Britain was not alone in witnessing a groundswell of interest in instruments of the violin family during the late nineteenth century. Existing research in women’s music history, for instance, shows that similar developments took hold in parts of Europe and North America. In her essay “Passed Away Is the Piano Girl,” Judith Tick treats the changing acceptability of women as professional violinists in the USA around the same time, while Margaret Myers’s study of European ladies’ orchestras from c. 1870 suggests that, as in Britain, women violinists tried to earn money in all-female ensembles.Footnote ¹ Such commonalities notwithstanding, aspects of violin culture “at home,” especially the examination system and the commercially led system of group violin instruction in schools, were initially peculiar to Britain, though they would subsequently spread to parts of the British Empire and elsewhere.Footnote ²

Nevertheless, in-depth studies of parallel developments in violin learning and playing in other countries are needed before the wider contribution of British violin culture can be fully gauged.Footnote ³ For that reason, this chapter takes the theme of “Britain” in another direction to consider how concepts of “nation” impacted British violin culture, focusing on ways in which the string world meshed with, on the one hand, the ideology of a unified political and administrative territory (the United Kingdom, for which Britain serves as a synonym) and, on the other, the seemingly cross-cutting efforts of the territory’s four constituent countries of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales to assert distinctive cultural identities through artistic expression and musical activities.Footnote ⁴ In turn, it examines how journalism helped create the sense of a string-playing community nationwide; how aspects of violin culture became bound up with the national war effort, 1914–1918; how traditional tunes played on the violin serviced notions of both the unified territory and its Four Nations; and how newly composed music for strings was often infused with markers of national identities. Throughout, “nation” and related words are context-specific but, unless otherwise qualified, refer to Britain.

String Playing and Imagined Community

By the first decades of the twentieth century, evidence of violin culture’s infrastructure could be detected across much of Britain, touching settlements of all sizes. Avenues for learning and for playing with others were to be found in most towns and some villages. Yet even where conditions for communal music-making were favorable, a considerable amount of isolation and travail awaited students. More critically, where an individual had limited access to others with whom they might make music, the solitary hours of private practice that were expected could make it difficult to stay the course. Amateur orchestras, though crucial motivators, operated seasonally; players’ interest could wane in summer months.

Under such circumstances what did it take to keep learners committed to their hobby? Encouragement of family and friends was almost always important, for where such support was lacking, a student might well give up. Witnessing string players in everyday life – on a seaside pier or in a local department store, for instance – could be motivating; but some of the greatest incentivization probably came from being able to see and/or hear star artists in concerts or (later) on the gramophone or radio. The eight-year-old Max Jaffa, having abandoned lessons, was inspired to return to the violin after hearing the sensational Jascha Heifetz give his London debut (Queen’s Hall, 1920): “the sounds he made … completely turned my head.”Footnote ⁵ Columbia Records, later that decade, advertised its recordings by Ysaÿe, Sammons, and others as a resource for “home study”;Footnote ⁶ if affordable, these would have been especially useful in remote communities, where opportunities to hear professionally played music were largely nonexistent.

A further source of encouragement, especially for adult amateurs, were magazines for string players. This “violin press” not only provided tips and information for players; it also established practical mechanisms for bringing people together to make music and used features and news items to help readers feel they belonged to a nationwide “affinity” community of like-minded individuals.Footnote ⁷ Niche, nationally distributed magazines were a sign of the times, the consequence of the formidable growth of affordable newspaper and periodical publishing during the Victorian era and the birth of a mass reading public. As Matthew Rubery explains: “Few groups lacked a magazine of their own,” and readers looked forward to “magazine day,”Footnote ⁸ often the first of the month. During violin culture’s boom years, string players were well catered for, though there were limits to how many titles the market could sustain.Footnote ⁹ The first magazine on the scene was The Fiddler in 1884, which began as a quarterly, quickly shifting to monthly distribution, though it lasted only until 1888.Footnote ¹⁰ Two relatively short-lived monthlies followed, The Violin (1889–1894) and The Violin Monthly Magazine (1889–1894; elaborately produced, expensive, and only occasionally publishedFootnote ¹¹), but were soon complemented by more long-lived, authoritative publications: The Strad (1890; still in existence), The Violin Times (1893–1907), and Strings: The Fiddler’s Magazine (1894–1898), all monthlies too.Footnote ¹² From 1908, the Violin Times was remolded as The Violin and String World and issued as a glossy monthly supplement to one of the leading general music magazines, The Musical Standard, until 1912.Footnote ¹³ This publishing decision may have been bound up with the arrival in 1906 of The Cremona (headlined as incorporating “‘The Violinist,’ A Record of the String World”).Footnote ¹⁴ In 1909, a title associated with the Maidstone string-teaching program, The Young Musician (later, The Young Musician and the School Orchestra: The Organ of the National Union of School Orchestras), arrived on the scene.Footnote ¹⁵ Thereafter, just one new periodical was launched, The Gazette of the College of Violinists. Published twice yearly and tied to the titular examination board, it ran from 1914 until 1939 (from 1921 titled The Violinists’ Gazette: The Official Organ of the College of Violinists). Most of these magazines were inexpensive, with several start-ups retailing at 2d. an issue, which in 1890 represented half the cost of the widely read, more generalist Musical Times.Footnote ¹⁶

Niche string magazines gathered fairly defined readerships, attracting people with shared interests and goals, even while targeting both amateurs and professionals, and students as well as teachers, of not just the violin, but the viola, cello, and double bass (and theoretically, in the case of The Strad, other instruments played with a bow, such as the viol). All were sold across the Kingdom; The Strad covered activities in Ireland even after the country achieved independence in 1922.Footnote ¹⁷ Although circulation figures remain frustratingly elusive, considerable amounts of advertising in the more long-lived string magazines reinforce the assumption of sizeable readerships. Self-evidently, readers were connected by shared passions, preoccupations, and allegiances, with magazines offering content to appeal to most of the main interest groups. Contrast this violin-press practice with generalist, nonmusic magazines, whose readers’ interests were much more varied, making loyalties harder won. In those publications, the serialization of stories and novels across issues were used tactically to retain readers. The Girl’s Own Paper, as Beth Rodgers has demonstrated, developed additional techniques that encouraged a sense of readerly community – namely, competitions that invited readers to contribute prose content and thus “participate in the textual voice of the magazine.”Footnote ¹⁸

With two exceptions, discussed later in this section, the violin press did not pursue such strategies long-term. Short or serialized stories about violinists were tried by The Fiddler and Strings,Footnote ¹⁹ the latter also dabbling in competitions, while the serialization of nonfiction features became common, especially in The Strad. But, typically, editors of string magazines were concerned with publishing expert information and advice, and with creating a sense of editorial authority such that, on the face of it, nurturing a community of readers who participated directly in editorial matters was not a priority. And yet close study of the content of the more enduring string magazines suggests that, whether unintentionally or by design, there was scope for readers across Britain to experience feelings of connection with one another, which may well have boosted those titles’ longevity.

Some of these string periodicals’ editorial choices were already established in magazine journalism: for instance, the regular printing of readers’ letters to the editor, and the insertion of “small ads” that enabled individuals, for a fee, to promote or seek resources, clients, and services, such as music, pupils, and teachers. In The Strad, a more affordable option for people wanting to sell, purchase, or exchange music and instruments locally was a succinct notice in its “Sale and Exchange Mart” column. Both advertising mechanisms were tools for community generation in that they held the potential to bring readers together in person for business transactions or music-making.

