Performing Multiculturalism in UK Hip-Hop: The Case of Riz MC

JUSTIN WILLIAMS

With its origins in the 1970s Bronx, hip-hop music and culture has since spread globally as a lucrative and often politically powerful genre of popular music. In the UK, rap music transformed from an imitation of US styles in the 1980s to carving out something more unique. The nation's most visible form of hip-hop, which has been labelled ‘grime’, emerged out of electronic dance music-based MCing in the early 2000s and has celebrated a renaissance in the mid-2010s,Footnote ³¹ leading to exposure on the 2015 BRIT awards, a BBC late night Prom in the same year, and rapper Skepta winning the Mercury Prize the following year.

Despite this high level of exposure and institutional backing from public service broadcasters such as the BBC (Radio 1Xtra in particular), hip-hop in the UK is vastly misunderstood by the wider public, often conflated with mainstream imagery imported from the United States (which is why much of UK rap is referred to as ‘grime’, to distance itself from the US model). Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) rap artists arouse suspicion and scepticism from more racist streams of British society, who see British-born second- or third-generation citizens still as ‘immigrants’. Those who define Britain in monoethnic terms, or for those who feel outside such a construction, reflect what Tariq Modood and John Salt call the ‘tacit whiteness’ of national identity in Britain.Footnote ³² In contrast to the often-stereotyped conflation of ‘Britishness’ with ‘whiteness’, UK hip-hop tells a different story. For many practitioners and fans who feel part of this imagined community, hip-hop provides a cultural citizenship separate from more traditional notions of citizenship in the UK and elsewhere.Footnote ³³ In response to the question ‘Who is British music?’, then, I posit that many youth cultures have turned to hip-hop both to express themselves and to gain cultural citizenship where other forms of belonging have seemed unavailable. These alternative voices, while varied and multifaceted, reflect a crucial musical and political voice in the British landscape.

Of the wide range of topics that UK rappers discuss and critique, I will focus on hip-hop's performance of marginality to critique what Gilroy outlines as ‘postcolonial melancholia’ in the UK, and its resistance through the celebration of multiculturalism. While space does not allow for discussion of the omnipresent immigration debates which led in part to the ‘Brexit’ outcome of the June 2016 referendum to leave the EU, I will show that rap music can provide a vehicle to address the cultural amnesia found in ethno-nationalist definitions of British identity. Using rapper and actor Riz MC (Rizwan Ahmed) as a case study, I will show how some ethnic minority British citizens navigate a notion of ‘Englishness’ through rap in opposition to and alongside mainstream/stereotypical signifiers in unique ways.Footnote ³⁴ Grime and hip-hop should be considered part of the British musical landscape, providing a widely visible vehicle for its practitioners while simultaneously critiquing such systems and structures it helps comprise.

West Indian Roots and Routes of British Jazz

CATHERINE TACKLEY

On 22 June 1948 the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in East London having made the transatlantic journey from the Caribbean. (Passengers had boarded first in Trinidad, before the ship proceeded to Jamaica, Tampico, Havana, and Bermuda.) Amongst the passengers were the Trinidadian calypsonians Lord Beginner (Egbert Moore), Lord Woodbine (Harold Philips), and Lord Kitchener (Aldwin Roberts), whose performance of his calypso ‘London is the Place for Me’ on the deck when the ship arrived in Britain was captured by Pathé News.Footnote ⁵⁰ Although the arrival of the Windrush is understandably heralded as a significant moment in the history of Britain and the Empire, historians have recently developed a more critical approach to the event. Matthew Mead suggests that ‘the shorthand symbolic usage of the Windrush tends towards the monadic’Footnote ⁵¹ and the editors of Before Windrush: Recovering an Asian and Black Literary Heritage within Britain argue that ‘the prehistory of that event becomes more crucial than ever for a country trying to understand the process through which it has become a postcolonial nation state’.Footnote ⁵² These perspectives illuminate the arrival of the Windrush within the broader context of migration and its impact on British culture and society. Certainly, there were precedents for West Indian migration, albeit not on such a scale. The aforementioned calypsonians in particular found in London a flourishing live music scene with many established West Indian musicians.Footnote ⁵³ In this contribution I explore the pre-Windrush migration to Britain of West Indian musicians, who were mainly from Jamaica and Trinidad, assessing the impact of their cultural roots and migratory routes on the development of British jazz in the interwar period.Footnote ⁵⁴

In the early twentieth century, several West Indian musicians came to Britain via the USA. Trumpeter Leslie Thompson, a later migrant direct from Jamaica, recalled that the circumstances of economic stagnation around the turn of the century led Jamaicans to seek work in the USA, often via Cuba or Panama.Footnote ⁵⁵ By the start of the century, violinist and pianist Dan Kildare, whose father was paymaster general of the Kingston (Jamaica) constabulary, was resident in the USA. A contemporary of James Reese Europe who was famous for bringing syncopated music to France with his Hellfighters band during the First World War, Kildare was similarly involved in the Clef Club, which had been set up to advocate black musicians and to act as a booking agency. He assumed the presidency of the organization in 1913. In imitation of the exhibition dancers Vernon and Irene Castle, who performed with Europe's all-black orchestra, the dancer Joan Sawyer hired Kildare to provide a similar band for her performances at the Persian Garden at the Winter Gardens Theater in New York. As with many American fashions of the day, this trend for black musicians became influential in London, where a group led by Kildare arrived in 1915. Kildare's West Indian roots are not obviously reflected in the surviving performances and known repertoire of this ensemble. Rather, in accordance with the fashions of the times, Hawaiian references are frequent, and Kildare's band was billed in explicitly racial terms in Britain as ‘Ciro's Club Coon Orchestra’. Moreover, the continued presence of the banjo linked this latest manifestation of American popular music performance in Britain unequivocally back to the stereotyped, generalized racial imagery of the minstrel show.Footnote ⁵⁶

In the early 1920s, West Indian musicians also performed in Britain with the Southern Syncopated Orchestra (SSO). Formed by the violinist, composer, and conductor Will Marion Cook in New York to perform a wide-ranging repertoire of spirituals, plantation songs, ragtime, blues, jazz, and light classical pieces, the original group which arrived in Britain in 1919 consisted mainly of African-American musicians, including noted saxophonist Sidney Bechet. Once the group was resident in Britain, disputes led to multiple fractures in the personnel. Replacements came direct from the USA, but increasingly also drew on diasporic populations in Britain and Europe including those with West Indian connections. Egbert Thompson, a Sierra Leonian raised in Jamaica who developed his career in New York, took over from Cook as leader of the group for a time. Similarly, trumpeter James Briggs from Grenada, George Clapham from St Kitts, and clarinettist Anthony Rivera from Puerto Rico had all joined up with the SSO to come to Britain having first emigrated to New York. Jamaican-born clarinettist John Russell and trumpeter Joe Smith, as well as Trinidadians Cyril and George Blake (vocalist and drummer respectively) and banjoist Alston Hughes also became members. Latterly, the SSO included some white British musicians such as the trombonist and later bandleader Ted Heath, trombonist John Greer, pianist Billy Mason, drummer Harry Robbins, and trumpeter Tommy Smith.Footnote ⁵⁷

In this early period then, the precise racial identity of the musicians was not a factor which significantly influenced either the nature of their performances or their employment opportunities in Britain, but their migratory routes via New York, or collaboration with African-American musicians in Britain, were often vital in allowing them to gain experience of the music which would secure their success. As we shall see, by 1935 the origins of the performers began to become logistically significant and more explicit in musical performance. But the story of the SSO also makes clear that by the early 1920s there was a growing community of black musicians in London who were well placed to exploit current fashions in popular music performance.

