A cornerstone of violin culture was the extent and vitality of recreational string playing. Typically involving ensembles with multiple participants – training for which was embedded in string pedagogy at all levels – this type of music-making operated both informally in private premises and as preorganized ensembles (usually orchestras) that rehearsed privately and gave concerts before local publics. A more precise definition, however, is tricky. Although such activities are associated with amateurs – that is, people who made music for pleasure, as opposed to those who earned their living from teaching or playing – the reality was that playing music for its own sake animated many professional musicians’ leisure time, too. Relatedly, while there was a growing assumption from the late nineteenth century onwards that “amateur musician” denoted a player of limited proficiency, this idea was at odds with the fact that several string-playing amateurs were acknowledged to be highly accomplished.Footnote ¹ Some participants in recreational groups were conservatoire-trained and had developed a portfolio of musical work and activities in the communities they settled in. (Then, as now, such players did not automatically seek big-city performance careers.) Indeed, many so-called amateur orchestras attracted professionally trained women string players who, being unable to net jobs in the male-guarded symphony orchestras, participated gratis. Also, music-making in the home sometimes mixed advanced students and/or professional players with those for whom string playing was a wholly leisure pursuit. None of this is to deny that many amateur string players displayed limited abilities. But it is to stress that as a descriptor for recreational music-making, the word “amateur” is unstable and troublesome; its usage in this chapter and Chapter 7 (which treats amateur orchestras) should be understood in the light of the caveats above. Furthermore, although amateur music-making must have ranged wide in terms of performance standards, it is the significance of the activities to those involved, not their quality, that is the focus of my interest here.Footnote ²

Both chapters examine the nature, spread, and functions of recreational string playing and the importance it held in people’s lives. In this one, the emphasis is on private-sphere activities and instrumental chamber music in the accepted, classical, sense of the term (duo sonatas to quartets or larger combinations), albeit stretched at times to include other types of small-ensemble music. Symbioses between public concert life and amateur activities are also discussed.

Evidence and the Private Sphere

Recovering experiences of music-making in the private sphere is a challenging proposition. As suggested above, as a social activity for string players, private music-making resists a straightforward taxonomy. The definition invoked in this chapter is deliberately loose, centering on what took place as private recreation in a small, intimate space: usually, but not necessarily, someone’s home; and normally, but not exclusively, for the social-cum-artistic experience of playing music with others. Often, such music-making extended beyond family members to include friendship and acquaintance circles or other groups who came together to play. My discussion mainly centers on small-scale music-making that was not intentionally presentational – that is, not intended to be given before a purposely assembled audience – while allowing that some people in the household may have unobtrusively “listened in.” Occasionally and unapologetically, it strays into situations where play-throughs of pieces – effectively informal “concerts” – emerged spontaneously, or even where music-making was conducted formally in the presence of a prearranged audience, a proportion of whom were often unknown to the players.

Participating in a string quartet or similar – an activity that allowed players to physically embed themselves in the harmonies, part-writing, and sonorities of a piece of music and to make a unique contribution to an artistic endeavor – gave coming together for ensemble playing special meaning, both personal and social.Footnote ³ It was also in the nature of such chamber music-making that it offered vicarious, collective experiences to listeners who stood or sat nearby, allowing them to engage in a heightened form of what sociomusicologist Christopher Small defined in 1998 as “musicking” – that is, “tak[ing] part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing.”Footnote ⁴ But playing alone could also have a meaningful recreational function. Many a solitary violinist was captured with their instrument by an eager artist or photographer, or was portrayed playing in solitude by fiction writers. In real life, Margery Bentwich, who later became a professional soloist, found playing the violin alone without the pressure of performance and knowing no one was listening to be the consummate experience. While studying in Germany in 1908, she wrote home that “[t]here wasn’t a soul stirring in the entire neighbourhood, everybody had gone to see the fireworks. I never enjoyed playing so in my life.”Footnote ⁵ More frequently, the sounds from someone playing the violin or cello – whether practicing or playing pieces for personal satisfaction – would have been heard and perhaps closely listened to by other household members (even, depending on the room used, by passers-by on the street).

Bound up with the challenges of definition is the sheer practical difficulty of documenting the making of music for its own sake in private, because such activities are typically represented in the “standard” primary sources – letters, diaries, and so forth – by either a disconcerting silence or a perfunctory mention. As with lessons and practice, the reporting of domestic string playing is not only rare but also, where it does occur, seldom accompanied by an evaluation of the musical or emotional experience. This account, in a letter from Lady Kate Hornby to a woman friend (1910), is characteristic: “[Zelma?] B. & I had luncheon with Lady Daly. Miss Knox made the fourth, & afterwards B. played accompanement [sic] with Lady Daly[’]s Cello.”Footnote ⁶ In addition, many extant first-person descriptions of recreational music-making were created after the fact, sometimes decades later, in memoirs or interviews, resulting in a loss of immediacy and (potentially) accuracy of detail. That said, the remembered emotional impact on the narrator is often striking.

