During the final years of the nineteenth century, amateur orchestras started to proliferate in Britain, righting the imbalance that Charles Stanford had lamented in 1883 between the abundance of regional choral societies and the scarcity of their orchestral counterparts.Footnote ¹ Embracing orchestras that capitalized on amateur musicians in a workplace and other performance groups that sought to recruit members and identify with one town or locality, these new ensembles both benefited from the growth in string players and furthered violin culture’s solidification. By 1908, there had been a sea change, as Stanford admitted.Footnote ²

Viewed against the difficulties inherent in documenting domestic string playing, the world of amateur orchestras in Britain provides far more solid traces of activity on account of the organizational formalities, institutional busyness, and public performances involved. Where retrievable, indications of individual players’ experiences add complementary perspectives on a form of recreation that straddled private and public domains.Footnote ³ By treating amateur orchestras, this chapter advances the investigation into recreational music-making, emphasizing the nature of activities and their significance in string players’ lives, but this time embracing larger communities of musicians.

Structures, Personnel, Activities

The flowering of amateur orchestras owed much to the growing surfeit of string players, especially violinists, since substantial numbers of them were always needed (then as now) if such an initiative was to be musically viable. Orchestras – more so than chamber ensembles – were inherently appealing to string players of modest accomplishment, because the sociomusical pressures were limited (no having to hold one’s line alone) and weaker players could be “carried” by the larger section. Moreover, amateur orchestras served as a crucible of encouragement for many novices. As noted in Chapter 5, “orchestra” was a catch-all term. It could refer to anything from a handful of assorted instrumentalists (what we might now describe as a small ensemble or band) to a small group of strings (with more than one player per part) – sometimes amplified by a few wind or brass instruments, or a piano, to fill in missing lines – to an ensemble of symphony orchestra proportions. Gradually, though, the prototype for the amateur orchestra became an orchestra of strings, winds, and brass (with percussion as required), typically a group that was identified with one locality – industrial or cathedral city, town, suburb, and even, occasionally, village – and run as a subscription society, with dues paid by the orchestra’s members. Rooted in weekly rehearsals of repertoire that could range from Haydn symphonies to “bleeding” instrumental “chunks” from Wagner operas and often including music that professional orchestras rarely performed, the goal per season was almost always one or two commercially run concerts to showcase the group’s achievements. Sometimes, orchestras teamed up with local amateur choral societies to provide the accompaniments for performances of oratorios or other works that required instrumentalists.

Running an amateur orchestra, however, raised several interrelated economic and musical challenges. Although several such ensembles endured, lasting well beyond the mid twentieth century (with some still in existence), others folded after only a few seasons or struggled over many years. The musical effectiveness and personality of the conductor could be a crucial determinant of success. But much, too, depended on the artistic and economic savvy of the orchestra’s administration and its understanding of the local context, from attracting players and audiences to identifying financial backers and people willing to offer administrative assistance. As happens today, successful groups benefited from energetic and resourceful individuals behind the scenes.

With hindsight, we can see that many amateur orchestras were formed within distinct sectors of middle- or upper-class society, with most of the ensembles founded in the 1870s and 1880s being circumscribed by not only class but also gender, for at this stage they typically did not mix men and women. In London, especially, some orchestras functioned as quasi-clubs for men of wealth or high birth, or with significant status in the world of commerce: they included the Royal Amateur Orchestral Society (established in 1872 by Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, who led the ensemble) and the Stock Exchange Orchestral Society (founded in 1883 for Stock Exchange employees), to name the two best known. Both had large string sections, the Stock Exchange orchestra numbering more than 90 string players in the 1890s.Footnote ⁴ Other groups included the more short-lived British Orchestral Association (1872–1875), initiated for “men of means, who guarantee the expenses of a series of concerts they are about to give,”Footnote ⁵ and the Bohemian Orchestral Society, a small orchestra that met in Putney from 1880. The latter’s all-male string section included a clergyman cellist and the well-heeled violin expert Edward Heron-Allen.Footnote ⁶ While providing concrete evidence of shifting attitudes in the privileged classes towards string playing as a leisure pursuit for men, initiatives of this sort surely further normalized the activity, providing (especially in the case of the Duke of Edinburgh) potential role-modeling for boys. Some orchestras for women of wealth and leisure also emerged in the London area. Later, and often by virtue of needing a critical mass of string players with an adequate skill base, many orchestras outside the major centers of population – such as the York Symphony Orchestra (established 1898) – showed more social mixture, allowing both men and women to join and drawing in string players from the surrounding region.Footnote ⁷

Some groups were built around working-class players: these included the Slaithwaite Philharmonic Orchestra (founded 1891) in the small industrial village in the West Riding and the ensemble that formed in the mining town of Rothwell, near Leeds. In 1896, a magazine aimed at amateur orchestral players noted that four of the Rothwell orchestra’s five first violins were coal miners, the fifth a quarryman, and that the viola player and one each of the two cellos and two double bass players were also miners (as too, unsurprisingly, were the brass).Footnote ⁸ The Slaithwaite orchestra – also initially a small band, with only fourteen strings (no violas), minimal winds and brass, and two percussionists in its first concert – was founded by local male textile workers, including one John Taylor, an amateur cellist. One woman played. Over time, the ensemble seems to have developed a cross-class constituency: the granddaughter of the orchestra’s president, a local factory owner, eventually became a playing member.Footnote ⁹ In its early years, the group was conducted by John Ferrior, headmaster of a local school. According to the orchestra’s historian, Adrian Smith, by 1911 a few of the players traveled from Marsden or Golcar (each about three miles away), but the “vast majority lived within easy walking-distance” of the village center.Footnote ¹⁰ In addition, some Nonconformist church communities seeded orchestras, the Nelson Congregational Orchestra in a Lancashire mill town (established 1888) growing to a remarkable 50 players by 1909, and the Burmantofts Congregational Church Orchestral Society in a strongly working-class district of Leeds (c. 1899) reaching 40 players in the 1930s.Footnote ¹¹

