The Foundation of Music & Letters

When Music & Letters was first established it had very little by way of an explicit policy or agenda. It had no prescribed length for articles, and no defined type of contributor in mind—it was simply open 'to those who can write from experience and sometimes to those who experience in order that they may write'.¹ The journal was independent and privately owned, costing three shillings and sixpence to purchase in the first instance. It relied for its existence entirely on a small group of loyal subscribers and the personal outlay of the founder and first editor, Arthur Henry Fox Strangways (1859–1948), a 60-year-old ex-schoolmaster. In his second career Fox Strangways had been music critic for The Times and The Observer, and had taken the decision to embark upon the venture of a new journal because he was wearying of the weekly grind of concert reviews. Fox Strangways was well aware of the short history and still shorter lifespans of the musical quarterlies in English that preceded his own periodical, and as he launched Music & Letters into the musical world he wished only that the journal have a 'merry life' and that its readers would not tire of it too soon.² Such was the modest ambition (or 'slender' vision, as Fox Strangways put it after the first decade of publication³) of a journal that now celebrates its centenary.

The title that Fox Strangways chose for the journal—Music & Letters—can be read in three interlinking ways. First, it was intended to encourage a conception of music as a form of thought rather than purely a language of emotion. Fox Strangways believed that leaving space for longer-form essays about music would promote more serious reflection about the art, leading to music being treated with the same degree of significance as literary criticism treated literature.⁴ Key to this reconceptualization, in Fox Strangways's view, was the fact that Music & Letters was to appear on a quarterly basis, rather than monthly or weekly as did other types of music criticism, and he claimed that Music & Letters was the only musical quarterly in Britain in the 1920s. In his editorial in the first issue of the journal, Fox Strangways called for music to be considered a branch of knowledge—a'subject of rational enquiry like any other'. In this sense a significant purpose of Music & Letters was to provide a forum to encourage a certain type of reasoned reflection on music.

Second, and perhaps more obliquely, the title reflects an ongoing preoccupation of Fox Strangways and his most regular contributors with the relationship between music and words (or ideas). This preoccupation found expression through the Music & Letters song translation competition, which was conducted over a number of the early volumes; the publication of original poetry; and frequent essays on topics such as the merits and limitations of programme music, the interaction between words, drama, and music in opera, libretto translation, and singing in English.

Finally, and most urgently, the journal was intended to be a forum for a more open and eclectic 'literary' style of writing about music. This intention flowed from Fox Strangways's concern about the dogmatic and opinionated style of music journalese as it was practised in newspaper columns of the day, as well as with the more rhapsodic, subjective style of 'impressionist criticism' that had been in preponderance before the Great War. Fox Strangways sought to set Music & Letters apart from other forums for writing about music by not confining its scope singularly to historical scholarship (which he saw as often simply adulatory), to music analysis, to the 'scientific' approach to music (which he associated with the Royal Musical Association and which he viewed as merely descriptive and technical rather than interpretative or illuminating), or to music journalese. He wanted his contributors to avoid taking 'refuge in paeans and purples … instead of telling [music's] nature'.⁵

In the issue of April 1922, J. D. M. Rorke mused upon 'The Personal Note in Musical Criticism' in a way that reflected this broader aim among the early contributors to the journal...