SOURCE: Girdham, Jane. “Black Musicians in England: Ignatius Sancho and His Contemporaries.” In Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters, edited by Reyahn King and others, pp. 115-26. London: National Portrait Gallery, 1997.

[In the following essay, Girdham offers an account of a number of little-known eighteenth-century Black musicians, many of whom were friends of Sancho's, and goes on to discuss Sancho's music and explain the social significance of his compositions.]

Music-making was one of the most popular leisure activities in 18th-century Britain. Gentlemen made sure their daughters learnt to sing and play the harpsichord, and no sophisticated evening's entertainment was complete without music. Amateurs performed at home, in private music clubs, and sometimes next to professional musicians in public venues. Public concerts were held in halls, in pleasure gardens and in theatres, the latter also being a common place for opera performances. Many of the people who formed the audiences at professional concerts were amateurs themselves. They kept music publishers busy printing songs, instrumental pieces, and instruction manuals. A few even composed and published their own music. We know little about them now beyond their printed music unless, like Ignatius Sancho, they were prominent in other spheres. Although Sancho's letters were a best-seller after his death, his music fell into obscurity. Yet without it, we do not have a rounded picture of this black man of letters.

Sancho was by no means the only black musician in 18th-century England; although his amateur status made him one of the least known. A few black musicians made their names as performers, composers and teachers. Music became their way to improve their social and professional standing, often despite the colour of their skin.

Solo instrumentalists made their names on the concert platform. An individual's popularity could be enhanced by some distinctive feature, such as a striking appearance or extreme youth. Child prodigies were always well received, from Mozart in the 1760s to other lesser known figures. Some, like the pianist and composer John Field went on to long professional careers; others soon dropped out of sight (Milligan, 1983, pp. 24-5, 140-1).

One of the most prominent young violinists in London in the 1790s was George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower (1778-1860), described in a newspaper review of 1790 as ‘little Bridgetower, the African’ (Milligan, 1983, p. 24). His father was West Indian, his mother from eastern Europe. His father had been a servant to Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, the Hungarian aristocrat whose musical court was directed by Joseph Haydn. Indeed Haydn may have taught the young Bridgetower. He came to London with his father in 1789, straight from his début in Paris. In England, Bridgetower père adopted a showy pose as an ‘African Prince in the Turkish attire’ (F. G. E., 1908, p. 303) and callously exploited his son, who eventually secured the patronage of the Prince of Wales (later George IV), himself an amateur cellist. Beethoven composed the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, Op. 47 for Bridgetower (despite a dispute between the two musicians which led Beethoven to alter the dedication), with whom he gave its first performance in Vienna in 1803.

Around the time of Bridgetower's arrival in England another black violinist was trying to establish himself in London. Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (c. 1739-1799), was already a prolific composer and well known in Paris, where he had become music director of the Concert des Amateurs in 1773. He was less successful in England where, according to the singer Michael Kelly, Saint-Georges and the violinist Giornovichi ‘attempted to carry on concerts by subscription, but they failed’ (Kelly, [1826] 1968, p. 339). Saint-Georges, born in Guadeloupe and educated in France by his aristocratic French father, had an unusual dual career. He was also a famous fencer and a soldier, and was better known in England for his fencing matches than for his considerable musical skills.

One of the few other black musicians we know by name was a provincial music teacher, violinist, and composer. Joseph Antonia Emidy was born in west Africa. He was enslaved and taken to Portugal where he became a violinist at the Lisbon opera house. He was captured in Lisbon by a British naval officer to play dances for his crew, and seven years later was released to settle in Falmouth as a professional musician and teacher. James Silk Buckingham, who took flute lessons from Emidy, failed to bring his music to a wider audience because certain London musicians decided that ‘his colour would be so much against him, that there would be a great risk of failure’ (Buckingham, [1855] 1973, p. 177).

Not all well-known musicians were so respectable. Billy Waters (died 1823), one-legged ‘king of the beggars’ and fiddle player, was so well established in London that he played himself on stage in an adaptation of Pierce Egan's Life in London and was portrayed in several engravings and broadsheets (Edwards and Walvin, 1983, pp. 163-70).

While some black musicians became professional soloists, others joined military bands, in which they had long been employed as trumpeters and drummers (Farmer, 1950, p. 103). In the last decade or so of the 18th century these musicians were assigned a new role when the British army finally succumbed to the fashion for ‘Janissary’ instruments in their bands. A group of black musicians would be deliberately set apart from the rest of the players as a ‘Janissary’ band, distinguished by their skin colour and elaborate costumes, and playing identifiably foreign (Turkish) instruments. This fashion had started on the Continent in the early years of the century when Augustus II of Poland acquired an entire military band from the Turkish sultan. ‘Janissary’ bands were especially distinguished by percussion sections of bass drum, cymbals, triangle, tambourine, and ‘jingling Johnie’ (a crescent with bells), whose distinctive sounds soon came to symbolise Turkish music to western European audiences. Composers began to use these instruments to evoke a Turkish atmosphere, most notably Mozart in his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) of 1782.

