London Voices, 1820–1840

Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories

Roger Parker, Susan Rutherford, Roger Parker, Susan Rutherford

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226670218
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

London, 1820. The British capital is a metropolis that overwhelms dwellers and visitors alike with constant exposure to all kinds of sensory stimulation. Over the next two decades, the city's tumult will reach new heights: as population expansion places different classes in dangerous proximity and ideas of political and social reform linger in the air, London begins to undergo enormous infrastructure change that will alter it forever.It is the London of this period that editors Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford pinpoint in this book, which chooses one broad musical category—voice—and engages with it through essays on music of the streets, theaters, opera houses, and concert halls; on the raising of voices in religious and sociopolitical contexts; and on the perception of voice in literary works and scientific experiments with acoustics. Emphasizing human subjects, this focus on voice allows the authors to explore the multifaceted issues that shaped London, from the anxiety surrounding the city's importance in the musical world at large to the changing vocal imaginations that permeated the epoch. Capturing the breadth of sonic stimulations and cultures available—and sometimes unavoidable—to residents at the time, London Voices, 1820–1840 sheds new light on music in Britain and the richness of London culture during this period.
 

• CHAPTER 1 •

How the Ballad Singer Lost Her “Woice”

Oskar Cox Jensen

It came from the mouth of an old, unshaven ballad-chanter, who looked as if he had made a hair’s-breadth escape from one of his Majesty’s houses of correction . . . his voice was a real woice,—all that vulgarity, hoarseness and tobacco, could produce; and his prononnsation was of the same cast,—for Ome, sweet Ome, was so thundered in the tympanum, that it was enough to drive the hearer from his home, be it what it might, and to ruin forever all domestic harmony.

—Exchange Herald, 31 August 1826

Although their names were rarely recorded, the ballad singers of the nineteenth-century London street—itinerant, disreputable, impoverished fixtures of the urban environment since Elizabethan times—nonetheless received a great number of “notices” from their social superiors. Admittedly, the vocalist described above is less favoured by the critic for his rendition of Henry Bishop’s “Home! Sweet Home!” than was Mary Ann Paton, whose performance of the same song a few months earlier at Covent Garden “was executed in the purest strain, and is still ringing in our ears, and wringing our hearts.”1 Yet the judgement of the street singer compares more equably with the verdict passed on Miss Foote’s Drury Lane delivery earlier in 1825: “when she sung [sic] ‘Home, sweet home, there’s no place like home,’ the audience seemed to feel the truth of what she was singing, and evidently wished she would go there.”2 And even the much-praised Paton had a rival, in the female ballad singer encountered by one J. M. Lacey in December 1823, whose “execution was in such a superior style, and . . . in a manner very much above many of our second-rate theatrical singers; . . . she went on to ‘Home! sweet Home!’ and finished it in a really beautiful style; it actually went to my heart.”3

The unnamed singer Lacey describes was, as the account acknowledges, exceptional: “unlike the usual run of street-ballad singing,” her performance revealed that she had “been taught music.” There was in truth no such thing as a “usual” ballad singer: the practice was not, contrary to certain continental traditions, a recognized vocation, but something a beggar might aspire to, or that a ruined actor, tradesman, or “fallen woman” might resort to and take up for a time. Their ranks thus included both those who had been singing on the streets all their lives and those who were new to the trade, and whose experience might range from the professional stage to being wholly unused to singing. Lacey’s example is of a talented singer (whether in public or private life is unclear) who had come down in the world. She was technically what we would now call a busker rather than a true ballad singer. The latter’s practice was not to perform for money but to retail single-sheet copies of lyrics for a halfpenny per song, so that their vocal renditions served to attract attention, and to communicate the tune by ear to prospective purchasers; it was therefore more functional than recreational in purpose. I scarcely need to add that the numerous descriptions of ballad singers’ voices that appeared in periodicals, travel writing, political treatises, moral tracts, comic sketches, fiction, and other texts, were never intended as serious musical criticism or “notices” and should not be read as such. Even Lacey’s account of the street busker, which takes note of several items in the singer’s repertoire, belongs more properly to a set of generic, moralizing descriptions of “poor but honest,” pitiable young female singers, wherein their pure, warbling, often trained voices stand in synecdochal relationship to their characters.4 In any consideration of these sources, then, our first supposition must be that when nineteenth-century writers made value judgements about ballad singers’ voices, their point was more likely to be moral or sociopolitical than musical—and that, unlike Lacey, most of these judgements were in denigration of street singers rather than in their praise.

The rationale linking character to voice was not altogether without a theoretical basis, so that condemnations of ballad singers could be couched in specifically musical language. In August 1831, an anonymous article, set in London, from the May issues of the Euterpeiad, a short-lived New York musical periodical, was reprinted in the Harmonicon of London, the leading musical publication of its day.5 This piece was entitled “On Vocal Music,” and its thrust was that English singers should, like their continental peers, pay more attention to science. In the process, it made space for a rather spurious piece of reasoning based in a contemporary understanding of natural philosophy:

