IT's TIME TO EXAMINE my claim that many of the musical structures and attitudes of the later twentieth century were already embedded by the start of the First World War. And it's time for some final conclusions about the achievements of the ‘long Edwardian’ era.

❧ The status of music

One striking change was the new status that music attained across the period.

Despite bitter complaints against the upper echelons, music was clearly significant in the lives of many – especially among the much-derided nouveaux riches. Whether through influence, active involvement or financial support, the ‘upper ten’ played a much more significant role than is generally recognised – not only men, including the Speyers and Howard de Walden, but women such as Lady de Grey and the Princesse de Polignac. Nor should we underestimate the part that music played in the lives of London's most distinguished artists, from the Pre-Raphaelites to Sargent, himself an accomplished pianist. Fuller Maitland observed that in all such circles, ‘music as a topic of conversation’ had grown beyond recognition by 1914, joining contemporary art as worthy of serious discussion among the elevated classes.

Musicians were also increasingly accepted in society. In part this was a direct result of the social class of those entering the profession, especially those appointed to prominent institutional roles. Head of the Royal College of Music was the independently wealthy Hubert Parry, Oxford graduate and Professor, habitué of the Gladstone and Balfour circles, and one who (according to a confidential memo) would have been a candidate for the House of Lords, had the Liberals chosen to slant the house in their favour. At the RCM, Parry was matched by Stanford – also from a wealthy family, and educated at Cambridge, where he became Professor of Music.

Several other prominent composers, including Vaughan Williams, were of the gentleman class, as were some illuminati of musical theatre: Lionel Monckton's father, for example, was Town Clerk of the City of London. Music was already becoming respectable outside the well-trodden church route.

The plot of one of the most popular BBC television comedies of the late 1970s and early 1980s hinged upon the fate of a minor country house and estate. To the Manor Born was first broadcast on 30 September 1979 and from the beginning the show received consistently high viewing figures. The narrative arc of the series would have been familiar to anyone who had taken an interest in what had happened to country houses over the course of the previous century. In the opening episode, recently widowed Audrey fforbes-Hamilton took control of Grantleigh Manor, the ancestral home with which her family had been associated for four hundred years. She discovered that her late husband's debts had put the house at risk. She subsequently lost the house at auction to Richard DeVere, whose personal fortune derived from the company he founded, Cavendish Foods. Despite the pedigree implied by these names, DeVere in fact represented new money, having risen from roots in the East End of London. Audrey resented his ascendancy as lord of the manor and looked on, with disapproval, from her new home – a cottage on the estate.

The final episode of the first series of To the Manor Born was watched by nearly twenty-four million people, making it the fourth most popular television event of the decade. The show was recommissioned for a further two series, before it finally ended in 1981. The success of the situation comedy showed, perhaps, that the UK television-viewing public intuitively understood distinctions between old and new money, and the humorous potential in the reversal of traditional class roles. The series appealed to the same underlying consciousness of British class culture that had driven the success of films such as Joseph Losey's 1971 adaptation of L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between, or the television drama Upstairs, Downstairs, first broadcast in the same year. The Go-Between, filmed at Melton Constable Hall in Norfolk, used the mise-en-scène of an Edwardian country house to tell the story of a love affair that crossed class lines. The film was a critical and box office success: Harold Pinter's screenplay won a British Academy Film Award, while Margaret Leighton was nominated for an Oscar for her role as the matriarch of the house.

The Canterbury dispute is one of the best chronicled of the late twelfth century. With over 600 surviving letters, and a chronicle of which over half is dedicated to the events of the conflict, we have evidence for this dispute which simply does not exist for many of the other conflicts at the time, apart from the Becket affair. These sources allow us to build a highly detailed picture of the events of the conflict, yet we must still tread carefully. Of the surviving letters, just under one sixth are from the archbishops or their supporters. The result is a thoroughly monastic picture of the dispute, which is also reflected in Gervase's Chronica. While we get an excellent picture of how the monks felt and acted in the dispute, this is much harder to achieve regarding the archbishops. We must therefore look closely at the monastic sources to understand why they have constructed the narrative they wish to present.

Lambeth Ms 415

The main body of the Canterbury letters survives in a single manuscript housed in the archbishop's library at Lambeth Palace (Ms 415). The manuscript is quarto in size, containing 140 folios, with two clasps, one of which is now missing. It was rebound in the seventeenth century and embossed with the arms of the scholar and collector of historical documents Archbishop Sancroft (1677–90). The original title was ‘Epistolae Reginaldi de Tempore Baldewini’, but Sancroft added a more detailed title on the facing page, as well as making several annotations to the margins of the text. The fate of the manuscript after the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century is unclear. Several names have been written on the fly leaves, including Thomas Draper and Beaufey (suggesting possible owners) as well as ‘Eaton’ and ‘Aetonae’, indicating a potential home during this time. Before November 1610, the manuscript was acquired by Archbishop Bancroft. In his will, Bancroft left his library of 6,065 books to his successor, so long as they remained as a body for the use of all future archbishops. This donation was to be the founding collection for a permanent archiepiscopal library, after Archbishop Matthew Parker had alienated the earlier collections. Lambeth 415, took its place in this new collection.

