Music and Class in London and Manchester

In this paper, I investigate the sounded urban liminality of the 2016 promenade performances of The Passion by Streetwise Opera in Campfield Market in Manchester, England where performers, listeners, and composers metaphorically (and literally) co-perform in what I call a Third Sound Space. As an abridged English-language version of JS Bach's St. Matthew Passion, the one-hour production calls for eight Jesuses, employs theatrical action, mixes amateur and professional singing, includes new music by James Macmillan, contrasts video projection with up-close staging, and requires performers and listeners (who stand) to move throughout the venue. Moreover, the production engages homeless and formerly homeless Manchester residents alongside the singers of The Sixteen, a professional modern-instrument orchestra, and early-music conductor Harry Christophers.  Emphasizing subjective perceptions of this soundspace, I provide a close reading shaped by my interviews with performers, directors and audience members, and draw conceptual connections between early musicking and Thirdspace thinking through Soja, Lossau, and Fischer-Lichte's rereadings of Lefebvre and Bhabha's postmodern geographies. Through a performative lens calibrated by my interviews, I unpack the spatial, temporal, vocational, and thematic liminality of The Passion as experienced within fixed polarities ranging from mobility-immobility to liveness-reality to closeness-distance to amateur-professional. Within these multiple liminalities, The Passion signifies to listeners two juxtaposed storylines: the explicit Passion of Christ with the more implicit one of the Manchester homeless.

Pleasure gardens first came to prominence in early eighteenth-century London as venues where visitors from diverse social strata could promenade about the walks, enjoy entertainments, and see and be seen. Writing in 1709, Daniel Defoe distinguishes seven social classes in England, including a group he describes as "the middle sort . . . who live the best, and consume the most . . . and with whom the general wealth of this nation is found." Recognizing the potential to profit from the newfound wealth of the "middle sort," entrepreneurs marketed new leisure activities to them, including trips to London's three chief pleasure gardens: Vauxhall, Ranelagh, and Marylebone. Although garden refreshments were notoriously overpriced, the modest admission charge enabled even those from the poorer classes to attend at least occasionally. At the other end of the social spectrum, the attendance of royal family members enhanced the prestige of the gardens. Music presided over all, facilitating exchanges amongst the classes and providing unprecedented opportunities for social emulation--whereby the "middle sort" could imitate their social superiors, and could themselves be admired and imitated.


Per contemporary newspapers, Haydn was one of the most frequently featured composers in English pleasure garden performances during the second half of the eighteenth century. Although advertisements for instrumental pieces rarely referenced keys, titles, or other identifying characteristics, London's Vauxhall Gardens advertised performances of Haydn's Symphony "La Chasse" ("The Hunt") throughout the 1780s and 1790s. Taking Vauxhall performances of this symphony as its primary case study, this presentation will explore how sonic evocations of the hunt interfaced with the dynamic musical and social atmosphere of the pleasure gardens. While music on the continent functioned primarily as an instrument of the court and aristocracy, music in eighteenth-century England expressed and catered to the values of a broader public. Departing from extensive previous scholarship on the hunt as a musical and cultural topic on the continent, this presentation will consider the hunt's musical and cultural significance in an English context. Ultimately, Vauxhall performances of Haydn's symphony brought the hunt--an activity emblematic of social status--to the ears and minds of diverse audiences.

Orlando Gibbons's _The Cries of London I and II_ (c. 1610), one of many pieces emulating the cries of vendors in marketplaces, provides a rare glimpse into the sonic landscape of early modern London and its working people. His use of melodies employed by hawkers and street vendors left a record of lower-class people's voices lost to history. At times the music's vocal parts imitate each other, but often they sing unique tunes and texts to advertise their products. Gibbons's work differs from the earlier piece by Clément Janequin, _Voulez ouyr les cris de Paris_ (c. 1530), which utilized far more imitation and punctuating cadences. The resulting aural effect of _Cries of London_ provides listeners with an experience of walking through a street market.
Music scholars such as Lucy Broadwood and A.G. Gilchrist -- and more recently Nors S. Josephson and David Fiala -- have explored the history and musical style of this repertoire. However, this music takes on new meaning when placed in the context of scholarship on sound and urban geographies, such as the work done by Jennie Middleton and Eric Wilson. This paper uses _The Map of Early Modern London_ (MoEML) and recent scholarship on London's street markets to show the distribution of markets and areas of industry, locating sites of street cries such as those in _Cries of London_ and charting the sonic territories of the city. I then use works by visual artists and writers such as Marcellus Laroon, William Hogarth, Samuel Pepys, and Henry Mayhew -- including Mayhew's rare interviews of London's poor from 1851 -- to provide further detail about the environment of London's streets and the people that Gibbons, Pepys, John Gay, and others writing about street life might have encountered.
While this paper covers a broad time frame, it reveals commonalities and continuities between the street life of the early modern city and the early nineteenth century. Its people experienced similar hardships and participated in separate yet lively street cultures. In these works of art, music, and literature, the voices of those anonymous street people lingered long after they passed into history. By mapping these sonic territories, I hope to illustrate how their labor and voices marked London's pre-industrial soundscape.