Other reader-generated content exuded a different tone. The Strad, The Violin Times, Strings, and The Cremona made a feature of advice columns in which enquiries could be authoritatively and publicly addressed. Questioners were identified by their initials or a pseudonym, and/or by the town or area from which they wrote. The Strad’s extensive “Answers to Correspondents” column offered advice “on any subject likely to interest players of stringed instruments.” Responses were concise, the questions not printed: doubtless a cost-saving measure, but also a way of intriguing readers, who might scan the column to see what advice they might find appropriate. To one string quartet in Forfarshire (1920s), presumably enquiring about editions of Haydn quartets, the reply simply read: “You can get them in separate numbers from Lengnick. I should think the set, Op. 20, would suit you.”Footnote ²⁰ Readers skimming that column would have immediately grasped the wide geographic spread of the enquiries: Easingwold (Yorkshire), Falmouth, Lerwick (Shetland), Monaghan (Ireland), Kyles of Bute (Scotland), London, Cardiff, Coventry, Birmingham, Doncaster, Hull, Shropshire, Sunderland, and Surrey were among the locations from which questions about instruments, music, technique, and so forth had emanated, offering tangible evidence of like-minded enthusiasts and practitioners nationwide, and the illusion of being part of a large community.

A similar effect was achieved by the publication of lists of successful candidates in the grade and diploma examinations of the College of Violinists (CoV). This information appeared initially in The Strad, then (also) in the Violin Times, before being transferred to the CoV’s Gazette (1914). Local examination centers or sometimes candidates’ hometowns were identified alongside the person’s name; marks were not revealed. From the publishing perspective, it was a shrewd way of encouraging those, or the families of those, whose names were printed in the paper to purchase the issue, while generating interest in the examination scheme itself.Footnote ²¹ Densely packed columns of exam results not only reinforced the geographic scope of string playing to anyone scanning them but also served to demonstrate to all readers who were exam takers – not just the CoV’s candidates – that they were part of a massive network of learners: people who shared a familiarity with both a body of music that everyone played and an assessment experience. Reports of the results of string classes at (regional) music festivals may have functioned similarly, effectively encouraging an “imagined” countrywide community of string players, to extend Benedict Anderson’s still relevant concept for examining feelings of national belonging. This is not to imply that the violin press was seeking to catalyze patriotic fervor, but rather to suggest that its publishing practices prompted, among exam-taking readers, consciousness of the national context in which their musical activities were situated, each reader’s mind holding an “image of their communion.”Footnote ²²

We might surmise, too, that the publication of exam and festival results generated positive feelings of belonging in candidates who saw their accomplishments enshrined in print, or that it encouraged less advanced students to persevere with their learning, by setting up dreams of one day being listed at the diploma level or as the winner of an advanced festival class. Yet where the remarks of a music festival adjudicator were included in a results feature, the potential follow-on seems less clear-cut. Fifteen-year-old Frank Bilbe may well have felt pride on seeing in print Spencer Dyke’s comment that his playing of a Bach concerto at the 1923 Croydon Musical Festival “could scarcely have been equalled,” but how might the sixteen violin contestants at the Father Matthew Feis in Dublin (1924) have reacted to their adjudicator’s comment about their bad intonation and “appalling” sight-reading?Footnote ²³

Most violin magazines targeted a broad audience of players who would “never know most of their fellow-members,”Footnote ²⁴ but two titles – the Gazette of the College of Violinists and the Young Musician – that addressed people involved with the national organizations to which the magazines were tied aimed to generate feelings of social connection among their readers. In each, the needs of the organization’s audience, along with institutional goals, were at the heart of the content.Footnote ²⁵ But the editors also used specialized techniques to encourage shared values, comparable activities, and a semblance of known community among their readers, fostering loyalty to the organization and setting up sociomusical ties that could be strengthened at annual in-person, participative events.

Targeting the CoV’s “past and present candidates” while also addressing teachers and representatives of local examination centers, the seriously inclined Gazette set out in 1914 not only to seek feedback from its readers but also to solicit “particulars of anything that may be of interest to Violinists, for insertion in coming numbers.”Footnote ²⁶ In the magazine’s early years, the tone and substance of its features suggest a target audience of individuals who aspired to take its advanced exams, as opposed to beginners or young children; by the mid 1920s it was addressing teachers, too. A significant amount of the content, including what would today be called an FAQ column, comprised practical information and friendly advice for those taking, or preparing students for, exams; it was supplemented with competition quizzes on music theory for both students and teachers. Other features were of more general interest: articles on violins, pedagogy, and technical matters, and explicit career advice. Some material promoted the College unapologetically: features on examiners and local exam organizers (sometimes with an accompanying photographFootnote ²⁷), news from local centers, extensive reportage of the annual London concert and prize-giving (at which some face-to-face interactions eventuated), and lengthy lists of successful candidates all helped create a sense of a known, closed circle, as did the rhetorical device of using “you” to address the reader. The community atmosphere intensified during World War I, with news of candidates, local secretaries, and examiners on active service, and obituaries of those who had fallen. The March 1917 editorial announced a willingness to send free copies of the magazine (postage paid) to any former candidate serving in the “Army or Navy, or in Minesweepers” whose family or teachers applied for the service.Footnote ²⁸ Postwar, the magazine’s collective identity was reinforced by upbeat articles on amateur orchestras.Footnote ²⁹

The bimonthly Young Musician developed a more relaxed feel, which emanated from its principally addressing youngsters.Footnote ³⁰ Easily digestible news and information, short features (e.g., on composers, famous violinists, violin technique), regular columns (e.g., “Uncle John’s Letter”), illustrations (many photographs), music (easy violin and piano pieces, occasionally songs), anecdotes, and jokes were to the fore, with most content related to the activities of the NUSO and its affiliated Maidstone-scheme classes (topics treated in Chapter 2). The magazine highlighted the winning groups at the NUSO Festival, along with their teachers – keeping those orchestras in touch with one another was an official NUSO objective – and it printed the results of Maidstone exams, drawing attention to specific students and schools. Instructors had their own column for discussing group-teaching issues and were evidently the audience for detailed reports of NUSO conferences and executive meetings.

Like the Gazette, the Young Musician solicited copy, albeit more aggressively, asking for “interesting items for publication” including “[i]nstructive articles and musical compositions,”Footnote ³¹ using methods akin to those operating in the Girl’s Own Paper. Other opportunities for readers, especially young ones, to interact with the magazine were calculated to build circulation and foster allegiance to the NUSO.Footnote ³² In a “Post Bag” column the editor answered questions and held “chats” with “young Correspondents.”Footnote ³³ Prize draws were introduced; competitions, too: one in 1911 asked readers to complete a limerick about the magazine.Footnote ³⁴ A postcard-exchange service encouraged children to correspond with one another, to “help you to feel that you all belong to a brotherhood of music.”Footnote ³⁵ A subset of readers, the Young Musicians’ Guild, which students could initially join for free (later, 1d.), received privileges, such as their own competitions and opportunities to advise the editor on content or purchase a membership badge. In return, students promised to be model pupils, read the magazine regularly, and solicit new readers.Footnote ³⁶ New members’ names were published. Photographs of some of them also appeared, as did the winning classes in NUSO competitions (with pupils sometimes identified in captions), heightening impressions of a nationwide community of reader-players and, for those pictured, pride in being singled out in a national magazine.

The NUSO was also concerned with establishing mechanisms for ex-students to continue playing by joining evening violin classes or amateur orchestras.Footnote ³⁷ One example of the latter, the Croyland Old Scholars’ Orchestral Society (encountered in Chapter 7), was trumpeted in an extensive feature, with photograph.Footnote ³⁸ Printing such images of people who shared readers’ affinity for the violin and their experiences of the Maidstone mode of instruction was important because it created a simulacrum of real sociomusical connection. Besides which, the NUSO festivals offered the possibility for some students to turn notional relationships into significant realities. In fact, long before the advent of the internet and social media, both the Gazette and the Young Musician strove to move beyond fostering the type of imagined collective of string players who were unknown to one another, and to build an actual, interactive (what Rodgers might describe as a “virtual”) nationwide community of young people who perceived they were connected in meaningful ways.

