Book Review: The Music Profession in Britain, 1780–1920: New Perspectives on Status and Identity

Abstract

The year 2015 marked the thirtieth anniversary of Cyril Ehrlich’s landmark book, The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (1986).1 A conference was organized, and this volume of essays has resulted from it. Professor Cyril Ehrlich (1925–2004) was primarily an economic historian of Africa. In the course of the 1960s, he switched his research to music. He realized that while the social history of music had begun to receive attention, its economic history had been virtually ignored. His first book in this field was The Piano: A History (1976) in which he focused upon industrial production and the growth of a market.2 Ehrlich’s influence has been considerable, as evident in a series of essays published in his honor in 2000, Music and British Culture 1785–1914 (Christina Bashford and Leanne Langley, eds.).3 As far as music education history is concerned, David Wright’s notable social and cultural history The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (2013)4 is clearly influenced by Ehrlich’s work. In the Introduction, Rosemary Golding outlines the main themes under consideration. Her dilemma lies in the impossibility of describing a single ‘music profession’ because of music’s protean nature. She quotes the sociologist Julia Evetts’s writing about professions: “Most researchers have accepted definitional uncertainty and moved on” (p. 2). In this volume, the contributors positively engage with such incertitude. Rebecca Gribble’s opening chapter considers the finances, estates, and social status of musicians in the late eighteenth century. She challenges the commonly held view that musicians occupied a low social status as artisans. In fact, they could gain patronage and improve their own social status through teaching socially superior young women to play an instrument or sing. Other artisans lacked this contact. Gribble concludes that while allocating ‘artisan’ status can be