ABSTRACT
The songs and music discussed in these three essays represent a tiny proportion of the outpouring of songs, ballads, march tunes, concert pieces and performances that marked the period 1793-1815. Music was an important part of most people’s everyday life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and was probably the most far-reaching form of entertainment in the country. Of course, performances varied in levels of sophistication and skill, and varied also in their targeted audiences. But there is considerable commerce between traditional ballad singing, country dancing tunes, the performances in Vauxhall Gardens, and the concert performances in St James, in the sense that players, tunes and musical styles traversed the terrain with relative ease: ‘Folk music impinged on art-music through a number of interlocking causes: a nationalist preference for British sources; and attempt to appeal to ‘popular’ taste; a more equal search for a pre-romantic exoticism; a desire for simplicity and pathos, often allied to an evocation of pastoral innocence.’1
