In this impressive and detailed investigation of the contributions women songwriters made to popular British musical culture in the long nineteenth century, Dr. Maren Bagge has written a study that scholars of music and popular culture in Great Britain will want to consult for many years to come. A substantial tome – it weighs in at 729 pages, including 542 pages of text, 156 pages of tables, and 46 music examples – it builds on the foundational work of many scholars, including Christina Bashford, Rebecca Grotjahn, Derek Hyde, Simon McVeigh, Derek B. Scott, and especially, Sophie Fuller.Footnote 1 She consulted a vast array of journals and newspapers from England, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Canada, and the United States, as well as Australia and New Zealand. Additionally, she has worked with numerous archival sources, consulting letters and diaries that yield important information. Anglophone researchers will also benefit from the way she draws on a century of relevant commentary by German critics and scholars.
In addition to the vast holdings of the British Library, this study has profited from the collection of music by English women composers preserved in the Research Center of Music and Gender (Forschungszentrums Musik und Gender) housed in Hannover, Germany, at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover. As of 2020 the collection contained more than 3,000 items, primarily songs for voice and piano published as sheet music between the late-eighteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a format that larger libraries have always considered ‘ephemera’ and struggled to catalogue and make available.
Dr. Bagge takes her first title words ‘favourite songs’ from a marketing phrase found as early as the eighteenth century. British publishers applied the words to arrangements of popular opera arias as a label for songs that were mass produced and sold widely at bargain prices. In the nineteenth century the phrase was applied to songs known from concert stages that then became ‘bestsellers and veritable mass media hits’ (p. 17). The other title words – ‘Popular English Music Culture in the Long 19th Century’ – indicate the chronological and intellectual sweep of her study.
She begins with several basic questions:
Who were the composers (male and female)? What types of music are the songs whose popularity is highlighted here? How did they achieve such a broad popularity? Who were the people involved in their distribution? Which distribution media were used? And finally, how, from a musicological perspective, can we approach these now little-known forms of British popular culture of the long 19th century? (p. 9)
Dr. Bagge structures her treatment of these questions in four wide-ranging sections: 1) publication and marketing strategies; 2) dedications as evidence of social networking; 3) the distribution, circulation and consumption of popular songs; and 4) songs and ballads on the concert stage. In each section the approach alternates between discussions of the four cultural practices identified in section titles and examinations of the songs composed by the women she has selected.
To answer her opening questions Bagge combines close readings of individual sources with ‘distant reading’, compiling big data from the British Library catalogue along with data gleaned from other sources, supplementing qualitative analyses with quantitative evaluations (pp. 11, 38, 43–4). In this she follows Stephen Rose, Sandra Tuppen and Loukia Drosopoulou, who prize large datasets because they offer ‘the possibility of a “distant reading” of musical sources, directing scholarly attention away from the canonized composers that are the usual object of research and instead highlighting long-term trends’ (p. 43).Footnote 2
Although we encounter dozens of lesser-known women songwriters in this study, Bagge – guided by her quantitative research – focusses on fewer. After considering two early songwriters, Harriett Abrams (1758–1821) and Harriet Browne (1798–1858), sister of the prolific poet Felicia Hemans, she turns to several who published in the second half of the nineteenth century, including Charlotte Sainton-Dolby (1821–85), Maria Lindsay (Mrs. J. Worthington Bliss) (1827–98), Charlotte Alington Barnard (Claribel) (1830–69), and Alice Maude Davis (Hope Temple) (1859–1938); and six who were active well into the twentieth century Frances Allitsen (1848–1912), Maude Valérie White (1855–1937), Amy Woodforde-Finden (1860–1919), Liza Lehmann (1862–1918), Alicia Adélaïde Needham (1863–1945), and Teresa del Riego (1876–1968). Another composer identified only as “Henriette”, who published in the 1870s, is rightfully included even though her identity can only be surmised (more on this below). These women published songs up to the end of the First World War. Needham’s last song, for example, appeared in 1917 and although Lehmann died in 1918, her family and publisher continued to issue her final songs for several years. Bagge’s extensive gathering of data allows her to deal not only with the most prolific and prominent women of the day, but also occasionally with women such as the Australian Dorothy Blythman, whose lone song publication, ‘A Bush Lullaby’, is an example of songs that publishers promoted by sending ‘Professional’ or ‘Complimentary’ copies stamped ‘Not for sale’ to journals or well-known singers (pp. 341 and 570).Footnote 3