As I have argued elsewhere, the absence of plentiful contemporary testimony for domestic music-making, especially in relation to “serious” chamber music with strings, does not necessarily correlate to an absence of such practice or reflect a weak amateur tradition.Footnote ⁷ Nor does it follow that, because participants did not document their string playing, it had little meaning in their lives. Both corroborative evidence and common sense tell us that playing with others eventually would have been the prevailing goal for most people who learned an instrument. Still, the reasons for the general dearth of written documentation on the part of the participants are worth examining. On the one hand, the absence of a regular detailing of private activities (whether lessons, practice sessions, or music-making with others) may simply reflect their quotidian and unremarkable nature, such that only the most devoted of diarists recorded them. On the other, the very real difficulty of putting musical experiences adequately into words may have induced an inertia or reticence towards writing. Indeed, as a form of emotional communication transcending the written or even spoken word, music-making could well have obviated the need to discuss it. The eloquent cleric John Henry Newman said as much after playing Beethoven’s Violin Sonata in A minor (probably the “Kreutzer”) with his sister, in a rare example of emotional response: “Often Beethoven transports me, but I cannot express, or analyze, the strange effect which its first movement had on me.”Footnote ⁸ Besides, in the British context, where gendered anxieties surrounded stringed instruments and intellectual connotations attached to much of the string chamber-music repertoire, there may have been good reasons why many men, especially Victorians, downplayed their musical activities and did not document them.Footnote ⁹

Despite these issues, once multiple sources are pieced together, a vivid picture of domestic string playing emerges. Fictional cameos, such as the family members and friend attempting Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert quartets (in a serialized story, 1892), offer one set of perceptions – in this case, of the immense enjoyment that players could have, despite the challenges of sight-reading.Footnote ¹⁰ In the real world, private correspondence reveals musicians eagerly setting up quartet dates. A letter of 1889 from Elgar to his pupil Frank Webb registers Elgar’s delight (“I am so glad”) that Webb and his sisters “will come & have a little Music. I have Mozart’s 10 IVtetts here – could you bring your Haydn?”Footnote ¹¹ Then there are the after-the-fact reminiscences, such as the artist Henry Holiday’s account of his wife and daughter’s daily routine of playing piano and violin “duets” together,Footnote ¹² as well as nonnarrative documentation. String magazines are important sources of evidence, because they published copious advice columns about ensemble playing and printed “wanted” ads for both music parts (new or secondhand) and fellow musicians. “GOOD AMATEUR VIOLINIST wishes to meet another for duet practice” ran the opening of one such notice in The Strad (1892).Footnote ¹³ Also important are extant inventories of the music cupboards in aristocratic country houses, archives of chamber-music clubs, and reports of small ensembles that participated in competitive music festivals.Footnote ¹⁴ Read against each other, and alongside circumstantial evidence of the growth of a string-playing population in Britain in the late Victorian era, these materials suggest an already dynamic culture of private, recreational music-making. Moreover, in the early 1900s two elements in violin culture’s emerging infrastructure – the Maidstone teaching project and especially the grade examination system – fueled the situation by raising a body of young, competent string players, many of whom would make music recreationally with others.

Recreational Music-Making

String playing for pleasure took place not only across a considerable social spectrum but in a variety of residential locations: music rooms in grand country or London town houses, parlors in middle-class villas, shared family space in working-class housing, and student accommodation in universities and conservatoires. Occasionally, activities occurred in alternative, appropriately sized spaces, such as rooms in clubs or other institutional accommodation coopted for the purpose. Many activities arose informally within musically inclined households, but more often events were premeditated, because invitations had to be issued to string-playing participants, who needed to know to bring their instruments with them at a prearranged time. (As shown in Chapter 7, some amateur orchestras met in large houses, too.) The music was typically executed by small numbers of players – often, but not exclusively, one to a part and involving a piano, that quintessential emblem of feminine domesticity.Footnote ¹⁵ Given the inherently social nature of such music-making, class boundaries were only occasionally transgressed, typically in situations where professional musicians were brought in (sometimes bought in) to stiffen a group of well-off amateurs.

Regular music-making offered participants significant opportunities to gain knowledge of much music through their fingers. Violin, viola, and cello players had a remarkably large repertoire to choose from – notably, the high-serious classical repertoire of one-to-a-part music in which strings are the main constituents of a small ensemble. String quartets, acknowledged as the socially intimate genre sans pareil, formed a significant segment of this repository. Inevitably, choices were subject to the constraints of taste, resources (musical, social, and economic), and ability levels; even so, across varied social settings a wide range of music was played and heard. It ran from easy parlor pieces with piano accompaniment to more challenging sonatas, and from hard-core string quartets and piano trios to ad hoc ensembles that accompanied family singing.

