Folk Song in England by Steve Roud

Author:Steve Roud [Steve Roud]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571309733
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2017-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

While the music hall was in the process of becoming the primary nineteenth-century working-class entertainment, the middle classes were also being served with a rapidly developing song genre of their own, which we now refer to as ‘parlour songs’, but at the time were more likely to be called ‘drawing-room ballads’, or simply ‘ballads’. As with all the musical genres of the time, and since, the term is a loose one which encompasses a wide range of songs and styles, but with the unifying feature of being part of a highly commercial drive deliberately aimed at a growing market of middle-class customers who could afford to buy their entertainment, and whose one overriding characteristic was an obsession with respectability.

The development of the music hall was mostly in the hands of the hall owners and their backers, but for the parlour song it was the music publishers who made all the running (and most of the money). The other significant difference was that while the former sought to gather their audience together to witness and experience a musical event en masse, the music publishers aimed at the domestic market, where purchasers were expected to perform the material among themselves. Sheet music was therefore arranged for common domestic instruments, most often the piano, but also the German flute, the harp and the guitar, with the amateur performer in mind. A huge proportion of this market was female, and much of the music was deliberately written and arranged to be within the capabilities of the average young home musician. Being aimed at home consumption also meant that the industry’s reach was rural as well as urban, and not simply confined to London but marketed all over the country and abroad.

In the best book by far on the topic, The Singing Bourgeois (1989), Derek Scott commented that sheet music was ‘the first product that showed how music might be profitably incorporated into a system of capitalist enterprise … It is in the production, promotion, and marketing of the sheet music of these songs (and the pianos to accompany them) that we witness the birth of the modern music industry.’33 When highly publicised public performances later became an essential part of the business, they were still aimed mainly at selling sheet music, and instruments, for home use.

Nicholas Temperley, writing of ‘drawing-room music’ in The Athlone History of Music in Britain (1981), defines its audience as ‘that ill-defined and fluctuating entity, “the middle class”, a portion of the population which was growing steadily throughout the century and which can be characterised as those who were sufficiently wealthy to have a room set aside for leisure activities, to be able to purchase a piano and pay for piano lessons, and to buy the sheet music’. He explains that drawing-room music shaded into upper-class music because of the aspirational nature of the people, but was sharply distinguished from working-class music:

In the subjects treated and their settings we find a remoteness from familiar everyday situations in which the finer shades of class distinction might be identifiable.

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