Episode 3 Rule Britannia! Music, Mischief and Morals in the 18th Century

From Glastonbury to Glyndebourne, from the glitter of London's

West End shows to our thriving regional choirs

and amateur orchestras, Britain today is alive with music.

But while we think of the 21st century

as the era of impresarios and celebrities, gossip magazines

and social networking, pop stars and groupies,

all these were first forged in the energy and inventiveness

of 18th-century Britain.

In this series I've seen how music was a galvanising force,

creating a powerful sense of identity in the new nation state

of Great Britain.

And I've experienced the heady pleasures of the moneyed classes

eager for glamour, leisure and musical novelty.

But as the century went on the quest for empty pleasure and sensation

was wearing thin. Britain acquired a new seriousness of purpose.

It was a society in search of the sublime and the perfect.

This green and pleasant land was becoming more urban and industrial.

People began to search for a new model of society,

digging deep into their own pasts to find a blueprint for the future.

Religious evangelists blazed a trail of spiritual idealism

and a new social conscience gave voice to Britain's have nots -

the poor, the dispossessed and the enslaved.

MUSIC SUNG: "The Negro's Complaint" by William Cowper

# Men from England bought and sold me

# Paid my price in paltry gold... #

Music now channelled righteousness and virtue into every British heart.

# Minds are never to be sold. #

"Up in the forest of Rossendale," wrote a Lancashire author,

"there is a little-known valley, a green cup in the mountains

"called Dean. The inhabitants of this valley are so notable

"for their love of music that they are known all through the

"vales of Rossendale as the Deighn Layrocks or the Larks of Dean."

The Larks of Dean were a local Baptist choir

who had come from miles around to make music together.

In order to do so, they had to walk the paths that crisscrossed

these moors, which are treacherous at best,

and in winter, absolutely perilous.

The fact that they were prepared to do it says a lot

about their commitment to music and also to worship.

When the Larks of Dean found their numbers growing so quickly

they had to move to a bigger venue. one of their devoted members,

Lawrence Ashworth, trudged for miles over these moors

lugging his much-loved old church seat with him

to his new spiritual home.

This is Goodshaw Chapel, built in 1760

by a congregation of Baptists

as a temple to music in the service of God.

DOOR CLOSES

What a blessed relief it must have been to turn up

in this chapel after a long walk over the blustery moors.

I think it's absolutely beautiful here. It's...

It's small, it's completely unpretentious,

simple flagstone floor and these lovely box pews,

really small and intimate, a place to, to sing together,

absolutely, as part of a community.

And they must have sung their hearts out.

It's said that in the chapel's heyday, the music could be heard

in Cribden, two miles away.

HYMN SINGING

We can still here how they sounded because the Larks' original

manuscripts were rediscovered by local enthusiasts

and the tradition brought back to life in the 1990s.

# A sovereign balm for every wound

# A cordial for our fears

# A sovereign balm for every wound... #

It's not sombre music at all but full of red-blooded life and vigour.

# Salvation! O Thou bleeding Lamb

# Salvation...

So, what is it then that connects you to

what those 18th-century worshippers and singers were doing?

Is it an emotional or a religious connection?

Well, both really.

It feels personal.

I'm from this area and it's part of my heritage, really.

And something that you're determined to keep as a living tradition?

Absolutely, a revived tradition

because it was dead for a number of years.

But we revived it, found all the old manuscripts again

and studied them, and we sing it.

What is it, then, that makes a Larks of Dean hymn to you?

What gives it a special quality?

The harmonies really.

It's quite folky, in a way. There's nothing pretentious about it.

# Salvation! Let the echo fly... #

Not pretentious then but it was rich and complex music.

There isn't one tune going on here,

but four - all woven together in counterpoint.

# While all the armies of the sky... #

The original Larks of Dean, mostly hand-loom weavers or farm workers,

were typical of working people across Britain who started

using music as an escape from the toil of daily life.

Local composers developed.

Shoemakers, craftsmen of various sorts,

in their spare time would write music, would take part in the choirs.

It may not have been wonderful music by national

or international standards but it was often quite intricate

and exciting music to perform.

Religious music was a kind of glue for rural communities

but for many urban dwellers, in place of hope

and self respect, there was poverty and despair.

City slums were everywhere, known as rookeries

because of their similarity to the filthy, jam-packed nests of rooks.