Eventually, most orchestras opened their ranks to women, large numbers of whom had been trained to high levels. The results were often transformative. In the south of England, the Newbury Amateur Orchestral Union (established 1879) performed with its first women string players in 1882, a “momentous event,” which could be appreciated only by “those who have seen a good many summers come and go,” according to a local observer.Footnote ¹² By the 1883–1884 season, “the number of lady players, principally in the string department, including even the double bass” had increased significantly, the women almost immediately pushing successfully for artistic reform (a “higher order of music” and a professional conductor) in exchange for their continuing participation.Footnote ¹³ The Newbury orchestra was seemingly ahead of the curve, its progressivism outpacing London’s, since the South Hampstead Orchestra (first concert 1886), conducted by Florence A. [Mrs. Julian] Marshall, was subsequently claimed as the first amateur group in the capital to admit women.Footnote ¹⁴ The Westminster Orchestral Society, established in 1885 by employees at Broadwood’s piano firm, set high aspirations for the repertoire it performed and the players it accepted (auditions were held, making the society “unhampered by the incapables who, in amateur societies, too often mar the excellence of their fellow performers”), but in 1892 it was still limiting membership to gentleman amateurs.Footnote ¹⁵ By 1898, however, the tide had turned and 15 of the 46-strong string section were women (violinists and viola players).Footnote ¹⁶ The suburban North London Orchestral Society listed an even greater proportion of women string players (18 of 55; 2 were cellists) in a 1900 program book.Footnote ¹⁷ And in the post-1900 period, to judge from the pages of The Strad, most amateur London orchestras actively recruited women as well as men, though exceptions remained, including in ensembles born of the financial sector. In regional towns and cities especially, women string players proved themselves critical to amateur orchestras’ viability. In the York Symphony Orchestra, more than half the seats of the string section were consistently occupied by women, with actual numbers peaking at 49 in 1912 (see Table 7.1). Further, women played a critical role in the postwar rebuilding of this ensemble.

A corresponding aspect of many of the larger orchestras’ makeup was the presence of a handful of paid professional players, who served to fill gaps in the ranks and play challenging solo parts. Brought in on the day of performance for rehearsal and concert, these musicians were most evident in the winds and brass because, except for industrial heartlands where amateur band traditions were rife, very few amateurs played these instruments to the requisite level.Footnote ¹⁸ But strings, though often plentiful in number (especially violins and cellos), also tended to benefit from professional support, and many orchestras appointed a professional violinist as leader. At the helm of the first violins, the leader would participate in all rehearsals (sometimes coaching string sectionals), guide less experienced players, and shape and stiffen the quality of the string playing. On occasion, professionals took the principal chairs in the other string sections, likewise leading from the front – a boon if the ensemble’s conductor had limited experience with orchestras.Footnote ¹⁹ In London, several high-profile groups hired violinists from professional symphony orchestras (men, of course) to lead, as happened with the Stock Exchange and Westminster societies, the latter in the early 1890s boasting violinist W. Frye Parker, a recognized leader in the professional sphere and an RAM professor.Footnote ²⁰ The Westminster orchestra also brought in members of the Hann family (all colleagues of Parker’s in the Philharmonic Society’s professional band) to lead, or jointly lead, the second violin, viola, and cello sections. Strong section leading would have been especially important in works that presented knotty technical challenges for the strings. The Westminster orchestra’s concerts in the 1890s included Beethoven’s Second Symphony and Rimsky-Korsakov’s May Night overture, both pieces having passages that surely tested the players’ bow control, left-hand facility, and tightness of ensemble. Still, where they benefited from the loyal presence of experienced amateurs, not all groups appointed extras: during the same period, W. W. Cobbett led the Strolling Players’ Amateur Orchestral Society, and Thomas Phipson, an accomplished player who was a scientific writer by profession, the Bohemian Orchestral Society.Footnote ²¹

In the regions, women seem more likely to have been in charge. The York Symphony’s founding conductor T. Tertius Noble (the Minster’s organist) appointed the well-esteemed local teacher Editha Knocker as the ensemble’s first leader (she played until 1914); Leila Willoughby, a Knocker student who had taken lessons with Auer, was joint leader towards the end of Knocker’s term. Postwar (1919), the well-known performer Edith Robinson, from Manchester, took on the position, having negotiated a significant fee (two guineas per rehearsal) and accepted there was much work to be done to rebuild and shape the string section.Footnote ²² Leading was coveted, not only for the local publicity it gave to women teachers and players but also for the musical experience they would otherwise never have had. Slaithwaite’s small orchestra similarly benefited from a female leader, to judge from the program for its first concert, which placed one Miss A. Quarmby at the head of its list of string-playing men and boys (1892).Footnote ²³

Not all the women string players were amateurs in the strict sense; some made a living through music – teaching, performing, or both – and would have considered themselves professionals. But since, in the prewar period, women who performed for money lacked, in Simon McVeigh’s words, “the remotest prospect” of “playing in a top symphony orchestra, let alone leading it,”Footnote ²⁴ the larger amateur orchestras held considerable appeal for many of them, offering opportunities to participate in rehearsals and performances of big Romantic repertoire. Except where players were hired into principals’ chairs, these women gave their services free, especially in the early years. As a contemporary conductor explained (1895), any female student from one of the London conservatoire orchestras knew she would find “no opportunity of exercising her powers, except in the amateur orchestra, where she can never hope for the remuneration and recognition which talent has a right to demand.”Footnote ²⁵ By 1914, the York Symphony Orchestra had waived subscriptions for what it called semiprofessionals: a category evidently used to persuade highly trained players, including some students, to play gratis.Footnote ²⁶ Whether this was a pragmatic decision, born of a need to fill the ranks, or a response to demands from professionally trained musicians (including women) who were not earning full livings from music is an open question; but surviving correspondence from 1919 – when the orchestra was rebuilding itself and professional status was a concern for trained working musicians – shows that at least some string players were aware of their critical value to the ensemble, because they requested payment for playing.Footnote ²⁷