Alongside those West Indian musicians who had developed their musical skills in the US, the structures of the Empire, notably the Exhibition and the military, were significant in bringing musicians directly from the Caribbean to Britain. In the summer of 1905, the band of the West India Regiment from Jamaica performed at the Colonial Exhibition at Crystal Palace in South London.Footnote ⁵⁸ The following year the Kingston Choral Union came to Britain to perform at the Colonial Products Exhibition at St George's Hall in Liverpool, and then toured the country, billed as the ‘Native Choir of Jamaica’.Footnote ⁵⁹ A notable precedent for the latter was the Fisk Jubilee Singers, an African-American choir who toured Britain in the late nineteenth century to raise money for university buildings at Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee. The Jamaican Choir performed a not dissimilar mix of religious and popular material in formal dress, which endeared them to their British audiences.Footnote ⁶⁰ These types of encounter with black ‘others’ were familiar tropes in Britain. Exhibitions had long provided a way for Europeans to encounter their ‘others’ in a controlled manner, since they allowed a suitable distance to be maintained between the visitor and the exhibit.Footnote ⁶¹ However, the close links between the British and West Indian military were more significant than to merely permit invitations for the West India Regiment band to perform at exhibitions, since a steady stream of West Indian musicians were sent to Britain to study at Kneller Hall, the Royal Military School of Music. Military service enabled West Indian musicians such as trumpeters Leslie Thompson and Leslie ‘Jiver’ Hutchinson, saxophonist Louis Stephenson, and numerous others to experience something of life in the ‘mother country’. These three musicians later settled permanently in Britain where they had significant musical careers.

The importance of the West India Regiment band, which became the Jamaica Military Band when the regiment disbanded in 1927, to the musical life of Kingston, Jamaica cannot be overstated.Footnote ⁶² In particular, the band enjoyed close links with the famous Alpha School, which provided an education for poor boys in Kingston, with an emphasis on music. The school boasts an impressive list of musician alumni including saxophonist Joe Harriott, who was to develop a style of free jazz playing when resident in Britain which ran parallel to that of African-American saxophonist Ornette Coleman. Leslie Thompson, a pupil at the school, recalled that the soldiers were employed as instrumental instructors, and the regiment band provided an obvious destination for the pupils when they left school.Footnote ⁶³

The few early reports of jazz performance in Jamaica are associated with the Myrtle Bank Hotel, originally constructed to house visitors to the 1891 Jamaica Exhibition and then rebuilt following an earthquake in 1907. Although proficient jazz performers began to emerge from the 1930s, jazz was regarded primarily as music for outsiders and therefore its performance would be influenced primarily by their tastes rather than the artistic expression of the musicians involved.Footnote ⁶⁴ The idea that Jamaican audiences were not sufficiently equipped to understand jazz was advanced persistently, and even by the time of independence, jazz continued to be positioned as an adjunct to the musical culture of Jamaica. Rather, independence could encourage jazz musicians to be more original within the context of the development of a local music industry. In 1962 journalist Hartley Neita described how ‘Jamaican jazzmen threw off the colonial cloak they had worn these many years. In the past, our jazzmen looked abroad for their musical ideas’ arguing how it was now possible for Jamaican jazz musicians to be more creative and individual.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, the critic Dermot Hussey remained sceptical:

Indeed, the successes of Jamaican jazz musicians in Britain were reported with great fanfare in newspapers such as The Gleaner in the 1930s and 1940s. Amongst the first Jamaicans to make a living from jazz in Britain was saxophonist Joe Appleton, who apparently went AWOL from the West India Regiment and arrived in Britain in 1924. In 1929 he was joined by Leslie Thompson, whose fascinating memoirs have been published by Jeffrey Green.Footnote ⁶⁷ Thompson had already visited Britain twice, to attend Kneller Hall in 1919 and then with the West India Regiment band for the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. Thompson recalled that his decision to settle permanently in Britain was unusual at the time: ‘That American magnet was still pulling Jamaicans away from the island in the 1920s. Indeed, hardly anyone thought of going to England unless it was on a scholarship, or to study law or medicine. Ordinary working chaps thought of America.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Having left the military band, Thompson had enjoyed a career as a theatre and cinema musician in Kingston, but had little direct acquaintance with jazz. However, he found that in Britain, as he put it, ‘my face was my fortune’ and that he was in demand as a black trumpeter as Louis Armstrong's records became better known prior to his 1933 visit. He recalled that ‘I had never heard anything of Louis Armstrong in Jamaica, but . . . fanatics had his records . . . Absolutely marvellous – the style was new to me, and that swing, that beat, was tremendous . . . It taught me a lot, and I knew that my concept of trumpet playing was lacking.’Footnote ⁶⁹ Despite his apparent authenticity, then, Thompson was in a position similar to aspiring white British jazz musicians who were increasingly reliant on records for their experiences of American jazz. Around this time, young British jazz cognoscenti such as Nigel Finch-Hill and Spike Hughes, with whom Thompson performed and recorded, had begun to appreciate and perhaps fetishize the black contribution to jazz. Hughes recalled this discovery,

At this stage, as with previous West Indian immigrants, Thompson's Jamaican roots had little influence on the nature of his musical output. However, it was in London that he became more politically aware through his interactions with the community of West Indian students, lawyers, and doctors, amongst them Harold Moody, who led the League of Coloured Peoples. This fuelled his desire to form an all-black band.

It can be no coincidence that Thompson judged that the time was right for this venture following a significant increase in the number of West Indian musicians in London in the mid-1930s, but the wider context for the migration of musicians in the interwar period is also significant. During the 1920s, the British Ministry of Labour introduced increasingly restrictive policies on visiting musicians in response to pressure from the Musicians’ Union. By 1935 American musicians, as ‘aliens’, were restricted to performing only in theatres (rather than for dancing) as soloists or as part of a band accompanying an act and positioned on the stage, thereby ensuring that a band of British musicians was retained in the pit.Footnote ⁷¹ The established popularity of African-American entertainment in Britain fuelled a demand for black musicians to provide apparently ‘authentic’ jazz performances which, as citizens of the British Empire and therefore not subject to the restrictions, West Indian musicians were well placed to provide. Thompson's group was later taken over by British Guianian Ken ‘Snakeships’ Johnson as the West Indian Dance Orchestra and achieved great success in London before the bombing of the Café de Paris in 1941 caused the band to split.Footnote ⁷²

The Trinidadian brothers Cyril and George ‘Happy’ Blake were vital to the development of the West Indian music scene in London in the interwar period. Both were long-standing residents of Europe and listed as part of the SSO at the time of a disastrous collision in 1921 involving a boat transporting the group to Ireland, in which several members were killed. After some time in France, the Blakes returned to London and ran a band at the Cuba Club on Gerrard Street in Soho for which they recruited Jamaicans Louis Stephenson and Yorke De Souza, who arrived in Britain in 1935, and subsequently Bertie King and Leslie ‘Jiver’ Hutchinson. These migrations are significant as they are the result of a specific demand for West Indian musicians, rather than general economic reasons. London's club scene had long been vital to the development of British jazz, since it provided spaces in which visiting American jazz musicians and their British colleagues could interact, largely free from musical, social, or legal restrictions. In the 1930s clubs such as the Nest, Jigs, and the Bag O'Nails remained popular amongst the large numbers of African-American performers who visited Britain and also attracted a white clientele who were keen to interact with them and possibly experience an impromptu cabaret of a more intimate and informal nature than was possible in a theatre.Footnote ⁷³ Entrepreneurs were keen to exploit the fashion for black entertainment, providing opportunities for black musicians that brought them to the capital from elsewhere in the UK and, indeed, the British Empire.

At the same time, Latin American and West Indian music, which had also begun to become available on record in Britain, contributed to its popularity beyond the associated diasporic communities.Footnote ⁷⁴ This musical migration produced a vibrant diversity of styles in Soho's clubs, including West Indian calypso and Cuban rumba as well as jazz, which were often played by the same musicians. The West End policeman Robert Fabian recalled, ‘I learnt all about jazz, boogie-woogie and calypso from my coloured friends years before they became known outside the murky little “coloured clubs.”’Footnote ⁷⁵ The Cuba Club was an early example of a venue which referenced Latin America and the Caribbean. The black Welsh guitarist Joe Deniz remembered the club as a small, dark, tatty basement, most likely of the ‘bottle party’ type in avoidance of licensing laws. Deniz also recalled the mixture of music performed, which included jazz standards such as ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ with the occasional rumba.Footnote ⁷⁶ Even in this early period there is some evidence of stylistic fusion, as Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson's band was said to have played ‘intriguing Calypso rumbas’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In time, this fusion of styles began to become more deliberate, and can perhaps begin to be understood as an expression of black British and/or diasporic identity. Obvious examples include Lord Kitchener's ‘Kitch's Bebop Calypso’, recorded with Guianaian saxophonist Freddy Grant's band in London in 1951, which alternates calypso and jazz styles with lyrics that name-check key jazz musicians, and Young Tiger's 1953 ‘Calypso Be’, which was rather less complimentary of modern jazz (‘This modern music's got me confused/to tell your friends I'm quite unenthused’), while still drawing on its stylistic features to some extent. Later examples include Joe Harriott's ‘Calypso Scenes’, which uses a calypso groove as a basis for ‘free’ improvisation, from his 1960 album Free Form. More recently, black British bassist Gary Crosby's group ‘Jazz Jamaica’ has fused West Indian music with jazz.