Across cities like London, Edinburgh

and Manchester sanitation was virtually non-existent

and dense alleyways and gloomy streets were home

to the helpless and destitute.

No wonder people self-medicated.

Drunkenness, starkly depicted by Hogarth in his scathing print,

Gin Lane, was rife thanks to a flood of cheap alcohol.

"Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence. Straw provided,"

read the grimly welcoming sign at many a slum drinking joint.

It's said the average Londoner consumed seven gallons of gin a year.

The widespread depravity, disease

and hopelessness began to prick the conscience of many Christians.

Increasingly, people were asking -

"Where in our society is the love for one's neighbour,

"where is our social justice,

"where is God in all this grit and grubbiness?"

For two devoutly religious brothers studying

at Oxford University, the call to arms began in the 1720s.

They started a movement to try

and make a real difference in the lives of Britain's poorest people.

They set up a small religious club, their aim - to replace the moral

vacuum they saw all around them

with the power of prayer and social action.

They were John and Charles Wesley.

They got up early each day,

studied the Bible, visited the poor -

their work carried out so methodically that they were

called by their peers, as a sneering insult - 'the Methodists'.

But the brothers were frustrated -

their zeal to change lives was achieving little.

The vital missing ingredient for success was revealed to them not

in Britain at all, but on a voyage in 1735 to the American colonies.

It was to be a transformative journey,

but not in the way the Wesleys imagined.

Most of the passengers were English colonists

but there were also 26 Moravians on board,

Protestant missionaries from Europe

travelling to preach the gospel to the 'heathen American Indians'.

One night, during the four- month-long journey to America,

the Moravians had just begun singing their evening psalms, when a

violent storm came up. It snapped the main mast of the ship in two.

The wind lashed at them. The rain poured across the decks.

The English passengers were running,

screaming in fear for their lives, but the Moravians kept on singing.

Charles Wesley was overwhelmed with the power of their faith

and the way that music bonded them to it.

It was the music he encountered on that fateful sea voyage

that was to be Charles's salvation.

On his return to England, he began writing hymns in earnest and over

the next 50 years he poured out some 9,000 of them, making him one of

the most prolific and influential musical figures who ever lived.

MUSIC SUNG: "Love Divine" by Charles Wesley

Hymns like Charles Wesley's Love Divine are now part

of the fabric of national life sung by many denominations

and an essential feature of the great occasions of State.

When they were created though,

they couldn't have been further from the mainstream establishment.

Prior to going to America, as far as the Wesleys were concerned

they would have accepted the norm of the day, which was that hymns

were something you used for personal meditation and prayer.

But they didn't see it as something that was sung by people,

and certainly not in a congregational setting within a church,

and the trip across to America is actually the pivotal point.

It makes them realise that actually there is a power to hymn singing

that is far greater than just meditating upon poetry.

# Hark the herald angels sing... #

Charles Wesley seized on existing music to set his words to.

Since then, each generation has set them to new tunes,

making them some of the best-known verses in English.

To their early followers, Methodism's power came as much

through Charles's hymns as it did from his brother John's sermons.

This wasn't music you sat and listened to inertly.

It was music that you created - with your heart, your soul

and, above all, your lungs.

Singing brought you closer to your fellow man and to God.

It was a pathway to the sublime.

# Glory to the newborn King. #

The Wesleys' ground-breaking hymns were a radical challenge

to the ultra-conservative Church of England.

The brothers were banned from preaching in Anglican churches,

so instead they held vast open-air meetings where crowds of up

to 10,000 people would come and listen.

The clergy were upset

because they felt that these men were invading their parishes.

The gentry were upset because they wrongly believed it was all

a cover for political activity. They hired mobs to drown them out and

that meant shouting verbal abuse. It meant throwing whatever you chose to

throw at them - parts of dismembered cats and stones and bricks.

It meant hosing them down with water, hiring bands to play music

so you couldn't hear what they were saying.

That didn't stop Charles Wesley, picking up music for his hymns.

Anything would do, as long as it roused a crowd.

There were tunes from the theatre, the pub, the street

and the quayside.

There's a famous story of Charles on one occasion in Portsmouth

hearing people sing a sea shanty song, to very rude words!

And deciding he'd write a hymn to that tune.

The Wesleys weren't revolutionaries but a groundswell of radical

social change was given added momentum by their fervent hymns.