Finances, in any case, were a preoccupation for most orchestras’ organizational committees, despite the upfront subscription revenue obtained from the regular players.Footnote ²⁸ Concert attendance was notoriously unpredictable (a problem for professional orchestras, too) and box-office takings could never be taken for granted, although amateur orchestras surely benefited from members encouraging their families and friends to buy tickets, and from genuine interest among the local community: a concert by the York Symphony in November 1913 attracted 1,044 people.Footnote ²⁹ In addition, orchestras had many expenses, including the hire or purchase of music (if borrowing parts was not possible), hire of rehearsal and concert venues, printing of concert tickets and programs, and fees for whatever professional musicians (including soloists) were deemed necessary to achieve attractive programming and acceptable performance standards. Outgoings varied depending on the size and makeup of the ensemble. The Bohemian Orchestral Society got by – apparently well – in the 1880s with an amateurs-only band of sixteen violins, two violas, two cellos, one double bass, one flute, two clarinets, two oboes, two cornets, and a piano, and with a repertoire that mostly featured overtures and short pieces, but its administrative leadership understood the necessity of paying for a “first-rate” musician to conduct, in this case the German-trained R. H. Gould.Footnote ³⁰ Ticket income was in the region of £20 to £30 and, along with the subscription revenue (charged at £1 a year for 29 musicians), seems to have easily covered operating expenses, including Gould’s fee.Footnote ³¹ But the York Symphony Orchestra, which presumed a much larger ensemble and professional stiffening, had far greater expenses and faced difficulties breaking even on concerts, especially because it hired several wind and brass players for performances.Footnote ³² York’s accounts show that often, despite large audiences, the fees for the professional musicians consumed most of the takings, and individual concerts made losses (£15 15s. 1d. in 1901; £46 9s. 1d. in 1923).Footnote ³³ Clearly, without the buffer of player subscriptions and its honorary membership scheme, introduced in 1907–1908,Footnote ³⁴ the York initiative – like most others – would have been unsustainable, and even then, it was ever watchful of the coffers. In 1919, expecting to have to draft in more professional players, it doubled the subscription to £1, “to meet the increased costs.”Footnote ³⁵ Lucky were those orchestras that benefited from successful honorary membership schemes or underwriting and donations from local grandees.

A few groups benefited from private funding. According to a Daily Express feature (1910), in London the affluent William Borders, “a commercial man with offices in Fenchurch Street,” had run a 40-strong orchestra drawn from his “friends and relatives” – both men and women (8 “ladies” were in the violins) – for at least fifteen years. The ensemble gave private concerts in the specially enlarged drawing room in his Balham home.Footnote ³⁶ In Huddersfield, Arthur Kaye bankrolled his eponymous symphony orchestra (first concert 1919) without requiring subscriptions; he persuaded his string pupils (some of them children) to play and hired professional wind, brass, and percussion players from the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester for performances. He sometimes made losses, in 1921 suspending the concerts for that reason.Footnote ³⁷

The orchestras that drew most public plaudits for high-quality performances were, more often than not, those that had gathered and trained strong string sections. The Westminster Orchestral Society and the York Symphony were among those that screened players before accepting them.Footnote ³⁸ Regular attendance at rehearsals was important, as was individual practice at home, but evidently in most orchestras some players fell short of such expectations, damaging the overall playing quality. Rules were introduced by the Strolling Players’ and York orchestras to combat these problems and included disqualification from playing in the concert if one’s attendance was poor; on more than one occasion, the York Symphony sent out a letter from the conductor, enjoining presence at rehearsals.Footnote ³⁹ There was an acknowledged and audible correlation, too, between the quality of an amateur string section and its being conducted by someone who played a stringed instrument and understood how to translate desires for expressive effects or tighter ensemble into technical instructions. In 1913, the York administration appointed Edward Bairstow (the widely admired Minster organist) as conductor, even though he had “expressed his view that it would be better for the orchestra if they had a conductor who was a fiddle player.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Seemingly as a compromise, string sectionals were introduced, almost certainly led by Knocker, with whom Bairstow shared the podium during that season’s concerts.Footnote ⁴¹

The Arthur Kaye Symphony Orchestra, which had developed from Kaye’s string orchestra (begun in 1907Footnote ⁴²), became acclaimed for the excellence of its string playing and his ambitious programming: a concert in January 1926, for instance, included Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila overture, Liszt’s Mazeppa, and Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio italien.Footnote ⁴³ The high quality of the often massive string section (110 players, including more than 80 violins, for that performance) was achieved by meticulous and extensive preparation, which Kaye, as conductor, was able to insist on. Former pupil Reginald Stead described Kaye’s demanding, albeit idiosyncratic, process from a student perspective:

Some years earlier, after a concert (October 1919) that contained Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture, Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony (No. 8), Grieg’s Peer Gynt suite, and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, Herbert Thompson, the exacting music critic at the Yorkshire Post, expressed admiration for the strings’ pure and ample tone, the uniform bowing, and the absence of any raggedness of ensemble.Footnote ⁴⁵ On another occasion he would describe Kaye as a “genius” of a string trainer.Footnote ⁴⁶