By 1782 the Royal Artillery Band had become the first British regimental band to use Turkish percussion instruments, with a group of bass drum, cymbals and tambourine; other regiments soon followed (Farmer, 1950, p. 45). In Britain the instruments were not played by Turks but by black British musicians dressed flamboyantly in ‘Turkish’ costume. They quickly gained a reputation for grand gestures and extravagant behaviour:

Dressed in high turbans, bearskins, or cocked hats, with towering hackle feather plumes, and gaudy coats of many colours, braided and slashed gorgeously and gapingly, they capered rather than marched, and flung their drumsticks and tambourines into the air, adroitly catching them in discreetly measured cadence. Their agility with fingers, arms and legs was only equalled by their perfect time in the music.

(Farmer, 1950, p. 46)

Janissary bands reached their height of popularity in Britain in the 1790s, when Haydn made a famous reference to them in his ‘Military’ Symphony, No. 100, written for the London concert season of 1794. He added a triangle, cymbals and bass drum to the normal orchestra, introducing them with startling effect in the middle of the slow movement. Janissary bands were disbanded early in Queen Victoria's reign, but reminders still survive in the drumstick gestures and leopard-skin aprons of modern military drummers.

Back on the domestic scene, the large black community in London doubtless spawned many an amateur musician, but documentation survives only for the few who found places in the ‘white’ world, usually through the patronage of some wealthy supporter. Julius Soubise, a Jamaican by birth, was the protégé of the Duchess of Queensberry and, amongst other things, an amateur violinist. His increasingly dissolute life led to a scandal which provoked the Duchess to send him to India in 1778. Sancho's letters criticise Soubise's untrustworthy character, comparing him unfavourably with Sancho's friend Charles Lincoln, another black musician. Lincoln was a ship's bandsman on the boat that Soubise took to India, and was characterised by Sancho as ‘honest, trusty, good-natured, and civil’ (Edwards and Rewt, 1994, pp. 35, 95, 154-5, 166-7, 254). Soubise died in India in a riding accident; Lincoln eventually returned home to St. Kitts.

Ignatius Sancho was one of the few Africans in 18th-century England to become a member of the middle class, highly literate and an amateur musician and composer. He was recognised in his lifetime as a man of cultivated taste in various artistic areas, but his legacy of four volumes of published music provides virtually our only information about his musical activities. No copy survives of his Theory of Music, which his biographer Jekyll said ‘was discussed, published, and dedicated to the Princess Royal’ (Edwards and Rewt, 1994, p. 24). His letters give us very few glimpses of his musical activities, just occasional modest remarks such as ‘the little dance (which I like because I made it)’ (Edwards and Rewt, 1994, p. 115).

Sancho's surviving music consists of one set of songs and three sets of dances, all published over roughly a twelve-year period between 1767 and 1779, and totalling 62 short compositions (Wright, 1981, pp. 3-62). Like most composers before the late 1780s, Sancho did not copyright his editions, so that no copies were assigned to the nine copyright libraries. Few copies of his music survive today. (Their title pages are listed in the bibliography.) Sancho identified himself merely as ‘an African’ in the first three publications, thus conforming to the habits of many amateur composers by keeping his anonymity (other common descriptions were ‘an amateur’ and ‘a lady’), while at the same time asserting his African heritage. In the last set of dances, Sancho gave his name on the title page, then identified his ethnicity in the title of the final dance. He called it ‘Mungo's Delight’, after the famous slave character in the opera The Padlock (1768) by Charles Dibdin and Isaac Bickerstaffe—‘Mungo’ rapidly became slang for ‘black man’. Sancho always made his ethnicity clear, using the signature ‘Africanus’ when writing to newspapers (Edwards and Rewt, 1994, pp. 93, 124), and persistently emphasising his appearance throughout his letters. This constant affirmation of his ethnicity shows a determination to disprove the contemporary opinion that Africans were intellectually inferior to Europeans.

Sancho also indicated his amateur status by having his music published ‘for the author’, which means he paid for the printing. Again this was the normal method of publication for composers who were not yet established. The title page of the second set of dances names Richard Duke as the printer and music seller. By the time Sancho published his last set in 1779, he had become a public figure and was therefore perhaps less of a financial risk. So thought Samuel and Ann Thompson, the reputable music sellers who published the dances. Sancho dedicated all his published works to close relatives of his third patron, George Brudenell, Duke of Montagu (Wright, 1981, p. xix). But although his dedications suggest he was composing for an aristocratic audience, they certainly do not preclude performance by other groups. For instance, gatherings of black servants would probably have favoured music by a black composer when, as an 18th-century writer reports, they ‘entertained themselves with dancing and music, consisting of violins, French horns, and other instruments’ where ‘all the performers were black’ (Wright, 1981, p. xv).