Strings in Wartime

Consciousness of Britain as “one nation” was noticeably heightened during 1914–1918, for, as the historian Hugh Kearney observes, the War served “to arouse a sense of ‘Britishness’ among many sections of the population.”Footnote ³⁹ It was effected largely through the mechanisms of propaganda that pumped patriotic messaging at the home front, especially during the enlistment campaign in the conflict’s early months, and music and musicians played a significant part in those processes. In the string world, hundreds of players employed in music-hall bands found themselves accompanying performances of propagandist songs by popular artists such as Vesta Tilley, while others were soon hired to make recordings of the same: essentially music that whipped up loyalty to country and commitment to the War effort and justified Britain’s involvement.Footnote ⁴⁰ Many string players (both amateur and professional) participated in the fundraising concerts that quickly became a feature of musical life in wartime, though expectations that professionals would give their services gratis, at a time when canceled events were causing financial hardship for musicians, became a point of controversy and pushback.Footnote ⁴¹ Some string players performed in concerts intended to lift the morale of soldiers who had been hospitalized back in Britain.Footnote ⁴² Others joined traveling troupes that went to the front to entertain at base camps, sometimes even playing outdoors close to firing lines. The touring concert parties organized by Lena Ashwell for the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) programs to support British troops typically comprised four singers, an accompanist, a variety performer, and an instrumentalist such as a violinist or cellist, who was often female (a notable advance for women musicians, whose presence in combat zones was unprecedented).Footnote ⁴³ Expenses were covered, but many players received no remuneration.Footnote ⁴⁴

Yet playing in concerts, or even attending them, was not the only way string players at home could leverage their expertise and interests in support of the national War effort. In the conflict’s later years, The Strad printed appeals for instruments and music that could be sent out to troops – on one occasion (April 1918) emphasizing editorially the solace that string playing could offer the many musicians who had been “out there for three years without any possibility of holding a fiddle in their hands even for half an hour.”Footnote ⁴⁵ That comment was made in relation to a full-page donation-seeking advertisement placed by the YMCA Musicians’ Fund in the same issue.Footnote ⁴⁶ The YMCA, which had already made far-reaching contributions to keeping British troops entertained, launched the fund only in the War’s latter stages, perhaps as a fresh attempt to buttress troops’ morale as the conflict dragged on.Footnote ⁴⁷ The ad itself called for financial gifts, fundraising initiatives (including concerts), or the donation of a violin “or some other instrument,”Footnote ⁴⁸ and was part of a national appeal by its Music for the Troops department in France, under the leadership of Percy Scholes, to equip the YMCA’s 2,000 huts with the tools for musical recreation.Footnote ⁴⁹ Instruments of all sorts were sought, but in the ad string playing was emphasized (“Few people realise how many fiddlers there are in the Army”),Footnote ⁵⁰ understandably so since Scholes, as Chapter 2 showed, was a vocal advocate for group violin classes.

This is not to say that up until then servicemen with stringed instruments had not been seen or heard in combat areas. Especially in the camps behind the lines, where diversion for soldiers was badly needed, music-making frequently occurred. Johanna de Schmidt has revealed something of the prevalence of instrument use among soldiers serving the French army, some of whom built stringed instruments from scratch.Footnote ⁵¹ To judge from soldier stories that surfaced during centenary commemorations in 2014–2018, instruments were similarly evident in British camps – often taken out by servicemen to war zones, where the focus and humanity of playing an instrument offered respite from the dehumanizing effects of industrialized warfare, as well as providing an important connection with home. Ernest Johnson (1883–1948), a carpenter from Tyneside who served as a sapper in the Royal Engineers and was on active service in France, Belgium, and Italy from 1915, came from a musical family. His violin was seemingly a constant, meaningful companion, in use both recreationally (family anecdote indicates that he played popular tunes, including the 1916 hit “Roses of Picardy”) and as a means of recording his war journey: carved into its back is a long list of dates and places of action.Footnote ⁵² Amateur cellist and insurance clerk Harold Triggs (1886–1964), who served as a lieutenant in the Royal Sussex Regiment, also took equipment, in this case a rectangular “holiday cello” that came apart for easy storage and portability; his regimental insignia had been painted onto its front.Footnote ⁵³

Even before the YMCA Musicians’ Fund began its instrument campaign, some camps had acquired stringed instruments, according to the testimonial of an unidentified musician serving in France, which led off that 1918 Strad ad:

The testimonial makes a strong case for providing instruments at the front to string-player soldiers, while hinting at hopes that Britain might yet assert its international supremacy through classical music. Further down the page, the YMCA’s own arguments flowed. Making music recreationally in camps, or listening to it, alleviated soldiers’ boredom. It also had important restorative value and was a means not only of gaining a “breath of the old home” but also of encouraging psychological healing in the many soldiers who had been traumatized by front-line action and the execrable filth and noise of the killing fields.Footnote ⁵⁵ The copywriter put the case in terms of “the roar and scream of shells [having] deadened the very senses of these men or so unstrung their nerves that they are no longer fit to fight,” insisting that “it is the great mission of music to restore them.”Footnote ⁵⁶ This was a timely comment for, as the numbers of horrendously wounded men rose, the therapeutic value of music for emotional healing was beginning to be acknowledged.

Donations of instruments for men on active service were meaningful, practical ways for individuals involved in violin culture “at home” to support the national war effort. Instruments were also sought for British soldiers who were held as prisoners of war, in situations where music might alleviate the strain and misery of detention. A notice printed in the March 1917 Strad had called for readers to donate violin music, especially easy tunes and tutor books, to the government’s British Prisoners of War Book Scheme, for distribution to men “interned in enemy or neutral countries.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Further, when the armistice came, the YMCA appealed for money, music, and instruments to help keep troops occupied during the long process of demobilization.Footnote ⁵⁸

***

From the War’s outset, “buying British” was understood as a practical gesture of patriotism – a means of contributing to the home economy and avoiding support of enemy markets. In the world of advertising, as T. R. Nevett avers, this was often “coupled with attempts to exploit the widespread anti-German feeling” and an insistence on the high caliber of British merchandise, especially in the months after war was declared.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Maypole Dairy Company’s margarine was touted for being made from nuts seized from German ships; Royal Worcester Kidfitting Corsets were upheld for having nothing German in them.Footnote ⁶⁰ As a rule, British violin-trade advertising – which had long exuded a restrained, modest tone (graphics were rare; budgets probably small) – steered clear of such new ploys and only a few ads in The Strad tapped into an overtly propagandistic agenda. Most such material simply emphasized through typography that the goods it promoted (typically strings or sundries) were made at home and of unsurpassable quality: for instance, the Manby-Jensen “ALL-BRITISH VIOLIN METHOD” (which would give better results than “GERMAN or AUSTRIAN methods so much the vogue lately”), G. A. Parker’s English violin strings (made in London from the “finest English Gut”), or Greener’s Bozone rosin (“A TRIUMPH OF BRITISH CHEMISTRY”).Footnote ⁶¹ The ad for Thomas Dawkins’s strings went a little further: “WHY BUY FOREIGN STRINGS?” it needled, since Dawkins’s products “CHALLENGE THE WORLD,” supplementing the rhetoric with a photograph of the Dawkins factory exterior, complete with Union Jack flying in the wind.Footnote ⁶²

An exception to the otherwise general restraint was the over-the-top advertising issued by the British Violin-Makers’ Guild, which repeatedly summoned excessive and inflammatory anti-German language. In operation by summer 1915, the Guild sought to spur a concerted national effort in industrialized violin making in order to replace the thousands of inexpensive, low-grade violins that had long been imported annually from Europe with better-quality, reasonably priced factory instruments from Britain. It is unclear how much a claim – publicly asserted in August 1915Footnote ⁶³ – that Mittenwald’s and Markneukirchen’s industries were halted and Mirecourt was “in ruins” may have been overstated, although production surely slowed owing to personnel shortages. But regardless, the Guild’s arrival looks well timed, for in September the government had introduced a 33.3 percent import tax on luxury goods (musical instruments were so defined),Footnote ⁶⁴ which must have dampened the retailing of new foreign factory fiddles. The Guild’s self-justification was that Britain had a body of violin makers whose work had been long overshadowed commercially by foreign instruments and who stood to benefit from a centralized effort to draw attention to their work.