Although the conflict of 1914–1918 forced many ensembles into abeyance, some (especially in London) put on charity concerts in aid of the War effort: the Strolling Players, for instance, continued weekly rehearsals and “devoted [their] energies to the entertainment of thousands of soldiers and sailors.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In the postwar period, several organizations rebuilt themselves, although some struggled to recruit string players to their former levels, as happened with the York Symphony (see Chapter 1, Table 1.4). Ads (for players) placed in The Strad in the 1920s by amateur orchestras in the London area indicate that some groups were having to work harder to find and retain members. Shortages went beyond the fatalities and social disruptions of wartime. Alternative leisure pursuits, including cinema-going and dancing, probably made ensemble music-making less appealing to some amateurs, including young people, who might have hitherto joined a musical group; also, string players who had trained to a high level may have abandoned the amateur sphere to try their luck professionally in the booming world of cinema music. A related part of the problem was the declining size of amateur orchestras’ concert audiences in the wake of the new public broadcasting in the 1920s and a growing market for sound recordings. Both technologies took orchestral music, professionally performed, into many middle-class homes, which meant, as Dave Russell has observed, that most amateur orchestras had “little chance of standing comparison with the work of musicians easily available from record shops and the BBC.”Footnote ⁴⁸ This state of affairs doubtless did not stop close friends and family members of players from turning out for amateurs’ concerts, but locals without a personal reason to support events probably attended them less and less, some perhaps preferring to travel afield to hear a professional group “live.” Meanwhile, without the expectation of large box office at their concerts, and when faced with smaller subscription income and other economic pressures, many amateur orchestras must have struggled to pay for professional “extras.” One solution, adopted in hard times at York in the early 1920s, was to put on concerts using smaller ensembles: a largely strings-only program on 16 January 1924 required an outlay of only £8 18s. 6d. on professional assistance, whereas the full orchestra program the previous autumn had required fees in excess of £52.Footnote ⁴⁹ A longer-term benefit was that preparing string-orchestra repertoire would have developed the section’s togetherness and sound.

Yet, for all that times were changing, the amateur orchestra movement by no means died. The postwar decade was certainly challenging, but new ensembles formed (in early 1920s London, the Amateur Orchestra and the Insurance Orchestral Society, both successfully) and groups became focused on ensuring continuation; several addressed more recent, often unusual, repertoire, performing works by Rachmaninov, Vaughan Williams, and others. Arthur Kaye’s orchestra flourished. Issues of The Strad during the 1920s hum with news about amateur orchestras, adverts for music specially designed for them, and features explaining how to set up and sustain an ensemble. In the longer term, activity levels would revitalize, especially post-World War II.

Women and Amateur Circuits

One especially versatile female string player on the amateur orchestra circuit in the Home Counties was Marian Arkwright (1863–1922), a woman born into wealth in Burghclere (near Newbury), where the family’s grand eighteenth-century house was supported by numerous servants.Footnote ⁵⁰ Arkwright was a multifaceted musician, whose social position and gender shaped much of her education and musical activities.Footnote ⁵¹ An accomplished pianist (she had taken lessons with Charles HalléFootnote ⁵²), she performed publicly as a chamber musician in the local area throughout her life, playing the piano in challenging works such as Brahms’s piano quartets and Schumann’s piano quintet. She was also a violinist and could sing well. In the late 1880s she began playing the viola in local amateur orchestras, probably to swell the section since viola players were usually in short supply. But she also broke into the male domain of composition, earning a teacher’s LRAM in that field in 1891.Footnote ⁵³ In 1895 she received a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Durham (the first woman so to do), and eight years later (1913) was awarded a DMus in composition,Footnote ⁵⁴ subsequently gaining recognition as a composer, including of large-scale works; her output included a requiem and piano quintet (with winds). By 1901 she had migrated to playing the double bass in amateur orchestras. The instrument was proverbially in demand, and a handful of women were seizing the opportunity to play it, riding out popular derision of the sort that can be found in the pages of Funny Folks magazine.Footnote ⁵⁵ Independently wealthy in adulthood, she never married. Later in life, and like other accomplished women string players such as Editha Knocker and Rosabel Watson – the latter also a double bass player – Arkwright began conducting amateur ensembles.

We know from Arkwright’s carefully curated scrapbooks that her concert calendar was busy: at least 35 concerts in 1895, 26 in 1910; a mix of orchestral, choral-orchestral, and chamber performances.Footnote ⁵⁶ She clearly valued these experiences enough to preserve evidence of them, seemingly over all other aspects of her life. Whether, and under what circumstances, Arkwright was paid for her orchestral services or took a share in any chamber concert profits is unknown, but it seems likely that she usually gave her time for nothing. She did not identify as a working woman and, in any case, several of the performances were for charitable causes, for which women were expected to take small fees or none at all.Footnote ⁵⁷ Arkwright was part of a network of ensembles and musicians active in her home region of the south of England. Many of her scrapbooked programs are for concerts – for which ad hoc orchestras were constituted – in market towns such as Newbury, Hungerford, Trowbridge, Wallingford, and Basingstoke. Many were choral society concerts, which in Britain were often only viable because of competent, local amateur string players. Several of the concerts she played in were under the baton of J. S. Liddle, regular conductor of the Newbury Amateur Orchestral Union and an accomplished violinist with whom Arkwright performed much chamber music. Women dominated many of these orchestras. One, the English Ladies’ Orchestral Society (ELOS), was constituted exclusively of women players (including winds and brass). It ran for some twenty seasons, 1893–1912, under Liddle’s musical direction, with the purpose of giving concerts to raise money for “women’s” charities, usually hospitals, while providing able players with a valuable vehicle for rehearsing and performing symphony orchestra repertoire.

