In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Ibbs and Tillett: The Rise and Fall of a Musical Empire
  • Benjamin Wolf
Ibbs and Tillett: The Rise and Fall of a Musical Empire. By Christopher Fifield. pp. xiv + 678. (Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington, Vt., 2005, £29.95. ISBN 1-84014-290-1.)

Christopher Fifield's book traces the rise and fall of what was for many years the foremost concert agency in Britain, responsible for the provision of soloists to music clubs, societies, and festivals, and for the management of international stars such as Myra Hess and Kathleen Ferrier. It is a welcome addition to the history of musical institutions, and a valuable resource for those researching the history of the music business, concert programming, or the social context of musical performance in Britain in the past century.

The book is long, consisting of 372 pages of text and a further 274 pages of appendices. It covers the history of Ibbs and Tillett from its creation in 1906 to its demise in 1990, and is based almost exclusively on a single, previously unexplored, archive—papers, brochures, letters, and photographs stored by Wilfred Stiff, a former managing director of the agency. Fifield's examination of this archive appears thorough, and his appendices list many of its more interesting contents: artists auditioned and managed by the agency, concert tours and programmes, Ibbs and Tillett artists appearing at the Proms in 1945 and 1947, contracts with Julius Isserlis, the 1965–9 diary of Emmie Tillett (managing director from 1948 to 1979), and selected correspondence with Rachmaninov, Hess, and Ferrier. These last appendices provide a useful insight into the lives (and financial arrangements) of star performers in the early to mid-twentieth century.

The structure of the book is largely determined by the contents of the archive. Chapters are arranged chronologically, and there is some duplication of the contents of the appendices in the main text. Many describe the musicians auditioned or taken on by the company at various points (and recorded in audition books), while others are pieced together from correspondence with musicians. Focus on individual musicians is provided by chapters devoted to Clara Butt's Australian tour in 1907, to the day-to-day existence of the conductor Albert Coates in 1933, and to relations between Ibbs and Tillett and Kathleen Ferrier.

By far the most insightful chapters are those in which Fifield shows a sense of the world outside the company. There is a short, but historically useful, chapter on the role of Ibbs and Tillett in fighting government plans (inspired by the Incorporated Society of Musicians) to block the entry of foreign artists to Britain in the 1930s—a kind of economic protectionism that meshed well with the prevailing political climate but was rarely enforced. There are also good final chapters on the fall of the agency, in which Fifield displays a keen understanding of the ultimate weakness of the Ibbs and Tillett business model.

Fifield attributes the company's collapse to a failure to adapt to changes in the musical institutions [End Page 700] that served the public, and to changes in the desires of star performers. It had built its success on providing soloists for Britain's burgeoning number of music clubs, choral societies, and festivals, acting always with the institution (not the artist) as its principal client, and providing musicians at reasonable cost on a national basis. As the music clubs became fewer and the business of classical music increasingly shifted in favour of high-earning musicians who sought international careers, an agency such as Ibbs and Tillett required significant reorganization to survive. Reorganization came too late, however, and in its later years Ibbs and Tillett was overshadowed by companies with small artist lists, dealing in 'personal management' and with truly international reach. These companies—Askonas Holt, Harrison Parrott, Van Walsum, and IMG, among others—continue to act as managers to the dominant performers of classical music today.

Nonetheless, these good chapters, and the wealth of useful detail scattered through the text, are not sufficient to overcome three major weaknesses in the book: an overdependence on a single archive, a lack of social context and analysis, and an uncertainty over potential readership.

Overdependence is...

pdf

Share