There was a continuum, too, in terms of musical experiences: from reading through a piece of music and stopping when it broke down, to working on passages that presented tricky ensemble issues, to playing through a piece without stopping, perhaps in the presence of listening bystanders, though equally perhaps not. Contrarily and as noted above, both spontaneous and prearranged “performances” to family members and guests occurred. Edmund Fellowes, in his Memoirs of an Amateur Musician, wrote of the musically “gifted group of undergraduates” he met at Oxford University, 1889–1893, and the occasion on which he visited the family home of fellow student Paul Benecke (Mendelssohn’s grandson) in East Barnet (Hertfordshire) and played the violin in a rendition of Mendelssohn’s D minor Piano Trio, with Paul on the piano and Paul’s father on the cello. Paul’s mother and sister “were the only audience.”Footnote ¹⁶ Happenings such as these were clearly informal; others were part of a more organized and elaborate salon event or postprandial private concert, at which guests were present. Folk-song collector Lucy Broadwood’s evening parties are a case in point: before forty invitees in 1904, her friend Dorothy Fletcher played pieces by Corelli and Leclair on the violin.Footnote ¹⁷ Hosts of high-society gatherings sometimes invited celebrity string players, but unstated expectations that musicians would sing for their supper (stemming from assumptions of servility) could cause friction, as Joseph Joachim’s behavior at a London party indicates.Footnote ¹⁸ Still, compare the after-breakfast and after-dinner concerts organized by Mary Gladstone (daughter of the politician W. E. Gladstone) at the family’s grand London house in the 1870s, where chamber music “of the highest order” was de rigueur. There, Joachim was treated as an “honored guest and conversationalist” and willingly played Beethoven violin sonatas.Footnote ¹⁹ At the other end of the social scale, in rural, working-class County Durham, nonconformist chapels were sites for presentational music-making: Eva Cheesmond remembered playing Raff’s violin Cavatina during a service at one of them (“full of people”) when aged twelve (c. 1905).Footnote ²⁰ All such public-facing events had the potential not only to draw listeners into intimate musicking but also to forge wider social awareness of string playing’s practical presence in contemporary life.

Over time, the domestic repertoire expanded, partly in response to the growing vigor of recreational string culture, and to the commercial availability of parts for a stream of bespoke works targeting small forces and a range of player abilities. A fair amount of this string music – from solo salon pieces to string quartets – was newly composed, though repertoire classics and reclaimed older music (especially by Bach, Corelli, and Handel) loomed large too. A foundational factor in the expansion of the repertoire was the arrival of women string players on the domestic-music scene in the 1870s and the integration of stringed instruments into a parlor culture that had been dominated for decades by pianism and singing. As a result, renditions of short and easy pieces for one melody instrument and piano prevailed in many homes, typically well-known airs, simplified “folk” tunes, or melodies shorn from operas, oratorios, and symphonies: music that could be tackled by string players of moderate, even elementary, ability, and that was well suited to the capacity of stringed instruments to “sing.” Music publishers were alive to the need to accommodate amateurs’ skill sets. Thus, we find RCM-trained violinist Isabella Donkersley (who was married to Novello’s editor August Jaeger) bowing and fingering the proofs of Elgar’s violin arrangement of his Canto popolare, at Elgar’s request (1904), to “make it nice for people to play.”Footnote ²¹

And play such music they did. The mother of John Condon, one of the beginner violinists in the British internment camp at Ballykinlar, Ireland (1921), told her son about his sister’s hope that he would be “able to play a piece with her on the piano” when he returned to the family home – in the workaday Rialto district of Dublin – also advising that Scottish airs would be more straightforward for him to learn than Irish ones, and expressing her hope that his violin playing would cause his father to dance.Footnote ²² In a different social milieu a few years earlier, suffragette and middle-class amateur violinist Vera (“Jack”) Holme (b. 1881), who worked in Serbia as an ambulance driver for the Scottish Women’s Hospital during World War I, wrote home to two friends, Alice Embleton and Celia Wray, with a musical request:

If no pianist was at hand, unaccompanied melody-driven music could still provide “musickers” with satisfying experiences. Victorian fiction evokes some such endeavors: in Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887), Dr. Watson narrates how “at my request” Sherlock Holmes had played him “some of Mendelssohn’s Lieder, and other favourites” on his violin,Footnote ²⁴ while J. Meade Falkner opens his ghost story The Lost Stradivarius (1895) by envisioning Oxford University student John Maltravers playing eighteenth-century Italian dance movements on the violin late into the night in his college rooms, after his pianist retires.Footnote ²⁵

Music publishers marketed the parlor repertoire vigorously, for it could produce considerable sales. Some of Elgar’s arrangements of pieces for violin (or viola or cello) and piano sold especially well, as did his own violin piece Salut d’Amour (issued by Schott, 1888; 3,000 copies were sold in January 1897 alone).Footnote ²⁶ Inexpensive publications flowed. Joseph Williams’s publishing house issued the Amateur Violinist series in the 1890s and continued to expand it into the 1920s. Glossed in advertising as encompassing “THE MOST FAVOURITE AIRS from the STANDARD OPERAS, ORATORIOS, etc., With the bowing and fingering carefully marked throughout by experienced professors,” the arrangements included selections from Bellini’s Norma, Balfe’s Bohemian Girl, and Handel’s Messiah and were marketed for various combinations of strings and piano, at low prices.Footnote ²⁷ Albums for violin and piano also proved an attractive format. Augener issued a few, including its Popular Violin Album: Seven Favourite Pieces with Piano Accompaniment (1921), aimed at reasonably accomplished players. Where works were set for grade or diploma examinations, home practice with a family member on the piano could be especially advantageous. The Star Folio series (from Paxton; Fig. 6.1) provided technically difficult music, occasionally concerto movements, alongside more approachable, melody-heavy pieces, all with piano accompaniment.

