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Author Topic: Change in music at the end of the C18?  (Read 10230 times)

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Hugh Taylor

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Change in music at the end of the C18?
« on: July 07, 2020, 07:19:25 PM »

I was having my weekly Zoom chat today with my mate Steve (Mcgrooger) and commenting on how much I enjoy the C17 & C18 tunes, partly because of the modality in a lot of them. I don't know much about the development of folk dance tunes (can I call them that?) but looking at most tune books that we now have access to, there is a general paucity of such modality. Yes I know there are lots of exceptions such as Vickers, but what happened to 'our' music around the end of the 1700's and the early 1800's?
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Andy Next Tune

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #1 on: July 07, 2020, 07:32:45 PM »

I suspect the migration of people out of the countryside into towns and cities fuelled by the Industrial Revolution has a lot to do with it.

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Calum

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #2 on: July 07, 2020, 09:02:44 PM »

The 18th century was an age of "improvement", and it's no coincidence that much of value was torn down in this time and replaced with new and modern styles.  Poetry, literature, architecture, art, the list goes on.  This fashion had a very clear idea of what "perfection" in music looked like, guided by the new perfection in functional harmony which gave people a set of intellectual rules to judge musical quality by.  Music that was not up to the task was discarded, as were instruments incapable of playing it.  It's no accident that the great collapse in traditional music around Europe began around this time.  Yet a brief generation earlier, you would have struggled to draw a line between Baroque performers and local folk musicians, who would often have been one and the same.  For example, the Northumbrian piping tradition is essentially a strange survival of late Baroque performance practice applied to a very regional music.
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richard.fleming

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #3 on: July 07, 2020, 09:05:22 PM »

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that folk song and tune collectors like Cecil Sharp did not note down the music as it was but as they thought it ought to be, believing that the individual musicians and singers were ignorant and uneducated, even though they somehow also believed that the 'folk' as a whole had an ability to create sublime music collectively of which  the individuals were incapable.Maybe the modes got lost in this condescending process?
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Thrupenny Bit

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #4 on: July 07, 2020, 09:45:27 PM »

Richard is absolutely right regarding Sharpe.
He had the same opinions of the Morris when collecting dances, bending the ideas of the old men to fit his own ideals and correcting them if he thought they'd made a mistake. An upper class academic was not to be argued with if you were a lowly illiterate farm worker.
In Devon we had other collectors, song in particular. The main person, collecting song 30 years before Sharpe, was the Rev. Sabine Baring Gould. He often cleaned up some of the bawdy or risque songs for his publications for a sensitive audience but his saving grace was he kept a record of his collected material 'as was told to him'.

With such practices common in collectors, I'm sure careful detective work can sense differences in the collected material in this era.
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CAB

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #5 on: July 07, 2020, 10:08:22 PM »

A bit unfair on Sharp (no -e).  He certainly had some weird ideas.  A lot of the old collectors thought the "peasants" had done a good job of preserving the music but it was better performed by trained musicians and singers.  But Sharp had a good relationship with his informants and a good understanding of their music.  I'd say his transcriptions were pretty faithful.  Have a look at some here: https://www.vwml.org/search?q=henry%20cave&is=1  .  He has annotated a tune in A dorian and added a note to the effect that a G was "very nearly G# at times" - at pains to record exactly what he heard.

A few years back, it was fashionable among some politically motivated critics to knock Sharp and the rest.  I think serious scholars have a more balanced view now.  Percy Grainger, incidentally, took great pains to capture every little nuance of his Lincolnshire singers' performance, using early recording technology and devising complex transcription conventions

Sharp and the rest collected plenty of songs with modal tunes but there does seem a paucity of dance tunes to match, perhaps for the reasons stated above.
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Thrupenny Bit

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #6 on: July 07, 2020, 10:24:54 PM »