The Guild was founded by opportunistic violin maker and experienced group teacher Albert J. Roberts.Footnote ⁶⁵ In a letter to The Strad in October 1915 that announced the initiative, Roberts claimed to have “visited all the principal Continental centres of the violin-making industry” and become familiar with “their methods.”Footnote ⁶⁶ He also disclosed the fitting-up of a factory in Hampstead, north London, “with appliances, motor power and machinery for the production of instruments which are to compete in price and surpass in quality the hitherto exclusively German product.” His goal was to develop a British violin-making industry that would endure beyond the War’s end, and he envisioned realizing it by creating an affiliation of British makers, whom he implored to join his scheme. The size of the potential pool is not recorded, but since some makers had already enlisted for military service and others would soon be mobilized (conscription was introduced in 1916), it cannot have been especially large. Still, Roberts committed to employing workers who had been invalided out of military service, and to establishing apprenticeships under skilled English, French, and Russian instructors.Footnote ⁶⁷

Appealing to a strand of xenophobic patriotism that had been whipped up in the aftermath of the first Zeppelin raids and the sinking of the Lusitania earlier that year, Roberts’s letter asserted that the supply of “thousands of German violins” to Britain’s elementary schools over the previous decade had put money into German coffers and thus “contributed towards the construction of that militarism which now threatens our very existence as a nation.” It also announced that the 25,000 German instruments “imported yearly into England and the Colonies” were canceled “forthwith”Footnote ⁶⁸ – a statement that turned out to be more wishful thinking than recorded fact, for when subsequently challenged about the veracity of the claim, Roberts argued (spring 1916) he was voicing foregone conclusions.Footnote ⁶⁹

In the several full-page, text-heavy advertisements for the Guild that The Strad carried over the next two and a half years, the inflammatory rhetoric, quite possibly penned by Roberts, turned more strident. Often employing the “anti-symbol”Footnote ⁷⁰ of the hateful Hun and playing on the “British” epithet in the organization’s name, the maneuver had two dimensions. It invoked events in the conflict as evidence of German barbarism, ruthlessness, and amorality – “the German Hun [had] hacked his bloody path through the defenceless towns and villages of Belgium,” committing crimes “unparalleled” in history – to justify the call for buying British products.Footnote ⁷¹ It also depicted the British violin trade as waging its own war with Germany. Casting the enemy’s factory instruments as made from good wood but lacking aesthetic refinements and producing a poor tone, the verbiage castigated German trade-talk as cunning, notably for the “specious” claims it made about why these new instruments sounded poor when first played.Footnote ⁷² By extension, German violins were anthropomorphized as brutes. Positioning its own British-made violins (priced from 1 to 20 guineas) as excellent, the Guild promoted its aim to “defeat the German in the mart as our Armies shall defeat him in the field.”Footnote ⁷³ These ideas, in tune with the bellicose quality of much general wartime propaganda as well as the rabble-rousing language that was rife in British piano-industry advertising, were nevertheless at odds with the measured tone of The Strad’s content and most of its other published ads, not to mention the gentility of the violin trade.Footnote ⁷⁴

By May 1918, Guild advertising could point to having sent 800 violin kits and music to the front, and was putting a positive spin on its achievements (“a very effective contribution to THE CAPTURE OF ENEMY TRADES”Footnote ⁷⁵); at least one “expert” had vouched publicly for the quality of its cheap instruments.Footnote ⁷⁶And yet, Roberts had to acknowledge that the Guild had not seen the successes it had hoped for, framing this disappointment as precipitated by the “pressing national need for men, machinery and material.”Footnote ⁷⁷ In any case, ambitions had been modest and unlikely to have delivered a monopoly of the “bargain” sector of the national, let alone international, market. Earlier, Roberts had aimed for the production of 1,000 instruments a year, 10,000 once the conflict ended.Footnote ⁷⁸ Even by 1919, the first goal had not been reached.Footnote ⁷⁹ Hopes were high for positive postwar developments, though these too were not realized, and the Guild ceased advertising in The Strad in 1927.

Although the failure of the Guild’s mission has rendered Roberts’s initiative a mere footnote in British violin history, the tone of its ads in The Strad makes it a productive topic for examining the violin world’s contributions to wartime propaganda. That said, it forms only part of the picture. Other sectors of string culture and its associated commerce – including players, small businesses, and violin magazines more generally – got caught up in national wartime efforts. Indeed, The Strad contributed much beyond the ads it printed. Whether raising awareness of fundraising concerts in its review columns, encouraging string players to organize events in aid of wartime relief, or cajoling readers to provide resources to the YMCA to enable soldiers to make music at the front, the magazine attempted to stimulate patriotic actions that could (and did) yield tangible results. Rhetorically, too, it encouraged its readers to believe that the string community at home was connecting with the “boys” abroad. Its pages thus provide multiple windows into how violin culture contributed to increasing consciousness of Britain as a unified nation during the War years.

Four Nations Music

In her study of how Britain formed a sense of itself after the Act of Union of 1707, Linda Colley observes that the growth of British national identity did not supplant “other loyalties,” but rather became “superimposed” on older allegiances to Wales, England, and Scotland (and to different regions, towns, etc. within each country), coexisting with them.Footnote ⁸⁰ The same might be said of the environment immediately following the 1801 legislation, which brought Ireland into the Union; but with the complicating caveat that in the period from c. 1860 to 1914 ethnic consciousness intensified.Footnote ⁸¹(Ethnic politics were most striking in post-Famine Ireland; there, the growth of republicanism reached its flashpoint in the rebellion of 1916, which led to sustained guerilla conflict with Britain and to Ireland’s eventual partition.Footnote ⁸²) In each of the Four Nations, music was among the tools used to communicate or heighten cultural distinctiveness during the 1870–1930 period. It was also marshalled to construct notions of a pan-national Britishness, which at times overlapped or merged with notions of Englishness. How violin culture, largely classical in orientation, intersected with such goals of national allegiance is a productive question, requiring, first off, consideration of the culture’s overlaps with traditional music-making, in which fiddle playing had historically been a central component.

As scholars of traditional music have shown, since the seventeenth century in all four countries violins – or, as they are conventionally known in this context, fiddles – had been among the assorted instruments used for traditional music practices.Footnote ⁸³ Across many communities, typically rural ones, national – and often, more accurately, regional – styles of fiddle playing were cultivated by fiddlers, most of whom, so the story goes, were men. Rich and distinctive activities were associated with some regions: for instance, northeast Scotland (Scotch-snap bowings characteristic of the strathspey); Northumbria (rapid dotted-rhythm patterns, with downbeats up-bowed); and the Irish counties of Sligo and Donegal (the former relaxed and highly ornamented, the latter fast and plainer, employing separate bow strokes). At the same time, tunes and styles of playing migrated between the Four Nations when populations relocated, creating swirls of cross-fertilization; as a result, “common songs and tunes crop up [in sources] over many parts of Britain and Ireland.”Footnote ⁸⁴ On the face of it, these largely aurally/orally transmitted performance traditions, with their strong connections to dance, would seem to have little in common with Britain’s commercially motivated violin culture, with its emphasis on notational literacy, its somewhat different playing technique, its classical repertoire, and bedrock of women players. But there are, in fact, points of intersection between the two musical cultures. In addition, the traditional-music historiography, it turns out, has tended to erase the contributions of women fiddlers: in reality, some were active, skilled players.Footnote ⁸⁵

Whether through happenstance or desire, some players who identified as fiddlers were versed in both classical and traditional styles. James Scott Skinner (1843–1927), the most famous and influential exponent of Scottish fiddling in his generation and the first to record commercially, began fiddle lessons informally in his family before moving on to a classical training, studying with a Hallé Orchestra violinist, developing his left-hand technique considerably, and giving public performances of pieces by Rode, Paganini, and Mozart.Footnote ⁸⁶ Bertie Clark (1877–1958), who played the fiddle in the Morris dance troupe in Bampton (Oxfordshire) from the mid 1920s, had previously taken classical violin lessons in London and played in the staff orchestra at the Camden Town railway depot, where he worked.Footnote ⁸⁷ Further, a 1929 recording of Irish fiddler Teresa Halpin playing a slow air reveals her considerable use of vibrato, quite possibly, as Tes Slominski argues, influenced by the recordings that were in circulation of classical violin music played with a continuous vibrato, made by virtuosos such as Kreisler.Footnote ⁸⁸