Figure 6.1 A Star Folio violin and piano album, published by Paxton, London, c. 1912. Star Folio albums were much reprinted over several decades. The price sticker on the item pictured here suggests it was purchased considerably later, well beyond the 1920s.

Image courtesy of Bar-Ilan University, Music Library.

For string players capable of holding their line in one-to-a-part chamber music, the core repertoire included some of the hefty Austro-Germanic works that were regularly performed in public concerts. This material embraced duo sonatas with challenging piano parts and string quartets by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Published sets of quartet parts were available for purchase, though they required a substantial financial outlay. Still, subscription libraries and secondhand purchases were a way of reducing, even eliminating, expense.Footnote ²⁸ Occasional small ads in The Strad’s “exchange and mart” columns highlight the benefits of recirculation. The following ad in 1903 from a musician in Barnstaple, Devon, reminds us that although costs of quartet music were high, a foursome needed only one set of parts, which could offer a lifetime of exploratory music-making: “Wanted[:] complete String Quartettes, by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Haydn; must be clean and cheap.”Footnote ²⁹ Wealthy industrialist, amateur violinist, and advocate for chamber music Walter Willson Cobbett (1847–1937) remembered becoming aware of much of this repertoire while playing with male friends in London as a young man. He wrote of “snug evenings passed in the rooms of suburban villas making acquaintance for the first time with the thirty ‘berühmte’ of Haydn, the great ten of Mozart, and the six op. 18 of Beethoven.”Footnote ³⁰ That his group stopped at Beethoven’s Op. 18 is hardly surprising, since the middle- and late-period works are especially challenging in terms of both ensemble and string technique. The same could be (and was) said of most quartets from the mid and later nineteenth century. A manual of 1923 by John Hayward, Chamber Music for Amateurs, targeting the “average amateur executant” with a “fair” but ultimately limited technical ability, warned that certain works were beyond amateurs’ mastery, but nevertheless encouraged working at them in private.Footnote ³¹ In respect to Brahms’s three quartets, he advised: “The amateur will never be able to execute these three quartets as they should be played, but the effort will do him no harm.”Footnote ³² Meanwhile, Mendelssohn’s quartets, Tchaikovsky’s Op. 11, and Dvořák’s were within reach, and Beethoven’s early and middle quartets were “possible,” but the late ones were, he felt, best left to professionals.Footnote ³³ Be all that as it may, limited skills might not have prevented players from attempting simpler movements from “difficult” canonic quartets or trying tough movements at slow speeds, and finding enjoyment therein. On the other hand, people evidently hankered after playable repertoire, as a “wanted” ad for quartets and quintets by Georges Onslow in the 1890s indicates.Footnote ³⁴ Onslow’s chamber works, which had been at the heart of the concert repertoire midcentury, had fallen away from the public stage and out of print; but the quintets, as Marie Sumner Lott has shown, were composed in a leisurely style, with gratifying lyrical part-writing for all the ensemble’s members, making them especially attractive to amateurs.Footnote ³⁵

In music magazines, calls for amateurs to join the chamber-music fold were often matched by commentary that suggests a marked increase in activities and infrastructure towards the end of the nineteenth century and again in the 1920s, a decade crowned by Oxford University Press’s publication of Cobbett’s hefty Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, itself testament to the popularity of such music-making and repertoire. Assembling an ensemble of appropriately matched instrumentalists was not without difficulties, even in urban settings where populations of musicians were most concentrated; however, music magazines sometimes served as clearinghouses, and amateur orchestral societies proved useful environments in which string players could make connections. In 1919, in response to “signs of increased activity among amateur chamber-music parties,” the Musical Times began a free advertising service with its column “Chamber Music for Amateurs” (from 1923, “The Amateurs’ Exchange”). Individuals seeking an ensemble (often able pianists looking for groups with which to attempt piano trios, quartets, and quintets) or string groups seeking members (often for the viola seat) could place notices.Footnote ³⁶

Societies to encourage the practice of chamber music among proficient players, with a view to performing it before an audience, also developed. These were able to match players to create functional ensembles, seeding the social networks necessary to sustain committed musical activity. High-profile organizations included the Strings Club (1902), directed by the violinist and admired chamber-music coach Gwynne Kimpton, which met at the Alpine Club in central London (later at Leighton House) – its membership was mostly women – and the men’s chamber-music clubs at Oxford and Cambridge (the Oxford University Musical Union and the Cambridge University Musical Club, founded in 1884 and 1889 respectively).Footnote ³⁷ Looking back from 1946, Edmund Fellowes acknowledged the extraordinary opportunities the Oxford society had given him c. 1890 and detailed how activities bled into regular undergraduate life, some of them providing a training in high-octane sight-reading:

A related, joint Oxford and Cambridge Musical Club was established in central London in 1899, also with chamber-music goals. Its core constituency comprised the many Oxbridge-educated, musically competent men who were pursuing professional, governmental, or musical careers in the capital. Cobbett was a regular member. Some 300 men joined in the first year. The community was augmented with distinguished professional musicians who received honorary memberships. Events included evening concerts by and for members, and “Ladies’ Nights,” when female relatives were allowed in. During World War I, the organization became what Ian Maxwell describes as “an artistic refuge for a number of stranded eminent foreign musicians” and from 1920 to 1940 it served as an important hub for music-making, with many eminent non-Oxbridge performers invited to participate in concerts.Footnote ⁴⁰ Artistically remarkable as its activities were, the club must have also functioned as a node for social-professional networking for many members.

