Music and Charity on the British Home Front during the First World War

Abstract

Although the outbreak of the First World War caused economic hardship for Britain’s professional musicians, they were still often asked to perform for free in the service of charity. The public debate about the morality of asking financially vulnerable musicians to perform without the expectation of payment led to some attempts to address these difficulties, with new programs founded expressly to help musicians in wartime Britain. Two principal organizations—the Music in War-Time Committee and the War Emergency Entertainments—proved successful in providing work for struggling musicians, either in public concerts or private performances for hospitalized soldiers, and in the process produced benefits far more complex, valuable, and far-reaching—in terms of both those employed to give the concerts and the effect on those who received them—than merely the monetary value of the sums involved.