality
into popular music, and in particular new sexualised forms of dance which were to be a recurring
subject of moral outrage throughout the 1910s and 1920s. The underlying anxiety was about the
role and conduct of women, in particular young women: the ‘frivolous, scantily clad, “jazzing
flapper”, irresponsible and undisciplined’, as the Daily Mail put it in February 1920, de-feminised, yet
somehow also libidinous, celebrating their emancipation with unsuitable dress and public behaviour.
Music was allegedly both cause and expression of this disturbing trend.
The black origins of ragtime and jazz were a recurring obsession for its critics, again threatening to
take music out of the realm of culture and back into man’s unruly past. As a writer in the Academy
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put it in 1913 ‘I have heard it [ragtime], or something very like it, coming from the doors of negro
shacks in Louisiana and even thrummed on tom-toms by savages in Africa, and if Europe is to go to
such ideals for its music, then truly we are looking backward’. In 1927, Sheffield’s own Sir Henry
Coward, who rose from humble beginnings to become the nation’s best-known conductor of choral
music, informed readers of the Daily Mirror in 1927 that the appeal of jazz was to ‘the subconscious
memories of thousands of years ago’, ‘the semi-barbarous habits of our great-great-greatgrandfathers’, or even ‘the instincts of the Simian stock’, and reflects the ‘antics of those “lesser
breeds” referred to by Rudyard Kipling’. Worse still, by ‘leading the negroes to feel what a superior
people they are, seeing that the whites copy them in so many ways – in their music, their mode of
speech, their dances and their eccentricities…. it has stimulated their determination to contest the
ascendancy which the whites have held, and still will hold, unless we throw it away by following low
ideas in conduct and pleasure-seeking’.
However, jazz also had its admirers in the high-cultural world, who saw its musical possibilities.
Unfortunately, these usually involved dragging the music into the world of the conservatoire and the
concert-hall, and into the hands of composers, whether from a classical or a jazz backgrounds. ‘The
development of jazz is now in the hands of the sophisticated composer’, Constant Lambert argued in
his book Music, Ho! (1934) The ‘symphonic jazz’ of Paul Whiteman, whose band toured in 1926, and
later Duke Ellington‘s fusion of improvisation and composition, were much admired as precursors of
such an incorporation. Although, said Lambert, ‘the “hot” negro records still have a genuine and not
merely galvanic energy, while the blues have a certain austerity that places them far above the
sweet nothings of George Gershwin,’ this ‘hot jazz’ with its reliance on improvisation, had gone as
far as it could. One dissenter from this view was J B Priestley, who declared that he had not gone to
hear the Whiteman band because jazz didn’t belong in the concert-hall, but in dance-halls and low
bars, where it could flourish as ‘one of the genuine manifestations of the spirit of the age’; or, as the
critic Sydney Grew argued, ‘In the music of today, the jazz dance and the Bartok and Schonberg
orchestral methods are blood relations’, both expressing the spirit of the age.
While some attempted to rescue jazz by rebranding it as art music, others justified it as a folk music,
springing from the collective and uncontrived creativity of a people – in this case, African-Americans.
But it was the rediscovery of English folk music that was supposed to revive national musical culture,
and despite a vogue for using folk tunes in classical compositions by Delius, Vaughan Williams and
others, there were many sceptics: didn’t this simply reflected a lack of melodic inventiveness, or a
desire to escape from ‘modern aesthetic complexities’, asked Gerald Cumberland as early as 1912.
Others cast doubt on Sharp’s narrative, and his crucial insistence that the folk tradition was totally
unconnected with commercial or educated cultures. Frank Kidson, of Leeds, who collected not only
folk songs but also printed music, insisted that much of what passed for folk song was in fact
remnants of popular song which had appeared in print years ago. Others queried Sharp’s
conception of ‘national’ music: serious music, it was argued, had outgrown its 19th century
nationalism, and was now ‘as broad as humanity itself’, said Sydney Grew. Moreover, as Constant
Lambert trenchantly observed, English folk songs have for the average twentieth-century
Englishman none of the evocative significance that the folk songs of Russia had for the average
nineteenth-century Russian…the London bus conductor is not to be found singing the type of tune
that occurs in [Vaughan Williams’s opera] Hugh the Drover; if he sings at all he is probably singing a
snatch of ‘Love is the Sweetest Thing’ in an unconvincing though sickening imitation of the American
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accent’. To most people, in fact, the heartiness of folk music ‘conjures up the hideous faux
bonhomie of the hiker, noisily wading his way through the petrol pumps of Metroland, singing
obsolete sea chanties…’
The American record producer Joe Boyd, who was behind many English ‘folk-rock’ albums of the
1960s, such as Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band, remarked in an interview that
‘Most people in Britain are still, the average person is still horrified by the sound of their own folk
music… that whole tone of voice is something that, for most English people, is unbearable… hooked
in with a kind of shame, and a kind of horror of early school days, when you had to sing folk songs,
join hands, and play games, and to school’. And, of course, it was through the schools that Sharp
had hoped to restore the national character, and Englishness itself, by means of folk music.
Classical music-lovers have proved stubbornly resistant to Schoenberg, though not to all modernist
composers. Ragtime prefigured a total transformation of popular music whose aftershocks are still
with us and still making waves. But it was Sharp’s folk music project, the most ambitious and radical
– and intentional – of our three musical insurgencies that in the end proved the least successful.