We know, from the urgent preservationist efforts of Cecil Sharp, Francis O’Neill, George Barnet Gardiner, and others who collected folk songs of the Four Nations at the time, that much traditional music-making was waning in the early 1900s and significant sources of expertise and information were disappearing. Today’s scholars understand that English fiddle playing was especially in decline in most regions by this point, a casualty of urbanization and the mass migrations to industrializing cities, on the one hand, and the loss of the West Gallery tradition, on the other.Footnote ⁸⁹ In 1901, only 22 percent of the population of England and Wales lived in rural, as opposed to urban, areas; a century earlier it had been 66 percent.Footnote ⁹⁰ According to Ian Russell, in England from c. 1850 the fiddle’s supremacy in traditional music-making was challenged by free-reed instruments (concertinas, accordions, mouth organs).Footnote ⁹¹ In nineteenth-century Wales, Phyllis Kinney reports, fiddlers had been “indispensable at fairs, weddings, wakes, feasts, and dances,” but seemingly by the early 1900s the fiddle tradition was “increasingly confined to Gypsy players.”Footnote ⁹²

Set against this picture are Irish and Scottish (also Northumbrian) traditions, which proved more robust and continued to evolve. In Ireland in 1898, one of the founding members of the Feis Ceoil Association, which promoted the collection, publication, and playing of traditional Irish music, maintained that “country fiddlers,” with knowledge of “an enormous number of tunes,” existed “in every parish.”Footnote ⁹³ Even allowing for a proselytizer’s hyperbole, this statement chimes, more than a century later, with Martin Dowling’s view (2016) of the 1890s as an “explosive era of virtuosity and creativity”; moreover, as Dowling observes, once activities become “audible on 78 rpm recordings,” it is possible for modern scholars to identify several “microcultures of fiddling” that were “blooming throughout the countryside,” notable, for instance, in south Sligo and southwest Donegal.Footnote ⁹⁴ Across Scotland, too, regional traditions persisted. In the 1970s, Alison Sharp, born in 1894 in a village near Dumfries, recalled the fiddle that hung on the wall and how it would be taken down for family members or visitors to play.Footnote ⁹⁵ Similar habits had been recorded in the Shetland Isles c. 1900, Laurence Williamson of Yell noting that “Shetlanders are much addicted to fiddling.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Even so, a weakening of fiddling quality, and, according to some sources, the number of practitioners,Footnote ⁹⁷ was diagnosed in both Scottish and Irish traditions. In Scotland, theater violinist William Honeyman (1845–1919) thought it sufficiently important for classically trained players to know the traditional style that he included a chapter on bowing strathspeys, reels, and hornpipes in his 1880s tutor The Violin and How to Master It,Footnote ⁹⁸ subsequently publishing a bespoke manual (c. 1898), for fear that the old style was being lost to bowdlerized (slurred) bowings.Footnote ⁹⁹ Similarly, an article in the New Ireland Review in 1901 lamented a progressive “decay” in Irish traditional music-making since Turlough O’Carolan’s day (d. 1738) and underlined the need for continued corrective action in modern times:

Attempts to shore up traditional music were evident in Ireland from the 1890s, a time when ethnic consciousness was growing (especially in the south) and Home Rule was starting to seem more likely. The Feis Ceoil was among multiple initiatives that aimed to cultivate Irish artistic and linguistic traditions, as culture and politics became fused.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Its annual music festival began in 1897, with contests in both classical and traditional idioms, including some for classical string players (solos, string quartet, orchestra). Fiddle playing had a limited presence initially: a class for itinerant or country fiddlers was added in the second year, but discontinued in 1901, at which point traditional players were invited to enter a contest for unpublished airs instead.Footnote ¹⁰² By 1908, however, the fiddle-playing contest had returned, suggesting momentum was growing; over the next eight years the winners were Bridget Kenny, Christina Kenny, Bryan McIntyre, and John Ryan.Footnote ¹⁰³ Interest in Irish fiddling was also expressed in the Ballykinlar internment camp in 1921, where students in a violin class had the rare opportunity to learn classical and traditional styles simultaneously from scratch. The instruction was given by two musician-prisoners: classically trained violinist Martin Walton and Frank O’Higgins, a celebrated fiddler from County Meath. Among the students was the staunch republican Peadar Kearney, who, in letters to his wife from the camp, expressed his enthusiasm for learning “the Irish style” from O’Higgins and for the traditional airs, Scottish as well as Irish, that he was slowly accumulating.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Moreover, although a violin class may not seem the most obvious vehicle for an expression of rebellion, it may be that for the republican violinists at Ballykinlar the very act of learning the instrument, in an environment in which the Irish style was taught, served as covert expression of national identity and political resolve for independence from the Union.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Transmission of fiddle tunes and styles was a dynamic process. In Scotland, celebrity fiddlers on the music-hall circuit, such as Skinner and Peter Milne, influenced styles of playing.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Skinner, especially, adopted a less earnestly preservationist spirit, contributing a flamboyant, somewhat romanticized, fiddle style, as well as composing hundreds of Scottish-style tunes, some of which became “embedded” in the handed-down repertoire.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ He also made recordings, which must have disseminated his performance style more widely and propelled transmission.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Though at the time of his death (1927) he may have been considered the “last of [the] great Scottish fiddlers” – “the Strathspey King”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ – posterity has been more circumspect, with scholars now debating whether he should be seen as having corrupted or reenergized the Scottish fiddle tradition.Footnote ¹¹⁰

How and to what extent fiddle traditions survived workers’ mass migrations to industrial cities in all Four Nations are further unsettled questions.Footnote ¹¹¹ According to Dowling, “[o]ne of the paradoxes of the post-Famine exodus” is that Irish performance culture may have “adapted and evolved differently [and] more successfully in the ghettoes of metropolises than in the remote districts of the homeland.”Footnote ¹¹² More research, such as Reginald Hall’s study of Irish music in London, is needed, particularly in relation to other cities and ethnic groups. We might suppose that some rural immigrants who fell on hard times played fiddle tunes they knew in the street and that, as Hall argues, those who moved into middle-class circles became removed from developments in traditional music-making.Footnote ¹¹³ What is not apparent is how poor families living in large conurbations who were familiar with rural fiddle traditions but were not players themselves responded to the availability of group instruction in classical violin and inexpensive instruments.

A related question is how a person rooted in classical violin culture – regardless of domicile or socioeconomic status – gained awareness of traditional fiddle musics, not least because the violin press displayed little interest in discussing these traditions. Doubtless, many classical players paid scant attention: as David Johnson notes, most trained European musicians in Scotland in Skinner’s day “despised” Scottish fiddling.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Meanwhile, extensive opportunities for hearing traditional music-making were some way off for most of the British population.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Probably few classically trained players showed interest in crossing over to echt fiddling until the second folk revival of the mid twentieth century. That said, from the 1890s onwards there was a strong likelihood that players who were learning classical violin had encountered smoothed-out versions of traditional melodies from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales in elementary tutor books or in arrangements of “national airs” aimed at parlor performance with the piano and suited to more accomplished students.

Some scholars have judged such “mediated” texts to be stained socially and musically by their translation into the aesthetic of the drawing room, but “national” tunes also fulfilled a broader cultural function, especially in teaching situations.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Though most were not fiddle (dance) tunes per se, many of the pieces available to violin pupils were simplified transcriptions of traditional vocal melodies that were already well known and sung, especially in schools, thanks to the several collections of so-called national song in wide circulation.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The tunes in question, sitting well in first position and denuded of ornamentation, were useful for developing the ears of beginners, who might well have “sung along” in their heads as they played and have enjoyed attempting music they had already internalized. One experienced group teacher in London saw such benefits, claiming that national airs “adapted to [students’] powers” could generate “new sensations … in the breasts of the youngsters.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Many violin methods from the 1890s to the 1920s, including the much-disseminated Maidstone tutor, contain such material, as do albums of easy pieces. While favorites such as “The Blue Bells of Scotland,” “The Minstrel Boy,” and “Men of Harlech” are hard to miss across these books, what is most striking is the variety of tunes such publications contain.

