Music in the West Country: Social and Cultural History across an English Region by Stephen Banfield (review)

The challenges of writing a history of music that transcends historically conceived divisions and instead explores all musical activity throughout time within a certain locality—thereby suggesting the potential for geographic distinctiveness of music—increasingly inspires scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. Stephen Banfield has widely written on English music, including that of the West Country, throughout his career. In this book, he eloquently qualifies the comprehensive, though naturally not exhaustive, outcome of his self-declared "labour of love" as a "provisional history" (pp. xi, xiii), which, based on recent local research throughout the peninsula, ranging from Salisbury in the East and the gateway cities of Bristol and Bournemouth to Land's End and the Isles of Scilly in the West, faces that challenge effectively. As might be expected from a monograph encompassing the medieval Sarum Rite and 1990s trip-hop, certain areas in the region's musical history, variably encoded in an often-fragmentary array of textual sources or through oral transmission, are of greater interest to the author than others. Even so, Banfield's command of the considerable volume of secondary literature and his elegant structuring along broad themes, such as musical authority, incorporation, and capitalization, allows him to reflect organically the musical multifariousness that is at the heart of his proposal.

He does so, in the first instance, by way of R. Murray Schafer's concept of "soundscapes" in relation to literary sources (of course including the region's most famous literary figure, Dorset-born Thomas Hardy), and both soundscapes and literature resurface in a less programmatic manner throughout the volume. The subsequent chapter on the West Country's organs and their builders presents the instrument's tumultuous history—before and after the Puritans' ransacking of churches— as both the musical and communal focus of towns and villages. His exegesis on the Victorian era describes the ecclesiastical ritualism in the Anglican Church and other churches, which not only significantly shaped class, gender, and even regional identity, but also the organ's use in liturgy and its designs and decorations. At the same time, the organ culture spread to secular entertainment in town halls and, by the early twentieth century, to theaters and cine mas, whose organs remain popular in seaside towns. He follows this with a lavish chapter on bands and choirs in which he marshals groups—waits (civic minstrels of the fifteenth to early nineteenth centuries), parish psalmody, military and brass bands, glee clubs and madrigal societies, modern choral societies—in order to chronicle collective music making against the backdrop of developing social mores. He brings this to a close with a no less organic but perhaps less compelling overview of pop and rock performers originating from the South West.

At the center of the book lies a two-part study of how secular musicians made a living, divided by prosopography—in relation to family life, education, patronage, and trade and migration (it is here that some of the more famous musicians and writers active in the region, such as Muzio Clementi and Thomas Moore, receive fleeting mention)—and individual case studies. The latter involve an array of lesser-known (if, by Banfield's account, no less remarkable) concert musicians of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including a fair number of women, who are generally well represented throughout the volume, as well as the black violinist and composer Joseph Emidy, a near contemporary of Beethoven whose remarkable life story has sparked wider interest in recent years.

The final two chapters, on "musical capitalisation," are introduced by way of "mild reference to theory" (p. xv), a proposed dialectic between the concepts of musicking, cultural capital (Pierre Bourdieu), and the idea of a kind of temporally...