Nineteenth-Century British Flute Music: A Research Project Revisited

Eight years ago, as part of my Masters study at the RWCMD, I undertook a research project into nineteenth-century British flute music.  My starting point was that some must have been written but nothing remained in the repertoire, so I was keen to find out what had been composed, who played it where, and why had it been forgotten – was it just not very good, or was it all a bit more complicated than that?  My investigations took me to the British Library reading rooms where I spent many happy hours studying nineteenth-century concert programmes, old flute tutor books and journals, tracking down the repertoire when I could and contextualising it all with biographical and historical research.  I fell in love with the world of nineteenth-century British music studies and with nineteenth-century Britain, savouring the glimpse provided by annotations and anecdotes into how people were experiencing this music and concert life two hundred years ago.  It is thanks to this research project that I am now undertaking my PhD.

But to return to the world of the nineteenth-century flute, in the dim and distant past of 2009 the BL did not allow people to take photos in their archives and the costs of using their copying facilities were prohibitive.  I found myself in the frustrating position of having identified hundreds of interesting pieces but I could not afford to actually play them, with the exception of the rather lovely Suite by Edward German which I had obtained from another source.  I wrote up my dissertation and moved on to projects new, keeping in mind a hope I could return to this music some day.  The opportunity presented itself in a course of lectures I was requested to give to the Glossop Guild in November/December 2016 on music in nineteenth-century Britain.  I immediately decided to make one of these a lecture-recital about nineteenth-century British flute culture.  Given the new photography rules at the BL I planned a visit, but first contacted Robert Bigio, the flute maker and researcher into nineteenth-century British flutes, to see if he was still happy to lend me some of his music as he had very kindly offered several years ago.  He was, so off I drove to north London.  He hauled several large cardboard boxes out of his shed, music given to him by the granddaughter of a flautist active at the end of the nineteenth century. ‘Take them away!’ he said.  ‘I haven’t even had the chance to look through them properly and they are taking up lots of space!’  We filled my boot with music, which is currently occupying my loft until I get a chance to catalogue, copy and return it.

The photograph of music accompanying this post is the first recital programme of nineteenth-century British flute music I have devised, from this collection supplemented by other sources.  I have now presented it twice, first in the context of a lecture-recital in Glossop, then in a shortened format at the Wesley Chester recital series in February 2017.  It is the tip of a very exciting iceberg – I was confident that much of the music I had discovered could work well in a recital programme, whether as great music in its own right, or whether as interesting pieces when framed and contextualised appropriately.  Presenting it to a general audience has confirmed this perception and several of the pieces have appeared in other recitals I have given since.

The stories behind this music, its composers, its performers and audiences are worth telling, ranging from pistols at dawn to not altogether honourable courting practices, but they deserve their own post.  For this one I will confine myself to a brief account of this recital programme.  It is approximately chronological, with several distinct groupings of repertoire style.  The first, by W. N. James, an amateur flute playing who published extensively, is very much intended for use in the home – an image of this piece is below, and you can picture the gentleman brandishing his flute in front of his friends saying ‘look what was in the Flutonicon this week!’.  It was James who met to duel with Charles Nicholson, the preeminent flautist in Britain at that time, after a series of increasingly heated exchanges by letter and in print.  They were arrested to keep the peace.  Nicholson’s piece here is one of his more virtuosic sets of variations, compared to others he wrote intended more for the domestic market.  It is rather difficult but a lot of fun.  The compositions by Prout, Barnett and Macfarren, all serious composers held in high esteem in their day, are the results of efforts by the flute makers and publishers Rudall, Carte & Co. to encourage and commission sonatas and similar genres for the flute, published in their Flute Player’s Journal and the Journal of the London Society of Amateur Flute Players who assisted in the cause.  There is some very appealing music within these pages, and the Barnett Sonata has now been reissued in a modern edition so I am evidently not the only person to think so!  Edward de Jong was the first principal flute of the Hallé Orchestra, giving at least 13 solos at Hallé concerts between 1858 and 1865, several of which were his own compositions.  This caprice is very well written and sounds much harder than it is!  Edward German, best remembered today for Merrie England, wrote his Suite for the Welsh flautist Frederick Griffith, perhaps the most sought-after flautist in 1890s London.  Griffith premiered it in Steinway Hall in 1892, with German accompanying.  The Romance by Dora Bright was also composed for Griffith, with whom she had a close friendship.  Finally, as it was nearly December when we gave this recital, we concluded with a rather wonderful set of variations on ‘Adeste Fidelis’ by Dipple, a contemporary of Charles Nicholson.  All these pieces have met with a warm reception from our audiences.

