How music created a public

Criticism, Spring, 2004 by Harold Love

The other tradition, that of the glee, has its Jacobean counterpart in such collections as Weelkes's Aires or Fantastic sprites--simple, largely homophonic three-part pieces for male voices. Its French counterpart was Ballard's Recueil d'Airs serieux et a boire de differents auteurs, published in monthly installments over thirty years from 1694. Playford's much reprinted Companion contained two-, three-, and four-part glees as well as catches. The mid-eighteenth century saw a remarkable efflorescence of glee-composition, whose monument is the thirty-two annual oblong-quarto volumes of Thomas Warren's Canons, Catches and Glees. (27) But even this ample collection contains only a small harvest of the huge body of pieces inspired by the two Samuel Webbes, Battishill, Stevens, and Callcott. The interest of the glee for a study of the creation of a musical public lies in its being performed by and often written for dedicated clubs. (28) Like the amateur orchestra, they might be found even in small villages. A kind of public status might be allowed them on the consideration that, social levels and carefully cultivated singularities apart, one such club was pretty much the same as another. The experience of singing Webbe's "Glorious Apollo" glass in hand could not have been all that different in whatever club it was undertaken and whatever private rituals accompanied it. There was also a sense of glee-singing and its accompanying sociability as being larger than any particular group of its participants, which becomes evident from the very existence of Warren's collection and the awarding by the Nobleman and Gentleman's Catch Club of an annual prize for the best glee. Glee-singing was also recommended on nationalistic grounds as constituting a native British tradition. (20) More important still is the fact that--as with the oratorio and concert audience, but not that of opera in its early decades--a common devotion to singing offered a way of transcending differences of class, politics, and religion that still applied in other public contexts, especially since discussion of such potentially divisive topics was usually forbidden by club rules. (30) Women were still restricted to the parlor, where they played keyboard instruments and the "English guitar" and sang solos and a range of polite glees for upper and mixed voices. (31) When higher voices were required for the male glee clubs they were supplied by boy choristers. Women's significance for the development of a musical public lay in their membership of concert audiences and the social support of professional performance, in which their influence was considerable.

The next stage in the evolution of amateur vocal performance saw the appearance of musical societies organized around the performance of choral works, particularly the oratorios of Handel, demanding progressively larger forces. In the most important of these, the Royal Philharmonic Society, founded in London in 1813, the orchestra was professional but the choir included amateurs, and the audiences were enrolled under the subscription system, already long established in opera- and concert-giving. (32) In many of its imitations across the Anglophone world, membership of these societies involved voting rights in its management. In the German-speaking lands the assertion of a right to elect one's committee and conductor was so deeply suspect that the organization of musical societies acquired a subversively political character, of which participants were often keenly aware. These societies also came to take an important entrepreneurial role in the provision of concerts of instrumental music, resisting absorption into the lessee-manager system that by then dominated the theaters. The regular participants in early-nineteenth-century concert life as amateur chorister or subscribing patron may be regarded as synonymous with the musical public, and the concert-giving organizations as the institutional face of that public.