Several tunes overlap with songs in The National Song Book (1906), edited by Stanford in association with the Board of Education for use in elementary schools.Footnote ¹¹⁹ This collection contained over 200 songs, most of them attributed to one of the Four Nations, and was grounded in beliefs in the power of music to both express national character and develop loyalty to, and pride in, country of residence (or origin) across all social classes and, by extension, the assumed happy family of the overarching Union.Footnote ¹²⁰ As Gordon Cox has shown, even in its day this musical-patriotic mission had its critics, Cox himself questioning Stanford’s ideological stance while providing relevant historical contextualization for the national song movement.Footnote ¹²¹ The National Song Book’s significance to violin culture arises from its reach – by 1917 “there was hardly a school in the country that did not possess a copy”Footnote ¹²² – and from its aim to expose children to both their own national musical tradition and the traditions of the other three nations in the Union. Encounters in violin tutors with National Song Book tunes or other melodies “of” the Four Nations stood to reinforce those goals, even if the tunes themselves found their way into string pedagogy more out of pedagogic suitability and convenience than deliberate, nationalistic strategy.

Stanford’s inclusion of “God Save the King” and “The British Grenadiers” – overtly Unionist songs – in his songbook underlined the foundational assumption that national allegiance and identity were pluralistic constructs. Violin tutors, including the Maidstone book, likewise included the melodies of both tunes alongside Four Nations ones. The approach allowed for the simultaneous celebration of ethnic difference and loyalty to the British political geography, even while Stanford’s classification of “British” tunes as English reinforced the politics of the Anglo ascendancy. In turn, by piggybacking onto the established culture of school song, elementary violin pedagogy capitalized on repertoire already in circulation, potentially engraining similar pluralistic loyalty to nation(s) and fostering notions of collectivity.Footnote ¹²³

In addition, the centrality of national songs in British schools, along with the growth of ethnic consciousness, creates ample context for understanding the many “national tunes” that were arranged and published in dozens of parlor anthologies for classically trained string players in the 1910s and 1920s: for example, Alfred Moffat’s Irish Airs & Dances (Augener, c. 1912) and E. D. Rendall’s English Songs & Dances (Weekes, 1919; publicized as “developed” from an Oxfordshire fiddler’s “Dance-book”Footnote ¹²⁴), both for violin and piano; also, The Strad’s four albums of airs, one for each of the nations, issued for violin or cello in 1926 and 1928 – “[a]ll fairly easy,” the advertising insisted.Footnote ¹²⁵ Regardless of how inauthentically ethnic these tune collections were, they spread the idea of distinctive national repertoires and cultural heritages, aided by the fact that the modern violin, of all the classical instruments for which such airs might be arranged, could claim recognizable descendancy from “folk” instruments. Indeed, where jigs and reels were included, connections with traditional fiddle playing came into focus. We can, obviously, never know how most individuals channeled these associations. Still, as consciousness of nation(s) and ethnic difference became cemented into musical life, tunes such as those issued by The Strad held potential to function as cultural symbols of patriotism for string players who identified, principally or otherwise, as Scots, Irish, Welsh, English, or indeed British.

New Repertoire

One of violin culture’s enduring legacies was a substantial body of newly composed classical music for strings. Much of it was conceived as an expression of national identity, sometimes evoking a pan-British sentiment, though more often the character of one of the Four Nations, especially England. This blossoming of repertoire was mostly concentrated in two areas: one-to-a-part chamber music (some in combination with piano) and music for string orchestra; and its development was stimulated and shaped by the increased number of professional string quartets, the proliferation of amateur string orchestras, and the development of a thriving concert culture.Footnote ¹²⁶ This new repertoire also materialized at a time when several composers, especially those now associated with the so-called English Musical Renaissance, were self-consciously referencing or embedding notions of nation(s) in their works. By drawing on older repertoires, genres, scales, and traditional (“folk”) tunes, or finding topical inspiration in distant national pasts (occasionally conflating England and Britain) or works of English literature, composers invigorated their creative palates and moved partially away from what had long been a predominantly Austro-Germanic musical idiom. Some of them engaged these objectives and tools when writing music for strings.

Chamber music was a fertile area for creativity for several reasons, including the greater economic likelihood of mounting performances of works that required usually no more than four or five players, and the ubiquity of both recitalists and, increasingly from the early 1900s, professional string quartets in public concert life. In London alone, there were three high-profile recital venues – the Aeolian, Bechstein, and Steinway halls – and several others (many in the suburbs) at which chamber music was performed.Footnote ¹²⁷ New works flowed, including during World War I, when, as David Maw observes, “Britishness and chamber music assumed new significance” and the idea of a glorious national heritage in Tudor-era music came forward; indeed, one advocate for chamber music’s renewal upheld the contrapuntal viol consort as symbolic of the teamwork and endurance needed in wartime.Footnote ¹²⁸ Relationships with performers and concert organizations frequently provided incentives to compose: the stimulus for Stanford to write his first string quartet (1891) was a commission from the Newcastle Chamber Music Society. The piece was premiered there in 1892 by the Cambridge University Musical Society Quartet, led by Richard Gompertz (Joachim pupil and colleague of Stanford’s), which group, according to Jeremy Dibble, probably “increase[d] the flow of Stanford’s creative juices.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Frank Bridge’s An Irish Melody (1908) resulted from the Hambourg String Quartet’s proposal that he write a movement based on the “Londonderry Air” for a collaborative quartet (the Hambourg gave its first performance).Footnote ¹³⁰ Important, too, was the Society of Women Musicians (established 1911; two of its three founders were former RCM students) and the advocacy of Walter Willson Cobbett, both of which, as Laura Seddon has shown, encouraged women to enter the men-only domain of chamber-music composition and organized concerts that included members’ works.Footnote ¹³¹

The string quartet, in particular, attracted younger (male) composers, partly because its mastery was widely understood as a sine qua non for professional recognition. A test of inventive prowess, usually within sonata structures, as well as of concentrated expression, the string quartet was, in the eyes of most musicians and music-lovers, exemplified by the extensive body of widely known “masterworks” from Haydn to Dvořák. British composers typically worked with the genre’s formal expectations. Some drew thematic elements from traditional music into their pieces, mixing that material with the musical language of late German Romanticism (e.g., Charles Wood’s Irish-inflected Quartet No. 3, 1911); others placed modal, quasi-folk melodies in a fresh sound world (e.g., Vaughan Williams’s Quartet No. 1, 1908). In so doing, they were reinscribing beliefs that folk songs contained the essence of national identities, which made them ideal material for generating unique national styles.Footnote ¹³² Stanford, Elgar, Bridge, John Ireland, and Herbert Howells were among the dozens who added to the quartet repertoire or related genres such as duo sonatas (several for cello and piano) and piano trios, quartets, and quintets, their works often carrying national tinges, including when the harmonic language evinced a more modern style. Ethel Smyth and Susan Spain-Dunk were among the few women who took on the string quartet; far more, including Ethel Barns and Rebecca Clarke, were drawn to piano ensembles with strings, or wrote sonatas or short pieces for stringed instrument and keyboard.