Their movement is a movement to encourage the ordinary person

to realise that they can make a difference to their own life,

and if enough of you change your lives then you begin to get the

whole neighbourhood changing and then you begin to get society changing.

So, inevitably there is a political outcome to this demand

that you look at yourself and look at society and to change it.

Evangelical Christians felt they had an opportunity - if they could

radicalise working communities, why not the entire country?

They seized on one issue in particular.

Britain's maritime interests were expanding across the globe,

making the nation rich.

And the engine driving this consumer boom was the slave trade.

The smarter parts of port cities like Bristol

owe their existence to the great fortunes made from slavery.

Slaves were taken in chains from Africa,

shipped to the West Indies in conditions of unspeakable indignity.

The ships then sailed to Britain laden with rum and tobacco,

cotton and sugar - all essentials for the well-to-do.

But despite the riches that the slave trade brought

to British merchants, and the luxury goods it placed on

fashionable British tables, there was a growing realisation

that slavery simply wasn't a defensible way

of treating one's fellow man.

MUSIC SUNG: "Amazing Grace" by John Newton

# Amazing grace... #

It was the slave trade that created one of the best-known

songs ever written.

The words of this famous hymn date from the 1770s.

The tune we sing today was added several decades later.

# I once was lost

# But now I'm found

# Was blind

# But now I see. #

"Amazing grace,

"(how sweet the sound),

"that sav'd a wretch like me.

"I once was lost but now am found,

"was blind but now I see."

This anthem to salvation is as powerful today as it was

when it was first published in 1779,

and it's still one of the best-known songs of the English-speaking world.

It's the work of a man whose guilt drove him to save others,

through the transformative power of music.

This was a redemption song.

But its author had only found the light after being plunged

into the heart of darkness.

# The hour I first believed... #

Amazing Grace was written by John Newton.

He'd been press-ganged into the navy and ended up by his own admission

as a foul-mouthed unprincipled rake and a blackguard.

He became a ship's captain in that most exploitative

of 18th-century industries, the slave trade.

And then he had an epiphany, during a terrifying storm at sea,

when Newton said he finally felt "the gift of God's amazing grace".

# We've no less days

# To sing God's praise

# Than when we've first begun. #

Newton eventually became a Church of England clergyman.

Having renounced the evils of his former trade,

he became one of the leading opponents of slavery.

Newton was convinced that the abolition of the slave trade could

only happen through a combination of political activism and artistic

rallying cries, what today we would call hard power and soft power.

So, alongside lobbying politicians like William Pitt the Younger

and putting pressure on parliament, Newton used music

and poetry to advance his cause.

By the late 1780s, there's a widely-based opposition

to the slave trade and it recruits all the arts.

So music is tremendously important, pottery, Wedgewood,

of course, famously produces works to attack the slave trade

and obviously literature and engravings.

There is a whole range of attack and assault

on the slave trade in the 1780s and 1790s.

So the arts are very much signed up for a providential,

reforming movement that helps to link people across the country.

In 1788 Newton asked his friend, the poet William Cowper,

to write something that would wake the British up

to the evils of slavery.

This is an original manuscript in Cowper's own hand

of the brilliant polemical poem he produced.

It's called The Negro's Complaint, and this is how it begins -

"Forced from home and all its pleasures,

"Afric's coast I left forlorn,

"To increase a stranger's treasures,

"O'er the raging billows borne..."

This is the voice of a lone African slave,

a voice of innocence, directness and simplicity.

It doesn't advocate anger or rage or retribution.

Instead this poem challenges us to look at our own prejudices,

to look inside ourselves at our own hypocrisy.

And, to me, it is that quiet challenge that makes this one of the

most radical and revolutionary pieces of writing

of the whole 18th century.

And once it was set to music, there was no stopping its popularity.

# Forced from home

# And all its pleasures

# Afric's coasts I left forlorn

# To increase a stranger's treasures

# O'er the raging billows borne

# Men from England

# Bought and sold me

# Paid my price in paltry gold

# But though slave they have enrolled me

# Minds are never to be sold... #

The Negro's Complaint, sung to a popular tune by Handel, was heard

in pleasure gardens and published in colourful editions for children.

It became a kind of campaigning anthem,

as the movement to abolish slavery unstoppably gained ground.

