‘to do something for music in the name of the Guild’

FEW GENRES owe their origins so clearly to one time and to the initiative of one man as the phantasy. The man in question, Walter Willson Cobbett, at an age when most would have been thinking about retirement, busied himself in the promotion of chamber music with unbridled energy and optimism. He had made his fortune in business, founding and chairing the Scandinavia Belting Company, but his passion was music. A keen amateur violinist with an enthusiasm for chamber music, during the last thirty years of his life he nurtured the genre with a wide variety of schemes: competitions, commissions, journalism, an encyclopedia, even the establishment of a free chambermusic lending library. There is no doubting that the high standing of chamber music in Britain at the time of his death in 1937 owed much to his enthusiastic proselytizing.

Cobbett's principal contribution to chamber music composition was the genre of the phantasy, whose invention followed his election as a member of the Worshipful Company of Musicians in 1905. He was encouraged ‘to do something for music in the name of the Guild’ and had the idea of a competition. He thought that the too great length and difficulty of chamber music of the day (which tended to follow the Brahmsian model) led to its being neglected by composers. In an address to a meeting of the Concert-goers’ Club in 1911, he reflected that ‘in literature there are the lyric and the epic poem, the short story and the long novel; in the orchestra, besides the symphony, the overture and the symphonic poem; but that in chamber music there is only one form that counts …’ He sought to fill the niche with the chamber-music equivalent of the lyric poem or orchestral overture.

He planned to encourage the composition of short chamber music works through a competition. The first was announced in the middle of 1905 and adjudicated in the following year. The specification for compositions was not clear when the competition was first announced, and the phantasy aspect merely suggested. When the rules were finalized, the composition was to be a phantasy for string quartet, though what that should mean was left open.