On September 2, Sultana's first full day on the open sea, a stiff wind from the north-northwest died down to a light breeze, then calm. As the pressure on the sails eased and they began to sag and flutter, the crew set to work adjusting the stays that held up the masts, and setting up the rigging. The six days spent moving down the Channel had been, literally, a ‘shakedown’ – under their first strain, with the wind coming on and backing off, and the schooner rocking and pitching on the sea, the rain drenching the rig, and the sun and wind drying it out again, the new hemp rigging stretched. The sails stretched and re-tightened. The masts developed a bit of play, and perhaps moved slightly out of true. They would have to be shifted and the stays and shrouds tightened up. As far as we know, no one aboard this little vessel had ever sailed her before. Even those familiar with schooners needed to learn as much as they could, as fast as they could, about this particular one – how she sailed, what she could do and what she could not, what her strengths and faults were. Their lives depended on it.

Two days later, the winds were contrary, which required a sailing vessel to take a zig-zag course, rather than a direct course, toward her destination, at least as long as the contrary winds held from the same direction. The Polynesians, perhaps the most skilled navigators in human history, were not so remarkable because they were blown downwind to islands that lay that way. They were remarkable because they settled the Pacific islands upwind of them. In addition to the extra work, and the extra fortitude, it takes more skill, both in operating the vessel and in navigation, to sail into the wind.

So, Sultana's crew tacked the schooner at half past four in the afternoon; that meant, first, making sure she was making good enough way through the water that she would have adequate momentum to swing her bow through the resisting wind far enough that the sails would fill on the other side. Then, the orders would be shouted, lines would be pulled, and the helm put over. It required a well-timed, coordinated, choreographed effort by the crew to execute the maneuver properly.

In the discussion of the song cycle and its relation to its poetic source in Chapter 1, I observed that Schumann's Eichendorff-Lieder – in contrast with Schubert's two Müller-cycles, Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise – was a poetic structure fashioned by the composer from his selection and arrangement of poems from a larger collection of the poet's work. As such, any story that the poetic cycle might tell would be entirely Schumann’s. We must make this same claim about Britten's cycles, of course, but it is telling to consider how plausibly the stories we have derived from the foregoing analyses might also be Donne’s, Hardy’s, and Blake’s.

The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, op. 35, pursues an anguished psychological pilgrimage fraught with doubt and fear. The cycle's narrator treads the same ground of mental turmoil and uncertainty again and again, painstakingly wresting a concluding assurance of redemption from an initial accusation of guilt. The antecedent circumstance to Britten's creation of the Donne songs – the event, specifically, that motivated the cycle – was the searing experience of Belsen. And though this work was his first artistic response to the war, composed in its immediate aftermath, it was not his last. He was drawn back in 1954 by Edith Sitwell's poem “Still falls the rain” (Canticle III), op. 55, and again, of course, by the commission for the War Requiem, op. 66, in 1961. For this ardent pacifist who lived through an era largely defined by the reality or menace of war, its dreadful waste and loss seems always to have weighed heavily. And yet he composed, in a horrified and febrile state, a cycle of nine songs that conclude with an unequivocal and unconditional assurance of redemption. As a response to the war, of course, the story of the Donne cycle is Britten’s. But we might quite reasonably rewrite these concluding sentences thusly: John Donne lived through an era largely defined by the menace of hell, and his fear of it weighed heavily. His Holy Sonnets desperately seek an unequivocal and unconditional assurance of redemption. In this sense the cycle also tells Donne's story.

Britten's architectural embodiment of this story divides the cycle's nine songs into three groups of three, this tripartite scheme deriving from the design of individual sonnets, and extending, first, to the arrangement of poems into groups, and then beyond this, to the ordering of the groupings themselves.

In her Oxford detective novel Gaudy Night (1935), Dorothy Sayers conjured up the scene in which Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane attend one of the prestigious Sunday evening recitals in Balliol College Hall:

From the evidence in Sayers's description as it continues, the event on which the passage quoted above was modelled has been dated to 26 May 1935. The ‘two famous violinists’ playing J.S. Bach's double violin concerto in Sayers's account of that Balliol concert were a reference to the d’Arányi sisters, the Hungarian-born Jelly d’Arányi and her older sister, Madame Adila Fachiri, great-nieces of Joseph Joachim, celebrated violinist and friend of Brahms. In fact (as opposed to fiction), from the extant evidence, the Balliol programme for that date did not include the Bach double, although Jelly d’Arányi and Adila Fachiri played a ‘Bach sonata’. However, in October 1937 a Balliol concert featured the sisters, accompanied by Sydney Watson, in a ‘superb performance of Bach's Concerto in D minor for two violins’: this concert was specially recalled by Edward Heath (then organ scholar at Balliol). After the sisters had played in England in 1909, they ‘settled there four years later, becoming well known for their performance of Bach's Double Violin Concerto’, which apparently they performed in public for the last time as late as 1960. Their names recur in the annals of Oxford's twentieth-century concert life, and they participated in the Balliol concerts on numerous occasions, discussed further below.