# Me to torture, me to task?

# Fleecy locks and dark complexion

# Cannot forfeit nature's claims

# Skins may differ, but affection

# Dwells with white and black the same

# By our blood in Afric wasted

# Ere our necks receiv'd the chain

# By the miseries that we tasted

# Crossing in your barks the main

# By our suff'ring since ye bought us

# To the man-degrading mart

# All sustain'd by patience, taught us

# Only by the broken heart. #

It became impossible to ignore the effects of this mass,

forced migration of people, not least

because around 15,000 Africans were thought to be living in Britain.

Many were servants, or doomed to live on the streets in poverty,

but some managed to rise through the ranks of society.

The story of one of the most remarkable of them

has only recently been rediscovered.

Joseph Emidy was a man with a passion for music.

He arrived here in Cornwall

and immediately threw himself into music-making of every sort -

teaching, composing, performing, setting up a local orchestra.

What made Emidy different from any other visiting musician

was that he had travelled to Britain not as a free man but as a slave.

Emidy had been taken from Guinea in Africa

and enslaved in Brazil around 1780.

There, he'd been taught to play the violin to entertain his master.

Then he was freed and ended up in Lisbon,

where he was hired as a violinist at the city's opera house.

One evening, his playing caught the attention of a visiting

British navy captain, Sir Edward Pellew.

Sir Edward asked one of his lieutenants to get together

a press gang.

The next night they jumped Emidy as he left the theatre,

forcing him into the service of His Majesty's navy.

Joseph had been kidnapped for a second time.

At the opera, Emidy had played the most refined and elegant music.

Now he was demeaned to playing cheap little ditties,

jigs and hornpipes for the sailors aboard that creaky ship.

And when he wasn't performing he was completely alone,

shunned by the crew, confined to his quarters,

he wasn't allowed a moment's shore leave in case he tried to escape.

After four years confined to his quarters, Emidy was finally

set free when the Indefatigable docked here in Falmouth.

And, at last, his fortunes began to change.

There are reports of brilliant concerts and fizzing new pieces.

The Cornish public loved him.

Joseph married a local woman and had eight children with her.

He became a respected performer and composer,

a well-regarded member of his new community.

Sadly for us, none of his music survives.

He's buried in this quiet, unfussy graveyard in Truro.

Jack Buzza is his only surviving British descendant.

I know you've spent years looking into what Joseph Emidy himself did.

-Yes.

-What was it that really impressed you about his achievements?

Well, from humble beginnings,

it was so fascinating to find someone like that, you know.

To achieve as he did from playing in bars and on the seafront

to running his own school, teaching all the gentry,

then playing with all the gentry in Truro in the Assembly Rooms,

then to be asked to play with the Philharmonic Orchestra.

And just recently I found out he had the title Professor Joseph Emidy.

And to end up as a professor,

don't you think it's a beautiful achievement?

Cos I do.

HE CHUCKLES

This painting is the only likeness of Emidy that survives.

His triumph was that he lived long enough not only to be fully accepted

and celebrated in society,

but also to see slavery abolished across the British Empire in 1833.

The religious and social awakening that had inspired

the abolitionist movement had been slowly bubbling away

in Britain for the best part of 100 years.

But it wasn't all about rabble-rousers and evangelicals.

From the 1730s, the social conscience of the British mainstream

had started to be mobilised.

As he'd done so many times before,

a composer called George Frideric Handel saw an opportunity.

FEMALE OPERA SINGING

Handel built his early career on the British passion for Italian opera -

tailored to the tastes of the aristocracy,

and written in a language that hardly anyone understood.

The craze inevitably passed but Handel was determined to come up

with something else to please his fickle public.

ORATORIO SINGING

Like the opera Handel had made so fashionable earlier in the century,

oratorio was an Italian import but with a crucial difference.

This was a Biblical drama, sung, but not "acted out".

There were no costumes or scenery -

making it respectable enough to be performed in church.

It was sung in English, and unlike Italian opera where the spotlight

was on virtuoso soloists, Handel's oratorios were all about the chorus.

So many of Handel's oratorios have these great choruses in up to

eight parts, and there's some evidence that he was aiming

for what we might now call surround sound.

You've got this sense of spaciousness and grandeur.

The chorus...

added a huge dimension to the sense for the audience that this

was something they were all but participating in.

Here was a community.