Apologies, we have a dance called Sharpe with an 'e' !
I have been fortunate to spend time in the company of Roy Dommett who went over the collected dances that went into the Morris Black Book, interviewing some that as young men had been interviewed by Sharp. I have more of a dancer's view of him.
Roy said some of Sharp's companions and fellow collectors were more sympathetic to their source material, some going back to the old men Sharp had noted dancing, as they couldn't understand his notations.
In my opinion he saved a lot of material that would have disappeared, but I've heard he tried to 'improve' their source material if he thought it needed it.
.... but I concede I have a dancer's viewpoint, not a musicians'
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CAB

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #7 on: July 08, 2020, 12:12:42 AM »

Apologies, we have a dance called Sharpe with an 'e' !
;D    We had a stick dance called "You did that on purpose, you b*****d"

Roy once showed us a film of Eynsham (I think it was?).  There were almost as many different approaches to stepping as there were dancers.  If some of what Sharp saw contained the same kind of variation, who can blame him for trying to impose some order to make the dances teachable to others?  I bow to your knowledge of his dance transcription - I'm more familiar with his collecting of music and song  ... which is where we came in.

My initial post was a response to Richard, by the way.  Yours appeared while I was typing!
« Last Edit: July 08, 2020, 12:14:40 AM by CAB »
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Julian S

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #8 on: July 08, 2020, 07:33:21 AM »

I'm certainly no musicologist, but if I had more knowledge I would certainly be wondering about looking at and analysing the available tune collections, and considering their background and context. Maybe there has already been some research into this, with comparison through the period.
As has been commented, the latter half of the 18th century was certainly a period of great social (and musical) change. I sometimes think as 'traditional' music as being something distinct from 'classical' composed music but I'm sure musicians back then didn't set boundaries in the same way, with collections including music of all kinds, including dance tunes.
Revolutions, wars, economic development - industrialisation and agricultural change...all must have had a profound effect.
Obviously the tune collections are the only record and must be only an indication of what tunes were being played (and maybe some of the tunes were no longer really current)- and I'd be interesting in comparing personal tune collections and those that were published during that period, if possible. And I also wonder whether the collections of 'favourite dance tunes for whenever' were big sellers - and whether these tunes were mainly played in the society ballrooms , or were popular in the pub (or gin shop !) as well.
Slightly off topic, but I was really interested to learn that British Napoleonic military bands commonly comprised 'professional' musicians - and often from different countries. Another way of cross fertilisation and development in music - and given that each regiment had it's own band...which later became unemployed...

J

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Thrupenny Bit

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #9 on: July 08, 2020, 09:05:11 AM »

CAB: Roy came out of retirement and gave us three workshops towards the end of his life. As ever really thought provoking stuff.
He made the point that collecting was difficult, especially when you had no notation so had to describe things for the first time. Music and song had an advantage as there was already a universal form of notation, for Morris he had to invent a dance shorthand so there would have been obvious teething problems. To his credit it worked pretty well.
The Rev. Baring Gould had a couple of collecting accomplices who had more fundamental problems collecting. One - sorry, name gone - invented a unique one wheeled carriage to enable them to traverse the uneven terrain of Dartmoor in search of tunes and songs!

Julian, you've touched on something.
I too am not sure if the boundaries between classical and traditional were do distinct .
During the Buttrey project one of the notators found a piccolo tutor dated 1765. In it was the tune 'March from 'Scipio', written by Georg Freidrich Handel . My version of the tune is dated 1726 but not sure if that refers to Handel or the tune.
The tune was amongst other traditional tunes in the tutor and has entered the traditional and military repertoire.
It is a march used by the Grenadier Guards and I play it in sessions!
There must have been a mechanism for this to happen, so perhaps travelling foreign military musicians might provide a reasonable answer.
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Thrupenny Bit

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Bob Ellis

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #10 on: July 08, 2020, 09:16:11 AM »

This is a huge subject into which I have undertaken quite a lot of research, but have only managed to scratch the surface. Rather than write pages and pages, which would probably bore most people, I'll just offer a few random comments.

