Bound for America: Three British Composers. By Nicholas Temperley. pp. xiii + 236. (University of Illinois Press, Champaign, Ill., 2003, $34.95. ISBN 0-252-02847-3.)

Abstract

It is unlikely that anyone trawling the pages of Brown and Stratton’s British Musical Biography (1897) would feel inclined to linger over the thirty-six words accorded George K. Jackson (1757–1822), or be greatly stimulated by David Baptie’s assessment of Raynor Tay1or (1747–1825) as a ‘Glee composer of taste and ability’ (A Handbook of Musical Biography, 1887). Vague though it is, only a comment in Baptie’s Sketches of Glee Composers (1895) might give rise to a flicker of curiosity. ‘About 1792’, we are told, ‘he went to America and was living in Philadelphia about 1825.’ As for William Selby (1738–98), neither Brown and Stratton nor Baptie have anything to report, while the first edition of Grove (1879–89) makes no mention of the hapless trio and their work. Yet it is the careers of these marginal figures that have prompted Nicholas Temperley to write a fascinating account of what happens when minor musicians are transplanted from routine careers in their native land to a New World fertile with opportunities for music-making.