Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England

Abstract

Music and Society in Early Modern England, by Christopher Marsh, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, xiii + 609 pp., accompanied by a CD, £65.00/$110.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-521-89832-4Reading this book left me with mixed feelings. It is good news that a prominent mainstream historian - Christopher Marsh is Reader in Early Modern History at Queen's University, Belfast - has ventured confidently into an area so long skirted around by social and cultural historians, observing that they have tended 'to contemplate the past with their ears plugged' (p. 25); music is conspicuous by its absence in the pages of G.M. Trevelyan, E.P. Thompson, Ronald Hutton, Barry Reay and many others. It is also good that Marsh draws on a wide range of primary sources, many of which will be unfamiliar to specialists in English seventeenth-century music, and has clearly read widely in the recent secondary literature - though there are some notable omissions, such as David Lasocki's thesis 'Professional Recorder Players in England, 1540-1740' (The University of Iowa, 1983) or the late John M. Ward's articles on ballads and popular music. Marsh praises Claude Simpson's book The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick NJ, 1966) without mentioning Ward's important corrective article 'Apropos The British Broadside Ballad and its Music', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 20 (1967), 28-86. Similarly, Marsh uses a few quotations from the writings of Roger North (1651-1734) without apparently realising that he was the first writer in England (or anywhere, for that matter) to try to analyse the emotional effects of different types of music in any detail, and would therefore have been more useful than most of the authorities assembled for his first chapter, 'Music and Mood'.Marsh lays his book out in nine chapters: after 'Music and Mood' come two devoted to 'occupational musicians', including cathedral musicians and town waits, one on 'recrea- tional musicians', two on ballads, one on 'dance and society' and two on parish church music. Despite his all-embracing title, Marsh is determined to avoid discussing what he calls rather sniffily 'written compositions that are judged to be of high aesthetic value', deploring the 'grey shadow' that great composers supposedly cast over 'the demographic majority' and 'the focus upon written notes' in musicological discourse (p. 29); what he is interested in, as the jacket blurb reveals, is 'English popular music', not music and society as a whole. Thus, to take just two glaring omissions, there is hardly any discussion of the court, under the Stuarts by far the largest employer of musicians and the most important musical institution in the country, and the chapter on domestic music has valuable material on the ownership and use of musical instruments, the role of singing, and the ways music was taught, but hardly anything on the music that might have been sung or played - that of course would in many circumstances have involved discussing written notes. Marsh discusses the role of printed instruction books in musical education (p. 208), but not the role of tablature (which indicates finger positions on the fretboard of plucked instruments or the viol) in giving beginners easy access to composed music without them having to cope with the complexities of staff notation.As one of those concerned with these pesky written notes, but also interested in unwritten traditions and music's place in social history, this form of inverted snobbery strikes me as limiting and ultimately self-defeating. In the section on the waits, for instance, Marsh notes the increase of groups 'typically from two or three members during the mid- sixteenth century to four or five by the 1620s' (p. …