In Britain in the interwar period, racial non-specificity was key to the reception of West Indian musicians in Britain, and thus influenced the work that was available to them – Thompson's statement ‘my face was my fortune’ powerfully reminds us that the generalized assumptions around blackness, inherent musicality and jazz were both limiting of a better understanding of racial diversity but also offered important opportunities to newly arrived West Indian musicians. However, there is evidence of an emerging understanding of the specific styles that West Indian immigrants contributed to popular music in Britain, alongside a growing awareness of the origins of jazz as African-American music, all of which were present and popular especially within subcultural environments. This led to more explicit combinations of musical styles, initially within the repertoire of bands and venues but then extending to musical fusions within individual numbers. Jazz has provided a common denominator through which these cultural and musical relationships have been articulated, resulting in musical outputs which often and variously reflected roots, both long-standing and newly constructed, and routes, the literal and metaphorical spaces between them.

Egon Wellesz: British or Austrian Symphonist?

ERIK LEVI

Composer, musicologist, teacher, and critic Egon Wellesz arrived in England in 1938 following the Nazi occupation of his native Vienna. Appointed a fellow of Lincoln College Oxford in 1939, university lecturer in 1943 and reader in Byzantine music in 1947, he became a British citizen three years later and was awarded a CBE in 1957. Prior to the Anschluß, he had established an international reputation as a composer and scholar, remaining at the epicentre of Viennese musical life for over thirty years. An almost exact contemporary of Berg and Webern, Wellesz was a composition pupil of Schoenberg and published the first detailed book on his teacher's music in 1921.Footnote ⁷⁸ He also studied musicology with Guido Adler, developing academic expertise in a wide range of subjects, from eighteenth-century opera to Byzantine church music.Footnote ⁷⁹

A founding member of the International Society for Contemporary Music, Wellesz was cosmopolitan in outlook, being amongst the earliest Austrian composers to acknowledge the achievements of Debussy, Ravel, and Bartók.Footnote ⁸⁰ He also established very good relations with British musicians, having already visited the UK twice before the First World War, the second time to appear as a delegate for the Conference of International Musicologists held in London in 1911. In the 1920s, he encouraged the wider dissemination of British music in Vienna, writing sympathetically, for example, on the work of Vaughan Williams.Footnote ⁸¹ Welsh composer Grace Williams and the writer Martin Cooper were given scholarships to study composition with him in the early 1930s, and the University of Oxford in 1932 awarded him an honorary doctorate in music for his services to composition and musicology. Wellesz was justifiably proud to have been the first Austrian musician after Haydn to receive this honour.

This connection with Britain effectively saved his life. Early in March 1938, Wellesz was visiting Amsterdam to hear the Concertgebouw Orchestra perform his orchestral piece Prosperos Beschwörungen. The concert coincidentally took place on the same day that Hitler's armies marched into Austria. Because of his partial Jewish heritage, Wellesz realized the dangers posed by returning to Austria and turned to his academic colleagues in Britain for help. Thanks to their efforts, he was able to move to Oxford and bring his wife and daughters out of Austria.Footnote ⁸²

After arriving in Oxford, Wellesz busied himself with intensive musicological activity.Footnote ⁸³ But the trauma of his sudden departure resulted in him giving up composition altogether. Further traumas must have exacerbated the situation. On 1 September 1939, the Reichsmusikkammer singled out his entire oeuvre for proscription in the Erste Liste unerwünschter musikalischer Werke (see Figure 1). The following year, he was interned for six months as an ‘Enemy Alien’ on the Isle of Man. He was eventually released thanks to the efforts of the music historian H. C. Colles and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and was able to return to Oxford. Nevertheless, it would be a further three years before he regained the necessary equilibrium to begin composing again. Establishing the same working pattern between his academic and creative work as had been the case in Vienna proved far more difficult, particularly since the university regarded him first and foremost as a musicologist who happened to compose, as opposed to someone who was equally talented in both areas.

Figure 1

The first list of unwanted music issued by the Reichsmusikkammer in 1939 proscribed all of Egon Wellesz's compositions.

This problem was highlighted in the first extended post-war appraisal of Wellesz's music by his composition pupil Wilfrid Mellers, which was published in 1947. Mellers acknowledged that the British had not been slow to honour Wellesz's achievements as a scholar, but was highly critical of his fellow countrymen for allowing ‘the most important creative musician to come to this country from Austria . . . to remain for more than six years completely neglected’.Footnote ⁸⁴ According to Mellers, Wellesz was unquestionably ‘the one great exiled European composer we have amongst us’, arguing that he deserved to be recognized in the way that the Americans to differing degrees had honoured Schoenberg, Hindemith, Bartók, Milhaud, and Stravinsky.Footnote ⁸⁵

Mellers could not offer any plausible explanation for Wellesz's current neglect. He speculated as to whether it had something to do with a peculiarly deep-rooted nineteenth-century concept that was inimical to the British which maintained that ‘it was dangerous for a composer to have brains’.Footnote ⁸⁶ He could also have pointed to the entrenched insularity and insecurity that had reared its head at this particular moment in British cultural life, especially with regard to the influx of Hitler refugees. Such fears were articulated by Ralph Vaughan Williams when invited to become a patron of the newly formed Anglo-Austrian Music Society in 1942. In a letter to the Society's secretary, Vaughan Williams expressed alarm at what he termed the ‘late peaceful invasion of this country’ by Austrian musicians, believing that it could ‘entirely devour the tender little flower of our English culture’:

To counter this danger, Vaughan Williams exhorted his Austrian colleagues to ‘become Englishmen’. He urged them to ‘try to assimilate our artistic ideals and then strengthen and fertilize them from your own incomparable art’. What was entirely unacceptable, however, would be to ‘force a “Little Austria” on England – keeping itself apart from the “untouchables” and having its own musical life without any reference to the life going on around’.Footnote ⁸⁸

Whether or not he was made aware of Vaughan Williams's sentiments, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that after he resumed composing in 1943, Wellesz genuinely attempted to ‘become an Englishman’. One obvious signal of this new orientation came through his vocal music which included a setting of Gerald Manley Hopkins's poem The Leaden and the Golden Echo scored for soprano, violin, clarinet, cello, and piano, and the composition of songs after Dryden and Milton for baritone and piano. Another came in an article he wrote in 1945 in which he claimed that for opera to be fully appreciated in this country, it needed to be sung in English and be written by living composers. Only under these conditions, he argued, ‘could the whole audience . . . be united in the incidents of the action, and . . . experience the emotions aroused by the drama, as in the theatre’. Furthermore, he believed that the untapped resources of English dramatic literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ‘need only be a guiding hand in order to transform them into libretti for generations of operatic composers and to make of the new opera, so eagerly expected by all friends of English music, a reality’.Footnote ⁸⁹

Wellesz's article intimates that he was already contemplating a resumption of his operatic career with a setting of an English text. True to the principles expressed in 1945, he would eventually choose to write his sixth opera based on the seventeenth-century novel Incognita by William Congreve. It received its only staging in Oxford in 1951. Concurrently with his thoughts about English opera, he had also embarked on an entirely new compositional venture at the relatively late age of sixty by writing a symphony. It was to be the first of nine symphonies that he composed between 1945 and 1972.