With a decidedly upper-class aura (patrons included nobility and royalty; features appeared in The Gentlewoman magazine; program booklets were luxurious objects) and rehearsals mostly in central London (South Kensington), the ELOS drew members from inside and outside the capital. According to player biographies of 1895, most of the women had been trained to a high level, often in London conservatoires or abroad.Footnote ⁵⁸ Many worked as teachers, but the group functioned as an amateur ensemble.Footnote ⁵⁹ In 1895 it numbered around 80 women; by 1900, it had reached 113.Footnote ⁶⁰ Subscription rates for 1900, according to the Englishwoman’s Year Book, were £1 1s. annually for “metropolitan” players and 5s. for “country members.” That same source reports that, in addition, an initial enrollment fee of 10s. 6d. was levied on “[a]mateur members.”Footnote ⁶¹ A signature feature of the society was that its concerts were not limited to one city or region. Performance destinations, to which members traveled at their own expense, ranged as far west as Cardiff and Swansea and as far north as Sheffield and Darlington.Footnote ⁶² As was standard with amateur orchestras, the society engaged professional soloists for concertos and programmed a mix of familiar and unfamiliar works. A concert in Kensington Town Hall, London, in November 1904 in aid of a Sanatorium for Poor Women in Suffolk included Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (soloist Nora Clench), a suite by Niels Gade, and William Sterndale Bennett’s overture to The May-Queen.Footnote ⁶³

The organization was player-run; Arkwright, a member from the outset, served for a period as secretaryFootnote ⁶⁴ and, to judge from her preservation of more than forty ELOS program books, along with various newspaper cuttings, she cherished her membership.Footnote ⁶⁵ The impetus for founding the orchestra came from one of the women,Footnote ⁶⁶ not Liddle, although he had shown himself able to recognize women’s musical value, having as early as 1887 conducted a series of choral concerts in Newbury with an all-women band.Footnote ⁶⁷ As far as women musicians’ wider quest for equality of opportunity and recompense on the professional concert platform were concerned, the ELOS can hardly be seen as transformational, since members, regardless of their professional training, paid to play in the ensemble rather than earning money for doing so. Moreover, although its social philanthropy achievements were impressive (by 1901 it had raised £1,079 for charities; £119,800 in today’s terms),Footnote ⁶⁸ it inevitably reinforced what Paula Gillett has described as “the expectation of gratis or low paid performance even when female musicians contracted for professional, noncharitable engagements.”Footnote ⁶⁹ But none of that negates the contribution the orchestra might have made in shifting chauvinistic ideas about women orchestral players, or the role-modeling potential that one hundred women on stage had for those who harbored desires to play orchestral instruments, and not just stringed instruments, although they were the most visible from auditorium seats.Footnote ⁷⁰

It is easy to imagine that, initially, the ELOS was considered something of a curiosity because of its symphony-orchestra scale and mission. But it was effectively an outgrowth of the broader and more visible phenomenon of ladies-only amateur string orchestras. Magnets for the overabundance of skilled women players, these groups were proliferating across the country by the mid 1890s, popular for the very reason that their concerts did not require the fuss (and often expense) of finding wind and brass players. Early initiatives included the Dundee Ladies’ Orchestra (1881), directed by local musician Arthur C. Haden, and the Ladies’ Mignon String Orchestra in Newcastle (1885), run by Hildegard Werner, in which her violin pupil Marie Hall later played.Footnote ⁷¹ Some ensembles were officially designated a “ladies’ orchestral class,” such as the one in Worcester, set up in 1887 and conducted by Elgar, who described “sixteen fair fiddlers all in two rows.”Footnote ⁷²

From 1888, Arkwright played the viola in two string orchestras: both became well known; both grew to be large ensembles (70–90 players); and both were named after their directors, the Viscountess Folkestone (Helen Pleydell-Bouverie, from 1889 Countess of Radnor) and the Rev. E. H. Moberly (an experienced conductor and violinist from Salisbury), respectively. The Folkestone (Radnor) orchestra targeted its concerts at “society” audiences in prime London venues, while Moberly’s began in Wiltshire and neighboring counties (Arkwright played in its performances in Oxford, Trowbridge, and Salisbury) and moved on to the capital in 1892.Footnote ⁷³ Folkestone’s orchestra became especially identified with wealth, privilege, and philanthropy.Footnote ⁷⁴ A published list of players from 1888 indicates that several upper-class women participated in her band – 17 of the 88 string players bore peerage titles; 7 others had double-barreled surnames, an indubitable marker of high social status.Footnote ⁷⁵ The ensemble was understood as inherently amateur, with concert profits destined for charitable causes – a framework that enabled aristocratic women to appear on a public stage without societal censure. Both groups (Moberly’s in particular) also attracted conservatoire students and ex-students, a few of whom worked professionally – for instance, Winifred Holiday, leader of Moberly’s orchestra, who was earning a living at the time as a player and teacher in London.Footnote ⁷⁶ Like Arkwright, some of the women also played in the ELOS.

The playing quality was high. Largely because of their London performances, the Folkestone (Radnor) and Moberly string orchestras gathered positive attention in the national press. Reviewers in the Musical Times, for instance, noted the “extreme care and intelligence” with which Moberly’s players had been trained and suggested that his band could “not be approached by any of our male amateur orchestras.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Striking images of both orchestras in concert appeared in newspapers, too, sending casual readers broader messages about the social acceptability of women playing stringed instruments in public, but also making suggestive statements about the future potential of all-female musical communities (see Figs. 7.1a and 7.1b). In practice, too, all-women string orchestras served as well-drilled player pools that could service ad hoc orchestras for large-scale choral performances in regional centers. Years later, a handful of Moberly’s string players, including Arkwright, were serving as section leaders in the full orchestra he conducted for the Test Valley Musical Society in Winchester.Footnote ⁷⁸

Figure 7.1a Viscountess Folkestone’s orchestra, Prince’s Hall, London, 1884 (The Graphic [26 July 1884], 80).