Not all music played in the home was challenging chamber music or even bespoke parlor pieces. In old age, several adults who had been children in working-class households in the 1890s and early 1900s recalled regular sessions of music-making in the houses of family or friends, especially on Sunday nights after church, using whatever forces and printed music were available. This music was invariably sacred (hymns, carols, anthems), a means of utilizing the day’s welcome leisure time without contravening the social conventions for the Sabbath. Robert Jaggard (b. 1882) remembered such evenings during childhood, when the boys and men in his large family played instruments (violins, cornet, and several woodwinds) and the girls sang, the group, “as a rule,” giving renditions of Sankey’s hymns from the hymnbook while sitting around a table.Footnote ⁴¹ There was no piano at the Jaggards, but in houses where one was available, it was the focal point for music-making.Footnote ⁴²

How often “serious” chamber music was made in working-class homes resists knowing, but in 1891, as the violin craze accelerated, the penny weekly Funny Folks, whose “social slapstick” was increasingly being aimed at working-class readers,Footnote ⁴³ printed a telling cartoon. It was a response to somewhat approving newspaper reports of a woman servant in an upper-crust household who had asked for an evening off each week for violin lessons, and of the surprise it generated in her employer.Footnote ⁴⁴ The image depicts the incongruity of a middle-aged cook and a footman (the latter looking not unlike Louis Carmontelle’s painting of Leopold Mozart in a similar moment of music-making, 1777), playing violin sonatas in a grand interior, she on the piano, he on the violin, having been allowed, says the caption, “access to the drawing-room twice a week for practice” (Fig. 6.2). The footman is evidently a servant, but the cartoonist dresses him anachronistically – his costume references the aristocratic eighteenth-century world where recreational sonata playing was associated with men from the ruling classes – thus underscoring the boldness of any servant’s claim to such musical activity.

Figure 6.2 “Worshippers of ‘Pan,’” cartoon (Funny Folks [5 Dec. 1891], 411).

British Library/Granger – All rights reserved.

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In the early and mid Victorian middle- and upper-class mindset, making music in the home had been associated with sociality and especially courtship. As is well known, a young lady often “performed” on the piano before the gaze of potential suitors, although if a male singer or instrumentalist invited her to accompany him, there was the possibility of her being overtly wooed by her musical partner. With the advent of women string players, however, the roles were open to reversal when a young lady violinist was accompanied by a man on the piano, as depictions of music-making in some creative literature insinuated. In Robert Elsmere, Rose plays a Beethoven violin sonata accompanied by one Mr. Langham, the reader learning that she “threw herself into it, bringing out the wailing love-song of the Andante, the dainty tripping mirth of the Scherzo, in a way which set every nerve in Langham vibrating!”Footnote ⁴⁵ Suggestive though such imaginings are, duetting between the sexes in real life was not invariably coupled with romance. Straightforward sociomusical motives seem just as likely to have prevailed. According to his family’s biographer, amateur violinist Frederick Lehmann played “every piano and violin sonata of Mozart and Beethoven” with George Eliot; she was an able pianist, and he “knew the traditions of the best players and was able to give her some hints, which she always received eagerly and thankfully.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Meanwhile, in professional circles musical urges were often strong. Conductor Hans Richter arrived at a social gathering at Henry Holiday’s London house (1881) keen to make music; as the host recalled it, Richter made straight for the piano and was soon playing the keyboard part of Bach’s B minor Violin Sonata with Holiday’s RCM-trained daughter Winifred.Footnote ⁴⁷

One striking idea that emerged early on from the growing public interest in string playing was the desirability of forming ensembles within families, and the role that chamber music might play in enriching a household’s life and strengthening kinship bonds, both between siblings and across generations. The Woman’s World in 1890 advocated for parents to match instruments to their daughters with an eye to building functional chamber ensembles in the home:

A similar approach had been proposed sixteen years earlier in Leisure Hour (the Religious Tract Society’s journal), here advocating for boys as well as girls to participate: “The brothers will take to the violoncello if the sisters will only learn the violin and viola, and then what a feast of music [Haydn and Mozart quartets] is opened as soon as a moderate progress is made.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Forethought to encourage ensemble playing was certainly afoot in the affluent Bentwich family. By the mid 1890s the parents had divided their many offspring into what the family called “squads” of three children, assigning piano, violin, and cello to each group.Footnote ⁵⁰