The obvious explanation for Wellesz's post-war decision to write symphonies, particularly when he had avoided doing so in Vienna, was that it was an act of nostalgia indicative of yearning for his lost homeland that at the same time paid homage to his great symphonic forebears, Bruckner and Mahler. The fact that coincidentally other exiled Austrian composers, such as Ernst Toch and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, also turned for the first time to writing in this genre might also support such a notion. We can even point to Wellesz's own anecdotal evidence that some of the thematic ideas for the early symphonies were generated whilst he was holidaying in the Lake District, an area of the country that vividly reminded him of the Alt-Aussee in Styria.

An alternative justification for Wellesz developing an interest in symphonic form was that in 1945 this particular genre was much more widely appreciated in Britain than on the Continent, and that by choosing this path, he would gain greater acceptance here. Wellesz remained acutely aware that musical taste in Britain was much less progressive than in Europe and that it was therefore incumbent upon him to make his musical language more accessible, cleansing it so to speak of too many allusions to the dissonant language of the Second Viennese School – a process that is certainly apparent in his first two symphonies.

Yet Wellesz faced another difficulty in his quest for acceptance. He openly acknowledged that the models for his symphonic style were Bruckner and Mahler, two composers who were distinctly undervalued or misunderstood in Britain at that time. A good indication of the level of hostility accorded to Mahler can be gleaned from an anonymous review that appeared in The Times of the first British performance of his Fifth Symphony in 1945. The critic lambasted Mahler's work: ‘It contained diatonic tunes of the utmost banality made to serve for aspiration and grandiloquence . . . The movements are interminable, a jumble of a huge number of episodes which defy unification.’Footnote ⁹⁰

Given the general lack of understanding and appreciation of Mahler, it is hardly surprising that the poignancy of the finale Adagio movement of Wellesz's First Symphony, unmistakably evoking the similar bitter-sweet emotions to the analogous movement in Mahler's Ninth, failed to register. In fact, Wellesz's First was premiered not in Britain but by the Berliner Philharmoniker under Sergiu Celibidache in 1948. This performance was subsequently transmitted by the BBC a year later, but at 11.10 pm which hardly guaranteed it a large audience. Indeed, with only one exception, European rather than British orchestras gave the first performances of Wellesz's subsequent symphonies (see Table 1). Even the Second, to which Wellesz gave the nickname The English, was heard first at the Vienna Festival in 1948, before two London performances took place under Walter Goehr and Sir Adrian Boult.

Table 1

Chronicle of early performances of Wellesz's symphonies

Notes: FP = first performance

AP = Austrian first performance

UK = British first performance

BBC = broadcast performance

Wellesz justified calling his Second Symphony ‘The English’ on the unsubstantiated claim that the some of the thematic material from the slow third movement was inspired by English folk music. It is also possible that he naively hoped that the nickname ‘The English’ might give the symphony a better chance of approval. But if this was really his intention, the gambit seems not to have paid off. Lewis Foreman has noted the generally critical comments of members of the BBC Reading Panel vetting the score for future broadcast, the most hostile coming from composer William Alwyn: ‘This is a scholarly work – erudite, rather than musical. The slow movement owes much to Mahler (as indeed does the scherzo) . . . The scoring is generally competent without showing any original flair for orchestration. In construction the work is thoroughly grounded on Brahms. I cannot recommend it with any enthusiasm.’Footnote ⁹¹

The BBC Reading Panel report dates from 1951, the same year as the ill-fated Festival of Britain opera competition took place. As is well known, the competition rules required that submissions be entered anonymously. But any plans for the winning operas to be staged were shelved after the adjudicators discovered to their embarrassment that two of them had been composed by former ‘enemy aliens’. Wellesz was not one of the competition winners. His sixth opera, Incognita, which at least secured a staging by the Oxford University Opera Society in 1951, failed to get past the first round – a humiliating experience for a composer whose previous opera, Die Bakchantinnen, received its premiere at the Vienna State Opera in 1932.Footnote ⁹²

Another disappointment came with the BBC's apparent reluctance to sponsor the premiere of the Third Symphony, which Wellesz had composed between 1950 and 1951. The work was to have been given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sir Adrian Boult. But Wellesz's publisher was not prepared to issue the score and parts without a cast-iron guarantee of performance. Since the BBC refused to sign such an agreement, a stalemate ensued and the performance never took place. Although very disillusioned by this experience, Wellesz nevertheless moved on to new compositional projects. But from now on, he relied more than ever on foreign orchestras to promote his symphonies. It is also notable that during the mid-1950s, his musical language became more brittle, reflecting a closer alliance with Schoenberg particularly through a partial adoption of twelve-note technique. Whether this evolution would have happened as a matter of course or was prompted by the bitter experiences of 1951 remains unclear, but there is little doubt that Wellesz suppressed his former adherence to conventional tonality. Yet becoming more adventurous in musical style did not necessarily guarantee wider acceptance. In many respects, Wellesz's later music fell between two stools, too bold for the conservative British music establishment, yet insufficiently avant-garde in idiom to have any impact upon a much younger generation of composers who had attempted to move British music away from its former insularity.

Wellesz had to wait until his eightieth birthday in 1965 before the BBC made some belated amends for their earlier neglect of him with a sequence of concerts featuring his music.Footnote ⁹³ In the same year, the CBSO under Hugo Rignold gave the overdue first British performance of the Fifth Symphony, the earliest of his works to bear a stronger indebtedness to Schoenberg. Most of the critics attending this performance wrote warmly about the work, but it was Peter Heyworth in The Observer who was most critical of the British music establishment for the shameful neglect Wellesz had suffered in his adopted homeland:

Egon Wellesz contributed a huge amount to the musical well-being of this country after he arrived here in 1938. Tremendously versatile as a scholar and musicologist, he was certainly a pioneer in bringing the previously neglected music of Bruckner and Mahler, not to mention Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, to much wider attention here. As an educationalist, he was largely instrumental in establishing the Oxford music degree by insisting that undergraduates take on a serious study of the history of music, something that had not happened before when the curriculum was exclusively geared towards organists and church musicians. But his great distinction as a scholar seemed to make it much more difficult for him to be recognized as a significant composer. His relationship with British conductors, publishers and the BBC was patchy, and to date not one of his works has been performed at the Proms. Ironically, the reverse situation occurred in post-war Austria where there has been a consistent stream of performances of his work, as well as a number of books dealing with his life and music.Footnote ⁹⁵ The only detailed scholarly explorations of his British-composed symphonies have appeared in Austrian journals and most recently in a book charting the history of the Austrian symphony in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁹⁶ Finally, the only commercial recordings of these works were made by the Radio Symphony Orchestra in Vienna.Footnote ⁹⁷

Can, or should, Wellesz be regarded as a British composer? In his 1963 book British Composers in Interview, which featured Wellesz in the second chapter, the Canadian composer Murray Schafer hedged his bets by declaring:

Whereas Schafer acknowledged Wellesz as an influential figure, historical surveys of twentieth-century British music published after his death in 1974 largely overlook him.Footnote ⁹⁹ Amongst more recent publications, Wellesz is not mentioned at all in Matthew Riley's 2010 edited volume, British Music and Modernism 1895–1960.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Philip Rupprecht, focusing specifically on the influence of the Manchester Group from the 1950s onwards, concedes that ‘the full complexity of the post-war musical world and its contemporary-music scene in particular is scarcely comprehensible without recognizing a generation of émigré musicians who settled in Britain during the 1930s, among them the Schoenberg pupils Egon Wellesz, Erwin Stein, Walter Goehr and Roberto Gerhard’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Frustratingly, Rupprecht does not attempt any further elucidation of this influence.

A recent article by musicologist Bojan Bujić, who knew Wellesz for the last ten years of his life, explains why he remained in Oxford after the war, rather than return to Vienna. He concedes that after ten years of exile, Wellesz found himself in a difficult situation:

No less difficult for Wellesz was his attempt to rebuild his fractured composing career in the very different cultural climate of post-war Britain:

Charley and the NHSFootnote ¹⁰⁴

FLORIAN SCHEDING

Following the election in 1945, the year that marked the end of the Second World War, Clement Attlee's newly elected Labour government began to embark on an ambitious set of social reform acts.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Seemingly unfazed by the economic constraints that marked the aftermath of the Second World War and brought the United Kingdom to the brink of bankruptcy, the so-called ‘post-war consensus’ amongst the two major political parties provided fertile ground for a considerable enlargement of public services and the consolidation of a welfare state aimed to serve all Britons from the cradle to the grave.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Spanning education, housing, health, women's rights, and worker's rights, reforms aimed to address what were supposedly the five main problems of British society: disease, want, squalor, ignorance, and idleness. The government nationalized 20 per cent of British industry; set about building twelve new towns to reduce homelessness and overcrowding; legislated all local authorities to provide primary, secondary, and further education, guaranteeing the national provision of state-funded secondary schooling for the first time in the country's history; and introduced national insurance, unemployment benefits, and family allowances.

