The Sea in the British Musical Imagination ed. by Eric Saylor and Christopher M. Scheer (review)

Given the liberal scholarly attention recently devoted to maritime topics in British literary and visual culture, The Sea in the British Musical Imagination represents a timely and novel publication. Although discussion of music finds a small place within such interdisciplinary volumes as Bernhard Klein's Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture (Aldershot, 2002)—and although isolated essays on the sea as musical metaphor have emerged amid a recent deluge of research devoted to British music and musical culture (notably Stephen Downes's chapter in British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960, ed. Matthew Riley (Farnham, 2010))—this varied and thought-provoking collection is the first to turn sustained musicological attention to the myriad ways in which nautical themes have conditioned the creation, dissemination, and reception of British music over more than four centuries.

The volume has been conceived with a view to examining issues of national, cultural, and aesthetic identity: as editors Eric Saylor and Christopher M. Scheer declare in their introduction, 'few subjects have received as much attention [as the sea] from as many generations of British musicians, attesting to its significant place within the nation's creative soul' (p. 1). Lest this rhetorical flourish suggest an idealized, essentialist treatment of identity formations throughout the volume, many of these essays pose nuanced questions of a kind currently shaping both British music and maritime cultural studies: how and why have British attitudes toward 'the sea' (especially where that entity refers to an idea of the natural world) changed across time and space? How might what Klein calls 'metaphorical and material links between the idea of the sea in the cultural imagination and its significance for the social and political history of Britain' (p. 5) be traced? And how, then, have artistic expressions—specifically musical works, performances, and reception histories—mediated broader cultural, social, and political discourses?

In drawing together answers, the editors have cast their net rewardingly wide, eliciting thirteen contributions that embrace historical musicology, analysis, hermeneutics, ethnography, and radio studies. Chapters attend to both art and vernacular music, and range from a discussion of how maritime themes in eighteenthcentury broadside ballads engaged early narratives of British national identity, to an essay on the use of 'Radiophonic' sound within seathemed radio dramas produced by the BBC during the 1950s. In an afterword, the unpublished correspondence of Grace Williams is mined for insights into her 'descriptive' sea music. There feature in between analytical accounts and contextual readings of seascapes and sailors in vocal and instrumental music by composers from Purcell to Maxwell Davies; an ethnography of mid-twentieth-century evangelical hymn-singing practices within a Scottish fishing community; and a study of Aldeburgh's representation in two recent productions of operas by Britten.

Three thematic divisions categorize the essays as follows: 'The Sea as Geography', 'The Sea as Profession', and 'The Sea as Metaphor'. There is curiously little engagement, either in the introduction or in the chapters themselves, with recent research into notions of place, landscape, metaphor, or 'work' (as Margaret Cohen has it, for example, in The Novel and the Sea (Princeton, 2010)). Admittedly, we learn from the acknowledgements that a plan for the volume was hatched among the editors some fifteen years ago, a moment coterminous with the expansion and professionalization of the field of British music studies, to which they, like numerous of the contributors, have made significant contributions. And this, in any case, yields one of the volume's more rewarding features, as authors freely figure individual interpretations of these categories according to their own historical (if not always theoretical) needs. Notable in this regard is Scheer's chapter (in the 'Geography' section), which reconsiders long-problematic questions of how the coastal landscapes of Aldeburgh might have shaped Britten's compositions and their reception by examining the transformation of Aldeburgh's cultural status from peripheral to...