Music and Victorian Philanthropy: The Tonic Sol-fa Movement (review)

In the flood of new research about Victorian musical life that has been reported in recent decades, two large sections of society have often been neglected—the working classes and the nonconformists. This study manages to open up both topics. Tonic sol-fa was a simplified music notation, based on letters of the alphabet and a few other ordinary signs. It was cheap to print and could be taught with little difficulty to people who lacked musical training and the means to acquire it. It was brilliantly successful, providing, for the first time, a disciplined and participatory form of music for the masses. It was invented by Sarah Glover, an Anglican schoolteacher, but John Curwen, a Congregational minister, was the one who seized on its potential for a vast expansion of musical activity and, hence, moral uplift.

McGuire, who is already known for his distinguished work on Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams, has boldly taken up this less conventional topic with flair and alacrity. He says that he came upon it by accident: When looking for other works that would have been performed during the same period as Elgar’s oratorios, he found a composition by George Frideric Handel printed in tonic sol-fa, which whetted his curiosity (218). The historical development of the notation had already been investigated by Bernarr Rainbow (in his book unhappily titled The Land Without Music [London, 1967]). But McGuire goes far beyond Rainbow in exploring the social significance of the tonic sol-fa movement. Curwen, who effectively controlled its activities through a series of musical editions and periodicals, believed in the power of music to encourage virtuous living and thinking, especially among the poor. McGuire’s first chapter, “Dissenters, Philanthropists, and the World of Tonic Sol-fa,” cogently explores Curwen’s paternalistic aims and his methods of advancing them.

The three succeeding chapters show how far tonic sol-fa affected three quintessentially Victorian enterprises—the temperance movement, Christian missions, and women’s suffrage. For temperance advocates, music carried danger in its association with dancing, provocative theatrics, and drinking. By encouraging innocent and uplifting forms of music as a harmless entertainment, Curwen and his followers hoped to steer the masses away from its more pernicious associations. Tonic sol-fa helped him to accomplish this end, because those who had learned to read it were necessarily restricted to singing whatever Curwen chose to print in that form. The music that he provided was accessible, demure, and for the most part based on tunes already well known. For missions abroad, tonic sol-fa proved to be equally beneficial, since people of any culture could learn how it worked with relative ease and could be taught to sing hymns and tunes of the missionaries’ choosing, first in English and later in their own language. McGuire records the astonishing success of tonic sol-fa as an adjunct to the London Missionary Society’s work in Madagascar, before the French conquest of the island in 1895.

In the third enterprise, the women’s suffrage movement, tonic solfa played a relatively unimportant part, since, as McGuire explains, most suffrage activists were aristocratic or upper-middle-class ladies who had been raised in the knowledge of classical music in conventional staff notation. Though the rationale for placing this chapter in the book may be thin, it provides an opportunity for investigating the extent to which music in general contributed to the suffrage movement. McGuire’s Epilogue explores the reasons for the rapid decline in tonic sol-fa’s popularity after 1900.

This valuable book helps to restore balance in our knowledge of the varied musical life of Victorian times. It is persuasively written, thoroughly documented, and on the whole well produced (except for the examples in staff notation, which are unbelievably slapdash, with a considerable number of wrong notes). It is particularly gratifying to see how a seasoned and broadly based scholar reacts to a phenomenon that most have not thought worthy...