In the oil painting The Home Quartette of 1883 (Fig. 6.3), pre-Raphaelite artist Arthur Hughes depicts the wife and daughters of London barrister Vernon Lushington: a family known to be musical (Susan, one of the violinists, developed an ability to transpose violin music for the viola at sightFootnote ⁵¹). The picture idealizes the relationship between home music-making and family bonds. Grouping the daughters together and a little apart from the parent, Hughes emphasizes the sisters’ connections with one another, but also highlights their relationship with their mother: they incline their heads towards her, while she tilts hers backwards towards them. Relatedly, the artist accentuates the warm domesticity of the situation in his evocation of the home’s lush soft furnishings and flooring (depicted by circles and curves), and the women’s richly textured dresses. If this painting holds a cultural subtext, it is surely that well-born women who pursue string playing in the early 1880s do so in the milieu of home and family, not in the public sphere.

Figure 6.3 Arthur Hughes, The Home Quartette: Mrs. Vernon Lushington and Children, oil on canvas, 1883.

Private Collection Photo © The Fine Art Society, London, UK/Bridgeman Images.

Almost a decade later, watercolorist Thomas Matthews Rooke brought many realistic details of music-making in a middle-class domestic interior to light in his depiction of the family of Alfred Rooke (possibly his brother) in their house in a fashionable part of suburban Ealing, west London in 1891–1892 (Fig. 6.4). With parents and children preparing to play a chamber work for piano and strings, this image – like that of Hughes – depicts cross-generational music-making, the positioning of the brother-sister musicians in the foreground connecting with what Claudia Nelson identifies as a tendency for middle- and upper-class Victorians to valorize sibling ties.Footnote ⁵² Note the family elder seated in the background, ready to listen in and be part of the musicking. The male participants are of interest, too, because they show no trace of the gendered anxieties about string playing that had beset earlier generations of respectable men: the father here seemingly leading the choice of music to be played, the young boy focused on tuning his cello in preparation. The women, in comparison, are cast recessively: the bespectacled daughter studies her part; the mother looks (up) at her husband, apparently following his directions. The painting’s atmosphere is serious and intense, as suggested not only by facial expressions but also by the shelves of music behind the grand piano and what is almost certainly a pocket (study) score on the table.Footnote ⁵³ This detail matters, because for much of the early nineteenth century the idea of intellectualism had been negatively attached to chamber music in Britain and had in turn heightened suspicions within the respectable classes that playing, studying, or listening to chamber music was an inherently unmanly recreational activity for men. A shift away from such beliefs was perceptible by the 1870s, and it gained ground as violin culture became consolidated.Footnote ⁵⁴ By the early 1880s, if we read between the lines of an enthusiastic review of a cello primer put out by Novello, take-up of the cello among male amateurs was both evident and showing potential for growth: “the use of this instrument in the domestic circle is likely to be still further increased when the first and second violins in quartets become more entrusted to the ladies of a family.”Footnote ⁵⁵ To be fair, older Victorian suspicions of the unmanliness of music as a leisure pursuit would prove difficult to erase, especially in upper-class circles; popular humor around inept male amateurs continued to act as a vehicle for the expression of anxieties into the late century.Footnote ⁵⁶ Still, by the early 1900s respectable men making music as a hobby had become unremarkable.

Figure 6.4 Thomas Matthews Rooke, Group portrait of Alfred Rooke and his family in their home in Mount Park, Ealing, watercolor, 1891–1892.

The Geffrye Museum of the Home, London, UK © Geffrye Museum/Bridgeman Images.

For all that Victorians emphasized the desirability of family activities, domestic music-making was always as much (maybe more) about kith as it was about kin, at all levels of society. Cobbett’s first chamber-music experiences at the home of the brothers of his friend Tom Lintott (late 1860s) had marked the start of a lifetime of middle-class domestic musicking: “They gave me much encouragement (I was horribly nervous) and allowed me, to my great delight, to take part in some Boccherini quintets.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Former violin pupil May Blight Pemberthy remembered “musical parties” around her working-class family’s piano after church on Sunday evenings, and friends coming by for them (probably in the 1900s–1910s).Footnote ⁵⁸ In university and conservatoire settings, networks for social music-making were forged from friendship groups or professional connections. The same obtained in the circles of working performers, though here, because of the dynastic aspect of musicians’ backgrounds, such ensembles often included family members as well. In London, c. 1908–1912, young professionals Margery Bentwich and her sister Thelma (cellist) played quartets with Rebecca Clarke (on viola) and one other;Footnote ⁵⁹ in Huddersfield in the 1910s, local teacher Arthur Kaye, his wife (viola), and his live-in cousin Gertrude McGowan, an RMCM-trained cellist, were regular ensemble partners in a household that was alive with recreational chamber music.Footnote ⁶⁰