Image reproduced from the collections of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Figure 7.1b Rev. E. H. Moberly’s orchestra, County Hall, Salisbury, 1891 (cutting in a Marian Arkwright scrapbook, Berkshire Record Office, D/EX/1090/2/2).

Image courtesy of Berkshire Record Office, Reading.

Gradually, as string-only ensembles exploited music suited to their instrumentation, a repertoire of European and British string orchestra works coalesced. It included new, or relatively new, music for strings, such as Grieg’s Holberg Suite or pieces specially written by British composers for particular ensembles; rehabilitated Handel concerti grossi and other Baroque works; and arrangements for string orchestra of music originally composed for other forces. There was thus much music for groups to pick from. A Moberly concert of 1891 presented the following string-orchestra choices, mostly interspersed, in time-honored fashion, with songs: Julius Otto Grimm’s Suite in Canonform Op. 10 (published c. 1867); Liszt’s Angelus (published 1887 for string quintet); one arrangement of Schumann’s Träumerei and another of a Bach fugue in A minor; and three movements from Tchaikovsky’s Serenade Op. 48 (1881).Footnote ⁷⁹ Of the pieces written with British ensembles in mind, Elgar’s Serenade (trialed in 1892 by the ladies’ class in Worcester) and Parry’s “Lady Radnor” Suite (premiered in 1894 by Radnor’s band) are probably the best-known examples (for a fuller discussion, see Chapter 9, section “New Repertoire”).

Courtesy of this rich, growing repertoire and the ongoing production of string players advanced enough to play it, amateur string orchestras persisted through the early twentieth century and retained their strongly gendered identity for quite some time. A number were conducted by women. Though some ensembles folded, new ones came to life. Around 1901 Marian Arkwright began conducting her own string band (all women),Footnote ⁸⁰ which by 1912 was performing ambitious music: one concert programmed Dvořák’s Serenade Op. 22, three dances from Arne’s Comus, Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto, movements from Arkwright’s own “Melbourne” Suite for strings, Sibelius’s Romanze Op. 42, and the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade Op. 48.Footnote ⁸¹ In 1910 the Glasgow Ladies’ String Orchestra was instituted, under the conductorship of Hilda Bailey, herself a violinist, and by June 1915 had given five concerts in aid of war charities (the alignment of women’s orchestras with charity performances had continued, gaining urgency during wartime).Footnote ⁸² Around the same time, the Orchestra of Queen Alexandra’s House (a residence hall for female RCM students) was performing string-orchestra music at prime London venues under Thomas Dunhill.Footnote ⁸³ To be clear, not all amateur string orchestras comprised women only, especially once the genre became established as a viable concert medium: examples of those that mixed men and women include the Croyland Old Scholars’ Orchestral Society, formed in 1906 as a continuing-education project for former Maidstone-scheme pupils at a council school in London (cellists were recruited); the Streatham and South London String Orchestra, formed in 1911 by local violin teacher Sydney Robjohns; and the Leeds XXV String Orchestra in the 1920s.Footnote ⁸⁴ But as long as women with extensive professional training were unable to achieve positions in top symphony orchestras, amateur string-orchestra activity would remain an important outlet for them.

The persistence of amateur string orchestras is further exemplified by their inclusion in the programming at regional competitive festivals. The winners of the string-orchestra class at the Midland Musical Competition in 1912 give a flavor of the social and geographic range of participating ensembles: the Moseley Musical Club Orchestra (from an affluent Birmingham suburb), Arthur Hytch’s Students’ Orchestra (from Walsall, directed by a well-known local violinist), and the Nelson Congregational Orchestra (from Lancashire).Footnote ⁸⁵ At the 1924 competitive festival in Leeds three local groups entered the amateur string-orchestra class: one from Bramley (a district of Leeds); one drawn from the South Leeds Orchestral Society; and the third being the XXV String Orchestra, which won first prize.Footnote ⁸⁶

Experiences and Community

Whether established in village, town, city, or suburb, amateur orchestras were more than self-contained subscription societies or clubs: they were communities of musicians that functioned within, and interacted with, larger communities in the locality – or, in the case of festivals, the region – over periods of time, and string sections were at their foundational core. So, what did belonging to an amateur orchestra mean to its string-playing members? And what musical or other benefits did activities generate? First and foremost, amateur orchestras were collectives that were sustained and reinforced by musical processes (rehearsals) and performances (concerts): across weeks of rehearsal, string players acquired or honed section-playing skills and absorbed much about orchestras’ practical conventions. But amateur orchestras were also inherently social, in that their activities made the people who played in them aware of connections between one another, itself an important “outcome.”Footnote ⁸⁷ To that end, orchestras, but especially their string sections, constitute what ethnomusicologist Kay Kaufmann Shelemay calls “affinity communities”: collectives formed by people with a desire “for social proximity or association with others equally enamored” with a musical style or tradition.Footnote ⁸⁸ Identifying chamber-music partners was a further, valuable perk for many string players.