Edward Heath's memories of attending the October 1937 concert convey the intensity of the experience:

The course of the twentieth century saw radical change in the music of Oxford's churches, as elsewhere in the country. Liturgical developments, depopulation of the city centre, decline in religious belief, and greater choice of leisure activities are just some of the contributing factors. Compared with cathedrals and other choral foundations, where the choir and its music are a permanent, statutory part of the institution, music at parish level has always proved more fragile in nature. Oxford's churches demonstrate that the fortunes of choirs could vary wildly within a short time, and their very existence be threatened. A change of incumbent or organist might completely transform a situation for better or worse, while the relationship between choir and congregation was frequently a cause of tension.

Sources of information for the first half of the century are unsurprisingly sparse. Items such as choir registers or old music books are rare survivals. A fair number of instructive photographs, however, exist, partly in the local press. Only one church, St Margaret's in North Oxford, has a published history of its music, which offers a fascinating survey of the whole period, with all its ups and downs. Church records provide one essential resource, and minutes of both the Annual Parochial Meeting and the Parochial Church Council (PCC) contain occasional references to music. This may be a note of thanks to the choir and organist for their good work, although mention more commonly occurs when there is some change of personnel or a problem with the music. What is most difficult and usually impossible to establish for this period is the weekly ‘bread and butter’ activity: the extent of the role of music within services, the method of chanting, or the frequency of anthems and other choir music. For the second half of the musicians, sometimes going back to mid-century, provide invaluable additional evidence, and this chapter owes much to their contributions. Although the music in Anglican churches is a primary concern here, that of the Nonconformists, who were particularly active before World War II, and of the Roman Catholics, also calls for consideration, as does the state and fate of the city's many organs.

Sultana's men also made their schooner impossible to ignore. On the 17th, they fired two guns at a brig to make her haul down her pennant. This was not the first time she had demanded this sign of respect. She did it again the next day to a sloop.

Merchant vessels tended to emulate or mimic naval vessels in visible ways, for reasons both of security and prestige. The trend was strong enough that we believe it had a significant effect on technological choice in early modern merchant ships. Painted-on ‘gunports’ and even dummy wooden guns are clear examples of mimicry for security, but the practice goes beyond that; it is likely that the merchant fleet did not adopt the two-masted rigs for mid-size vessels that, by Sultana's time, had become so popular, until the Navy had done so. It was to a merchant ship's advantage for a potential predator to mistake it for a warship from a distance, in an age when maritime warfare was endemic and a major component of that warfare was predation on the enemy's commerce by naval cruisers and privateers. Mimicry for prestige was not separate from mimicry for security; it was at times perhaps a matter of retaining a trait after the security value of that trait had become obsolete. The retention of painted-on gunports – the ‘checkerboard pattern’ – of both British and U.S. merchant ships through the early decades of the nineteenth century is an obvious example.

A less-obvious example is the flying of pennants – long, streaming flags – from the masthead. This was a naval custom, and merchant ships imitated warships when they did this. According to custom and naval regulation, a merchant ship was required to strike, or at least dip, such a pennant when encountering a King's ship, out of respect for the King and acknowledgement of his sovereignty. Given how often Sultana demanded this courtesy by firing her swivel guns, it is clear that the masters of these merchant vessels were in no hurry to make their obeisance to this unusually-small member of His Majesty's Navy.

The Oxford & Cambridge Musical Club was established in 1899, but its form and purpose derived from the long history of informal music-making that had been a part of student and scholarly life at the two universities for several hundred years. This chapter presents an overview of the development of musical societies in the universities from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and shows how graduates at the beginning of the 1900s established a parallel tradition that enabled them to continue and extend their undergraduate musical practices.

While the origins of student music-making are obscure, it is possible that it began through convivial singing (and occasional instrumental playing) during gatherings of scholars at mealtimes or in ale-houses, and this social tradition was probably commonplace from the early years of each university's existence. The first documented account of informal college music clubs in Oxford is dated to the 1650s, and no record of a music society in Cambridge has been discovered that predates the testimony of Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, who visited the city in July 1710:

Uffenbach's somewhat disdainful observations notwithstanding, the Christ's College Music Club was evidently a well-established and popular institution, and it may be supposed that it continued to provide the ‘bach-elors, masters and doctors of music’ with music-making opportunities in a congenial environment for many years. Later in the eighteenth century – also in Cambridge – the Black Bear Inn at Market Street hosted a musical club that promoted concerts in its first-floor assembly room.