W. N. James                                            Jack Redburn’s description (in music) of a horse race (1840)

Charles Nicholson (1795-1837)       Au Clair de la Lune: Introduction, Theme & Variations

Ebenezer Prout (1835-1909)             Sonata Op. 17 (1883)

                                                                                1: Allegro con anima

                                                                                2: Romanza

John F Barnett (1837-1916)                Grand Sonata

                                                                                1: Allegro

W. A. Macfarren (1813-1887)             Recitative and Air (1883)

Edward de Jong (1837-1920)              Caprice “Will o’ the Wisp” (1899)

Edward German (1862-1936)            Suite for Flute and Piano (1892)

1: Valse Gracieuse

Dora Bright (1862-1951)                      Romance and Seguidilla (1891)

T. J. Dipple                                              Variations on “Adeste Fideles”

 

Best laid plans: Lessons from a PhD pregnancy

Babies don’t follow plans. This may sound obvious, I thought it obvious too, but it is still my biggest lesson of the past two years.

If you had spoken to me in January 2015 you would have found me quite good at planning. I was juggling being a PhD student, flute teacher, freelance flautist, Army Reserve musician and mountain rescuer, so I had to be. I was also, having been with my husband for nine years, fast reaching the conclusion there would be no perfect time to try for a baby, so we might as well get on with it.

The position I found myself in, thinking about motherhood just halfway through a part-time PhD, is not uncommon. 40% of postgraduate students in the UK are over 30, at postgraduate research level the proportion of women is around 47%, and in 2014 the average age of all mothers was 30.2 years. And of course this doesn’t include the number of students who might be thinking about becoming fathers.

The plan going forward was by necessity vague. I thought I understood that every pregnancy and every baby is unique, but I did, nonetheless, have an outline of a plan in my mind, incorporating a degree of flexibility to allow for the uncertainty in what was to come. My AHRC Studentship made provision for six months paid maternity leave, with the option to take a further six months unpaid. I planned to get as far ahead with my research as I could while pregnant, then expected to keep things ticking along while on leave and to return after six months.

The first surprise was falling pregnant straight away. Part of me had assumed I had time before this all happened. I wasn’t ready! There was so much still to do! Then my plan for getting ahead immediately ran into problems when I was completely floored by first-trimester exhaustion. ‘You may feel tired,’ the books said. Tired? I could do tired! I couldn’t, it turned out, do unable to think clearly, unable to wake up in the morning, fast asleep on the sofa by 5pm pregnancy-tired. I couldn’t even turn to caffeine, though I did treat myself to an espresso just before giving a conference paper; but this being my first coffee in weeks it gave me the shakes, and as my Director of Studies did not know I was expecting he now thinks I am a really nervous speaker…

About twelve weeks in I got my energy back, just in time to attend my first international conference – the Nineteenth Century Studies Association conference in Boston, Massachusetts. With hindsight, given the combination of pregnancy and jetlag, booking a place in a 6-bed youth hostel dorm was not the brightest of ideas. My morning sickness also never quite caught up with the time difference and became teatime sickness (it was a disappointment to be staying in the middle of Chinatown and to never feel like dinner), while the conference reception of wine and soft cheeses was a peculiar form of torture.

Now well into the second trimester, I needed to inform the hierarchy of my pregnancy. I will admit I had been a little worried about how my department and supervisors would react but everyone was entirely supportive and helpful. I had chosen to tell my lead supervisor at twelve weeks as I wanted to be able to discuss my plans. The rest of my supervisory team and department found out some weeks later, on or around the day I presented at the college’s annual research student symposium, as by that point it was becoming obvious in any case. I am lucky to be in a department where the Director and Associate Director of Research are, as one of them put it, archetypal busy women, in the sense that ‘if you want something done ask a busy person to do it’. They had no doubt, as a fellow busy woman, I would be able to make it all work. My supervisors were also fantastic, speaking positively of other students who had babies during or just after PhDs, though it was quite telling that the two who are fathers encouraged me not to make any plans for post-baby, just see what happened and go with the flow, while the one who (as far as I know) does not have children was strongly encouraging me to use maternity leave to write up some of my conference papers for publication.

