John Stainer: A Life in Music.
Kuykendall, James Brooks
John Stainer: A Life in Music. By Jeremy Dibble. (Music in Britain,
1600-1900.) Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007. [xiv, 362 p. ISBN-10:
1843-832976; ISBN-13: 9781843832973. $55.] Illustrations, music
examples, work-list, bibliography, index.
Aside from his other scholarly activities, Jeremy Dibble is a
gifted biographer, having produced the excellent studies C. Hubert H.
Parry: His Life and Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), and Charles
Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002). His new exploration of the life and music of John Stainer
(1840-1901) is finer still, and all the more impressive because of the
neglected terrain that he covers. Although some of Stainer's works
have found their way into studies of English church music, his life has
received much less attention. With the resurgence of interest in
nineteenth-century British music in recent scholarship, Dibble's
book is a timely reminder of Stainer's significance as a public
musician of a stature comparable to his contemporary and friend Arthur
Sullivan, despite their very different careers.
Stainer started his musical life as a chorister at St. Paul's
Cathedral in London; his training there led to a position as organist at
St. Michael's College, Tenbury when he was only seventeen. There
followed prestigious appointments at Magdelen College, Oxford, and St.
Paul's. Failing eyesight forced him to retire to Oxford in 1888,
although he continued his service as government Inspector of Music in
Schools and Training Colleges. The following year he was appointed
Professor of Music at Oxford, and he became increasingly involved in
scholarly endeavors until his death. Each of these varied capacities
draws from Dibble a rich contextual discussion, the breadth and depth of
which sometimes threaten the progress of a single biographical
narrative. He frames Stainer's boyhood at St. Paul's in the
late 1840s and early 1850s with a history of the choir since the end of
the eighteenth century. His discussions of the intrigues at Oxford and
national reforms in music education (including the Tonic Sol-fa
controversies) have a similarly ambitious scope. Dibble's archival
research is considerable, and the copious information here is tangential in the best sense, underscoring Stainer's connections with the
wider cultural milieu.
Dibble's portrait presents an impressive figure indeed:
"polymath and reformer, conservative and liberal, practical
musician and scholar" (p. 312). The tensions between some of these
characteristics provoke some of Dibble's most convincing readings.
Stainer spent the preponderance of his career as a church musician
implementing conservative Tractarian reforms to a tradition that had, to
some extent, decayed. Stainer's conservatism is thus almost a
radical orthodoxy that appears conservative mainly in hindsight.
Particularly fascinating are the glimpses of Stainer's convictions
about professional standards: Dibble discusses very public
confrontations over the right to claim credentials (pp. 172-74) and the
copyright status of ostensibly "folk" carols (p. 120ff.); and
we see Stainer in private challenging unreasonable examination questions
(p. 271) and looking out for those colleagues who lacked the
professional advantages that he had enjoyed (pp. 272, 301-03).
Dibble's contextual approach leaves less room for a thorough
examination of the music itself. The scattered brief analyses tend to
emphasize tonal motion at the expense of motivic development and even
word setting. This is most convincing in the perceptive discussion of
the 1877 Evening Service in B-flat (p. 191ff.) so much so that it seems
Dibble has developed his analytical method around the mature Stainer and
has then projected it back onto earlier works. There is a sense of
teleology as the things hinted at in earlier pages come to fruition at
last. Even so, Dibble grounds the focus in shifting tonal spheres in his
lengthy discussion (p. 129ff.) of Stainer's A Theory of Harmony
Founded on the Tempered Scale (London: Rivingtons, 1871); moreover, the
chromatic shifts in Stainer's works are remarkable, and were
recognized as such by his contemporaries (p. 240). Most interestingly,
Dibble's tonal analyses enable him to posit musical
"genuflections" in Stainer's text-setting (pp. 61, 122,
126, 191, 282), a stimulating example of Stainer as practical theorist.
The book highlights several other (and more concrete) instances of
Stainer's practicality. Chief among these is the work for which he
is best known, The Crucifixion (1887). As Dibble details, the cantata "revealed Stainer's 'democratic' aspirations for
parish church choirs to enjoy the same form of experience and
occasion" as a Bach Passion, but on a scale that could be
manageable by fewer and more limited--though still competent--musicians,
and its popular success has amply demonstrated Stainer's success
(p. 242). In a similar way, Dibble views The Daughter of Jairus (1878),
composed for the Three Choirs Festival, as a practical response to
controversies at the 1875 festival about the propriety of music in the
cathedral. Stainer's solution was a cantata conceived from the
start to fit within the Anglican liturgy (pp. 206-08). Most intriguing,
perhaps, are Stainer's insights into acoustical and psychological
aspects of changing practices within St. Paul's, as they illuminate
tangible changes in the new music composed for the services as well as
the older music either retained or discarded (pp. 154ff., 162ff.,
184ff.).
Dibble has the uncongenial task of describing music generally
unfamiliar to his reader. Despite the extensive dissemination of
Stainer's music by Novello, anthems and services are precisely the
sort of inexpensive editions that often have not been retained in music
libraries, particularly in the United States. Aside from the most
successful pieces and those featured in the supplements of the Musical
Times, in many cases the music is not readily available; for this
reason, a greater number of music examples would have been helpful.
(There are only twenty-two examples in 315 pages of text.) On rare
occasions in which extensive examples are given--the 1858 anthem "I
saw the Lord", for example (pp. 57-60)--Dibble's compelling
discussion still has one turning to the complete score, at the very
least in order to find the measure numbers (lacking in all but one of
the examples, but cited in the text).
The illustrations, placed at the end of the text, are
well-selected. The few typographical and editing errors were easily
recognized as such. The work list is impressive and useful, but it is
marred by a puzzling organizational scheme. It is ostensibly divided
into four main sections: church music, secular vocal music, instrumental
music, and "Literary Works." This last section comprises
books, articles, lectures, papers, and addresses (with Stainer's
lectures as Professor of Music at Oxford listed separately);
Stainer's five educational primers are included not here but at the
end of the church music section, together with a lengthy list of the
Novello primers edited jointly by Stainer and Hubert Parry. (Publication
dates for the entire list would have been helpful.) Also included within
church music are works edited by Stainer, although why Schumann's
Das Gluck von Edenhall should be considered sacred is not explained. A
table of Stainer's hymn tunes is organized chronologically by year,
but within each year items are listed by metrical scheme of the text
according to a computerized alphabetization: because of its initial
digit, 11 appears before (not after) 4, and numbers come before letters.
Granted, in such a list, any organization beyond the chronology could be
arbitrary. Systematic though it may be to a machine, I found this
particular solution annoying. Moreover, inconsistent classification of
the meter defeats any merit in this organization, and yielded at least
one redundancy ("Joy bells are sounding sweetly" on p. 326).
The works listed in the index are arranged more sensibly.
The greatest strength of this and Dibble's other biographies
is the further study he provokes by the vast extent of his contextual
treatment. In his examination of John Stainer, Dibble reminds us of the
complexities of the cultures within the Victorian cathedral, university,
and educational system, and provides a model for an understanding of how
these interact with Victorian music. Most important, Dibble's work
invigorates--rather than overwhelms--in opening areas for further
exploration.
JAMES BROOKS KUYKENDALL
Erskine College