Sancho's music was designed to be performed on social occasions, at dances and at informal domestic recitals. His country dances include instructions for steps. Sancho's instrumental parts are playable by amateurs as well as professionals. In either case most of the players would have been men, because violins, horns and flutes all belonged to a distinctly male preserve. Only the harpsichord (and perhaps the mandolin) were commonly played by women.

The songs are suitable for amateur performers, either women or men. They are printed in the standard two-stave oblong layout of the time, with the vocal part for soprano or tenor. An easy keyboard accompaniment doubles the voice and adds harmonic support. The songs could be performed by a single performer accompanying him- or herself, or by two people.

Sancho's dance music is written in dance forms that were already popular: minuets, English country dances and cotillons (French country dances), some of which he gave colourful English and French titles. A country dance is less a series of specific steps than a choreographed series of movements in a line dance formation. Unlike minuets, country dances can be danced to music in a variety of meters, though in practice they are usually in two to a bar. Sir John Hawkins, a contemporary of Sancho, states that ‘for the composition of country-dance tunes no rule is laid down by any of the writers on music, perhaps for this reason, that there is in music no kind of time whatever but may be measured by those motions and gesticulations common in dancing’ (Hawkins, [1776] 1963, pp. 705-6n). A minuet, on the other hand, always has three beats in a bar and ‘consists of two strains, which, being repeated, are called reprises, each having eight or more bars, but never an odd number’ (Hawkins, [1776] 1963, p. 705).

Regular phrasing is just as essential for country dances as for minuets. Sancho's dances all use regular two-bar or four-bar phrases built into short repeated sections. He writes in the popular galant or ‘pleasing’ style of mid-century, with a simple texture and in predominantly major keys. His melodies are tuneful and delicately ornamented; his harmonic style is not adventurous. … In ‘Christmas Eve’, two-bar phrases combine into larger repeated sections, and the active melody outlines chords. ‘Le douze Decembre’ has somewhat broader four-bar phrases, a generally smoother melodic line and more rhythmic variety. Both are harmonically very plain. These titles may indicate when they were originally performed. Other titles seem to be whimsical, while still more may refer to people and places in Sancho's life (Wright, 1981, pp. xxii-iii). His dance ‘Lindrindod Lasses’, for example, could refer to a visit to Llandrindod Wells by a correspondent of Sancho's, Mrs Cocksedge. Similarly, the dance ‘Culford Heath Camp’ may be associated either with Sancho's brother-in-law, John Osborne, who was in the military, or with Mrs Cocksedge, who visited the camp (Edwards and Rewt, 1994, pp. 116, 143).

Sancho's dances can be played by various combinations of instruments. First and second violins, mandolin, German (i.e. transverse) flute, harpsichord, two horns and a bass instrument are listed on the title pages and within the scores. In practice, the dances could have been played on harpsichord alone (as specified for the third set), by a duo of one melody instrument and harpsichord, or by a fuller ensemble that included several melody instruments (violin, flute and mandolin, and any other available instrument), a pair of natural horns and a continuo group of harpsichord with either cello or bassoon.

Sancho's songs are some of his most appealing pieces. They are charming and light in spirit, straightforward and easy to sing. Like other songs being published in increasing numbers in the second half of the 18th century, they were well suited to domestic entertainment.

Sancho's six songs are all in fashionably galant style, attractive and within the capabilities of most amateur singers. They are well placed in soprano and tenor ranges (with tenor reading up an octave); there are only a few really high notes, and vocal ornaments are confined to straightforward trills and appoggiaturas.

Sancho showed a wide-ranging poetic taste in his choice of song texts. He set one poem by Shakespeare (from Measure for Measure), one by the Greek poet Anacreon in modern translation (Wright, 1981, p. xix), two by David Garrick, and one is anonymous. The last is by ‘a young Lady’, who may have been an acquaintance. Sancho was also acquainted with Garrick, who was the most famous actor of his time, proprietor of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and an author.

Five of the six songs are strophic, with the first verse set to music and subsequent verses written out below to be sung to identical music, like a hymn. The music generally conveys an overall mood rather than illustrating specific words in the poems. In fact, with the exception of the first song of the set, ‘The Complaint’, the words are often little more than an excuse for a pretty tune. It is clear from the way Sancho broke up the lines of verse, sometimes repeating one short phrase over and over to give direction to the musical shape, that he cared more about musical phrasing than poetic coherence. In ‘Sweetest Bard’, to a text by Garrick, he repeats all the lines twice or three times. Like most of the other songs, ‘Sweetest Bard’ is squarely phrased and harmonically simple. Only in ‘The Complaint’, the most serious song of the set, does Sancho use musical imagery in direct response to the words, with particular emphasis on ‘so sweetly’ and colourful harmonies to the words ‘but my kisses bring again’.

