Musical life in twentieth-century Oxford featured a wide range of events and institutions beyond the confines of the university and its colleges, often interlinked with the ‘gown’ side. Percy Scholes, writing on ‘General Musical Life at Oxford’ during the MT century, warned: ‘The present account can give but a glimpse here and there of an ever increasingly active musical life, which reached its climax during the Allen Professorship and to recount which in a worthy completeness would enlarge too much the present volume’. In this chapter, we too give a ‘glimpse here and there’ of the active musical life sustained throughout the twentieth century in Oxford. In view of the kaleidoscopic nature of the topic, we take a variety of approaches to our material, with a special focus on local performing groups, visiting performers, and concert organizations. A common thread among the sections that follow is the interaction between town and gown.

Although ‘Oxford has no proper concert hall’, in the twentieth century the city was richly provided with auditoria, large halls, and other suitable spaces for musical use. Moreover, it boasts the first custom-built music room, the Holywell Music Room (opened 1748), noted for its ideal acoustic for chamber music, and for larger-scale events there was both the Sheldonian Theatre, the University's assembly room, associated with music from its inception in the late seventeenth century, and the Town Hall, opened in 1897 (Figures 2.1–2.2).

The ‘porous boundaries’ between town and gown mentioned in Chapter 1 are reflected in many examples of reciprocity. On the one hand, the Music Room at ‘Gunfield’, 19 Norham Gardens, home of the Deneke family associated with LMH, was used for concerts by groups including the Oxford Ladies’ Musical Society (OLMS, which became the Oxford Chamber Music Society), and George Thewlis's Oxford Madrigal Society (OMS), discussed further below. On the other hand, the St Aldate's Choral Society (see Chapter 4 on the choir) advertised its regular performance of Handel's Messiah at the church in 1927, with soloists ‘Miss Trueman, Miss Denne Parker, Mr. Edward Manning (Christ Church Choir), and Mr. Clotworthy (New College Choir)’, adding: ‘Any member of the University who knows the work and would care to sing is welcome to do so’. Other examples include the reciprocity between the Balliol Concerts and the OLMS in booking visiting performers (noted in Chapter 7).

Music has always played a central role in the life of Oxford, both in the city and the university, whether through the great collegiate choral foundations, the many amateur choirs and instrumentalists, or the profes-sional musicians regularly drawn to perform there. Music at Oxford from earlier centuries has long been a fruitful source of study, but the twentieth century has not yet received its proper due. We hope this book will start to make good that deficiency.

It has not been, and could not realistically have been, our aim to assemble a comprehensive history of music in twentieth-century Oxford. Given the enormous scope of the book's subject as a whole, selectivity has inevitably been necessary throughout, and has helped shape the differing approaches and structures of the chapters. Their focus is primarily on the ‘classical’ music tradition. Oxford musicians and visiting performers during the twentieth century cultivated other genres such as pop, jazz, and folk, in venues varying in size from the New Theatre (in some phases known as the Apollo) to a city pub. These areas of Oxford's musical life deserve – and we hope will attract – attention from historians that is beyond the scope of our project here.

The well-established notion of the ‘long century’ has proved indispensable in forming the structure of this volume. Its application has been flexible, depending on the chapter topics. For example, with Chapter 6 on the women's colleges the topic clearly invites us to begin the story from the late 1870s, when the earliest such colleges, Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville, were established, while Chapter 8 opens in 1930, when the University College Musical Society was founded. For Chapter 2 (‘Music in the Town’), whose topic is packed with a myriad of musical enterprises, it made sense for the chronological range of its content to start from the 1880s, in view of the founding of numerous organizations at that time which lasted well into the following century or beyond. (However, we have not included in that chapter ventures that began life only at the close of the twentieth century.) And while the focus of Chapter 10 is primarily on the decades around the mid-century, when the Faculty of Music was established under Sir Jack Westrup's leadership, it concludes with highlights of its continuing development under successive holders of the Heather Professorship.

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.

‘On December 7th 1896, the Oxford Bach Choir conducted by Dr. Basil Harwood, organist of Christ Church, gave its first performance in St. Mary Magdalene Church’. Thus Cyril Bailey opened his jubilee history of the Oxford Bach Choir (OBC). Bailey continued:

Basil Harwood, who came from a prosperous background, studied music at Leipzig. Some of his compositions (including his anthem ‘O how glorious is the Kingdom’) are still sung. Henry Hadow was Classics Fellow at Worcester College, while the historian Reginald Lane Poole edited the English Historical Review; both published books on music. Poole's wife Rachael compiled a catalogue of portraits held by Oxford University and its colleges. Henry Gerrans was Bursar of Worcester College and a distinguished mathematician. Paul Benecke, Classics Fellow of Magdalen College (and grandson of Felix Mendelssohn), was a fine pianist. Mabel Price was the daughter of Bartholomew Price, Master of Pembroke College. Cyril Bailey was Classics Fellow of Balliol, and his wife Gemma helped to run the choir.

The OBC's founders came from that modern University elite created when dons were permitted to marry. There were also important recruits from the women's colleges, including Violet Winslow, Bursar of St Hilda's College from 1914–36, and OBC Secretary, who encouraged many St Hilda's undergraduates to join. There were existing choral societies in Oxford, notably the Oxford Choral and Philharmonic Society (the ‘Choral and Phil’), created in 1890 from the Oxford Choral Society and the Philharmonic Society, founded in 1819 and 1865 respectively. Nevertheless, as Bailey wrote, ‘Bach enthusiasts in Oxford feared that he had been unduly neglected there and wished to make special provision for the performance of his works’.

The nineteenth century had seen an awakening of interest in Bach's music in Britain, culminating in the founding of the London Bach Choir (henceforth LBC) in 1876. People in Oxford took notice; in March 1873 the St Matthew Passion was performed in Christ Church Cathedral. On 16 March 1896, a ‘Passion Service’ (opening with a psalm and prayers, and ending with a blessing) was given in Christ Church, with Basil Harwood at the organ.