10 styles · 24 venues · 11 bands and companies · 14 artists · 47 songs
Oxford and every parish
The Church is the realm's great patron of music and its oldest teacher. Every cathedral keeps a choral foundation whose boys are trained from childhood; Oxford is the centre of it, and much of its music is for the dead.
London, the Great Alianor and Vexley Hall
The high stage of the capital, where London settles which piece is no longer fashionable but national. A great name on the bill can carry a whole Season, and the boxes are sold by family, not by number.
Vexley Hall and the private drawing rooms of London
Winter recitals by artists from beyond the Narrow Sea gather river magnates, embassy households, clergy's sons and women of the theatre into one room under the excuse of culture. An invitation to the small private evenings is worth more than a seat in the hall.
Playhouse Lane, London
Below the great stages stretches the trade of the halls: a chairman with a gavel, tables, drink, and choruses that travel home to the lodging houses at midnight.
Sarrum, at the change of the bell
In Sarrum the songs are newspapers. A boiler accident has its chorus before the inquest opens, and a verse fastens on a bad foreman's name so firmly that moving him to another compound does not shake it off. Verses change by district, and the changes tell opinion.
The mast yards of Cambridge, London and Oxford, and the engine halls
The aerial crews sing as the river crews do, to keep a rope in time and a ballast line steady, and like the river crews they sing of the ones the weather kept. The engine trades add comic songs of contraptions that work too well, and the halls take them up within the season.
Taprooms, fairs and coaching inns, the Northern Marches above all
Local memory is carried longest by the road bards: harvest histories, old bargains with spirits, the names of men the bad roads took. In the March their songs are heard as warnings, and carters listen to which roads are sung and which are passed over.
Village taprooms, greens and fair days; the Wheatsheaf at Little Wendle
The songs a village keeps for itself: the harvest lord and the last load, the hiring fair, courting by the Midsummer fire, and the ballads in which it remembers its heroes, since a village keeps its heroes in songs and not in books. Nobody is paid to sing them and everybody knows the chorus.
Kent: the Dover quay houses, the hop fairs, the Canterbury road
Kent sings its news before the Packet prints it. On the quays a wreck has its song before the master has his Christian name in the paper, and every man in the room knows the answer to every line; inland the hop fairs and the pilgrim road carry comic verses about pickers, planters, excisemen and county people.
London's Southbank Rooms, Cambridge, the university towns; outlawed, in the Undercity beneath London
A fashion of students, younger clerks, reformers and artists that defies inherited propriety: mourning worn where nobody has died, the poets of the ruined centuries, a ruin preferred to a monument and a question to a sermon. Its music is the loudest in the realm, and its songs are of love that outlasts the grave, of ruin, the night and the old world under the new. The Church dislikes it more quietly than the papers do, because a few of its rooms move from playing with spirit lore to practising it. At its extreme, where the songs turn against the government and border on anarchy, the Gloam is outlawed: below London's tolerated cellars, in the Undercity, its black phonograph discs pass from hand to hand, owning one is an offence, and half the young clerks of London have heard them anyway.