Sancho never claimed to be a gifted musician, but he obviously felt competent enough to compose and to see his compositions into print. He clearly composed music for real people to sing and dance to, probably people he knew. He kept his pieces simple, within the bounds of his own skills and those of any amateur performer. Within their technical limits, Sancho's compositions work well: they are tuneful, cheerful, easy to understand and easy to remember.

There was never any question of Sancho the African stepping out of the norms of mid-century European musical style, as his education—however he achieved it—had taken place entirely in England. Although Sancho always remembered that his was an adopted culture, his musical compositions are some of the best proof of his assimilation into that culture.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Complete list of musical publications by Ignatius Sancho

Minuets, Cotillons & Country Dances for the Violin, Mandolin, German Flute, & Harpsichord Composed by an African Most humbly Inscribed to his Grace Henry Duke of Buccleugh, &c, &c, &c. London. Printed for the Author. [c. 1767].

A Collection of New Songs Composed by An African Humbly Inscribed to the Honble. Mrs James Brudenell by her most humble Devoted & obedient Servant, The Author. [c. 1769].

Minuets &c. &c. for the Violin Mandolin German-Flute and Harpsichord. Compos'd by an African. Book 2d. Humbly Inscribed to the Right Honble. John Lord Montagu of Boughton. London. Printed for the Author and sold by Richd. Duke at his Music Shop near Opposite Great Turn stile Holburn, where may be had Book first. [c. 1770].

Twelve Country Dances for the Year 1779. Set for the Harpsichord By Permission Humbly Dedicated to the Right Honourable Miss North, by her most obedient Servant Ignatius Sancho. London Printed for S and A Thompson No 75 St Pauls Church Yard Price 6d. [1779].

Secondary Sources

Angelo, H. (1904), The Reminiscences of Henry Angelo, with Memoirs of His Life, Father and Friends, [1830], Philadelphia, I, pp. 347-52;

Banat, G. (1990), ‘Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Man of Music and Gentleman-at-Arms: The Life and Times of an Eighteenth-Century Prodigy’, Black Music Research Journal, vol. X, pp. 177-212;

Buckingham, J. S. (1973), ‘Emidee, A Negro Musician’, The Black Perspective in Music, vol. I, pp. 175-7;

De Lerma, D-R. (1990), ‘Black Composers in Europe: A Works List’, Black Music Research Journal, vol. X, pp. 275-343;

De Lerma, D-R. (1976), ‘The Chevalier de Saint-Georges’, The Black Perspective in Music, vol. IV, pp. 3-21;

Derr, E. (1980), ‘Saint-Georges [Saint-George], Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, XVI, pp. 391-2;

E., F. G. (1908), ‘George P. Bridgetower and the Kreutzer Sonata’, Musical Times, vol. IL, pp. 302-8;

Edwards, P. and P. Rewt (eds) (1994), The Letters of Ignatius Sancho, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press;

Edwards, P. and J. Walvin (1983), Black Personalities in the Era of the Slave Trade, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University;

Farmer, H. G. (1950), Handel's Kettledrums and Other Papers on Military Music, London: Hinrichsen;

Hawkins, Sir J. ([1853] 1963), A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 1776, New York: Dover;

Highfill, P. H. Jr., K. A. Burnim and E. A. Langhans (1973-1993), ‘Bridgetower, George Augustus Polgreen’, in A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800, Carbondale, Ill., vol. II, pp. 332-3;

Kelly, M. ([2nd ed., 1826] 1968), Reminiscences of Michael Kelly of the King's Theatre and Theatre Royal Drury Lane, New York: Da Capo Press (1968);

Landon, H. C. R. (1976), Haydn in England 1791-1795, pp. 65-7, 256, Bloomington: Indiana University Press;

McGrady, R. (1991), Music and Musicians in Early Nineteenth-Century Cornwall: The World of Joseph Emidy—Slave, Violinist and Composer, Exeter: University of Exeter Press;

Milligan, T. (1983), The Concerto and London's Musical Culture in the Late Eighteenth Century, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press;

Papendiek, C. (1887), Court and Private Life in the Time of Queen Charlotte, London: Richard Bentley & Son;

Wright, J. (1980), ‘George Polgreen Bridgetower: An African Prodigy in England 1789-1799’, Musical Quarterly, vol. LXVI, pp. 65-82;

Wright, J. R. B. (ed.) (1981), Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780), An Early African Composer in England: The Collected Editions of His Music in Facsimile, New York: Garland Publishing Inc.