Cobbett engaged multiple mechanisms to encourage chamber-music composition, including from women. Not only did he advocate in print for new works, but from 1905 he endowed a series of prize competitions for compositions and began commissioning works for publication. The competitions and commissions were for a new genre called the phantasy. Modeled on the Elizabethan viol fancy (fantasia) and thus tapping into the broader historicist trends emerging in early twentieth-century English/British music, phantasies were to be one-movement, multisectional contrapuntal works that respected the democracy of part-writing inherent in the chamber-music ideal. The first “open” competitions for a phantasy string quartet (1905, awarded 1906) and string trio (1907, awarded 1908) were won by William Hurlstone and Bridge respectively and heralded a burst of works in this unique genre, including phantasy duo sonatas, piano trios, quartets, and quintets by John Ireland, Susan Spain-Dunk, Alice Verne-Bredt, Thomas Dunhill, and Richard Walthew, among others, written for either contests or commissions.Footnote ¹³³ By specifying that it was for the composer to determine the phantasy’s shape, Cobbett hoped to give “free play” to the imagination.Footnote ¹³⁴ To some extent, he succeeded. In practice, however, norms developed: composers often related sections to one another and treated multiple themes; several works blend multisectionalism with elements of sonata-form design.Footnote ¹³⁵

In 1910, Cobbett switched tack and commissioned phantasies from twelve composers, each writing for a different chamber-music combination.Footnote ¹³⁶ Competitions returned in 1915 and from 1923 to 1950 were embedded in the RCM.Footnote ¹³⁷ As a direct consequence of Cobbett’s various initiatives, hundreds of new chamber works (not only phantasies) were produced, several by women.Footnote ¹³⁸ Many were never published. Although only seven prizes were awarded to women up to 1930,Footnote ¹³⁹ this tally represented significant public recognition for “outsiders” in a sphere of high-serious composition historically inhabited by men. Indeed, since some evidence suggests that at least one competition involved “blind” judging, biases against women, unconscious or otherwise, may have been reduced.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Meanwhile, if, as Maw’s work points up, the extent to which the phantasy prizes succeeded in generating a distinctively British genre remains questionable, the phenomenon nevertheless made a sustained contribution to the quest to imagine national musical idiom(s). The rehabilitation of a Tudor model gave works a veneer of largely English historicism, while the string quartets written for the 1917 competition, which required composers to use thematic material drawn from folk song “of any of the four nations,”Footnote ¹⁴¹ placed the phantasy in the same category as the many orchestral and vocal works that exploited resources believed to be intrinsic to those nations’ peoples.

Most of this new chamber music did not gain a foothold in the concert repertoire until later in the century, and record labels initially showed limited appetite for issuing it. Up to 1930, a smattering of individual movements and character pieces, such as Bridge’s Two Old English Songs for string quartet, was recorded by British ensembles. Only a few large works were issued in full (albeit often with internal cuts): Bax’s and Elgar’s string quartets and Vaughan Williams’s Phantasy Quintet were among them.Footnote ¹⁴²

What made a better-known and more enduring contribution to the concert repertoire was the music that British composers wrote for string orchestra, 1883–1930. Numbering over fifty works by more than thirty composers (see Table 9.1), this output laid the foundations for a national creative tradition that generated compositions by Michael Tippett, Lennox Berkeley, Alan Rawsthorne, and others into the 1930s and beyond. Much of the music written before 1930 was intended for amateur string ensembles: groups that were eager for repertoire and already, by the 1890s, performing European string orchestra compositions such as Dvořák’s Notturno and Serenade, Tchaikovsky’s Serenade, Grieg’s Holberg Suite and Elegiac Melodies, and the several serenades by Robert Fuchs (see Chapter 7). Dvořák’s and Tchaikovsky’s Serenades, which quote material from earlier movements in their finales, may have served as a model for Elgar’s own of 1892.

Like many British works of the time, Elgar’s Serenade is associated with a specific ensemble. Having produced his Three Sketches for the Worcestershire Musical Union’s strings, whose 1888 performance, he opined, “took well,”Footnote ¹⁴³ Elgar composed the Serenade and trialed it with his Worcester Ladies’ Orchestral Class.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ As one member reportedly remarked, he was “always writing these things and trying them out on us.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Similarly, Parry’s “Lady Radnor” Suite (1894) was his response to Radnor’s request for a piece for a concert that her all-women string band was to give.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Eighteen years later, Holst began his St. Paul’s Suite for the strings of the orchestra at the private St. Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, London.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

A local first performance was a significant birthing moment, but publication was essential if a work was to become widely played. As Table 9.1 shows, some pieces were published around the time of their premiere, while others (including several composed before c. 1910) appeared slowly. In the early 1890s, when the violin “craze” looked just that – a passing fad – Novello’s publishing house considered string orchestra music an uneconomic proposition. Despite deeming his Serenade “very good,” the firm’s reply to Elgar’s request that it publish the piece was unequivocal: “We find however that this class of music is practically unsaleable, & we therefore regret to say that we do not see our way to make you an offer for it.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Consequently, Elgar turned to Breitkopf & Härtel, which had premises in London and was prepared to take it on, albeit with a subvention from the composer.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ (Elgar’s approach was logical, because German firms had been issuing string orchestra music since the 1870s and because British composers had long found them prepared to publish repertoire – such as chamber music – that was considered unviable at home.) Within a decade, however, Novello had reconsidered its position, publishing Percy Pitt’s Air de ballet (in 1899) and Parry’s “Lady Radnor” Suite (1902), and subsequently issuing two works by Elgar (1905, 1910). In the 1910s and 1920s, as the viability of music for string orchestra became clearer and the amateur circuit showed itself to be firmly established, other publishers, including Goodwin & Tabb and Curwen, entered the market.

Stylistically, much of this “amateur” repertoire comprised short pieces in straightforward forms, with playable, idiomatic lines. Textures and sonorities are usually nicely varied, using divisis, muted sounds, pizzicato, and other inventive effects. Ability to score for strings was critical in any competent composer’s toolkit; still, it is striking how many composers of music for string orchestra had at one time learned the violin. Some, seeking additional color, added a harp to the string ensemble – notably, Elgar (Sospiri, 1914, with organ also) and Frederick Septimus Kelly (Elegy, 1915). Dance suites and sets of character pieces were favored genres, but self-standing miniatures (e.g., Spain-Dunk’s Idylle, 1925) or other one-movement works were also popular: typically one-mood pieces that were lyrical, relaxed (as opposed to tightly worked-out), and easy for conductors to bring to performance. A few composers adapted their own string quartet pieces for string orchestra sonority (e.g., Bridge’s Two Old English Songs).

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that music for string orchestra was programmed purely by amateurs. Professional symphony orchestra concerts often included a European work for string orchestra. Moreover, some modern British compositions were specially written for top orchestras’ string sections, with two early twentieth-century works breaking ground in terms of design, invention, and sonority. Those pieces were Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro (1905), conceived as a showcase for the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra, and Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910), premiered by the same ensemble. Both works stand today as distinctive contributions that revealed possible vistas of antiphony and polyphony while offering the players substantial technical challenges. At the same time, “easier” repertoire was by no means performed only by amateur groups; professional renditions happened, too, giving pieces important publicity such that amateur uptake might quickly follow. Bridge’s Lament, a short work written in response to the wartime sinking of the civilian liner Lusitania (1915), was premiered at a Queen’s Hall Promenade Concert and published the same year, with a repeat London performance in October 1916. By that time, cellist Clive Twelvetrees’s mostly-women string orchestra in Dublin had already played the Lament in a charity concert for the War effort.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Thus, together, amateur and professional orchestras contributed to the repertoire’s coalescence and spread; competitive festivals played their part, too, when they stipulated British works as test pieces for amateur ensembles (e.g., Elgar’s Serenade at the Feis Ceoil, 1916; Dunhill’s Dance Suite at Leeds, 1924).

Many string orchestra composers made self-conscious use of older genres and forms. Parry, in both his “Lady Radnor” Suite and English Suite, created mock-antique flavor in dance movements that paid homage to Baroque (or slightly earlier) musical style. Contrary to what Parry’s and others’ titles might suggest, the old dance forms used (e.g., arabandes and minuets) were not intrinsically English, and by the early twentieth century they largely connoted a generic pastness that could be appropriated by composers to create a veneer of an older England.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Elgar, in his Introduction and Allegro, took inspiration from the Italian Baroque concerto, making dramatic use of textural contrasts and antiphonal effects by pitting a solo string quartet (effectively a concertino) against a larger orchestra – what he called “a return to the practices of a bygone day.”Footnote ¹⁵² He also put “a devil of a fugue” in place of a conventional development in the work’s Allegro section.Footnote ¹⁵³ Vaughan Williams, in his Tallis Fantasia, followed Elgar’s scoring, though added a second, smaller orchestra, creating three units of sonority; he also specified how the groups should be positioned, with the intention of ensuring that the antiphonal effects and juxtaposition of colors were prominent. These works were not lone efforts. Subsequent composers exploited the concerto principle in inventive ways, Eugene Goossens anticipating Tippett by choosing a double string orchestra for his Concertino of 1928.

