Sizeable symphonist

Musical Times, Summer 1999 by Phillips, Peter

PETER PHILLIPS

The John Marsh journals: the life and times of a gentleman composer (1752-1828)

Edited, introduced and annotated by Brian Robins Sociology of Music no.9 Pendragon Press (Stuyvesant NY, 1998); xiv, 797pp; $76. ISBN 0 945193 94 7.

Although John Marsh is still the most prolific composer of symphonies to have been born in this country he is not well-known for it. History has not dealt kindly with the reputations of composers who were born in Dorking in 1752. Nor has it been any more helpful that Marsh inherited property which enabled him to practise music as an amateur, was closely involved with the organ lofts of Salisbury, Canterbury and Chichester for which he wrote anthems, voluntaries and psalmchants, and avoided London more or less deliberately all his life. Yet Brian Robins has thought it worthwhile to edit and publish eight-hundred pages' worth of this provincial man's diaries (a gesture preceded by Nicholas Temperley's distinctly upbeat assessment of him in New Grove).

It was not wasted effort. One assumes without much danger of contradiction that Marsh's compositions are unlikely to be of serious interest now - I've never heard any, and would be delighted to be corrected in this assumption; but as a man of his time, as expressed in his diary, he is priceless. Wherever he was he seems inevitably to have been at the centre of the local music-making, from setting up concert-series, to dealing with and paying the local professionals, to actually writing or arranging the pieces which were to be played. When he moved on the musical scene he left behind soon faded. He was, in Robins's late-20th century phrase, `hyper-active'.

Perhaps it is for his unsanctimonious view of the world he inhabited that we can admire him. Nothing takes him by surprise and he seems to have had time for everyone, including his sizeable family: one feels he would do very well in middle America. And he was able to express what he saw with a directness which rivals Pepys. Here are his impressions of the Dean of Chichester when Marsh first arrived in that city in 1787: The Dean at this time was Dr Harward a man much fitter to be at the head of a regiment than of a Chapter being a very headstrong passionate man dir much given to swearing; dealing out his oaths to the virgers whenever he had the least cause of complaint. He was also a very litigious man, Sr was remarkably irreverent in his behaviour at church, frequently talking during the lessons & sometimes amusing himself on week days with pencil & paper etc.

His observations about the choir are equally hard-hitting, fresher even than the more famous report on the low standard of singing in provincial cathedrals by SS Wesley, written 62 years later:

... the choir only consisted of 4 singing men or lay vicars (instead of 6. the proper number) bz 6. boys, so that it wo'd have been much smaller than that at Canterbury, had the 4 vicars been in the habit of all attending the service instead of w'ch there seldom was more than one at church at a time. And as to these lay vicars, one of them was good for very little, Prince, a bass-singer who pleaded a stomach complaint that prevented his making the least exertion in singing, Er another, Silverlock, an old man the only tenor voice, was worse than none at all, every note he sang being so flat & out of tune as to mar, instead of improve or add to the general effect [. ] The strength of the choir seem'd therefore to consist almost wholly of trebles, the 6. boys bawling Er making all the noise they co'd as if by that means to remedy the deficiency of men.

This is typical of Marsh's strength of observation and expression. Eighthundred pages of such private thoughts represent a very good read, as much as a largely untapped source of contemporary opinion.