Chapter 9 - Amateur Music and Musicians

Summary

Though often noted by scholars, Vaughan Williams’s work with amateur musicians has generally been neglected by them, presented as a kind of social or aesthetic backdrop to his more prestigious compositional projects. Such neglect does the composer a disservice, not only because more than half of his catalogue was written with amateur performers in mind but also because he recognized that it was on ‘amateur music’ that the entire edifice of English music stood. This essay charts the ethical significance that working with amateur musicians had for the composer (who was a principled democrat) and examines the economic impact that such music-making had on the emergence of a viable English compositional style. In a country where laissez-faire economics reigned supreme, it was the rise of an enormous amateur music market in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that created the modern music profession – the professional performers, teachers, journalists, publishing houses, administrators, and promoters who fed and ultimately grew this market. It was a development that in turn helped ‘make’ the modern English composer.