A FEW weeks before Zambia's 2001 election, the then 65-year-old Sata rejected growing calls for him to leave active politics to younger people. Featuring on Radio Phoenix's Let the People Talk, a popular weekly programme that enjoys nationwide listenership, the leader of the recently formed opposition PF party insisted that he would do so only ‘after serving as Republican president in State House. I am exiting politics from State House.’ His inauguration as President of Zambia a decade later, on 23 September 2011, represented the fulfilment of that ambition, one that started almost half a century earlier. Sata's strategy for gaining power, and the specific pledges he made to win votes, offer some criteria that can be used to assess not just how he attempted to deliver on his campaign promises but also the relationship between populism and political change in Zambian history.

Sata's Achievements and Legacy

It is a hard task to assess the legacy of Sata since he died in office on 28 October 2014, barely three years after his inauguration. In a sense, Sata's long road to the presidency involved almost his entire life. By the time he became president, he was an old man and, for much of his presidency, he was seriously unwell. His untimely demise prevents a definitive judgement about whether he would ever have fulfilled his many pre-election promises, but there are strong indications he would not have done so. For instance, once in office, Sata reversed his stance on the constitution, arguing that ‘Zambia does not need a new constitution but only amendments to its existing one’. He also reversed his position on decentralisation. Having campaigned on a promise to use the Barotseland Agreement as a template for devolution, President Sata argued that implementing the Agreement would lead to the break-up of Zambia. These U-turns suggest that he never had a genuine commitment to honour his promises and that he adopted the ideas merely to win votes. Having spent much time in the opposition criticising the poor working conditions in Chinese-owned enterprises, Sata in power became an ardent supporter of Chinese businesses in Zambia.

Urban landscapes

LONDON's POSITION IN THE late Victorian and Edwardian world was marked most spectacularly by its buildings. The city was never subjected to the remodelling that Paris enjoyed in the 1860s – closest, perhaps, was the construction of the Mall leading to Buckingham Palace, followed by the link between Aldwych and Holborn known as Kingsway. But a distinctive style of architecture, the ‘Edwardian Baroque’, gave public buildings not only a grandeur reflecting the imperial metropolis but also new layers of spectacle, opulence and comfort. The same spirit was reflected in a spate of new halls and theatres in the West End, the beating heart of the city's cultural life.

Since the eighteenth century, music had been centred on the London mansions of the upper classes, those affluent Georgian squares extending westwards towards fashionable Mayfair. But after restrictions on theatre building were lifted in 1843 the area became increasingly associated with leisure, as entertainment and shopping infiltrated middle-class lifestyles. In short, music had joined the consumerist revolution.

Central to this model were those modern transport links cutting through London's notorious congestion – the chaotic mix of horse-drawn carriages and omnibuses increasingly exacerbated by early motor vehicles. By 1900 there was already an extensive network of trains from the suburbs into termini around the inner Circle line; while the expanding underground system encouraged relatively inexpensive excursions ‘up West’.

Nothing could compete with the sheer pulling power of London's pleasure district. By comparison, the original City of London boasted no major concert hall or theatre until the Barbican Centre opened in 1982; nor was the exclusive shopping district in Knightsbridge accompanied by new venues, beyond the Royal Albert Hall. It was the West End that set the agenda.

To explore the shape of the musical city more closely, we’ll take a walking tour around London. But before entering the pleasure district, we first need to acknowledge that symbolic centre of musical tradition and power represented by Westminster Abbey.

The English musical tradition was built on choral singing; and for many, the Anglican church still offered not only education but also a large part of their living.

THE STUDY OF MUSIC in its social and cultural contexts has come a long way since I began to study eighteenth-century London concert life many years ago. Urban musicology was at that time no more than a shadow on the horizon. But it was already becoming apparent to many from other disciplines that music could be studied in all manner of new ways.

One of those was the late Cyril Ehrlich, who united the skills of an economic historian with a passion for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music. It was on a joint plane trip, while returning from a European conference, that this book was born, during which my own interest in London music leapt forward a whole century.