The influence of the temper upon tone deserves much consideration. . . . In the voice there is no deception; it is to many the index of the mind, denoting moral qualities; and it may be remarked, that the low, soft tones of gentle and amiable beings, whatever their musical endowments may be, seldom fail to please; besides which, the singing of ladies indicates the cultivation of their taste generally, and the embellishment of the mind. For an instant compare the vulgarity of a ballad-singer, her repulsive tone of voice and hideous graces, to the manner of an equally uncultivated singer in good society; or watch the treatment of a pretty melody from the concert-room, at the west end of London, until it reaches the ears from under the parlour window, and observe how it gains something new of vulgarity with every fresh degradation.6

The passage implies a causal correlation between character and vocal tone, the former—constructed as innate rather than learned—informing and being conveyed by the latter, and it is inserted into the discussion as a concession to the argument that some voices are naturally more talented than others. As this idea is applied to street balladeers rather than concert singers, we may observe a quasi-racialized prejudice against lower-class performers in both accounts of the street renditions of “Home! Sweet Home!” mentioned above.7 Lacey’s “delicate female”8 has a correspondingly “delicate” voice, while it is no coincidence that the hoarse, vulgar singer is suspected of convicted felony: his voice, as well as his situation, suggests that he belongs to the criminal classes of society. Just as critics of the Italian street musicians, discussed in Mary Ann Smart’s chapter later in this volume, saw only tanned skin and rags in these denigrated “foreigners,” so they heard in indigenous ballad singers only deplorable accents and intonation. In both Lacey and the Harmonicon article, and in a hundred other commentaries, it is not melody—which travels unchanged through social and physical space—that denotes breeding, manners, character; it is, rather, voice in its “treatment” of the melody that is the marker of difference.

This supposedly scientific reasoning, dating from the early 1830s, clearly postdates its application: just as the same article also draws on Shakespeare to make a similar point, so were the 1820s’ verdicts on singers’ voices (with which this chapter begins) representative of a discourse that stems from the late sixteenth century. The journalist was writing for an educated middle- and upper-class audience happy to pay three shillings for an elite periodical that, not coincidentally, also provided sheet-music editions of songs for domestic performance. This is in stark contrast to the halfpenny lyric sheets sold by ballad singers and is effectively extrapolating a principle from preconceived prejudices.9 To generalize only a little: respectable writers did not deem ballad singers disreputable because their voices were bad; they characterized voices as bad because they deemed the singers disreputable. The longer explanation of this axiom will involve, in musicologist Robert Walser’s phrase, “accounting for taste,” although the process is more nearly an inversion of his proposition that the “understanding of cultural pleasures is an unavoidable precondition to understanding social relations, identities, structures, and forces.”10 In short, my title is “How the Ballad Singer Lost Her ‘Woice,’” but I also hope also to achieve something more: to find it again.

Detecting Distinction

As already suggested, ballad singers were a fixture of the streets of London from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, selling printed songs to an eager and evidently appreciative audience. Yet accounts of their singing were consistently negative. In the nineteenth century, these accounts ranged from the condescending—“it was his harsh, cracked, blatant voice that growled, squeaked, shouted forth the glorious truth”—to the proverbial: “bawling for fair play, with a voice that might deafen a ballad singer.”11 It is hard to swallow so many accounts of discordant, broken, reedy—in a phrase, unfit for purpose—voices, when in order to make a living, singers had not only to attract customers but to communicate a variety of tunes accurately enough to be remembered and repeated. The most obvious explanation for this disjunction is an insuperable barrier of class and, therefore, expectation: Lacey, for example, supposed it “pretty evident, that such execution and even pathos, could only have been acquired by a musical education.”12 By this reading, middling- and upper-class auditors were simply incapable of engaging with a musical tradition that, however valid, long-standing, and sufficient on its own terms, was nevertheless incompatible with that of those more elite auditors. For convenience, we might label this putative division as one between a “vernacular” and a “trained” voice, where “trained” refers to a formal, literate, and generally expensive musical education in the Western classical tradition. Even in its own terms, this division is problematic: to clarify, it does not map to a professional/amateur divide, not only because street singers were remunerated (albeit indirectly) for their vocal efforts and depended on such efforts for their living, but also because even the most mediocre of genteel amateur singers, satirized by Austen or Dickens, must be classed among the “trained,” if only in terms of what they conceived the art of singing to signify. Moreover, to label a voice “vernacular” by no means precludes the possibility that it might be highly skilled and indeed taught; it merely acknowledges that any such education would not be recognized as such by the readers of the Harmonicon. To take a (slightly) more modern parallel: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was “trained,” whereas Bob Dylan would be described as a vernacular singer. Yet even if we accept this division, the posited explanation remains insufficient on at least two counts. First, almost all new melodies to which printed ballads were set originated on the respectable stage, composed by everyone from Weber to von Neukomm to Braham—not to forget Henry Bishop, of “Home! Sweet Home!” fame—and there was therefore a substantial overlap of repertoire between stage and street.13 As Smart discusses later in this volume, even the arias of the Italian opera, the “pinnacle of the aesthetic hierarchy,” were pressed into service on the street.14 Just as in the Euterpeiad/Harmonicon example, the songs might easily remain the same, in terms of melody and lyrics, irrespective of location. Second, even the wealthy, the learned, and the fashionable were known to have bought street ballads.15 The economic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• introduction
• chapter 1
• chapter 2
• chapter 3
• chapter 4
• chapter 5
• chapter 6
• chapter 7
• chapter 8
• chapter 9
• chapter 10
• chapter 11
• chapter 12
• chapter 13
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Index