Paul Watt

A ‘GIGANTIC AND POPULAR PLACE OF ENTERTAINMENT’: GRANVILLE BANTOCK AND MUSIC-MAKING AT THE NEW BRIGHTON TOWER IN THE LATE 1890s

ABSTRACT In 1897, the New Brighton Tower and its Gardens opened for business. This vast leisure precinct attracted millions of visitors each year and provided a host of leisure activities including ballroom dancing, acrobatics, exhibitions of foreign and exotic cultures and orchestral concerts. This article focuses on the first four years of the orchestras life when it was conducted by Granville Bantock, the only period of the orchestras history for which many programmes have survived and from which a detailed reconstruction of the orchestras repertory and programming can be made. The article discusses how class division, press propaganda, moral panics and commercial imperatives affected the programming of so-called ‘serious’ or classical music.

Street Music in the Nineteenth Century:: Histories and Historiographies

This article highlights the paucity of musicological scholarship on street music in the nineteenth century but examines narratives of noise, music and morality that are situated in studies of street music in related literature. The article argues that a new history of street music in the nineteenth century is overdue and charts ways in which such studies may be undertaken given the substantial primary source material to work with and the proliferation and usefulness of theoretical studies in related disciplines.

Editorial—Street Music: Ethnography, Performance, Theory

Street music comes in all shapes and sizes. It is played, danced, sung, acted, or expressed in a combination of these forms. A performance can be unanchored or fixed to a particular and regular space within a street, and it can be either improvised or systematically rehearsed ahead of time. Street music is most often staged for either commercial gain or altruism. Street musicians may move location, appropriate and subvert genres and educate, and entertain or annoy their willing (or unwilling) audiences. Street music may be born of national artistic traditions or express local musical values. By way of introduction to this issue, a brief examination of the “Handel at the Piano” project, directed by Russian-Dutch pianist Daria van den Bercken, illustrates some of the contexts in which street music operates. Den Bercken explains the Handel initiative as follows:

Music, Lyrics and Cultural Tropes in Australian Popular Songs of the First World War: Two Case Studies

During the First World War, hundreds of songs were written in Australia to give expression to the nations attitudes to the conflict. Very few of these songs became well known but two songs in particular, ‘Sing Us a Song of Australia’ (1916) and ‘For Auld Lang Syne: Australia Will be There’ (1915), achieved wide and, at times, spectacular success. This article examines the circumstances that led to the creation of the songs and the reasons—musical, social, cultural—that made them so well regarded and well known. The article argues that both works became emblematic for the nation for quite different reasons yet both relied to an extent on exploiting notions of nation, empire and masculinity for their success.

Dance and Dancers in the Victorian and Edwardian Music Hall Ballet

Abstract On 11 January 1890, a critic by the name of ‘G.A.S.’ wrote in the newly founded liberal periodical, The Speaker, that the music hall was a ‘half-graceful, half-grotesque medley of spectacle and buffoonery … [it] is in a condition of hopeless decline, and that its total disappearance from the English stage is only a question of a few more years‘. Yet to some of G.A.S.s contemporaries, such as the emerging music critic Ernest Newman, the music hall was a place of wholesome entertainment. Such polarized views on the value of music hall in the late Victorian period were common, but the music hall, as an important cultural institution, could not be easily dismissed or ignored. As F.Vr Robinson noted in The Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper on 8 June 1878, there were over 400 music halls in London to which 175,900 people went each night. Even though G.A.S. was writing some twelve years after these statistics were published, the music hall was far from languishing in the 1890s.