This week, I’m writing about a British literary family history and its connection with music for silent cinema. One of my favourite living writers is Alan Bennett (1934-), and among all his work it is his memoirs and personal essays that I revisit again and again. This is, in part, because many of them are available as audiobooks read by the author himself. I have read his memoirs more than once but listened to the (abridged) audio versions many times over. Of particular interest are two volumes: Telling Tales (2001) and Untold Stories (2005). The former is a series of reflections on Bennett’s childhood and the people and places he knew as a boy growing up in Leeds in the 1940s. Telling Tales is a kind of sketch for Untold Stories, but the latter goes into more detail about Bennett’s parents and their history, tracing the mental illness on his mother’s side of the family through two generations. Both accounts contain details that are of interest for this blog, for Bennett writes about his early cinemagoing experiences—and the earlier experiences of his parents’ generation.
In Telling Tales, Bennett’s piece “Aunt Eveline” relates memories of Eveline Peel, his grandmother’s sister-in-law. At the end of the silent era, she had been a pianist for a cinema in a local cinema (in, I presume, Halifax, where she lived). After the arrival of sound in the 1930s, she became a “corsetière”, then in the 1940s she turned to housekeeping. But she never stopped playing the piano at home, and her music collection was founded on the repertoire she built for silent film accompaniment. Bennett records that he still has Eveline’s sheet music. Much of it is covered in brown paper, not uncommon to preserve well-thumbed scores. More interestingly, the edges of the pages are likewise bound in brown paper, “for easier turning over when, in the darkened pit of the Electric, she gazes up at the silent screen while thumping out ‘Any Time’s Kissing Time’, ‘Mahbubah’, or ‘The Careless Cuckoo Cakewalk’ by Ernest Bucalossi, in brackets ‘very animated’.” Bennett likewise records finding “The Mosquito’s Parade” by Howard Whitney, “At the Temple Gates” by Gatty Sellars, and “sheets and sheets of Ivor Novello” (Telling Tales, 119), together with works by Vivian Ellis, Gilbert & Sullivan, and copious “Edwardian favourites” like Albert Ketèlbey (“Untold Stories”, 52-55).
I was curious about these titles and decided to look them up. Some were easier to find than others. Both “Mahbubah” and “Any Time’s Kissing Time” are numbers from Chu Chin Chow (1916), a musical comedy by Oscar Asche with music by Frederic Norton (1869-1946). This was loosely based on “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves”, and proved an immensely popular hit—running for over five years and two thousand performance. It’s no wonder the music migrated to the popular music press, to recorded media, and thence to the repertory of cinemas. Much the same can be said of the work of Vivian Ellis (1903-1996), a prolific composer for musicals in London’s West End in the 1920s and 30s. Numbers like Ellis’s “Spread a Little Happiness”, from Mister Cinders (1928) could achieve success on stage, then success on record, then success as sheet music for pianists at home or at the cinema.
As for Ernest Bucalossi (1863-1933), he was the son of Procida Bucalossi (1832-1918). Both men were British-Italian composers of light music, as well as arrangers and orchestrators of the music of others. Their work is now obscure, doubly so since they often signed their scores “Bucalossi” without distinguishing father from son. Lists of their hits include numerous dances, arrangements of Gilbert & Sullivan, the occasional operetta or musical, and countless “descriptive” pieces. The latter no doubt appealed to theatre and cinema orchestras to fit new arrangements for stage and screen. Works for ensemble and small orchestra were endlessly used and reused, and who knows how often films were shown with Eveline Peel’s favourite choices at the piano or organ. (I can find no recording of the “Careless Cuckoo Cakewalk”, but there are plenty of short pieces by Bucalossi that survive in various renditions. His delightful “Grasshopper’s Dance” seems to have been a much-favoured ditty since its publication in 1905.)
The other pieces Bennett cites are more obscure. Gatty Sellars (1875-1947) was a popular recital organist in the 1920s-30s, and all I can find out about his piece “At the Temple Gates” is the year it was published: 1930. An exquisitely clunky film by British Pathé shows Sellars performing this piece in 1931. Sellars himself peers awkwardly over his shoulder at the camera, a glimpse of one of innumerable popular entertainers from the interwar years who have disappeared into the shadows. Likewise, I’ve been able to find out very little about Howard Whitney (1869-1924), composer of “The Mosquito’s Parade” (c.1899). He seems to have been American, and several of his short pieces were recorded in the early 1900s. The earliest of these is listed as “Mosquito Parade”, recorded by Arthur Pryor’s Orchestra in 1899. Numerous other short pieces (as with Bucalossi, often given descriptive titles) received renditions for small orchestra, piano, organ, banjo etc. in the earliest years of the gramophone. He was clearly popular enough in the 1900s for his music to have made it into the British repertoire in subsequent decades.
But the most prominent name among Eveline Peel’s collection is that of Albert Ketèlbey (1875-1959), whose acute accent appears as a delightfully distinctive affectation. Ketèlbey was an extraordinarily successful composer of “light music” from the 1910s until the 1940s. He was the master of the “descriptive” piece, short (around five minutes) musical numbers that could fill out a concert programme or be used as scene-setting for a silent film score. Simple, succinct, and suggestive, Ketèlbey’s music was easy to perform and easy to arrange and rearrange for performance in theatres, cinemas, and at home. His career traversed the lucrative worlds of late Victorian and Edwardian musical theatre, silent cinema, and the coming of sound. His music was copiously published for public consumption, as well as being recorded and distributed on various formats. Either as a full score (for orchestra and chorus), or as arranged for smaller forces or soloists, his short piece “In a Persian Market” (1920) was “probably more frequently played, at home and abroad, than any other work in the history of English music, with the possible exception of the national anthem” (Ehrlich, Harmonious Alliance, 37).