The first chapter, ‘“I’ve Brought Some Songs”: Publication and Marketing Strategies’, focuses on the techniques employed by female composers for distribution of their English songs and ballads. Using data compiled from the British Library, Bagge graphs the steep rise of song publications by both men and women in the later decades of the nineteenth-century until roughly 1910, when a correspondingly precipitous fall occurred (p. 60).Footnote 4 As the middle class increased in size and the prices of sheet music fell, music publishers prospered. By 1898 British publishers sold roughly twenty million copies of sheet music each year, with purchases from the United States contributing a particularly lucrative share of the market. There were fortunes to be made. Aware of the potential, many women composers initially paid for engraving and printing their own songs to gain visibility. This may have been financially risky, but the strategy could function as a career catalyst, offering the hope that a successful self-published song would attract the interest of a major publisher. Case studies that include some of the most popular songs of the century – including those by Claribel (Charlotte Alington Barnard), Amy Woodforde-Finden, and Margaret Camidge – demonstrate that early self-financing could lead to later commercial success through reprints, new editions and publisher-backed distribution. The publication path of Amy Woodforde-Finden’s Four Indian Love Lyrics, including above all her ‘Kashmiri Song’, for example, is surprising, for although it became one of the most successful song-sets in the first half of the twentieth century, at first it had to be self-published. Only after they were embraced by Covent Garden baritone Hamilton Earle, a popular singer of ballads, did Arthur Boosey relent.
Bagge analyses the broad spectrum of contractual arrangements between composers and publishers, especially through the example of Frances Allitsen, who worked with at least 21 different publishers. She identifies three main remuneration models: unpaid publication, one-time fees (from modest to substantial) with full transfer of rights, and royalties based on sales. Royalties offered long-term income potential, but publishers typically retained a disproportionate share of profits. There were also a variety of ways in which these options could be combined. A composer, for instance, could collect a fee upon publication and then continue to receive a share of royalties once a certain number of sales had been reached. New editions and subsequent arrangements also played a role. But, as Bagge convincingly shows, publishers benefited from successful songs significantly more than did the composers, who often had to rely on multiple income streams, including teaching and performing.
In her discussion of the popularity of songs by British women in the American market, Bagge’s treatment of Liza Lehmann’s American popularity and her 1909–10 tour of the United States is particularly interesting. After first summarizing the performance history of Lehmann’s music in the US (including the programming of her songs by the operatic baritone David Bispham starting in 1897), Bagge quotes reviews of her recitals and plots out a tour map from Boston and New York City to California. She correctly understands Lehmann’s tour as a promotional strategy, but also points out that few women songwriters had the performing skills and the financial means to undertake such a lengthy trip (Cécile Chaminade in 1908 and Carrie Jacobs-Bond, who made many regional tours of the United States between 1905 and 1912, were two others). Marketing, in fact, was mostly left up to the publishers.
In Chapter 2, Dedicated “to my Sisters at Home and Abroad”: Dedications as a Mirror of Networks, Bagge turns to questions of relationships that aided women songwriters throughout their careers, including the use of dedications as paratexts that reveal social networks and calculated forms of self-presentation. She starts with contrasting examples by Harriett Abrams and Frances Allitsen and shows how dedications ranged from brief personal notes to elaborate, illustrated statements that served both private and public functions. She draws on Gérard Genette’s theory of paratexts and more recent scholarship on dedications to Mendelssohn, Brahms and other male composers.Footnote 5
Bagge’s main case study in this chapter is the British-Irish composer Alicia Adélaïde Needham, whose extensive body of published music as well as surviving letters and diaries make possible a detailed analysis of dedication practices. More than 60 per cent of her published works have dedications, which address more than 100 individuals or groups. These encompassed friends, family, musicians, composers (male and female), members of the aristocracy, politicians, women’s organizations and men in the military. Needham’s dedications to military officers and personnel (such as ‘Dedicated to our Soldiers and Sailors’, and ‘Dedicated to The Irish Regiments At The Front. South Africa, 1900’) spur a discussion of the extent to which dedications also served as expressions of commitment or veneration (a discussion that should be referenced in future considerations of the thousands of pro-war songs published by American amateur women songwriters during the Spanish–American War and again in 1917–18). Ultimately, Bagge concludes, Needham sought to strengthen professional ties, seek patronage, express her commitment to the suffragette movement and, perhaps above all, to enhance the market appeal of her works.