The trope of shared passion is embedded in much source material. Members who were “bound to [their ensemble] simply by his or her love of music,” is how a Daily Express journalist described William Borders’s orchestra in 1910.Footnote ⁸⁹ A more elaborate description (1893) comes from an amateur who remembered having taken, at the age of eleven, “a humble position at the rear end of the second fiddles” in an orchestra that “met in a large loft over a stable.” The person recalled the group’s immense enthusiasm – despite having to contend with the clanking of chains and the stamping of horses during rehearsals – and the determination of all members, regardless of technique (some, he said, “fought shy of anything beyond the third position”) to do their “level best,” a determination born of their being “full of love for music.”Footnote ⁹⁰

It is reasonable to assume that the emotional satisfaction from being part of a team that prepared works – often well-known ones – for performance, not to mention the visceral thrill of contributing to a large, potentially awe-inspiring tapestry of sound (including in the adrenaline-high moment of concert performance), offered something uniquely meaningful to those who joined amateur ensembles, regardless of the quality of any actual rendition. The very nature of orchestral string playing, with its emphasis on united expression and sound production, lent itself to the formation of strong musical bonds between players – both at the section level (first violins, etc.) and between desk partners. Marian Arkwright annotated the printed lists of players in the program books she preserved in order to record changes in personnel on the day of the concert – an act suggestive of the importance she ascribed to musical experiences shared with others.

Meanwhile, individual orchestra members’ testimonies can evoke the intensity of musical experiences and draw our attention to the connections that evolved among them.Footnote ⁹¹ Reginald Stead recalled the string sectionals and the pressure of preparing for Arthur Kaye’s concerts as:

Kaye’s regimen was, admittedly, extreme,Footnote ⁹³ but discipline was expected of string players in all amateur orchestras. Furthermore, the collective spirit that orchestral string playing engendered seems to have remained with many musicians long afterwards. Desk partners were singled out in some participants’ memories, suggesting the importance of the experience and the bonds thus forged. Margaret Dyson remembered Frank Haigh sitting beside her during the years she led the second violins in the Arthur Kaye Symphony Orchestra.Footnote ⁹⁴ Another example is Edmund Fellowes. For him, playing alongside an experienced professional player hired from London, Alfred Burnett, in the orchestra for one of the Oxford Bach Choir concerts was a “privilege” from which he “learnt much.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Motivations for joining an ensemble were many and varied. Some people were thought to be attracted purely by the social prestige that orchestra membership offered and the possibility of thereby acquiring what we might now think of as cultural capital. A journalist in 1895 sneered that people, especially ladies, often joined orchestras “to show their friends they are considered sufficiently musical [to do so], or with a view of getting into a certain class of society.”Footnote ⁹⁶ But from the evidence at hand it seems that string players were more often galvanized by musical factors: perhaps drawn by a charismatic conductor or the prospect of learning orchestral music “from the inside,” or acting on the advice of a teacher; after all, the educational benefits of orchestral playing were legion and widely acknowledged. Equally, a desire to belong to a group of “like-minded music makers” (another Shelemay phrase) was likely a strong pull for both adults and youngsters, along with the aesthetic thrill of being part or an orchestral (sometimes choral-orchestral) body of sound. As the Violin Times (1898) submitted, “nearly everyone derives more pleasure from his playing when in combination with others.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Indeed, musicians who stayed the course were likely to find their connection with their orchestra’s community strengthened by the shared experience of rehearsing and the team-building that went with it, as well as the satisfaction of contributing to a performance on concert days. Writing in her diary about the Slaithwaite Philharmonic’s trips to the competitive festivals in Blackpool in 1911 and Birmingham in 1912, violinist Maggie Woodward (then in her mid teens) captured a little of the drama of the contests, detailing the number of marks awarded to each ensemble.Footnote ⁹⁸ She described the Birmingham competition, for which the test piece was Wagner’s Meistersinger overture, as follows:

Despite lacking any musical reflections on the orchestra’s performance, Woodward’s description signals her glee at belonging to the winning team. She noted with pride, too, that the chief adjudicator, Herbert Brewer (composer and organist at Gloucester Cathedral), had told the orchestra’s conductor that “he had heard Wagner played as it should without any modern tricks of the [conducting] trade.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Woodward’s diary also indicates how much young people might have appreciated the broader social benefits of being part of an orchestral community on the festival circuit, including opportunities to interact informally with players in their ensemble. Her lengthy accounts of each of the competitions indicate whirlwind group activities packed into free time during the long “day out.” In 1911 she recorded “mouch[ing] around” Blackpool with her girlfriends after the contest and meeting some of the male players who “kept us laughing about ½ hour.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Similarly, while waiting to rehearse for the 1912 contest:

Later, after the evening concert, she “[w]ent to the pictures” with a sizeable group of male and female friends, before joining the remainder of the orchestra on the night train back to Yorkshire.Footnote ¹⁰³

Even without contest participation, amateur orchestras’ weekly rehearsals built cohesion and enabled friendships between players to develop, especially during breaks – which might be catered if circumstances allowed. In the 1880s, the men in the Bohemian Orchestral Society were provided with “coffee and refreshments” at the end of their practices at Phipson’s home.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ More so, in the early days of the Newbury Amateur Orchestral Union a “hot supper” was supplied at a hotel that adjoined the rehearsal venue during a “generous interval” that enabled “fiddles [to be] ‘scraped’ with renewed vigour … through these replenishments of the ‘outward man.’”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Networks could be extended, too. In 1882, the twenty-five-year-old Elgar, who led the Worcester Amateur Instrumental Society, admitted in a letter to his friend Charles Buck (amateur cellist from Yorkshire who had played in a recent concert) that he had “accidentally let out to Capt. Corkran [who served as the society’s secretary] that you were single,” adding that he had no doubt that “he has duly informed the fair Maud [probably Maud Baldwyn, a local talented pianist] of his discovery.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