Together with Leanne Langley, we devised a research project, ‘The Transformation of London Concert Life, 1880–1914’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This book would never have come to fruition without long and stimulating conversations with both Cyril and Leanne, over many years. I am immensely grateful to Leanne for her continuing support and invaluable advice.

It was always my intention to write a book that would reach beyond music historians to anyone fascinated by British culture in the years around 1900. I have avoided technical analyses in the hope that the significance of music – its centrality in London lives – will emerge in a far broader perspective. And while we can never hear with Edwardian ears, perhaps we might at least start to understand the varied music of this challenging era in quite different ways.

The book builds on a fast-growing body of research across many fields, and I am grateful to scholars and archivists too numerous to mention by name for their generous assistance and input. Some of the ideas in the book arose from seminars with students of Goldsmiths, University of London.

David Wright selflessly gave of his time and expertise in reading a late draft. Eva Mantzourani did sterling work on data collection relating to London concert life: a complementary set of data is available at www. music-in-edwardian-london.com.

I am extremely grateful to Michael Middeke at Boydell Press for so generously supporting the project over many years.

Appendix

ON 23 September 2011, Michael Sata, leader of the opposition Patriotic Front (PF) party, was inaugurated as the fifth elected President of Zambia since independence from Britain in 1964. This followed his victory against incumbent Rupiah Banda of the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD). After a decade in opposition, and at the fourth attempt, Sata, 74, overcame strong competition from Banda, 75, and nine other opposition presidential contenders. He obtained 42 per cent of the vote, ahead of the sitting president, who polled 35.6 per cent. In the early hours of the same day, soon after being declared winner, Sata addressed the media: ‘How do I receive this victory? Well, this is the beginning of a long journey.’ In fact, it was the exact opposite. At the formation of the PF ten years earlier, Sata had indicated a single-minded focus on becoming President of Zambia, a focus that could be traced back to his days in the grassroots structures of the United National Independence Party (UNIP) in the early 1960s. ‘I am coming from grassroots politics to rule’, he said in October 2001. ‘I will retire from politics after being President [of Zambia] in State House.’ In this sense, his generally unexpected victory in the 2011 election was not the beginning of a long journey, but the end of one.

This book explores that historical journey, which began before the achievement of independence and therefore cuts across many supposed divides in Zambian political history, such as the colonial, post-colonial, one-party state, and multi-party eras. In this way, the book addresses a major gap in contemporary academic accounts of Zambian history, which tends to get segmented into different periods and to downplay the importance of individual leaders in the broader processes of political change. It demonstrates that the successful process of political mobilisation and the history of individual leadership that led Sata to victory in the 2011 election had deep roots. The leadership that he provided, the grievances that he articulated and played on, the policy appeals around which he rallied support and the language with which he expressed those appeals, the constituencies he targ1eted and mobilised, and the nature and style of his political strategy, all had their origins in much earlier phases of Zambian history, starting from the late-colonial period.

HALFWAY INTO the official count of the 2006 election results, with most votes from Lusaka, Copperbelt, and the Bemba-speaking Luapula and Northern provinces already tallied, Sata declared himself winner of the presidential election. Notwithstanding that results from the remaining five provinces were yet to be counted, the opposition Patriotic Front (PF) leader went on to announce that ‘I have won the presidential race by 55 per cent followed by President [Levy] Mwanawasa at 25 per cent’. So confident of victory was Sata that he moved to instruct the Cabinet Office to shift his inauguration from the Supreme Court grounds, the traditional venue, to the 30,000-seater Independence Stadium in order to allow the maximum number of his supporters to attend the ceremony. He then went on to direct that Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe should be invited to the inauguration ceremony as the guest of honour.

Sata's actions elicited strong criticism from the ruling party, whose campaign chief, Vernon Mwaanga, described them as ‘premature’. Mwaanga argued that Sata's strongholds ‘do not represent the total results of the elections for the whole country’. As shown in the previous chapter, the results from the Electoral Commission of Zambia, which saw Mwanawasa of the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) the declared winner, demonstrated how hasty Sata's declaration was. Mwaanga's rebuke of Sata also highlighted the PF leader's limited understanding of the Zambian political landscape. In effect, the MMD campaign chairperson was making the point that, to secure the national presidency, a candidate needed to win their main electoral constituencies comfortably and perform well in the strongholds of their opponents. This was a consideration that Sata's campaign strategy had overlooked until then.

This chapter, building on the preceding one, explores the strategies of electoral mobilisation that Sata employed between 2006 and 2011 to establish a national constituency as a response to his electoral defeat. It demonstrates that during this period, Sata managed to achieve his objective by targeting and appealing to non-Bemba ethnic groups through specific policy messages, such as decentralisation, which found an echo in several constituencies of the Lozi-speaking Western Province.