Of course, people without proximity to players with appropriate competencies, instruments, or social standing had to identify “colleagues” through other means. Although one music magazine eventually provided clearinghouse services, as mentioned earlier, for chamber musicians, it was more typical for players to place small ads in magazines read by “people like them.” An ad in the Tonic Sol-Fa Reporter of 1878 that introduced a “VIOLA or SECOND VIOLIN” player who was eager to join a quartet in north London “to play from the Tonic Sol-fa Notation” would have targeted musicians from the lower-middle and upper-working classes, whereas one in The Strad in 1904 that announced vacancies for an amateur second violin and viola in a quartet that rehearsed at a relatively smart address in suburban Brixton (London) would have expected responses from more bourgeois players.Footnote ⁶¹

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Despite having expanded to include new breeds of string players (including women), the playing of high-serious chamber music in private was still, in the early years of the twentieth century, identified with middle- and upper-class life. Some proponents of string playing “for all” (especially champions of the Maidstone school-teaching method) harbored a paternalistic vision of wide working-class participation, emphasizing the inner satisfaction engendered by playing with others. In 1914, Paul Stoeving, champion of the Maidstone movement and former violin professor at the GSM, which offered evening instruction to working people in east London, insisted publicly that among the poor “playing together … engenders a happy esprit de corps, a feeling of equality and fraternity among the children, symbolical of our highest human ideals.”Footnote ⁶² He went on to argue that ensemble playing could offer them lifelong experiences that could transcend their everyday existence in a quasi-spiritual manner. In his characteristically rhapsodic fashion, he suggested that:

Considering the levels of skill and experience required of any player in a chamber ensemble, these were ambitious goals. Earlier chapters have shown that some high-level string players did emerge from working-class milieus, but they were hardly representative of the majority of learners from poor backgrounds, many of whom did not persevere with their instrument or acquired only elementary techniques. However, some former Maidstone students played in amateur orchestras through adulthood and they may have participated in chamber music as well. Unfortunately, testimony is lacking. One scrap of somewhat related information comes from a former pupil in Nantwich (one H. Stubbs), the only surviving member of his class who had kept up the violin into the 1950s. Then “still an Amateur” (though he had “played with Professionals in the local theater”), he reported that he often played the arrangement of the slow movement of Haydn’s “Emperor” Quartet Op. 76 No. 3 in the Maidstone method book.Footnote ⁶⁴

Synergies: Chamber Music and Concert Life

Professional string players often played chamber music with one another recreationally, as did students at conservatoires and universities. Sometimes, high-ranking performers and advanced students combined, as on the evening in 1912 when student violinist Eugene Goossens was sent by the RCM to a wealthy London home, where he found himself amidst an astonishingly star-studded group of visitors and soon playing viola in one of Brahms’s string quintets with Jacques Thibaud, Paul Kochanski, fellow-student Rebecca Clarke, and Pablo Casals.Footnote ⁶⁵ For players who hoped to perform in public as chamber musicians, private chamber-music sessions carried untold benefits for their muscles and minds, being opportunities for both note-learning and repertoire familiarization.

However, the relationship between private music-making and the public concert went deeper than that. For one thing, the expansion of public concert culture for chamber music in Britain, c. 1880–1914, was rapid and prodigious and could hardly have come about without the substantial support of listeners who were steeped in practical experiences of playing music with others in the home and were willing to attend performances. Also important was the potential for concerts given by able professional players – not to mention recorded and (later) broadcast performances – to encourage and vitalize amateur string playing, whether that meant inspiring waves of learners to take up an instrument, creating amateurs’ desire to try “difficult” chamber music, or, for players who were technically well advanced, providing object lessons in how particular works might be interpreted. In turn, repeated renditions of certain pieces in private and in concert contributed to the processes that led to them being deemed “great” works.

Paula Gillett posits the heightened interest in chamber music and its essentially domestic overtones as one of the reasons for the disintegration of the taboo against women playing the violin in the 1870s and pinpoints the Monday and Saturday Popular Concerts at St. James’s Hall in London as fueling female enthusiasm for the genre. These concerts, despite what their name might suggest, were serious chamber-music events, and they must, she argues, “have provided a strong stimulus” for girls to learn the violin, fostering dreams of playing such music in their own homes.Footnote ⁶⁶ In this scenario, the presence onstage of Wilma Norman-Neruda, who regularly led the otherwise all-male string quartet at the Pops, implicitly carries role-modeling significance.Footnote ⁶⁷ That said, only girls and women who were in a position to attend concerts in central London (and, in Gillett’s argument, one set of concerts in particular) or to catch one of her chamber-music appearances in the regions would have been impacted by seeing and hearing her publicly.Footnote ⁶⁸ On the other hand, there were several settings beyond public concerts where Norman-Neruda performed in ensemble music (duo sonatas especially): private parties, “at-homes,” and more. These events would have contributed to her visibility, given that some of them gathered fairly large audiences, as James Tissot’s 1875 envisioning of a high-society salon performance (Fig. 6.5), purportedly depicting Norman-Neruda as the violinist, suggests. Indeed, in that same decade, Norman-Neruda played at the Gladstones’ private concerts, and it may be no coincidence that Mary Gladstone, then twenty-five, began violin lessons shortly after one of them (June 1873).Footnote ⁶⁹

Figure 6.5 James Tissot, Hush! (The Concert), oil on canvas, c. 1875.

Image courtesy of Manchester Art Gallery.

