AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts saturday afternoon 141
“IN POINTED AND DIAMETRICAL OPPOSITION TO THE
RULES OF TRUE TASTE”: THE GOTHICK MUSICAL STYLE
AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF BRITAIN
Ardal Powell
Pendragon Press
The Gothick strain in the literature, painting, architecture, and decoration of the newly-
United Kingdom portrayed a mythic national past rooted in an imagined era of passion and
disorder. Encompassing, in Sir Walter Scott’s phrase, “whatever was in pointed and diametrical
opposition to the rules of true taste,” the style provided distinctively native antithesis to
continental classical purity.
This paper outlines a parallel but hitherto unremarked movement in music, manifested in
professional and domestic performance as well as in British musical discourse. It focuses on
the practices of amateur flute-playing among middle-class men during a surge in the flute’s
popularity during the 1820s, and on the controversial style of their Wellington, the English
flutist Charles Nicholson (1795–1837).
The first native professional instrumentalist to achieve star status in Britain, Nicholson
presented a manly, sentimental, and heroic persona sharply distinguished from those of nonnative
artists, especially the polished French instrumentalists who visited London in the first
two decades of the nineteenth century. I argue that aspects of his repertoire and performance
practice that contemporaries identified as “Gothick” provide the key to appreciating Nicholson’s
distinctiveness, to understanding the polemics over his “taste and judgement,” and to
evaluating discourse on musical ideals and practice during a formative period of the British
national self-image.
With precise reference to musical notation and to instructions for performance practice, I
illustrate a distinction between “embellishment” and “expression” that privileged pathos and
sentimentality over classical structure and bravura. I refer to the distinctive techniques of “expression”
Nicholson documented in unprecedented detail in several tutors and study volumes
published from 1816 to 1836, in particular his painstakingly-notated version of the Scotch air
“Roslin Castle,” to show how the Gothick taste was manifested and perceived in the precise
execution of tone, ornaments, inflections, articulation, and playing posture. Contrasting these
practices with those of foreign flutists visiting London, as documented both in published criticism
and in French and German method books, I make clear the wide gulf between British
and continental tastes.
I argue that Nicholson’s reputation as “our first English artist on his instrument” (The Athanaeum)
rests not only on his birth and his distinctively British style but also on enterprises in
publishing and instrument manufacture that made his practices imitable. The special flute design
he licensed for manufacture, together with his method books, notated expression, public
concerts, and private lessons, afforded a host of male amateur flutists a script for re-playing
his distinctive sounds, actions, and body, and thus to enact a uniquely British, male, Protestant,
middle-class set of manners and feelings at a time when the distinction of this emergent
social class from foreigners, women, Catholics, and the aristocracy held acute political and
social significance.