Bernarr Rainbow on Music: Memoirs and Selected Writings (review)

Bernarr Rainbow (1914–1998) was an important figure in English musical life, and it has been well worth while assembling this tribute to his work. It takes an unconventional form: two introductory assessments; an unfinished autobiographical memoir; a reprint of Rainbow’s biography of John Curwen (which is still in print); and a miscellany of his shorter articles and reviews. Although the editors are naturally motivated by respect and warm feeling for their subject, their comments include some critical appraisal as well.

Rainbow was an accomplished choral conductor, organist, teacher, and administrator, and it could be argued that his greatest influence was conveyed directly through these activities. His teaching methods, his choice of music for choirs to sing, and his administrative decisions were practical expressions of strongly held and often controversial views that he seems to have formed early in life. At the same time he sought to justify these ideas in his research and writing, where his gifts were also of a high order. But objectivity was often a casualty of his partisanship. This was true for both his areas of historical interest: music education and Anglican church music.

His work on music education was first brought forward in 1967, when his master’s thesis at the University of Leicester was expanded to form his first book, The Land without Music: Musical Education in England, 1800–1860. I could never quite forgive him for using this disgraceful and wholly inappropriate title, which appeared just at a time when I was trying to show, almost single-handedly, that England was not, and never had been, a land without music—a point that I think has by now been abundantly demonstrated. I expressed my indignation in a Musical Times review, and I needn’t repeat it here. It did not affect my personal fondness for the author, nor my admiration of the book itself, which opened up an entirely unfamiliar aspect of musical history.

Rainbow showed convincingly how the tonic sol-fa system, based on the ‘movable doh’ principle, where doh always represents the keynote, is inherently superior (for teaching singing) to ‘fixed doh’ systems, where doh always represents C. Despite this irrefutable fact, John Hullah’s fixed-doh system, following French models, was officially adopted by the government and for long prevailed in the vast majority of English schools. Rainbow identified the pioneer of tonic sol-fa in Sarah Glover, a previously unknown Norwich schoolteacher, and its strongest advocate in John Curwen, a nonconformist minister who disclaimed any technical understanding of music. This intriguing story is retold with many new details and arguments in Rainbow’s biography of Curwen, reprinted here, and in some of the shorter publications included in the book. One of the most significant of his later discoveries was that tonic sol-fa was the basis of Zoltán Kodaly’s educational methods, through which it gained far greater influence than most people had suspected. The historical importance of the system has been reaffirmed and enhanced by Charles McGuire’s recent book, Music and Victorian Philanthropy (Cambridge, 2009).

Although tonic sol-fa eventually succeeded in England, it never fully replaced traditional music notation in school teaching, as Rainbow thought it should. In his passionate advocacy he forgot that instrumental music can also have an important place in children’s education, in classes as well as individual teaching, and that much worthwhile vocal music is modal, modulates frequently, or is even atonal. These facts limit the value of tonic sol-fa. Even if it is more difficult to learn sight-singing from traditional notation, students who overcome the difficulties have a clear advantage for further musical development over those who only know tonic sol-fa. But Rainbow was not willing to give such arguments serious consideration. He remained certain that the voice and the ‘inner ear’ were the only true foundations of musicality (which perhaps they are), and that a teaching method...