For all that, given that the journey from novice to being able to hold a line in a chamber work was a long one, Norman-Neruda’s influence may have had equal, if not greater, traction among people who were already fairly competent players. A short story published in the Violin Times in 1894 paints a credible scenario in this regard, albeit by suggesting that her playing inspired men as well. The narrator, who is male, recalls an imagined performance by Norman-Neruda at one of the Saturday Pops:

Concert performances by other prominent players must also have encouraged amateurs, especially able ones, to attempt chamber works. In his memoirs, Charles Stanford signaled that public chamber-music concerts – given by “finished players” – at Cambridge had galvanized interest in quartet playing among male, “music-loving” undergraduates (c. 1870s). He noted one “devoted four” who played through all of Haydn’s quartets, and recalled how they “used to practise assiduously, often into the small hours of the morning, in rooms in the great court tower of Trinity facing the chapel.”Footnote ⁷¹ The roster of must-see visiting players included Joachim, who led a cycle of Beethoven’s late quartets; a performance of any of those, wrote Stanford, “meant a sold-out house.”Footnote ⁷²

By the 1880s, many other cities, including Liverpool and Manchester, were witnessing high-caliber chamber musicians play concerts. Looking back from 1923 at the broader influence of the London Popular Concerts, Hayward connected public concert culture in northern Britain with the region’s domestic chamber-music-making:

The potential for public performances of chamber music to have encouraged ensemble playing among string-playing attendees must have increased considerably after 1900, when chamber music concerts proliferated and several high-caliber permanent string quartet ensembles, including several all-women quartets, were making appearances around the country. Either named after their leaders (e.g., Joseph Joachim, Edith Robinson, Nora Clench, Spencer Dyke) or electing a moniker (London, English, International), quartets with distinct public identities were a new feature on the commercial concert (and recording) scene, and some of them became known for particular repertoire.Footnote ⁷⁴ All this activity also offered plentiful role-modeling and motivation for would-be learners, especially individuals who may have felt ambivalent about learning to play a stringed instrument. In imagining such a population, we should remember the men and boys from middle- or upper-class backgrounds who had been discouraged historically from taking up stringed instruments or being serious about music. Altered attitudes about the respectability of string playing as a hobby or career choice for men were well in train by 1900 and may have been further encouraged by the regular appearances of all-male professional string quartets – for instance, the English String Quartet (1908–1915; Frank Bridge was a member) – on the concert stage, where the understood seriousness of the music especially dignified the vocation.Footnote ⁷⁵

Working-class men were not constrained by the old social stigmas, and some played stringed instruments purely recreationally. On the face of it, given chamber music’s association with high culture, the majority of working-class amateurs would seem unlikely consumers for public chamber concerts. Yet in some metropolitan areas, they had surprisingly frequent and affordable opportunities to hear high-quality artists perform such music, thanks to the social and moral do-gooding that was prevalent during much of the period under discussion. Steered by musically inclined members of the wealthy classes and rendered financially viable by the small performing forces required, this work was driven by a mix of social responsibility and beliefs in the value of providing “good music” to the lower orders as a form of rational recreation. Alan Bartley’s study of this phenomenon, which was especially buoyant in Edwardian London, reveals a plethora of low-cost (often 1d.) chamber concerts organized on Sundays in underprivileged areas of London, especially the East End, by the People’s Concert Society (PCS; established 1878), and at the South Place chapel in Finsbury, where free performances, run by the South Place Ethical Society, began in 1887.Footnote ⁷⁶ Showcasing expert players, these events attracted substantial audiences, men in particular.Footnote ⁷⁷ According to one contemporary (1899), PCS concerts drew audiences that ranged from those in a “dead level of poverty” to railway employees and clerks earning small wages, and from dock and factory workers to skilled mechanics and soldiers.Footnote ⁷⁸ That audience, Bartley notes, probably numbered between 2,000 and 3,000 people weekly.Footnote ⁷⁹

If those numbers represent “a mere drop in the ocean” of the East End’s population,Footnote ⁸⁰ they also mean that 2,000 or more people were regularly electing to participate as listeners in chamber music. By extension, some people’s experiences may have inspired them to have their children take up the violin through the Maidstone scheme, or to learn instruments themselves, with all the private music-making opportunities that then beckoned. Others were probably already amateur instrumentalists, for whom the pull of the concert experience would have been strong. In an interview in the 1970s, a former railway-canteen worker, Florence May Thompson (b. c. 1893; married 1912), described such a scenario in Liverpool, c. 1912–1914. Her husband, a tugboat worker, who had enjoyed playing the violin around the home, “loved the classic music.” Thus, “[i]f there was a concert anywhere I used to try, you know, and scrape the money up to get him to go to [it].”Footnote ⁸¹ Whether these were chamber-music concerts is unknown, but the reminiscence is a reminder of the important role that violin culture played in developing and sustaining audiences for classical music, and especially chamber and orchestral music – in which string-writing usually loomed large. For this concert-hall repertoire was inherently relatable from the viewpoint of both current and erstwhile string players, such that the experience of listening to and watching a concert would have held meaning for people who played, or had once played, in ensembles.