Needham also figures in her next chapter, ‘“My Favourite Song”: Distribution, Circulation, and Consumption of Popular Songs’. Here Bagge pivots to individual consumers, who often developed personal connections to the sheet music they acquired, as manifested in written annotations on a sheet music imprint, in the binding of a sheet music collection, and in the practice of copying of songs by hand. At the outset she raises several questions, asking how individuals acquired prints, how people learned of new publications, what opportunities they had to purchase them, how they were kept (once acquired), and how music circulated other than by being purchased (pp. 303–4). Bagge first reviews the various ways that individuals could acquire music: shops in London’s West End, publisher’s stores, department stores throughout Great Britain, journals like The Girl’s Own Paper (with a circulation of ca. 250,000) and supplements in newspapers and magazines. These were not songs intended for public performance; rather, they were simpler, some of them didactic, many of them religious, aimed at amateur singers seeking entertainment for themselves and their families. Bagge explores at some length the ways individuals could access free songs, both in London and in the United States. Publishers and composers (such as Needham), for example, eagerly supplied singers, voice teachers, friends and influential acquaintances with promotional copies, including some still in manuscript. In addition, newspapers regularly announced the arrival and first performances of newly published songs.
There were also commercial lending libraries in all large cities, and many that were not-so-large (including one on the Isle of Jersey). Among the contemporaneous German sources that Bagge draws on for their outsider insights into life in nineteenth-century London, she cites Heinrich Meidlinger on these libraries: ‘There are even [circulating] music libraries here … where one can borrow the most famous and best musical works and arias. The main institution is Willis’s Harmonic Saloon in Westmorland Street, which owns 30,000 musical works and lends them out, along with all kinds of instruments, for £3 per year or 12 shillings per month’ (p. 353).Footnote 6 Bagge provides evidence that such libraries were run by the music publishing houses of Chappell, Jullien, Boosey and others. To round out the chapter, Bagge moves on to a consideration of personal collections and then to binders’ volumes and hand-copied collections.Footnote 7
The final chapter, ‘“Ballad Concert Successes”: Songs and Ballads on the Concert Stage’, begins with a review of the vast scholarship on the thriving vitality of concert life in nineteenth-century London: concerts delivered in a variety of formats with a repertoire more diverse than found on the Continent. As Simon McVeigh observed, ‘British music had to fight its own corner in an open market, and to concert promoters and audiences it represented just one more type of new repertoire’.Footnote 8 Beginning in 1867 with John Boosey, Ballad Concert series became hugely popular and lucrative, with other publishing houses (Chappell, Enoch and Cramer) following suit, each promoting their own catalogue of songs and ballads. Among the many questions related to these concerts that Bagge tackles here are the following: ‘Whose works were performed by whom and before whom? To what extent were songs we have been considering by female composers integrated into the concert series? … What influence did works by female composers have on the success of the concert series?’ (p. 415).
From concert programmes (such data has not been fully available until recently) and notices and reviews in newspapers and trade journals, Bagge creates a template for a typical Ballad Concert: eight or nine singers usually sang fifteen to twenty-three solo vocal numbers, as well as a vocal duet, polyphonic part songs, glees or a chorus or two. A few solo pieces for piano, violin or cello broke up all the vocal music. Composers frequently appeared as singers and accompanists of their own songs, introducing their latest efforts and reprising their popular hits to sold-out halls of up to 3,000 (mostly) middle-class ticket holders.
In London’s male-dominated music world, ballad concerts provided welcome opportunities to hear British women’s songs. Drawing on her painstaking analysis of concert programmes, Bagge shows that works by women regularly appeared in the London Ballad Concerts, although their proportion fluctuated over time. Her data account for 15,000 performance announcements between 1867 and 1913–14, of which 1,300 (8 per cent) were by women. From the 1897–98 season onward, the average for women composers rose to 14 per cent each season. Some women – including Claribel, Hope Temple, Maude Valérie White, Liza Lehmann, Alicia Adélaïde Needham, Teresa del Riego and Amy Woodforde-Finden – achieved sustained success, with several of their songs becoming perennial ‘evergreens’.Footnote 9
Among the most intriguing figures Bagge studies in this chapter is the songwriter known only as Henriette, who achieved success as a composer of sentimental ballads in the 1870s. Bagge discusses 19 of Henriette’s songs, but newspapers of the time announce the publication of several more.Footnote 10 Bagge documents the particular association of the contralto Mme. Janet Monach Patey with Henriette’s early hit, ‘Always Alone’. She also calls attention to a later edition (from 1879?) published by the family firm, Patey & Willis, with ‘Madame Patey’ printed conspicuously at the top of the cover page and her initials ‘JP’ stamped in the lower right-hand corner, the spot usually reserved for the stamped signature of the composer.Footnote 11 Although Bagge leaves open the possibility that this was the pseudonym of a man, I think Henriette was likely a woman. In the years in which she published, the gender of the other composers identified only by a woman’s first name was female, as for Dolores (Ellen Elizabeth Dickson) and Claribel (Charlotte Alington Barnard). Only later, when women songwriters had secured a respectable portion of the market for popular songs, did men join the first-name charade, most successfully Harold Vicars (as Moya) and Charles Arthur Rawlings (as Nita).