Obviously, traditional dance music was driven by changes in the popularity of different types of dance. While gradual changes in the styles of music took place from Playford's English Dancing Master in 1651 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, there wasn't a huge difference between the tunes popular in the late seventeenth century and those popular in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Neither were there significant differences between the contents of published collections of tunes and the tunes to be found in the manuscripts of local musicians. This is hardly surprising because many of the tunes published in the music press of the day had been collected from village musicians, while many of the tunes in manuscript tunebooks had been 'pricked out' (i.e. copied by hand) from published collections. It is impossible to know at this distance whether musically illiterate musicians played the same repertoire as those who could read music, but it is likely that their repertoires contained fewer of the tunes from the plethora of music books written and published during the late eighteenth century. What does seem to be clear is that modal tunes were more popular at that time than they were from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The same is true for what American fiddlers sometimes call 'crooked' tunes (i.e. tunes with an irregular number of bars or with an irregular number of beats in some bars).

A significant change began to take place at the end of the eighteenth century with the introduction into Britain of the waltz, followed from around 1816 by the quadrille (reputedly introduced from France into British high society by Lady Jersey) and these rapidly became popular in all levels of society. Typical English dance evenings at the beginning of the nineteenth century comprised reels, jigs, hornpipes, cotillions, and country dances, perhaps with the occasional strathspey or allemande included. The first half of the nineteenth century saw major changes as successive crazes for the waltz, the quadrille, the polka, and the schottische swept through not only fashionable society but also middle-class professionals and tradespeople, and ordinary country folk. All of these social classes tended to refer to the dances they held as balls. By the mid-century, the majority of the dances performed in a typical ball were waltzes, quadrilles, polkas, galops, and schottisches with a few country dances and other older dances included. For some reason that I have not yet uncovered, the music for these dances was much less likely to be played in modal keys than the music for earlier dances. The incidence of 'crooked playing' also diminished significantly, probably because crooked rhythms disturbed the flow of these new dances.

Julian's comment about "military bands composed of 'professional' musicians" is also apposite. Most regiments in the British army had a 'professional' band and this even applied to the volunteer regiments (the territorials of their day), whose other ranks were part-timers but whose officers and bandmasters were often paid officials of the regiment. A fashion swept the country for quadrille bands from the 1820s until the final decades of the nineteenth century. These quadrille bands usually comprised three to six musicians and played for dances at all levels of society. Their members were often drawn, at least in part, from members of military bands or of local brass bands, so the music they played will have been influenced by the repertoires of the military and brass bands as much as by the traditional dance tunes learnt from earlier generations.

For anyone interested in further information about quadrille bands and their influence on folk dance music, I have recently written an article about the quadrille bands of the Yorkshire Dales and two further articles tracing the history of the Reeth Quadrille Band and the Leyburn Quadrille Band. These articles are now in the hands of my webmaster and will appear shortly on my website: www.dalestunes.org.uk.
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Thrupenny Bit

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #11 on: July 08, 2020, 09:27:56 AM »

Thanks Bob for popping along.
Your historical  overview here is just what I needed!
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Thrupenny Bit

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Julian S

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #12 on: July 08, 2020, 10:08:53 AM »

That's really interesting Bob. Thanks ! Just like today, the dance musicians back whenever have to be able to play suitable music for the particular dance...and the popular couple dances of the 19th century were revolutionary ( >:E) in themselves -and controversial at the time. I've never been into Playford or 18c dancing, but I do wonder about how 3/2 tunes were used...
On the subject of military bands, my old friend who used to be in charge of the Duke of Wellingtons regimental museum told me that the precursor of that regiment (33rd foot I believe) had problems in 1815 as they had laid off their band musicians just before the Waterloo campaign - and most of the musicians had headed home to German states...Unfortunately I don't think there is a tunebook lurking in the regimental archives !


J
« Last Edit: July 08, 2020, 01:27:25 PM by Julian S »
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Thrupenny Bit

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #13 on: July 08, 2020, 10:45:24 AM »

I keep thinking of this month's Theme of the Month: tv tunes and how readily they've been played and obviously practiced for sessions and I'm sure adapted for particular dances as a bit of fun for the dancers.
I remember someone describing traditional musicians as 'magpies of the music world's,,  it seems a fitting description for us!
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Thrupenny Bit

I think I'm starting to get most of the notes in roughly the right order...... sometimes!

