William Morris and music: Craftsman's art?

Musical Times, Autumn 1998 by Heywood, Andrew

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

Morris, undergoing his political debut as an opponent of a Balkan war, must have been painfully aware of this endearing ditty. Music of the past was treated, in the main, as of merely antiquarian interest, with a few 'great' exceptions being made such as Handel and Mozart. These were 'improved' by re-orchestration and by performance by ever larger forces such as the 644 participants in the Handel festival in Westminster Abbey in 1834, the year of Morris's birth. Old instruments were seen as inferior precursors of their more 'efficient' and powerful modern counterparts, while the performance practice of the past was dismissed as primitive. Morris had already applied his alternative approach to the past in politics, design and in his attitude to restoration of old buildings, his connection with, and influence on, George Bernard Shaw and Arnold Dolmetsch provided a catalyst for a fresh examination of the music of the past and its performance.

As has already been indicated, the links between these two figures and William Morris will be dealt with at length in a separate article. Nevertheless, some indication of the importance of those links can be given here. Shaw, during the period in which he knew Morris, was a luminary of the Fabians and was pursuing his career as a playwright. He was also supplementing his income by acting as a music critic for a number of publications including The World and The Star. As a critic, Shaw championed the performance of early music, notably by Arnold Dolmetsch with whom he was acquainted. He also took a critical look at contemporary performance of early music by established performers. In both these endeavours, the influence of a radical approach to music history is obvious. At times Shaw makes what he sees as the intellectual connection between Morris and the reappraisal of early music explicit: ... there is going to be a great awakening of the purely musical conscience by men like Arnold Dolmetsch, who sits down with a beautiful old clavichord before him, and makes a still more beautiful new one with his own hands instead of reading books by Wolzogen on Wagner. That clavichord will start just such a reform in musical instruments as William Morris started in domestic furniture. It is noteworthy, by the way, that Morris, whose ear, as I can testify from personal observation, is as good as any musician's, and whose powers as poet, artist and craftsman have made him famous, hates the pianoforte, and is evidently affected by modern music much as he is affected by early Victorian furniture. He will not go to an ordinary concert; but he will confess to a strong temptation to try his hand at making fiddles; and he has been seen at one of Dolmetsch's viol concerts apparently enjoying himself. Probably he will not make the fiddles; but Dolmetsch will make more clavichords; [...I Fourth you will have. concurrently with the movement in instrument-making and interacting powerfully with it, a revival of the best of the beautiful music composed before the opera came in the XVIII century.. 27 or again: