Histories of British Music and the Land Without Music: National Identity and the Idea of the Hero

Summary

DESPITE the vast array of historical material available, it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that a fully fledged study of British music was written. Fuelled by principles of the Enlightenment, late eighteenth-century Englishmen like Charles Burney and John Hawkins provided general histories incorporating reference to British music, followed in the early nineteenth century by writers like Thomas Busby, William Stafford and George Hogarth. But these writings provide information on British music only to varying degrees, situating Britain within a larger European, and at times global, historiographical framework. Thus until the middle part of the nineteenth century British music, like so much other national music, remained an integral part of music history at large. From that time, however, British music history began to assume a more independent form, with the publication of what is, arguably, its first monograph, the anonymously authored Music in England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time (1845). Written for Cradock & Co.'s New Library of Useful Knowledge, it sets the tone for histories of English or British music right up to the time of John Caldwell's magisterial histories of English music published at the tail end of the twentieth century.

It is perhaps no surprise that Britain's first and most recent national music histories are so remarkably similar in their aims, joined, as they are, by a rich vein of national apologetics concerning Britain's most seemingly indestructible musical criticism: namely, ‘the land without music’. Indeed, because of their unity as a genre, it is national histories of British music, perhaps more than any other type of musical literature, which help to interpret Britain's most demeaning musical epithet. That epithet, sustained over years of critical recrimination and reflection (both foreign and domestic), has been the source of numerous theories, including general faults in British character, a decline of British musical genius, the oppressive hegemony of Purcell and Handel, over-centralization of culture in London, poor education, the Continental values of a foreign court and more recently xenophilia.