A striking feature of this entire body of music is that so much of it carried markers of national identities. Intentional evocations of one or more of the Four Nations’ landscapes (invariably rural) or their cultural traditions were sometimes communicated through the titles of works (e.g., Bantock’s Scenes from the Scottish Highlands, Parry’s English Suite). Several pieces exploited the resources of regional folk music, whether through overt presentation of traditional melodies (Mackenzie’s Ancient Scots Tunes) or the generation of thematic material from such tunes. Composers drew largely – though not exclusively – on musical traditions that aligned with their own ethnicities, sometimes having collected material firsthand. English- and Scottish-tinged pieces predominated, but Bridge arranged the “Londonderry Air” (An Irish Melody), and Elgar integrated into his Introduction and Allegro a tune with a falling minor third that he claimed to have heard in Wales (as well as the English borders). In addition, composers often used older modes (especially the Aeolian and Dorian scales, common in traditional tunes) to inflect harmonic language and create a folksy flavor within the otherwise inherently “high culture” art-music sound world; although, as with arrangements of melodies for the drawing room, the resulting mediation of traditional music’s materials has laid such works open to charges of exoticizing the idea of folk music and idealizing its original context.

English composers, especially of the early twentieth century, are noted for using musical signifiers of a rural past to construct a distinctive national identity, and several commentators have suggested that behind this tendency stood a romanticized (middle-class) hankering after bucolic, typically southern English, landscapes and simpler ways of living.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ If these desires contributed to composers’ broader idealization of the nation’s past, they also aligned with many city dwellers’ repugnance for the ugly realities of industrialization and its harmful impact on everyday life in England.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Similar sensibilities might well have affected composers from Wales, Scotland, and Ireland who likewise aimed to refresh their musical idiom with national character in times when industrialization was also creating new social and cultural orders in those countries.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

Yet while scholarship has done much to determine the source of such composers’ melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material in the traditional musics of Britain, it has rarely explored the interrelated significance of composers’ propensities to score exclusively for strings. Chapter 8 proposed that the developing aura around the wooden, fragile instruments of the violin family in the late nineteenth century was bound up with people’s desires to identify with both a vanished artisan past and the materiality of the natural world. By extension, a composer’s decision to score for string orchestra – a medium replete with connotations of collectivity – might be read as a figurative way of exalting the simpler lifestyles and smaller communities that had been part of a nation’s nonindustrial past. In their day, such perceptions could have been heightened by the fact that the violin had a double identity as (folk) fiddle. Indeed, fiddle style was often alluded to when composers foregrounded traditional dance tunes, as in Holst’s St. Paul’s Suite.

In some pieces, as already noted, English composers (especially) evoked a contrasting historical milieu by referencing older art-music genres and styles. At first blush, this stance may look inherently contradictory to attempts to capture the spirit of workaday rural living, since such musics – including courtly dances – had originated in an elite, rarified world far removed from the realities of much country life. On the other hand, nostalgia for a national past (including the much-glorified Tudor kings and queens), with which people in the present might connect, was unfettered by such logic.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Indeed, some composers incorporated musical signifiers of both milieus into their compositions for string orchestra. Parry referenced both courtly dances and folk music in his English Suite. In the Tallis Fantasia, Vaughan Williams virtuosically brought together several musical elements with varied connections to a national past: the multisectional Elizabethan phantasy genre and its associated polyphonic style; a hymn by Thomas Tallis that generates the piece’s Phrygian tone; rhapsodic, folk-song-infused melodic lines in the section for solo quartet; experiments in antiphony; and a sonic spatiality redolent of centuries-old cathedral music.

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Jeremy Dibble, in his biography of Parry, notes a “real affinity for string music that was to emerge with such a wealth of creativity in succeeding generations of British composers.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ A significant part of that creativity is displayed in the formal innovations that characterize their works for string orchestra, but another is discernible in a strand of dark, elegiac compositions. These include the Elegies by Elgar, Kelly, and Howells, Bridge’s Lament, Owen’s Threnody, and Vaughan Williams’s unsettling Tallis Fantasia (using Tallis’s hymn “When rising from my bed of death”), all written between 1909 and 1917. Somber and elegiac works continued to be written after 1930 (e.g., Tippett’s Fantasia Concertante on a Theme by Corelli, 1953, which dramatizes contrasts of dark and light). Aside from defying the standard, reductive interpretation of early twentieth-century British music as conservative and bucolic, this subset of repertoire begs questions about why composers favored the string orchestra medium for the expression of grief and anguish.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Some explanation may be found in the established association of stringed instruments with the human voice, rendering them a fitting choice for pieces associated with grieving. A related possibility resides in contemporaneous ideas about the potential for stringed instruments to act therapeutically on the nervous system. Notions about the healing power of music – which would lead eventually to the discipline of clinical music therapy – had emerged in the late Victorian period,Footnote ¹⁶⁰ and they gained currency in the international medical community during World War I, when music’s value to wounded soldiers’ physical and psychological convalescence started to become evident. Such ideas pertained especially to strings, as the YMCA’s national stringed-instrument campaign of 1918 (discussed above in the section “Strings in Wartime”) demonstrates. An important voice in wider conversations was that of English-born pianist Margaret Anderton, who carried out what she called “musicotherapy” with Canadian soldiers and went on to gain publicity for music’s curative potential through her lectures at Columbia University in New York in 1919. In her view, the sounds from instruments made of wood – strings are, of course, the obvious example – were especially healing, their vibrations affecting the nerve centers of the player’s spine more than the piano or the human voice.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Within a few years the concept had gained credibility among some British physicians, to judge from Cobbett’s testimony: “to play a violin means constant vibration in every nerve and fibre of the body, and it is this vibration which gives to chamber music practice the therapeutic value of which, I may add, my medical friends are all convinced.”Footnote ¹⁶² In this regard, British composers’ favoring of the string orchestra for expressions of grief feels more than coincidental. Admittedly, there is no smoking gun indicating that any of them were familiar with, less still advocates of “musicotherapy,” but we might nevertheless consider that, when composing in response to bereavement, they were drawn intuitively to the soothing possibilities in the richly resonant sonority of orchestral strings.

By way of example, the War years saw the composition of three especially compelling works of mourning for string orchestra. Bridge’s Lament grieved a child he knew who drowned when a German U-boat sank the Lusitania; Kelly wrote his Elegy in Gallipoli in 1916 in response to the death and burial of his comrade, poet Rupert Brooke; and Howells’ Elegy memorialized fellow RCM-student Francis Warren, killed in action in 1917.Footnote ¹⁶³ In each case, the composer would have had fair expectation that his piece would be publicly heard. Indeed, Bridge and Howells – neither of whom served in the military – saw their works premiered professionally in England shortly after composition; Kelly’s Elegy was performed in 1919 under Bridge’s baton at Rugby School (Brooke’s alma mater) and also included in a concert at London’s Wigmore Hall. (Kelly himself died on the Somme.) Whether experienced in rehearsals or concerts, these pieces had the potential to act as a conduit for both private and shared grief in not only those who played but also those who listened. Grieving is about coming to terms with loss – a therapeutic process, which clinicians would later show can be aided by music’s ability to act on the emotions. In the case of these three wartime works, the sounds and vibrations from massed stringed instruments were seemingly in a position to heighten that process, while the sight of a string ensemble playing together would have underscored the collective aspect of a nation in mourning.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ To those ends, these three composers, when considering the medium for their elegiac outpourings at a time of national crisis, may well have felt a string orchestra to be the most compelling choice.