Rob2Hook

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #14 on: July 08, 2020, 11:15:59 AM »

Very interesting to hear of all these influences on music development.   Also very glad to see that no-one has been tempted to argue their position against/despite others' suggestions.  I've been trying to produce a reference manuscript for each of the dance tunes used by our morris side in the style of our side.  Now that sounds simple yet in my inexpert hands I find standard musical notation cannot express style.  The conclusion I have drawn from this is that whilst the manuscript goes some way to representing the objective I will have to record a performance of the tune to demonstrate the style - and I consider my playing as being rather staid compared to some!

So no matter how good and flexible a notation system is I believe that it will invariably limit the extent to which it can represent dynamics, timing and pitch.  Much has been discussed in threads here on the iniquities of equal temperament and how it changes the character of a tune.  I well remember hearing Menuhin playing Beethoven's violin romances very late in his life.  Some of our party were of the opinion that his powers were diminishing with age as his intonation was "imperfect", but generally those of us who played instruments ourselves enjoyed his pure intonation often said to come from his gypsy origins.  Similarly there have been in my lifetime some pretty much last ditch recordings of singers from very isolated areas whose performances ignore today's musical norms and have a balance and beauty that can never be expressed in notation.

Like other things in life, universal conformity has made modern life possible yet at a high price in the loss of local variation.  Most influences in this process have more to do with increased mobiiity of populations and improved communications, the late C18 seeing a massive acceleration of these changes.

Interesting to note that Sharp's lectures were largely accompanied on a concertina - a recent newcomer and incapable of departing from equal temperament.

Rob.
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Tone Dumb Greg

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #15 on: July 08, 2020, 12:53:11 PM »

This is a fascinating subject, but seems to be characterised by a scarcity of information.

Can anyone recommend a good book with an in depth, knowledgeable discussion of the development of music in Europe, especially Britain.. Particularly, one that doesn't just concern classical music, but, also covers the (to me) far more interesting areas of the development of popular music and dance music  etc. and the inter-relationship of different cultures, prior to the middle 19th century, that includes more than the lyrics to folk songs? The idea seems to get dismissed because of a need to know the unknowable, but there is an enormous amount of information out there.

If not, can someone write one, please? The only man I know who could do this properly is too busy with other projects.
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Chris Ryall

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #16 on: July 08, 2020, 01:13:59 PM »

.  I well remember hearing Menuhin playing Beethoven's violin romances very late in his life.  Some of our party were of the opinion that his powers were diminishing with age as his intonation was "imperfect", but generally those of us who played instruments ourselves enjoyed his pure intonation often said to come from his gypsy origins.

He had a gypsy teacher, and many friends, eg Grappeli. But with name Yehudi was probably not one himself 🤔
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Squeaky Pete

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #17 on: July 08, 2020, 01:14:27 PM »

Vic Gammon is the chap for this, Greg.
I don't know what books he has written, but Mr Google will tell you.
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Tone Dumb Greg

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #18 on: July 08, 2020, 01:24:14 PM »

Vic Gammon is the chap for this, Greg.
I don't know what books he has written, but Mr Google will tell you.

Thanks
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Rob Lands

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Re: Change in music at the end of the C18?
« Reply #19 on: July 08, 2020, 03:44:44 PM »

Books on music development with an emphasis on folk. You probably need to cross from folk music into study of music.  Perhaps move away from Sharpe and Grainger to Karpeles etc? I have been collecting them in a very small way from the second hand market. Perhaps "Folk Music of Britain...and beyond" - Frank Howes might be of interest although on the borderline of academic and factual in will give you a 1969 overview.  He was a professor at the Royal College, a music critic at the Times and editor of the folk song journal for 20 years.  The recent books I have seen tend to be "song based".
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