Things seemed to be going well. Okay, I hadn’t managed a huge amount of new research, but my pregnancy was going smoothly, I had written three papers in three months with another in the pipeline for a July conference, and I had a wonderful summer of archive visiting planned ahead of an October due date.

But then, at just 18 weeks into my pregnancy, my waters broke.

I rang the hospital at the time and was told the symptoms I reported were normal and nothing to worry about. It was not until my 20-week scan, when the sonographer suddenly went quiet and headed off to find a doctor, that I was diagnosed with PPROM – Preterm Prelabour Rupture of the Membranes. I found myself admitted to hospital and told to expect to lose my baby within 48 hours. No one expects to spend the night of their twenty-week scan on the delivery suite, listening to labouring mothers through the walls while your own uterus contracts in sympathy. Twenty weeks was too early, too small.

Nothing could be done but wait, so wait we did. And somehow minutes turned into hours, hours into days. The hospital sent me home, poor prognosis ringing in my ears (the consultant told us to plan for the worst but to hope for a miracle), where I sought information via Google from medical journals to online forums, entering a strange parallel world of micro preemies, late miscarriage and the margins of infant viability. I bought my baby a toy sheep. Whatever happened, I wanted him to have a cuddly toy.

Days became weeks and somehow he stayed put. I began to do a bit of work – I wasn’t much good at thinking and writing but I sorted out my filing, reorganised my computer folders and brought my annotated bibliography up-to-date for the first time in two years. We made it past 24 weeks, 28 weeks. Due to the lack of fluid we wouldn’t know until he was born if his lungs had developed enough to sustain life, but each day further brought more hope. Our complications sprung complications – pericardial effusion (for him), subchorionic haemorrhage (for me) and I was admitted a few times, then from 30 weeks not allowed home. During my weeks of hospital bed rest, I alternated listening to Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour while cross-stitching a blanket (proof alone that pregnancy has strange effects on one’s character!) with reading Foucault and Bourdieu.

At 34 weeks exactly baby Oliver was born by emergency caesarean (all that waiting and he still arrived in a hurry!). The relief when he came out angry and purple and screaming was tremendous. He did have underdeveloped lungs so spent time in neonatal intensive care, but after nineteen days mostly spent feeding and growing we got to take him home. We felt like the luckiest parents in the world – I still can’t quite believe we got to keep him.

Oliver is now seven months old. I have written most of this article with him dozing on my lap, with interludes to puree sweet potato, feed him melon and sterilise bottles. He continues to refuse to follow a nice neat plan and his life so far has been punctuated with hospital admissions for ongoing complications, though thankfully these are either things he will grow out of or are fixable with operations. He is a very cheerful little man with a broad grin and a Tintin quiff. He is also very interested in the world, to the extent that he doesn’t really do sleep, which combined with all the hospital time means PhD work has been somewhat patchy (though he does fall asleep when I practice the flute, which is very handy). I have just extended my suspension to a full year, with the full support of my department and supervisors.

Yet, while Oliver interrupted my plans in spectacular fashion, I think once life settles down I will be a better person and a better academic for it. I have learnt a lot about resilience, resourcefulness and flexibility over the past year. Whatever the world sends your way, you keep on going – you don’t really have much choice. I have also learnt that while plans have their place, there is a lot to be said for finding joy in the present and making the most of each day, whatever tomorrow may bring. Already I am making better use of what time I have (even if the best use of that time is to sleep!) and even when I procrastinate I find it is generally on something useful.

Babies don’t follow plans. But actually that’s okay. After all, think how boring our research would be if it always turned out exactly as we expected?

If you don’t have a studentship but are self employed and pay Class II National Insurance contributions, you qualify to receive the Maternity Allowance.

Detailed guidance on various legal and practical aspects of student pregnancy and maternity leave are addressed in the Equality Challenge Unit publication ‘Student Pregnancy and Maternity: Implications for Higher Education Institutions’.

This post first appeared on the RMA Research Student Blog in May 2016.

 

 

‘Material Cultures / Material Worlds’ NCSA Boston 2015

Nineteenth Century Studies Association Conference, 26-28 March 2015

‘Material Cultures / Material Worlds’

Boston, Massachusetts

In March 2015 I presented a paper at the Nineteenth Century Studies Association’s annual conference. Held in Boston, Massachusetts, this was my first overseas conference and my first exposure to the American scholarly community. The conference was on the theme ‘Material Cultures / Material Worlds’, inviting engagement with the current turn to materiality evident across the represented disciplines. It was held at the Parker House Hotel, a grand building founded in 1855 which is something of an institution in Boston. It was here that the Boston Cream Pie, now the official dessert of Massachusetts, was invented in 1856.

