Sonneck Society for American Music
Bulletin, Volume XXIV, no. 1 (Spring 1998)
Letter from Britain
I write to you in late February looking out the window onto a gloomy, chilly,
overcast, and damp md-winter day in England. While hiking around Cheshire several weeks
ago, however, we saw an entire hillside of snowdrops in full bloom, so spring can't be
very far off.
I'm writing from Keele University, a familiar name to many Sonneckers because of the
SSAM special conference held here in 1983 and also because it is the home institution of
David Nicholls, who usually pens this Letter from England. Keele is located midway
between Manchester and Birmingham in te area known as "the Potteries," consisting of
Stoke-on-Trent, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Hanley, and several other towns. It is called
"The Potteries" because this is where the big-name china manufacturers -- Wedgwood, Spode,
Royal Doulton, and so forth -- are all located (although "pottery" conjures up in my
mind much more pedestrian images than the likes of Wedgwood china). Tiny Keele village
and the Keele estate, on which the university is located, are two miles due west of
Newcastle-under-Lyme. The Department of Music is in the Clock House building, a two-minute
walk away from Keele Hall itself, which is a glorious 1860 red sandstone Victorian
manorhouse, complete with turrets and wrought-iron weather vanes, a formal garden,
and a sweeping vista of the rural Staffordshire countryside. I write this letter on
David Nicholls's computer in his office in the Clock House, and he is plausibly at this
moment sitting at my computer in my office at the College of William & Mary, for we've
swapped places for the semester. (And yes, our families have accompanied us, so we
aren't going to duplicate the dicier parts of David Lodge's Trading Places.
It has been a very interesting experience for me to figure out how to teach not only
in a different institution but also in an unfamiliar educational system. Although I
am teaching some familiar classes, there are many profound differences. The students
here, for example, attend university for three years, so third-year students are the
equivalent of our "seniors." And music students all seem to arrive at university with an
expertise in music that I cannot take for granted of students at home. Students here are
presumed to be self-starters to a much greater extent than American undergraduates; textbooks
are not required, nor are the sets of tapes or CDs that most American professors put
on reserve. Students at Keele, I am assured, will go off and find appropriate recordings
and read materials that have been put on reserve in the library to supplement the lectures.
The semester is twelve weeks long (ten weeks for third-year students) and classes in this
department meet only once per week, for two hours; this is consistent, I suppose,
with the concept that students are educating themselves with guidance from the professors,
or lecturers as anyone but a full professor is titled here. While I'm on the topic of
semester length, I should mention Easter Break, which lasts for an entire month
and falls roughly 3/4 of the way through the semester.
Consistent with the idea of self-starting students is the fact that few classes have
exams or quizzes and very rarely is work turned in for en-route grading; a student's
assessment is based on papers, compositions, or performances, al turned in or accomplished
at the end of the term. And the grading process -- in which at least one faculty member
in addition to the class teacher assesses each student's portfolio -- is a process I
hope I'll have figured out by the end of the semester. So far I've been able to adapt to
the students and the system, and I think that the students are adapting to the
visiting Yankee, for we seem to have established a good rapport.
One of the classes I'm teaching is on American Musical Theatre. Perhaps because the
subject matter is on my radar screen, I've been struck by the relatively large number of
musical theatrical offerings available in the greater Manchester/Birmingham area. I wasn't
particularly surprised to find professional shows; after all, BIrmingham and Manchester are both
fairly large cities, and Keele is located between the two. Nevertheless I was pleased to
discover that in very early February a performance of West Side Story was mounted at the
Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham, and last week, the Northern Opera Company presented
Sweeney Todd in Manchester. There are also college productions, including one of
Stephen Sondheim's early musical Saturday Night, to be given at Birmingham
University in several weeks.
What I was astonished to discover, however, was the wealth of amateur productions available in
this area. Two weeks ago, I took my calss to a performance of Oklahoma! given by te
Porthill Players at Queen's Theatre in Burslem, one of the towns in the Potteries area. I had
no idea what to expect, but the tickets were reasonable. I was more than pleased with the
quality of the performance -- and astonished to discover (after talking with an usher) that
the singers, dancers, and instrumentalists were all amateurs. The singing was quite
good, the acting impressive, and the dancing fine. The accents -- which should have been a
give-away to an Ohioan -- were quite convincing; although there was an occasional tell-tale burr on
te ends of some of the actors' lines, the two lead players, I was convinced, were Americans. Not so;
the actor playing Curly, I was told, was "Potteries born and bred." The house was about
half full, of mostly older folks (it was a school night), but the experience
of feeling/hearing/seeing the whole crowd exuberantly clapping along with the funal lusty
rendition of "Oooooooklahoma!" as the cast took its curtain calls was amazing indeed.
I metaphorically rubbed my eyes and looked around. Where exactly am I? I thought to myself
in some astonishment.
I later rang up the Porthill Players and the secretary of the society put me in touch with
Jonathan Ferneyhough, who played the lead role in the musical. In real life, there is no
mistaking his British origins. Mr. Fernyhough spent about a half an hour telling me about the
Players and about the phenomenon of amateur productions of American musical theatre here in the
heart of the UK. The Porthill Players started life in 1911 as a church social group, affiliated
with St. Andrew's Church in Newcastle-under-Lyme. They put on occasional pantomimes, one
per year for many years, and then around 1975 started to produce musicals in the church hall.
Three years ago they graduated to the "big time" -- Queen's Theatre in Burslem, which seats around
1000. By moving up to the larger theatre, the Players joined the ranks of several other large
local amateur musical theatre societys: the City of Stoke-on-Trent Operatic Society, the
Newcastle Operatic Society, and the North Staffs Operatic Society. All of these groups,
I was told, have been around for between 80 and 100 years; all of them are social organizations,
and all put on one (some of them two) musicals per year -- all for the simple joy of doing so.
In the last several years, for example, the Porthill Players have mounted Hello, Dolly!,
Brigadoon, High Society, South Pacific, and Camelot. This year the
Newcastle OS is putting on The Sound of Music (in mid-March), and the North Staffs
troupe will perform Gigi, also in mid-March. The production of Oklahoma! cost
the troupe about £ 35,000, paid for by Society memberships and ticket sales -- about half of which are
purchased by friends and families of the cast members.
The Societies are social groups, Mr. Fernyhough told me, and there is quite a lot of overlap
in membership. Although there may be some feelings of rivalry, tey also share
audiences. When the Society members are not involved in putting on musicals, they
work at regular jobs -- as editors, homemakers, in the potteries, as salespeople.
The members of the Society also get together for social events once per month. Mr.
Fernyhough expressed concern that their audiences are aging -- over 80% of their
audiences, he told me, are over 50 years old. Younger folk are interested in the newer
musicals, which amateur societies have neither the technical capacity nor the rental
fees to mount. So I might have stumbled upon an amateur musical theatrical
tradition that is on the way out in the UK. I hope not. In any case, in 1998 the
tradition is alive and well and is going like gangbusters.
--Kitty Preston
Keele University
Updated 4/15/98