Perhaps of longest lasting significance was the introduction in 1948 of a comprehensive, universal system of British health care. With rationing an everyday experience for Britons well into the 1950s, the National Health Service (NHS) provided access to doctors, dentists, opticians, and hospitals free of charge for all at the point of use. Paradoxically, this reform highlighted how severe the national health crisis had been. Almost from its inception, the NHS faced enormous difficulties. From the day the service began work on 5 July, NHS institutions and facilities were inundated with patients who had previously been unable to afford treatment. Demand for medical care exploded and soon outstretched capacities. By September, prescriptions had nearly doubled, rising from seven million per month before the establishment of the NHS to thirteen and a half million. The NHS was becoming a major factor in government budgets. By 1951, charges were introduced for opticians and dental treatment, causing health minister and architect of the NHS Aneurin Bevan to resign. Personnel, too, were stretched. Before long, the NHS experienced a severe shortage of doctors, nurses, midwives, ancillary workers, and other medical staff – a situation that worsened when, during the first decade after its introduction, 3,500 British doctors emigrated to Canada, the US, and elsewhere in protest because they were unwilling to participate in the new health service.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ One of the government's main responses to this staff shortage was migration. The British government recruited nurses, doctors, and ancillary staff, mostly from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent, to come to the UK and fill the vacant positions.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The strategy of filling vacancies with migrants has been a constant feature in the history of the NHS. By 1980, the proportion of NHS staff with migration backgrounds reached 30 per cent and has never since fallen below this number. In February 2018, the House of Commons Library, the information resource of the lower house of the British parliament, reported that a minimum of 12.5 per cent of all NHS staff in England do not hold British citizenship and can therefore be presumed to be first-generation migrants. Most of them are citizens of African, Asian, and non-British EU countries. With 7 per cent of NHS employees registered as unknown nationalities and an unknown number of the 82 per cent with British citizenship foreign-born, figures are likely to be greater – up to 18 per cent or more.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ They also depend on the profession. In 2017, the BBC reported that 36 per cent of NHS doctors trained outside the UK.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Writing for the Nuffield Trust, Mark Dayan has pointed out that the UK is one of the developed countries that relies most on importing doctors from abroad.Footnote ¹¹¹ Even MigrationWatch UK, a right-wing think-tank dedicated to lobbying policy-makers against immigration to Britain, concedes that the NHS has been heavily dependent on migrant labour and that the employment of staff trained elsewhere has saved the British government considerable costs with regards to expensive medical training.Footnote ¹¹² As Hayden Smith has put it in The Independent, ‘the NHS would collapse if it wasn't for immigrants’.Footnote ¹¹³

It is instructive to contextualize such numbers against overall migration statistics in Britain. Writing for the Office of National Statistics, Michael Rendall and John Salt report that, overall, proportional numbers of immigrants to the United Kingdom have steadily increased since the mid-twentieth century, from 4.2 per cent of the population in 1951 to 12.7 per cent in 2011.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The Migration Observatory, based at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at the University of Oxford, states that, in 2015, 13.5 per cent of the UK population was foreign-born, with 8.9 per cent non-British citizens.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In the NHS, then, immigrants are punching above their weight. And they do so with regards to the economy more widely, too. The Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM) based at University College London has found that migrants coming to the UK since 2000, for example, have been 43 per cent less likely to claim benefits or tax credits compared to the British-born workforce and that the European immigrants amongst them have contributed more than £20bn to public finances between 2001 and 2011. As the authors of the study show, ‘between 1995 to 2011, immigrants endowed the UK labour market with human capital that would have cost about £49 billion if it were produced through the UK education system and contributed about £82 billion to fixed or “pure” public goods’. The UK-born population during the same period had a net fiscal cost of £591 billion.Footnote ¹¹⁶

In spite of this evidence, British politicians have made direct links between poor NHS performance and immigration. Doing so in fact became a prominent line of argument for those advocating the country's withdrawal from the European Union. One of the main promises of the campaign to leave the EU, displayed prominently on the so-called ‘battle bus’, was that departure from the Union would save Britain £350 million per week, which could then be used to bolster the underfunded NHS. The other promise was that the country would regain control of its borders and reduce the numbers of immigrants. While those campaigning for continued EU membership remained largely silent on the issues of migration and public health, voices advocating Brexit loudly informed voters that the two issues were directly related. Boris Johnson, who was promoted to foreign secretary after the successful Brexit campaign, claimed ‘We get uncontrolled immigration, which puts unsustainable pressure on our public services.’Footnote ¹¹⁷

The facts contradict such statements, and the suggestion that migrants are a drain on public resources rather than an essential asset to the provision of public health in Britain has been rebuffed continuously and resolutely.Footnote ¹¹⁸ To name one recent example, the Channel 4 News website questioned whether migrants are causing an NHS crisis. Before the background that since 2010 the number of people waiting more than four hours for accident and emergency treatment has seen a nearly six-fold increase, Channel 4 journalist Georgina Lee put forward evidence that ‘there's no correlation between the proportion of immigrants in an area and the performance of local A&E departments’; that so-called health tourism ‘costs less than a tenth of one per cent of the total NHS budget’; that ‘immigrants are less likely to access health services than the native-born’; and that immigrants make a ‘positive fiscal contribution to the UK’ that bolsters the NHS budget.Footnote ¹¹⁹ That such debates can be found in a public-service TV station, rather than being restricted to academic journals or dedicated research institutes, illustrates the extent to which migration and the NHS are at the forefront of public discourses in 2018. Indeed, in the commentary section below the Channel 4 online article, the reader ‘S Maddocks’ comments, ‘I truly believe this crisis is caused by EU migrants, it is common sense.’ Such attitudes are not new. As Roberta Bivins has shown, throughout its history, discussions about the NHS align closely with debates about migration.Footnote ¹²⁰ British debates about immigration since the mid-twentieth century, then, have been as much informed by the NHS as discussions about the NHS have been linked to migration.

How do migrant artists and musicians figure in all this? Let me rewind to the immediate post-war years. As illustrated by the aforementioned emigration of 3,500 British doctors, who left the country in protest against the introduction of a national health service, not everyone embraced the idea of the NHS with open arms. Before the NHS first opened its doors in the summer of 1948, the government felt that it was prudent to convince Britons of the wide-ranging reforms and embarked on a considerable propaganda campaign. Films were central here, and several shorts were commissioned to advertise the government's reforms. Prefacing the feature, they reached wide audiences and were shown in cinemas across the nation. This was not, of course, a novel strategy; nor was it unique to the Attlee government. During the Second World War, the Ministry of Information (MOI) had poured considerable resources into commissioning propaganda films, including shorts and features, which were shown both in Britain and abroad. Indeed, Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards have suggested that ‘the story of British cinema in the Second World War is inextricably linked with that of the Ministry of Information’.Footnote ¹²¹

Following the upheaval of wartime, which had exposed populations in Britain and beyond to transmissions of propaganda through the new media of film and radio on an unprecedented scale, it is perhaps unsurprising that the British government continued to employ the same strategies to convince voters of its policies. Focusing on the US Marshall Plan, Maria Fritsche has convincingly argued that the role of film was central in post-war political campaigns and discourses, much as it had been during the war years.Footnote ¹²² And while a lot of cinema owners were reluctant to show factual government films they feared to be less popular with audiences, it seems that, at least in some cases, such films were well liked, or at least appreciated, by audiences. Referring to productions sponsored by the MOI more generally, Geoff Hurd, for example, has suggested that the 1940s brought about ‘a genuine rapport between British film-makers and their audiences’.Footnote ¹²³

Two of the small team behind the film I now focus on belong to a group of artists who sought refuge in Britain during the 1930s in order to escape fascist persecution. The co-producer and director of Charley in Your Very Good Health (1948), the second in a series of eight films, was John Halas, born Janós Halasz in Budapest in 1912, and the music was composed by Mátyás Seiber, also Budapest-born, but seven years before Halasz, in 1905. Halasz had co-founded Hungary's first animation studio, Coloriton, in 1932. Having arrived in London in 1936, he co-founded the production company Halas & Batchelor in 1940, in partnership with the British-born animator and scriptwriter Joy Batchelor. (They married in the same year.) The company was immensely successful, particularly with propaganda shorts made during and after the war for the British government and achieved notable success with the feature length cartoon Animal Farm (1954), to which Seiber also wrote the score.

