8 - Art, Commerce and Artisanship: Violin Culture in Britain, c. 1880–1920

Summary

BRITISH music history has long acknowledged the centrality of pianos, brass bands and choral singing to Victorian life. But the significance of a ‘perfect craze for learning the fiddle’, as the music educator and writer Frederick Corder put it (in 1922), and its intersections with the world of commerce are relatively unexplored, despite important recent work on specific aspects of the topic. It must be said straightaway that the word ‘fiddle’ has long been used in Britain as an affectionate synonym for the classical violin, and not merely to distinguish a folk instrument. So what is under discussion here – and what Corder was referring to – is the playing of the classical violin, the instrument that has taken an intrinsic role in art music's repertoires and traditions. The main facts are as follows. During the 1880s and 1890s, a new interest in the instruments of the violin family emerged among a wide slice of the British population. The surge in activity, which lasted at least into the 1920s, broke longstanding barriers of gender and class; it was underpinned by changing social and cultural values; and it was articulated and supported by a growing commercial infrastructure. In sum, violins, and to a lesser extent cellos and violas (and double basses) – instruments with notable expressive potential and great beauty as objects – became all the rage.

What seems remarkable is the speed with which this ‘violin culture’4 took off, and the change in musical life that it embodied, at both professional and amateur levels. Contemporaries commented often on the novelty and pervasiveness of the new craze, as ever more people were spotted out and about with their instruments. The writer Gerard Eliot Hodgkin had this to say in the Strad magazine in 1894:

During the last dozen years London has changed its appearance in many ways; not only in the fashion of its streets but also in the aspect of those who throng them. It is not merely that the clothes of 1894 differ considerably from the clothes of 1880 – there is also a difference in the footpassengers’ articles of portable property. Especially notable is the enormous increase in the number of music portfolios and fiddle-cases carried.