Having spent much of the morning listening to Ketèlbey’s tunes on youtube, I can vouch that he represents the very definition of “light music”. He is tuneful, elegant, and very easy on the ear. Indeed, the easiness of the music—to perform and to receive—is doubtless the reason for its extraordinary success. Such pieces of light music are the distant relatives of the kinds of “programme music” or “tone poems” produced by many major composers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though they share the same method of evocative titles and descriptive music, their depth and complexity is… well, far less deep and complex than their “serious” forebears. As I write, I’m currently listening to “In a Fairy Realm” (1927), the first movement of which is like something from Parsifal watered-down to a kind of sugary vagueness. It’s mood music for audiences that could never go to the opera, or who might not have the interest in going. Instead of four-and-a-half hours of Wagner, you can have four-and-a-half minutes of Ketèlbey. If this is not music of lasting depth (either aesthetic or emotional), it is certainly music of great utility. I’m not sure I’d sit and listen to a concert of pure Ketèlbey, but I can absolutely imagine his music working perfectly with silent films. Its lightness might easily be deepened and enhanced by cinematic images, just as the music would enhance the images.
To return to Bennett’s memoirs of his parents and aunt, it’s worth reflecting on the incredible impact of cinema on the business of light music. There was a reciprocal relationship between film and music, as well as between music publishers and cinemas. There was a huge demand for light music to perform during screenings, so music (and the rights to it) had to be made available for this purpose. Composers like Ketèlbey benefitted enormously from the growth of film with live musical performance in the 1910s and 20s. As audiences boomed, so did the quality and quantity of music. Larger audiences meant larger cinemas, larger cinemas meant larger musical forces. And more and longer films required more and longer musical accompaniments. Once embedded in a cinema orchestra’s repertoire, who knows how many times the same pieces would be rearranged and replayed for new films? (For a history of the legal situation of music publication and performance in Britain in this period, see Davison, “Workers’ Rights and Performing Rights”.)
The boom in music was also, of course, a boon for musicians. As Geoffrey Self relates, three-quarters of British instrumental musicians were employed (partially or wholly) in cinemas by the end of the 1920s (Light Music, 125). Cinema can be credited for the fact that, in that decade, “more live music was being performed by professional musicians than at any other time in the country’s history” (Ehrlich, Harmonious Alliance, 35). Eveline Peel was thus among the tens of thousands of musicians who benefitted from regular employment by cinemas, not to mention those like Walter Bennett who performed as occasional performers when the need arose. In this context, the coming of sound was an unimaginable crisis. A census in 1931 suggests that about one third of all musicians in the UK were unemployed: up to 15,000 musicians had lost their jobs as a direct result of synchronized sound films (Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain, 210). Eveline Peel’s move from musician to “corsetiere”, and from corsetiere to housekeeper, was just one of thousands of transitions enforced by the shift in film technology.
Bennett’s account of his aunt reopens a whole little world of film history. I wonder what other pieces, by what other composers, survives in her sheet music collection? And how often were they performed, and accompanying what films? Answering such questions would certainly make a good research project: a small window into musical performance in northern England at the end of the 1920s. But Bennett’s own account also illustrates the wider significance of Eveline and her music.
After the arrival of sound, Eveline Peel made music only within the home, with close family and friends. Bennett records that throughout his childhood in the 1940s, there were regular musical gatherings at his grandmother’s home. Eveline would play the piano, Walter would accompany her on the violin, and various others would sing. His description of this kind of communal musicmaking is another window into home entertainment in the war and post-war years. The conclusion to Bennett’s account of his aunt is likewise instructive:
[I]t isn’t death that puts paid to these musical evenings, though when Aunt Eveline dies we inherit her piano and take it home. What takes its place in the smoky sitting room is a second-hand television set and it’s this which, within a year or so, makes such musical evenings inconceivable. My other aunties don’t mind, as talking as always had to be suspended while Aunt Eveline presides at the piano, whereas with the TV no one minds if you talk. And until they get a proper table for it, the TV even squats for a while in triumph on the piano stool that Aunt Eveline has occupied for so long. (“Aunt Eveline”, 119)
I say “instructive”, and of course it is: it touches on the way home entertainment changed from music-making to music listening, from active participation to passive reception; it suggests how the fate of the music and musicians of the silent era gradually sank away into obscurity and obsolescence. But more than this, Bennett’s memoirs are an immensely engaging and moving account of family history. I recommend both Telling Tales and Untold Stories unreservedly.
Paul Cuff
References
Alan Bennett, “Auntie Eveline”, in Telling Tales (London: BBC, 2001).
Alan Bennett, “Untold Stories” and “The Ginnel”, in Untold Stories (London: Faber & Faber, 2005).
Annette Davison, “Workers’ Rights and Performing Rights: Cinema Music and Musicians Prior to Synchronized Sound”, in Julie Brown and Annette Davison (eds), The Sounds of the Silents in Britain (Oxford UP, 2013), 243-62.
Cyril Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain Since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
Cyril Ehrlich, Harmonious Alliance: A History of the Performing Right Society (Oxford UP, 1989).
Geoffrey Self, Light Music in Britain since 1870: A Survey (London: Routledge, 2016).
The Realm of Silence 