A typically ‘hearty’ Old Member of University College, opening his copy of the 1929/30 issue of the University College Record, the College's annual magazine, and reading its opening sentences, would have felt that all was right in the world: ‘Seeing day by day five University College names in the University Crew gave great pleasure to all members of the College during the early months of 1930. The College has a great tradition on the River … It was a good year in College athletics’. He would have been still more cheered, no doubt, to find the whole of the first page devoted to thoughts on College athletic success. Page 9 of the 1929/30 Record, though, contained a surprise: ‘The College Musical Society has made a vigorous start through the initiative of Mr. John Maud, who gave the impulse to its formation, and has provided admirable programmes’.

Univ. had never been a particularly musical college, lacking, like the majority of Oxford colleges, any kind of choral foundation. Individual members of the College had played or sung for pleasure at least since Elizabethan times, and during the late nineteenth century there grew up the tradition of so-called ‘Smoking Concerts’, after-dinner medleys of orchestral items, songs, instrumental pieces, and recitations, performed mainly by members of the College, past and present, but that was all. There were glimmerings: Paul Rubens (matriculated 1893), for example, won a considerable reputation before 1914 as a composer of successful musical comedies for the London theatre. His performances at Univ. Smoking Concerts were always a highlight, when, like some Edwardian Dudley Moore, he sang and played his songs to a delighted (and well-lubricated) audience. There is also evidence for occasional summer concerts put on at Univ. before 1914, but these appear to have been on a smaller scale than those arranged elsewhere. This chapter, therefore, will offer a case study of how such a college came to acquire a musical tradition through its Musical Society, and to create thereby a different focus for collegiate social life.

The situation changed when John Maud was elected the College's first Junior Research Fellow in 1929. Maud, an alumnus of Eton and New College, was a lover of music, and his fiancée Jean Hamilton a concert pianist (who had studied with Artur Schnabel), and he thought that the College ought to have a music society.

Intimate Entanglements and Acoustemological Pivots

I could not play. Had I not been so eager, I may not have been so careless as to play through the searing pain—that all-too-familiar, singeing sensation radiating back up from the piano keyboard through my fingertips. I already knew this throbbing pain when it reappeared after that first rehearsal in the Canary Islands. Pulsating from near my elbows, it would continually send out sharp jabs—back along my forearms to my hands and fingers, and up through my shoulders to my neck and temples—until the newly reinjured shreds of my tendons fused back together again. And then, back to the top.

I have been coping with that pain—the mark of chronic bilateral tendinosis— since my undergraduate days, when the tenuous balance of an ambitious practice routine, gig schedule, and multiple lessons per week was upset by a new instructor's approach that turned a few idiosyncratic elements of my posture and technique into a debilitating injury that has never completely healed. In the ten years between that injury and the rehearsal at saxophonist Enrique “Kike” Perdomo's home on the island of Tenerife, I had adapted, learned to ration my playing, to approach it more mindfully, and to practice self-care after more rigorous performances so that the injury would not flare up—or at least that minimal recovery time would be required for healing whatever damage I had done. (And then, back to the top.)

The reemergence of that injury, though, made it clear to me that the decade's worth of coping strategies was insufficient for this new challenge. I didn't know how to accommodate Perdomo's Petrof grand. That piano with a beautiful sound but impossibly hard action. Cramped into a small home studio with drum set, bass amp, and mic set up for the horn player. And a mixing board, computer desk, and photographer/friend up-for-the-hang. And the acoustics. As the sounds of my collaborators at their instruments reverberated around me—off the walls and up through the floorboards—I struggled to hear myself. I needed to hear myself. I kept pushing—down “through the keys,” my teachers used to say. But the other musicians were closer to the piano's soundboard.

The primary sources for analyzing Sultana's sailing operation and performance were the Bruce and Inglis logbooks – primarily Bruce’s, as he tended to provide more detail about sail sets and changes, given his role on board. I prepared and used transcriptions of Bruce's logs of seven voyages: the transatlantic crossing from England to America from August to October 1768; a short coastal passage from Boston to Newport in December 1768; Virginia to Halifax in August 1770; Halifax to Virginia in October 1770; Virginia to Newport, October–November 1770; Boston to Philadelphia in October 1771; and the transatlantic crossing from Boston to England, October–December 1772.