The composer of the Charley film music, and notably of the recognizable theme tune that connects all the films in the series, was Seiber. In Budapest, he studied composition with Zoltán Kodály. Following the takeover of the proto-fascist Miklos Horthy regime, Seiber left Budapest to settle in Frankfurt where he accepted a professorship in jazz at the prestigious Hoch Konservatorium. There, his compositional development marks him as a composer of the avant-garde, making him one of the first to employ dodecaphony outside Schoenberg's circle. In 1933, the Nazi administration dismissed Seiber in an act of ethnic cleansing on account of his Jewish heritage. Seiber left Frankfurt and migrated to London in 1935, where he eventually established a reputation for himself as composer, conductor, and one of the country's most renowned composition teachers.

The sheer number of refugee artists who exerted influence upon British film-making in the mid-century has become something of a trope in exile studies and caused Tobias Hochscherf, for example, to speak of a continental connection.Footnote ¹²⁴ While many artists left the European continent for Hollywood instead – Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Marlene Dietrich, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Hanns Eisler, Berthold Viertel, Elisabeth Bergner, and many others spring to mind – Britain, and London particularly, became a destination for many, amongst them Alexander Korda, Max Schach, Gabriel Pascal, Emeric Pressburger, Friedrich Feher, and Lajos Bíró.Footnote ¹²⁵ Hungarian-born Miklós Rózsa recounts a joke from mid-century that the three Union Jacks hoisted at the Denham studios stood one for each of the three British, non-migrants working on the premises.Footnote ¹²⁶ Musically, too, immigrants changed considerably the history of British film. And yet, despite Erik Levi's claim that migrant composers such as Allan Gray, Walter Goehr, Hans May, and Ernst Hermann Meyer perhaps achieved their greatest successes in the area of film music, their story remains seldom told.Footnote ¹²⁷

Indeed, beyond the field of exile studies, migrant voices remain largely absent. Richard Farmer, to name one example, in an otherwise carefully researched book, does not reference immigrant film-makers or composers in his detailed discussion of the MOI's emphasis on propaganda films.Footnote ¹²⁸ Sarah Street dedicates several sections of the first half of her book to British responses to what she calls the ‘Hollywood invasion’ during the 1930s, but the influx of migrant artists during the same period is largely excluded from her discussion of British national cinema.Footnote ¹²⁹ She does mention that Emeric Pressburger, for example, was Hungarian-born, but this, for her, cemented his status as someone with an ‘outsider insight’.Footnote ¹³⁰ Conversely, Brian McFarlane includes John Halas, one of the protagonists of this article, in his encyclopaedia of British film and Tony Shaw calls Halas & Batchelor ‘Britain's largest and most respected animation company.’Footnote ¹³¹ Despite such appraisals, propaganda shorts are not frequently discussed in the literature. While many mid-century short films are today easily accessible on online video platforms, stalwart modernist Hanns Keller's complaint from 1955 continues to ring true today: ‘so much good work is done in unobserved corners – in “shorts”, cartoons, documentaries, etc., which never see the light of a press show and are not easy to track down’.Footnote ¹³²

Commissioned by the Central Office of Information (COI, the successor organization to the MOI from 1946), Batchelor and Halas (as co-directors, co-script writers, and co-producers) joined forces with Seiber to produce a series of eight films, each between eight and ten minutes long.Footnote ¹³³ Released from 1948 onwards, all of them are based around the cartoon character Charley, a likeable and cheeky but otherwise ordinary man, presumably of working-class background. Charley explores post-war Britain on his bike, forming a double act with the narrator to comment on the government's reforms. At first reluctant to embrace political change, the films show Charley shedding his initial hesitations and even promoting the reforms, notably to his neighbour, posh George. As the Attlee government invited Indian doctors and Caribbean nurses to come to Britain and fill labour shortages in the NHS, migrant artists such as Halas and Seiber were approached to make these propaganda films.

By the time the COI commissioned Halas & Batchelor to produce the Charley series, they had a fairly long-standing business relationship: according to Vivien Halas and Paul Wells, the studio had made over one hundred shorts for the government by 1950.Footnote ¹³⁴ This included, for example, the Abu series, which was shown in the Middle East as anti-Nazi propaganda.Footnote ¹³⁵ Between 1942 and 1947, Seiber had contributed the music to at least fifteen propaganda shorts. There is evidence to suggest that this collaboration proved successful beyond a merely functional level. For example, the 1946 eight-and-a-half-minute film Modern Guide to Health, which promoted general health including correct posture, exercise, well-fitting clothing, and proper sleep, won first prize at the 1947 Brussels Film Festival. The Charley series was received particularly favourably. Two shorts, Charley in New Town and Charley's March of Time, both produced in 1947, were selected for the 1948 Cannes Film Festival, with the former also shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival during the same year. Farmer Charley, the last in the series, was screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1949, and several shorts produced in the following years were likewise successful internationally.Footnote ¹³⁶

Targeted to a mass audience like the other Charley films, Your Very Good Health is the second in the series. It demonstrates how Halas and Batchelor mastered the technique of packaging a complex political message into a focused, humorous and seemingly light-hearted film narrative. Interspersed with energetic action scenes, which see Charley hypothetically falling off his bike or imagining that his wife falls ill (‘We mothers can't afford to be ill’, she retorts wryly), the story is narrated in a straightforward and easily intelligible manner. Surprisingly entertaining even today, the film capitalizes on animation's potential to convey a considerable amount of complex information in an enjoyable, even charming, manner, but without losing sight of its topic. Tony Shaw has suggested that Halas's migration background contributed to the success of films such as Your Very Good Health, pointing to ‘the proselytizing qualities of animation, enhanced by its instant accessibility and apparent ideological innocence, and Halas and Batchelor's distinctive style, which combined the sentimentality of Disney with an Eastern European graphic boldness and darkness’.Footnote ¹³⁷

The music was essential to the success of the Charley films and is a prominent feature throughout. First, there is Charley's recognizable and catchy theme tune which accompanies the opening titles of each of the films in the series, in which he rides across the screen on his bicycle, writing out his name. It also recurs periodically throughout Your Very Good Health, including a rendition an octave higher when the narrative briefly shifts to Charley's baby son. In addition, there's some mickey-mousing, for example when a tuba hilariously synchronizes Charley's breathing during an imagined episode of respiratory disease. Seiber's score perhaps most enhances the action and slapstick scenes, such as the sequence when the narrator asks Charley to imagine what might happen if his bicycle brakes gave out, he fell off his bike, and needed an ambulance. Overall, and in line with the others of the series, the music contributed to the film's success, which, as a propaganda achievement, apparently pleased the government.Footnote ¹³⁸

Through media and cultural means, migrant artists such as Halas and Seiber thus participated in the political debates of the time through their creativity. Whether they were necessarily supportive of Attlee's reforms on a private level is a different matter. But their individual attitudes are not germane to my point. Rather, I suggest that through short films such as those of the Charley series, immigrant artists such as Seiber and Halas played an important part in the history of what were perhaps the most wide-reaching social reforms in twentieth-century Britain since the Second World War. Just like the immigration of large numbers of Caribbean nurses and Indian doctors kept the NHS going in its infancy and still does so today, musicians, composers, and film-makers are also an intrinsic part of the history of an organization so inextricably imbedded in British daily life. There would not be an NHS in the form we know it today without migration. Migrants are an inseparable part of the very fabric of British society. Their contribution may at times seem hidden, but it is still in full view, if only we look and listen.

