Finding Themselves: Musical Revolutions in Nineteenth-century Staffordshire

In April 1917, a man by the name of Daniel Heath wrote to his son, Thomas Wood Heath, in Australia. His letter, entitled Some Recollections of Musical Instruments, and Those Who Played them in the Stoke-on-Trent Area, provides a rich and detailed firsthand account of music-making in the Potteries over the preceding seven decades. ¹ Among descriptions of his many musical undertakings, Heath reveals that he was one of the founder members of the Burslem Tonic Sol-fa Choir, a group of amateur singers that surfaced in Staffordshire in the middle of the nineteenth century. And what emerges most strikingly in his letter, and has implications for our understanding of the development of amateur music-making in provincial Britain, is the extent to which the Tonic Sol-fa notation and method of teaching could be regarded as having catalysed musical improvement in that area. This chapter seeks to investigate that question, and to consider Heath’s experiences of the Tonic Sol-fa movement in their appropriate contexts, both local and national.