Important supplementary sources were the interviews conducted with experienced period replica schooner operators Drew McMullen, Aaron Thal, and Jan Miles, and the ensuing discussions of issues raised with Jan Miles and Nick Burningham.1 The overarching goal was to understand as much as possible about how the vessel was sailed: what sails were set in what conditions and why, and Sultana's operational parameters in terms of wind direction, sea state, and speed. Such an effort relies on the principles established for the specialty of experimental archaeology, adapted to the exigencies of replica ship operation in the real world, as opposed to anything approaching laboratory conditions.

The first task was to condense Bruce's log to information pertaining directly to sailing performance: wind direction, wind strength, course made good over the day's run, the day's run in nautical miles, the times of sail changes, and the details of those sail changes. For ease of use, I then converted the original point-system directions and bearings into degrees and minutes. I also eliminatedall days from this modified log for which no sailing performance data was provided.

For wind strength, I used Bruce's and Inglis's terminology. As it is impossible to correlate, exactly, their terminology to the modern Beaufort Scale, I would introduce less uncertainty and/or error into the interpretations by sticking to their terms. As is typical of eighteenth-century verbiage, Bruce's and Inglis's ‘weather categories’ are not strictly consistent. For example, I am confident that ‘light breezes and calms’ is the same as ‘light breezes mixed with calms.’

Sacred judgment is the slowly emerging but central theme of Tallis and Byrd’s Cantiones. In terms of the auditor's expected reception, part of what the English Renaissance writer Philip Sidney, following Aristotle, would call the poetic delight of the cycle lies in the way the composers’ chosen theme gains significance, weight, and clarity as the story progresses. The overall effect is to turn the set into a kind of harmonia, where small seemingly independent parts add up to one larger, discernable, whole. As far as the immediate aesthetic experience is concerned, because revelations are meant to engulf the engaged auditor in a series of accumulating waves, the collection's ideal active listener is someone who knows the story well enough to appreciate how it might be retold with such a focused theme, but still begins unsuspectingly. Only as the clues mount up does this person come to realize the importance of the musico-textually depicted acts of judgment in the collection.

One who suspects, however, that Tallis and Byrd may have been foreshadowing the set's sacred judgment theme in their preface – by presenting a form of the word “judgment” twelve times – would probably have their suspicions confirmed if instead of moving song by song through the book, he or she simply skips all the way to the last two of the set to see and hear the words addressed to Christ – dum veneris iudicare saeculum per ignem (Thou shalt come to judge the world by fire) – in Byrd's Libera me Domine de morte aeterna (33), followed by a plea for His “mercy” in Tallis and Byrd's Miserere nostri (34). By the sheer force of their musical rhetoric, the composers ensure that anyone listening to musical performances of these last songs is prepared for a cathartic experience after their deepest fears are played out before their ears: as here the unsettling sound of a frightened voice from the dead is followed by a thrilling depiction of the Opening of the Seven Seals with the dreaded Apocalyptic Four Horsemen arriving on the scene, via a tour de force canon. The texts involved are shown in Table 6.

With the initial striking section of the very first work of their Cantiones, Tallis’s Salvator mundi (I), Tallis and Byrd figuratively bring their queen into their book's narrative in a way that makes her the main target of their argument or, in rhetorical terms, the one to persuade (see ex. 3.1). As Desiderius Erasmus explains, panegyrists liken their subjects to an excessively flattering, often outright deific, example as the standard means to speak to or even argue with their ruler to counsel as well as praise. To follow Erasmus's model, Tallis and Byrd choose as their example for Elizabeth a specific image of Christ, the Salvator Mundi, which depicts Jesus as a judging king and figure of justice. The composers thereby set a personalized, ruler-oriented, “pattern of goodness” as a model for their queen.

Much of the evidence discussed in this chapter is visual, as it was in the visual arts where the association of Christ with the Salvator Mundi label (iconic title or term) and type was at its strongest. But this investigation as a whole was triggered by aspects of the music in the Cantiones.

In his Politics, Aristotle describes music as a poetic form capable of producing “imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and all of the qualities contrary to these, and of all the qualities of character.” When we experience music, “our souls undergo a change” he suggests, as “even mere melodies” imitate character and the same mimetic “principles apply to rhythms: some have a character of rest, others of motion, and of these again, some have a more vulgar, others a nobler movement.” We do not know, of course, which musical sounds prompted Aristotle to sense these distinctions, nor do we know which sounds he would label as expressing nobility as a general quality. But one imagines that had he heard the first twenty breves of Tallis's Salvator mundi, it would exemplify for him the way certain melodies and rhythmic movements conjure up mental images of a stately, even regal, character.