The NCSA is highly interdisciplinary, papers presented over the three days covering wide-ranging literary, historical and sociological areas. The 62 parallel sessions ranged from Material Texts to Mummies, via Eco-Materialities, Women and/as Things, and Body Parts. The most unlikely-sounding papers were as a rule the most engaging. I particularly enjoyed Kelly Bushnell’s paper on ‘“Monster” Whales: Politics and Poetics of Sea Monsters on Display in the Nineteenth Century’. Other unexpected highlights included tales of Napoleon’s penis (which was chopped off after his death and is currently in private ownership in New Jersey), Rossetti’s pet wombat, and an entertaining paper by Arne Koch on ‘Cats, Ethnography, and Zoontological Disorientation’, detailing the uneasiness caused in the nineteenth century by cats apparently regarding themselves as superior to humans, thus upsetting the proper god-given order of things.

I was one of a small contingent of musicologists, with three parallel sessions at this conference devoted to music. The first of these – ‘Materialising the Ideal: Opera and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century Ideologies’ – was excellent. Cindy Kim, Marie Sumner-Lott and Kristen Turner, all well known to each other, together formed a coherent, stimulating panel. Their papers drew on musicology, sociology and cultural history to explore respectively published operatic ornaments, nineteenth-century operas based on the middle ages, and nineteenth-century staging of virtue and vice in Carmen. All three have had connections with the field of Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies and the open, interdisciplinary approach characteristic of this field in the UK was very much in evidence.

My paper was titled ‘Materialities, Music and the “Manchester Man”’, detailing how the stereotype of the industrial philistine breaks down when confronted by the evidence of his engagement with the material culture of music. My paper was one of a handful overflowing from the specifically musical sessions, instead being scheduled in ‘Theatre and the Stage’. I was initially concerned I might not reach my intended audience, but I need not have worried as most of the musicologists present at the conference did attend. My paper was well received, prompting several questions in the session then much discussion during the remainder of the conference. It was particularly useful to make the acquaintance of David Coates (University of Warwick), who is currently researching nineteenth-century amateur theatrical networks.

The international presence at this conference was relatively small. About ten of us had travelled across from the UK, and for us British scholars more familiar with affordable academic venues and generous catering, the American tendency for expensive conferences in impressive venues brought a few surprises – in particular the ‘drink token’ for the wine reception on the first night! A three-course conference lunch was provided on the middle day, with Boston Cream Pie for pudding of course, but this lunch doubled up as the AGM for the NCSA – a cunning ploy for maximising attendance, but all the speeches and ‘ayes’ and ‘nayes’ did somewhat limit scholarly conversation. There were nonetheless numerous opportunities to network over coffee as well as at the formal events, and I came away with many useful contacts and insights into academic life in the United States. A Graduate Caucus Panel was an illuminating inclusion, with a formal discussion on ‘preparing for and navigating the job market’ followed by informal discussions in a nearby bar.

Attending this conference brought various financial and logistical challenges. A conference rate for rooms had been negotiated with the Parker House, but as this was still $199 plus tax per night I had booked into the HI Boston Hostel a mile down the road, where the same amount covered four nights in a 6-bed dormitory. While this had its occasional inevitable challenges (particularly as I was 12-weeks pregnant and struggling with jetlag!), the kitchen, lounge and coffee shop were all very useful, and the peculiar combination of academics attending various conferences, gap year travellers and a Chinese school party in residence led to many interesting conversations over breakfast. Did you know you can catch leprosy off armadillos in the Southern U.S.?

I allowed time to spend the day before the conference exploring Boston, including walking the Freedom Trail, visiting the USS Constitution museum, Bunker Hill Monument and the Public Library. I had planned on a boat trip up the Charles River but as this was still frozen solid I ambled along the esplanade instead. It was peculiar being confronted with a history celebrating bashing the Brits at every opportunity – a very different account of British naval power to that presented in Portsmouth! After the conference I also visited Manchester, New Hampshire, while visiting my old housemate from university who lives nearby. Filled with nineteenth-century industrial detritus and crumbling red-brick cotton mills, there are many parallels with our own Manchester, including a Palace Theatre, just off Oxford Road.

My attendance at this conference was supported by the RMA’s Oldman Research Grant, the NWCDTP Conference Fund and the MMU Conference Fund.