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Self-evidently, an amateur orchestra was nothing without the nonplaying supporters who gave practical help or financial donations to enable the ensemble to flourish, not to mention the local audiences who attended concerts. Indeed, we might consider an orchestra’s “affinity community” as extending to at least the listeners, given that they too craved proximity or association with others of like minds, most notably at the orchestra’s public concerts and in the opportunities for silent communion they offered: a form of performance participation that coheres with Christopher Small’s notion of “musicking” as involving those who take part “in any capacity, in a musical performance.” To the extent that his concept allows for musicking to embrace “all the [human] activities that affect the nature of that event which is a performance,” there is also an argument for including volunteer helpers within the “affinity community.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Sometimes opportunities emerged outside of public concerts for both donors and any volunteers who worked behind the scenes to interact socially with the players, further consolidating the commitment of an orchestra’s patron community to the ensemble’s artistic goals. The Slaithwaite Philharmonic’s historian reports that a fundraising Knife and Fork Tea, Social and Dance was organized in October 1894, the Ladies’ Committee “arranging the provision of food, while the men concentrated on raising contributions”; at least 270 people attended.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ A more unusual example of a bonding experience pertains to the well-heeled Westminster Orchestral Society in London. In 1898 it announced a summer cycling tour – “after the Rehearsals have ended” – for its “lady and gentlemen Members” (thus not only the players but supporters who had purchased life or honorary memberships).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The itinerary took in Northampton, Lichfield, and Chester, ending at the opulently appointed Eaton Hall, the country seat of the Duke of Westminster, the society’s president (also “the richest man in England”Footnote ¹¹⁰). The duke’s offer “to give your cyclists every facility for seeing Eaton, and accepting luncheon or tea, or whatever we might arrange”Footnote ¹¹¹ suggests considerable accommodations were made for the orchestra’s extended community to visit his home and have social contact with him. The broader context, however, provides other perspectives, for this event occurred amid the new trend of stately homes opening their doors to paying visitors, and Eaton Hall was among them. As cultural historian Peter Mandler points out, by 1891 some 17,000 visitors – including many day-trippers paying just 3d. – were moving through the estate each year.Footnote ¹¹² Still, the orchestra’s smart social profile was such that we might assume that some special treatment for the orchestra visitors was involved.

In their home situations and beyond their own “affinity communities,” amateur orchestras were poised to provide broad social benefits to the larger collectives in which they were located. Within the orchestras that arose in London’s commercial sectors, for instance, the skills of musical cooperation that were developed by orchestral playing (especially in string sections) may have reached positively into the workplace, fostering better-functioning groups of employees. Indeed, this potential by-product quite possibly encouraged companies’ leaders to support their workers’ leisure pursuits financially. The orchestras in question include those drawn from the employees of banks (Barclays Bank Musical Society; National Provincial Bank Musical Society), department stores (Clarence Orchestral Society, mostly comprising employees of Maple’s furniture-making firm), railway companies (the Great Eastern Railway Musical Society had a choir and orchestra that drew from all sections of the workforce; William Galloway sometimes conducted), and wider groups of professionals (Stock Exchange Orchestral Society; Insurance Orchestral Society of London, founded c. 1922, which recruited its members from many companies, among them Hearts of Oak and Friends’ Provident).Footnote ¹¹³ Where amateur orchestras were associated with towns and cities, their public spokesmen or a loyal local press might well proudly register the ensemble’s musical contribution to civic identity and cultural life. In York, the liberal ethos of the city’s council led it in 1902 to reduce the fee for the rental of a civic concert venue for the York Symphony’s autumn concert on condition that 1000 1d. seats for the working classes be offered.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The initiative reverberated in the region, its “conspicuous” success quickly reported with admiration in Leeds and Hull newspapers.Footnote ¹¹⁵

In any case, until the advent of broadcasting, amateur symphony orchestras’ concerts often provided the only opportunities for an area’s population to hear large-scale orchestral music, including concerto performances with guest soloists. Where groups were top-notch, the contribution to high culture in the locality was significant. At their best, amateur orchestra performances could be hailed by experienced ears as outstanding. In Huddersfield, where the (professional) Hallé Orchestra only occasionally performed, musically inclined residents were able to attend high-quality and well-acclaimed performances of a good deal of ambitious repertoire – including some local premieres – by the Arthur Kaye Symphony Orchestra. Kaye himself wanted his concerts to “do for great music what the Everyman [Library] series had done for great literature by bringing it within the reach of all.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ But even where performances were less polished, and especially in towns and cities unvisited by professional orchestras, an amateur band provided a cultural product that might otherwise never be experienced. Especially in the Victorian era, moral approval was rarely far away. An 1896 article on the rapid increase in amateur orchestras highlighted their influence on the “community at large,” suggesting the value lay “not so much [in] what amateur orchestras directly accomplish in giving pleasure to society” as in “the refinement and culture they indirectly exert upon the community in which they move.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

Of course, where performances were severely lacking in quality, they were liable to engender derision, especially among the music profession. But even in a less than perfect performance, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out in a review of the Richmond Orchestral Society (1893), a listener might well hear “fresh and convincing” artistic moments that were obtained simply because of the amateurs’ “unlimited rehearsal which is commercially impossible to the professional.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ In addition, whatever the quality of their performances, the members of amateur orchestras – the majority of whom were always string players – constituted a central block of the national audience who attended professional concerts of classical orchestral music. By learning orchestral works “from the inside,” thousands of amateur string players gained knowledge and appreciation of a considerable corpus of music, such that throughout their lives a professional concert of symphonic repertoire could hold the promise of enjoyment regardless of whether they remained active players. Some of this ripple effect was already evident to Shaw in the early 1890s: “[T]o me the amateur orchestra is all-important; for out of every ten people who support music in England, at least nine and three-quarters must have acquired their knowledge of it as amateurs and from amateurs.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ He might well have added that many of the supporters he had in mind would have been string players.