Might Mme. Patey have published as Henriette? Perhaps. In fact, if Mme. Patey chose to perform a song she had composed under another name, she had company in this practice: Bagge notes that in 1902 the composer-singer Gordon Cleather sang the song ‘The Knight’s Farewell’, a song he had composed and then published under a woman’s first name, ‘Nina’ (p. 460).Footnote 12 To that I can add the examples of Hilda Wilson, who as a singer performed her hit ‘From Oversea’ (1903), which she had published as Douglas Hope, and also Miss Ira Aldridge, who programmed songs by Montague Ring.Footnote 13 Aldridge adopted this male pseudonym as a way of keeping separate her activities as a teacher and performer of art music and her composition of popular music.Footnote 14 Mme. Patey possibly pioneered this strategy of performing a song she had published under a pseudonym.
Although the primary focus of this chapter is Ballad Concerts, Bagge also discusses women who tried to promote their own music by organizing their own concerts, renting halls and taking care of advertising, etc. Again, Needham’s diaries provide useful insights, as does Maude Valérie White’s autobiography, in which she details the stress of organizing concerts of her own works through the 1890s without the support of a professional concert agent (pp. 517–18).Footnote 15 Few women, however, could afford the financial risk this involved. Indeed, in her conclusion Bagge turns back to Needham, who recorded in her diary a conversation she had with Arthur Boosey that illustrates the precedence of the monetary goal: ‘Your songs are most artistic + much above the ordinary song. + I don’t want you to spoil your writing but I want the million to buy your songs + not only the artistic few’ (p. 523).
Bagge’s conclusion is a defence not only of the music and the women she has presented, but also of the musical culture of England. She opens with a quotation from a German visitor in 1844, Joseph Gambihler in his Handbuch für Reisende (Handbook for Travelers to London and its Surroundings): ‘People believe that England is poor in original compositions: they will soon realize their mistake’ (p. 525).Footnote 16 This adumbrates another, better known, contradictory impression from a German visitor, Oscar Schmitz, who in 1914 derisively proclaimed Great Britain as ‘a country without music’ (p. 538). Bagge also articulates the very multifaceted rejection of rigid dichotomies that she wove through each of the preceding chapters – public vs. private, professional vs. amateur, centre vs. periphery, and art music vs. entertainment music – and instead argues persuasively that performers and composers all operated in interconnected social and professional networks. Printed sheet music functioned not only as a means of musical communication but also as a commercial, social and cultural medium that shaped identities of all kinds.
Remarkably, this seems to be the first review in four years of Bagge’s important study. In comparison, Candace Bailey’s closely related study of American women and sheet music, Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South, published barely a year earlier, was reviewed at least six times in the first three years after it appeared.Footnote 17 A likely explanation is that for many British and American scholars, a book this size in German is intimidating or beyond them altogether. Bagge is the most recent of a number of German scholars who have made significant contributions to the study of music and British cultural life in the long nineteenth century, including Gunilla-Friederike Budde, Sven Oliver Müller, Susanne Rode-Breymann, and Melanie Unseld.Footnote 18 There are also the various authors active in Musik und Gender im Internet (MUGi) and pertinent articles in the ever-evolving encyclopedia, Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG Online).Footnote 19 Anglophone scholars of British and American music unaware of relevant scholarship by their colleagues who publish in German (and other languages) miss important insights. Although AI may help make Favourite Songs: Populäre englische Musikkultur im langen 19. Jahrhundert more broadly available, I have rarely encountered a book so deserving of translation for the audience that will most benefit from reading it.
