Exhibit

Songs: Introduction

Marseillaise.png

Description

Isidaore Pils's later depiction of the impact of Rouget de Lisle's singing of the Marseillaise, for all its fictive quality, captures an important truth about song in our period: it is a major medium by which to engage and move men and women. And for many people, the popular song remained a source of news, a detached representation of events of the day, a source of reflection on the vagaries of history, and a medium for questioning and testing the resilience of the status quo.

In Britain, popular songs could be high or low and could move across performance spaces and between very different audiences. They could become firmly positioned with radical implications - such as the Irish Erin-go-bragh; or emerge, ephemerally rise and then sink with little trace. Tunes might similarly be firmly linked to particular songs, but could also be used (as with Derry Down) across the political spectrum, and be found endless parodied or become vehicles for new inspiration. The Vicar of Bray, about a vacillating and opportunistic clergyman in the early 1700s, can be found parodied in relation to socialist ideas late in the 19th century.

What we have less sense of is the extent to which national traditions of singing, playing and circulating songs were essentially similar or different. It seems likely that predominantly rural communities would function differently from the major urban areas. But the scurrilous and bawdy song culture that eluded the police in Paris in the reign of Louis XVI does not seem exactly mirrored in Britain. And the political resonances and impact of high culture in Europe varied greatly, as we can see from the way that the Belgian Revolution of 1830 was sparked by a stirring song about liberty in an operatic performance in Brussels, and from the invocation of opera as a medium for communicating the nationalist ambitions of the Italian Risorgimento.

This collection cannot do justice to the sheer variety of material available, but it does something to indicate the importance of song both to mark, to commemorate, and inspire forms of protest.

Contributor

Mark Philp