Ivan Caryll, the Belgian Doyen of British Musical Comedy

DEREK B. SCOTT

Ivan Caryll (1861–1921) was born Félix Marie Henri Tilkin in Liège, Belgium. He first became a student at the conservatoire in his home town, before travelling to France to study singing at the Paris Conservatoire. After moving to London in 1882, he made a basic living by giving piano lessons. He also composed songs and managed to sell some of them to the theatrical manager and impresario George Edwardes. The latter was so impressed with Caryll, he made him musical director of the Gaiety Theatre in succession to the long-serving Wilhelm Meyer Lutz. Meyer Lutz was also an immigrant musician, having left Bavaria for England in 1848, at the age of nineteen. Indeed, when Caryll took over the Gaiety orchestra, it contained only one English player, a person always alluded to humorously as ‘the foreigner’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Caryll was a dedicated and energetic musical director, and proud of his position as conductor of one of the finest theatrical orchestras of the period. As a stage composer, Caryll rose to fame in the 1890s, and he remained an important and successful musical comedy composer until his death in 1921. The genre of British musical comedy owed a great deal to this immigrant composer, who was a key figure in defining the style of the musical comedies at the Gaiety. In fact, he was rarely alluded to as an immigrant musician, which may be partly explained by the Gaiety's history of employing musicians from continental Europe, and partly by his own character and personality as a cosmopolitan figure in the musical life of the West End.

George Edwardes is credited with having coined the term ‘musical comedy’ for a new blend of topicality and romance in stage musical entertainment.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ He had detected that the days of burlesque and the topsy-turvy world of the Savoy operas were reaching an end, and the audience was ready to respond to something fresh and more related to modern life. Edwardes made his first experiments at the Prince of Wales Theatre, because he felt the change would be too sudden in the Gaiety, which was regarded as the home of burlesque. His production of In Town at the Prince of Wales Theatre in 1892 was billed as a ‘musical farce’, but it already had many of the features of what would become known as musical comedy, such as modern dress, and an eclectic score with musical styles ranging from operetta to music hall. The label ‘musical comedy’ was actually applied to the following production at the Prince of Wales, which was A Gaiety Girl. Neither of these productions had music by Ivan Caryll. The composer of In Town was F. Osmond Carr, and for A Gaiety Girl it was Sidney Jones.

Ivan Caryll was asked to compose the music for the next musical comedy, The Shop Girl, in 1894 (once more described as a ‘musical farce’). This was staged at the Gaiety with such unequivocal success that this theatre from then on became the home of musical comedy. Seymour Hicks, who performed in the show before he became a successful actor-manager and producer, wrote in 1910, in a book recounting his early stage career, ‘There are some musical comedies whose music may have been better, though I doubt it, and others may have had better characterization, or a stronger plot, etc., etc., but no other play possessed all its merits in so marked a degree.’Footnote ¹⁴¹ Hicks's wife, the actor and singer Ellaline Terriss, declared in her own memoirs, written forty-five years later, that The Shop Girl was ‘the beginning of a new era not only at the Gaiety Theatre but in the British musical theatre’.Footnote ¹⁴²

Figure 2

a) Ivan Caryll and b) Lionel Monckton.

The book of The Shop Girl was by H. J. W. Dam, who claimed to have researched his subject in Whiteley's department store and the Army and Navy stores in order to capture ‘the life of today’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Most of the music was composed by Caryll, with additional numbers supplied by Monckton to lyrics by Adrian Ross. Monckton had studied Law at the University of Oxford. His music was not dissimilar to that of Caryll, and the same held true of their moustaches (Figure 2). Caryll handled the trickier concerted sections, such as finales, and did the orchestration. Monckton often came up with the instantly catchier tunes, even though (unlike Caryll) he was a constant reviser of his material.

The Shop Girl was an enormous success, running to 546 performances, and firmly establishing musical comedy as the most popular stage entertainment in the West End. There was a link between the big shops and the theatre, because affluent women from the suburbs would often combine a shopping trip with a visit to the theatre. Both of these activities were respectable, although both might involve chance interactions with men. The two leading actors were Ada Reeve (a music-hall singer) as the shop girl Bessie Brent, and Seymour Hicks (at this time a comedian with little singing experience). Ellaline TerrissFootnote ¹⁴⁴ replaced Reeve, who had already been pregnant went she took on her role.

The first act was set in a department store and the second in a bazaar. Department stores were a feature of cosmopolitan modernity. The opening chorus informs us, ‘Ev'ry product of the planet / Since geology began it’ can be bought on one or other of its ‘mile on mile of floors’. In ‘The Song of the Shop’ we have lines critical of those who behave as social superiors to shop girls. In verse one, they are the women who bully them:

In verse two, they are the men who sexually harass them:

Hicks's interpolated song ‘Her Golden Hair Was Hanging Down Her Back’ was considered risqué, with its insinuation that a young woman has been free with her sexual favours. Hicks and Adrian Ross adapted it from an original by Felix McGlennon, published in New York in 1894. It does not feature in the vocal score published by Hopwood & Crew in early 1895. The variety elements present in musical comedy meant that a song reminiscent of the style of the music hall or US vaudeville did not jar as it would have done in stage work more closely associated with comic opera or operetta. The respectability of women who attended musical comedy was much more relied upon by theatre managers than that of those who attended the music hall. In the latter environment, hair hanging down a woman's back carried strong implication of impropriety. Theatre historian Peter Bailey cites a report that appeared in the Evening News the month before the premiere of The Shop Girl, which stated that women with ‘loose, unbonneted hair’ were being denied admission to the Empire Theatre. This was a variety theatre in Leicester Square, managed by George Edwardes, but which was at this time the subject of scandal regarding prostitution.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

The possibility that elegant young women in the chorus at the Gaiety Theatre, popularly known as Gaiety Girls, might have an opportunity to marry into the nobility is hinted at in the song ‘The Smartest Girl in Town’.

Women were no longer typically portrayed as passive. Miggles, a shopwalker at the shop, whose job is to supervise the sales staff and help customers, sings a song about being forced to become a vegetarian by his new wife:

Sadly, after all his suffering, his wife elopes with a butcher.

The Shop Girl witnessed the stage debut of George Grossmith Jr, son of a famous comedian, and known as Gee-Gee to his friends. He played the masher Bertie Hoyd, the cut of whose coat was ‘quite the thing’. His masher song ‘Beautiful Bountiful Bertie’, composed by Monckton to Grossmith's own lyrics, proved to be one of the show's hit numbers. The term ‘masher’ was given to fashionable, fun-loving men about town, who were often inappropriate in their sexual attentions. Bertie has the onerous duty of escorting a group of foundlings around town (Figure 3).

Figure 3

The foundlings in The Shop Girl.

The Shop Girl was the first musical comedy to have a full chorus line of modern Gaiety Girls. Nevertheless, it played safe by also having a scantily clad burlesque troupe of women from the Frivolity Theatre who appear in Act 2. Another sign of modern times is the inclusion of a newly wealthy US businessman. He is presented in the song ‘The Millionaire’, in which Bunco Brown tells how he transformed himself from a desperado in the gold mines to ‘plutocratic Brown of Colorado’.

The production of the show followed the usual procedure: Pat Malone and Sydney Ellison took charge of the production until the final rehearsals. Then, Edwardes turned up to have his say, making comments and offering advice that, as always, was found to deliver significant improvements. Edwardes was so pleased with this show, he sent a touring company to Palmer's Theatre, New York, and another company to the Prince's Theatre, Melbourne. It was also adapted for performances in continental Europe; for example, as La Demoiselle de magasin in Paris (1896), and Die Ladenmamsell in Vienna (1897).

Caryll's next musical comedy was The Circus Girl, which opened at the Gaiety on 5 December 1896. James P. Tanner, who was responsible for the book, ensured that it was not all circus oriented, and included a scene at a Paris ball. Caryll once more had the assistance of Monckton, who provided additional numbers. The stars were Ellaline Terriss, Seymour Hicks, and comedian Connie Ediss. Once more, Monckton succeeded in providing a hit song, with ‘Just a Little Piece of String’ sung by Terriss. So popular was it, she used its title for her autobiography. Ediss sang ‘The Way to Treat a Lady’, which told of her being left in a pub by her husband, who did not even pay for her glass of port and lemonade. The Circus Girl was almost as successful as The Shop Girl and ran for 494 performances. It also enjoyed a New York production in 1897.

