William Morris and music: Craftsman's art?

SO FAR, a sketch of Morris as lover and performer of early choral music has been built up. His attitude to instrumental music is less easy to pin down yet also more significant in that it indicates his criteria of musical judgment. Morris did not play an instrument and his attitude was critical of those of his own day. Vallance quotes Shaw to the effect that `conventional instruments conventionally handled his soul abhorred'22 and Vallance himself suggests that Morris would wait outside cathedrals to avoid hearing the organ. In `Labour and pleasure versus labour and sorrow' Morris says of furnishing a house: `Now unless we are are musical and need a piano (in which case, as far as beauty is concerned, we are in a bad way), that is quite all we want'.23 It is perhaps already possible to suggest that Morris's objection to the organ may not have been to the instrument itself, though he may have been aware of some of the barbarities inflicted in the name of restoration, but to the diet of Stanford, Parry and their contemporaries which the Victorian organ so often played or accompanied. Similarly. Morris's objection to the piano probably had more to do with the latter's symbolisation of Victorian domestic taste and its inseparable links to 19th-century amateur musical production. This interpretation is supported by an anecdote by William de Morgan on his first visit to the firm in Red Lion Square in 1864: 'I chiefly recollect his dressing himself in vestments and playing on a regal, to illustrate points in connection with stained glass'.24 It is intriguing to speculate how much Morris knew about the Regal and where he might have obtained one from in this distinctly nonmusicological age. The impression is, nevertheless, that Morris was prepared to take this instrument seriously enough to attempt a credible representation of its use in stained glass. This in itself was untypical - church restoration has destroyed much evidence about old instruments contained in glass, stone, and wood. It also indicates that Morris was prepared to invest an old instrument with sufficient importance to justify the care and attention to detail which he expended on his better known subjects. In fact a regal or portative organ appeared in the window of St John the Evangelist, Torquay the following year, and instruments featured consistently in Morris and Co. stained glass throughout the lifetime of Morris. According to Peter Stansky, Jane Morris kept a harpsichord which Arnold Dolmetsch tuned for her,25 although this does not necessarily prove that Morris himself liked the harpsichord. The fact that he wished for virginals on his deathbed combines with this information to reinforce the view that while Morris was critical of the instruments associated with Victorian music making. He was appreciative of those linked to the music of earlier periods.

MORRIS'S VIEW of history would inevitably make him critical of the attitudes prevalent amongst those who made music for the Victorian middle and upper classes. For Morris, Victorian society was not the culmination of thousands of years of 'progress'. The past could not be seen simply as an imperfect preparation for the present - indeed it could be better than the present in important respects and should be examined as a distinct complex of social and economic relationships and not simply 'compared' to the present. Victorian music very much reflected the prevailing self image of the age. Music became a mass celebration of a self-confident society: the middle classes packed into venues such as the Royal Albert Hall for spectacles such as Mendelssohn's Elijah, while popular songs such as 'Jingo' by GW Hunt (1877) summed up an aggressive patriotism: `We don't want to fight but by jingo if we do, we've got the ships, we've got the men, and we've got the money, too. We've fought the bear before and while we're Britons true, The Russians shall not have Constantinople'.26