It has by now become obvious how popular the word ‘girl’ was in the title of a musical comedy. The labelling of young women as ‘girls’ has been described by Peter Bailey as a strategy to frame them as ‘naughty but nice’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The Gaiety Girl was not prim or over-zealous in religion and politics, nor intellectually ambitious in the manner of the New Woman of the 1890s. The Gaiety Girl may not have been an example of the New Women, who spurned fashion and regarded marriage as something that stifled careers and ambitions, but she was certainly an example of the modern woman, a woman who knew her own mind and was not inclined to passivity in her dealings with men. This did not deter male admirers: the term ‘Stage Door Johnnies’ was used at this time to refer to those men who would crowd outside the stage door hoping to escort one of the young women to supper.

The last of Caryll's musical comedies of the 1890s was The Runaway Girl (Gaiety, 21 May 1898), and it became another runaway success, with a New York production in the same year. The book was by Seymour Hicks and Harry Nicholls, the lyrics by Aubrey Hopwood and Harry Greenbank, and the music by Ivan Caryll, again with the assistance of Monckton. The team of people involved in creating the words and music may be interpreted either as indicating that a new kind of art world is emerging, or alternatively, as representing the division of labour that characterizes industrial production methods.

A Runaway Girl featured Terriss, Ediss, and Edmund Payne and Kate Seymour (a couple admired for their dancing and duets). The Times saw this piece as a return to operetta with a diminution of variety show elements. It was set in Corsica and Venice. The audience's love of spectacle was usually satisfied by giving each act a picturesque location. Caryll followed it with The Messenger Boy, which was the first musical comedy to have a male gendered title. It opened at the Gaiety on 3 February 1900, running for 432 performances, and it had 128 performances on Broadway the next year. The book was by James T. Tanner and Alfred Murray, the lyrics by Adrian Ross and Percy Greenbank, additional music was contributed by Monckton.

The Toreador, opened at Gaiety in 1901, and was the final musical comedy produced there before the theatre was demolished and the new Gaiety built nearby. The book was by the same creative team as The Messenger Boy, except that Tanner's partner in writing the book was Harry Nichols. Again, there was a noticeable shift of focus in this title to the male, and Edwardes's superstition that ‘girl’ was necessary in a title in order to bring good luck was evaporating. In fact, The Toreador and The Shop Girl enjoyed the two longest runs at the old Gaiety Theatre (675 and 546 performances, respectively). The drama involves Teddy Payne as a footman whose full livery leads him to be mistaken for a toreador, so he is sent to the bull ring. Other performers were Marie Studholme, George Grossmith Jr, and Gertie Millar, who was making her London debut. During the run, Lionel Monckton proposed to her, and they married.

The musical comedy The Toreador offers an interesting example of how an immigrant composer like Caryll can bring something novel to a genre that otherwise seems so typically British. An illustration is Teresa's song, ‘Oh, Señor, Pray Be Bold of Heart’. First note the fandango rhythm in the verse section. That was a typical means of representing Spain in later nineteenth-century British songs, such as ‘A Bandit's Life Is the Life for Me’ (words and music by E. Harper, 1872), and ‘The Bandolero’ (words and music by Leslie Stuart, 1894). However, the refrain is different, and introduces a new dance rhythm to musical theatre (Examples 1 and 2).

Example 1

‘Oh, Señor, Pray Be Bold of Heart’, opening of verse (The Toreador, 1901).

Example 2

Refrain ‘For There Both by Day and Night’ (The Toreador, 1901).

The rhythm is that of the habanera, a Cuban rhythm (the term ‘habanera’ indicates an origin in Havana). This rhythm was much more familiar in Paris, where Caryll, as a French-speaking Belgian, studied, and, indeed, he marks it with the French term ‘havanaise’ in the score. There is, of course, a famous example of the rhythm in Bizet's Carmen. Caryll's habanera has caught the idiomatic cross-rhythm of threes against twos. Not only does Caryll introduce the dance to musical comedy, but in doing so he also anticipates the popular enthusiasm for the tango a decade later. Interestingly, when the tango reached Britain, it arrived via Paris too. The habanera and the Argentine tango are closely related musically, and differences tend to be found mainly in the respective dance movements.

Although I have only had space to look at the earlier musical comedies that involved Ivan Caryll and changed perceptions of musical theatre, his achievement in this field of entertainment was extensive, and, added to this, he was the composer of one of the most popular of British twentieth-century light operas, The Duchess of Dantzic (1903). After The Toreador, his three biggest hits in the West End were The Orchid (1903), Our Miss Gibbs (1909), and Kissing Time (1919). His biggest triumph on Broadway was with The Pink Lady in 1911. A run of over 150 performances for a stage work was generally seen as marking a success. Caryll exceed this benchmark twenty-three times in the West End between 1890 and 1920 (the last time with the 1920 revival of The Shop Girl), and fourteen times on Broadway, 1894–1920. The editor of The Play Pictorial, B. W. Findon, paid tribute to Caryll in 1909:

Since then musical comedy has become one of the most neglected genres in British theatre history, and Ivan Caryll – who, in 1903 enjoyed the unprecedented achievement of seeing five of his stage compositions run simultaneously in the West EndFootnote ¹⁴⁸ – has, sadly, become one of the most neglected of theatre composers.

Aural Borders, Aural Bordering

TOM WESTERN

Musicology needs migrant histories. Florian Scheding and Erik Levi write of the discipline's lack of engagement with displacement and its impacts as ‘all but negligent’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ This is reflective of a broader historiographical situation, whereby history is written from the perspective of states and places, placing the figure of the migrant outside of history.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The figure of the refugee, similarly, is constructed as an ahistorical, universal humanitarian subject.Footnote ¹⁵¹ From this footing, national (musical) histories seem inevitable, and national borders delineate objects and areas of study as well as societies, nations, and communities.

Yet recent border theory tells us that there are more types of borders now than ever before. It no longer makes sense to think of borders only as lines on maps or physical barriers that separate nation-states. Borders, instead, are technologies of social circulation; and societies are the products of bordering, rather than the other way around. For Thomas Nail, borders are material technologies that produce social division, acting as filters or sieves that allow the free flow of capital and elites, but catch the global poor. Rather than framing this as a system of inclusion and exclusion, however, Nail argues that the border can be better understood through circulation. Borders are always in motion, and are never finished including and excluding, continuously redirecting flows and things across or away from themselves.Footnote ¹⁵²

A border, then, is an institution, an experience, a business, a knowledge system, a part of everyday life, and a cultural entity. And a sounding one. I am not the first person to think about aural borders. Josh Kun considers the border as ‘a field of sound, a terrain of musicality, of static and noise, of melodic convergence and dissonant clashing’, writing of the aural border as an archaeology and genealogy of subjugated knowledges.Footnote ¹⁵³ More generally, he writes of migration as a sonic act as much as a spatial one.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ But here I am less interested in the sound cultures that exist at the physical border, and more interested in the ways that music has been used to produce borders.

Territory here becomes conceptually important. Stuart Elden argues for an understanding of territory as a political technology, more to do with relations between power and space, terrain and technique than with notions of land as an inert backdrop for states. Accordingly, for Elden, territory is never static, but is ‘a process, made and remade, shaped and reshaped, active and reactive’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Moreover, projects of nation building can, and frequently do, take place within well-established territorial borders.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ So a fuller understanding of territory is built from the techniques used by governments and institutions to measure and manage terrain and populations.

This resonates with another argument from Nail: that borders do not exist solely at the perimeter of a territory but suffuse the social and pop up at any point where a linguistic, ethnic or cultural division occurs.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ And this, in turn, feeds into my understanding of aural borders. They are works of cultural production. They are the result of sonic labour. So, while sounds cross borders more easily than people, and music does not stop at checkpoints, they are, at the same time, political objects that have been enrolled in securing aural borders. Borders are created within and through culture. History is mobilized and circulated through these endeavours.