MUSIC SUNG: "Messiah" by George Frideric Handel

# Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah... #

I first sang Messiah as a young teenager so I thought I'd join

a choir rehearsal to remind myself of the visceral thrill you get when

Handel unleashes the full force of his musical imagination on a chorus.

# Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

# For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth

# Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! #

Greg, Handel was a master of rousing mass emotions

and he doesn't do it better, I think, than in the Messiah, does he?

He knows exactly how to move you,

he knows exactly what instruments to use at the right time.

And he is a real master.

The thing I think is so brilliant in a way is the simplicity.

When you think of the Hallelujah Chorus and you get Ha-lle-lu-jah.

It's so simple, it's a syllable to a note

and he just slowly ratchets it up, doesn't he, as the thing goes on.

Absolutely, and shifts key and takes it up one note at a time

and that certainly increases the tension.

# King of kings

# For ever and ever

# Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

# And Lord of lords

# For ever and ever

# Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

# King of kings

# For ever and ever

# Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

# And Lord of lords

# King of kings

# And Lord of lords... #

Messiah was a triumph when it was first heard in Dublin in 1742.

But a performance in a London theatre the following year

was less successful.

Critics were scandalised that the sacred subject of Christ's life

was being sung about in a place they saw as a den of iniquity.

But Handel cracked how to make it a success - perform it for charity

at the Foundling Hospital, an institution for abandoned babies,

and you guaranteed the British public would love it.

# King of kings And Lord of lords... #

Staging oratorios became particularly associated with

raising money for charitable sources

so it reinforces this element of morality

that you are performing your civic and your moral duty.

So the combination of morality, virtue, philanthropy,

plus artistic excellence, which the oratorio could offer,

was a very winning combination.

# Hallelujah! #

The audiences at an oratorio listened in hushed silence.

This wasn't about concert-going to see and be seen.

More, it was an opportunity for contemplation

and spiritual reflection, a kind of sacred activity in itself.

Handel, for England, represented this turning point.

The great English tradition of hymn singing is, interestingly,

born around the same time as the great English tradition of oratorio.

Handel's oratorios provided a way

for bringing communities together in musical terms.

Across England, music societies sprang up

to perform these works in tiny, tiny places.

And we mustn't forget the power of communal song.

In the 18th century, the idea that choral singing could have

this effect of uniting the nation was a relatively new one.

As the go-to composer for pretty much any state occasion,

Handel was in a unique position

to harness the forces of Protestantism, nationhood

and communal singing and to channel them into a musical product

that reinforced Britain's idea of its own special destiny.

The Britons saw themselves as being the modern version

of the chosen people of the Old Testament.

They were God's people now as the Israelites had been then.

And Handel's oratorios really established Handel

as our national composer,

largely because, I think, of Handel's association

of his music with Protestantism

and the great association of political identity in Britain

with the Protestant religion in the 18th century.

You didn't have to look far to see the parallels.

Handel and his lyricists made an art of portraying

glorious Biblical victories, which deliberately echoed

the military might of the 18th-century British.

In his chorus, See, The Conquering Hero Comes,

Handel celebrates in music the Crown's crushing of the Jacobite Rebellion.

An uprising, set on restoring the Catholic Stuarts to the throne,

ended in slaughter at Culloden in 1746

and Handel doesn't let us forget it.

BAGPIPES PLAY

Following the Battle of Culloden,

the Crown tried to suppress the Highland clans and their culture.

It was a deep wound for many Scots and led to a desperate clinging-on

to a host of traditions, now celebrated every January in Burns Night -

an evening devoted to Scotland's national poet.

Robert Burns was born on a smallholding in Ayrshire in 1759.

Educated by his father,

he was determined to overcome his background

and to change the world around him

through the power of poetry.

Burns was a natural spokesman for the poor and the disenfranchised.

He was also a vocal defender of Scots culture,

its ancient art of poetry and song passed through the generations.

He was an unstoppable womaniser and a hard drinker -

in short, he had all the makings of a cultural hero.

Burns was writing at a time of cataclysmic change,

and not just in Britain - the French Revolution,

with its call for brotherhood, freedom and equality,

stirred up in Burns, and others like him, the call to arms.

Their work must be a rallying cry

for a freer, fairer and more just society.

# Is there for honest poverty

# That hings his head, an' a' that

# The coward slave, we pass him by

# We dare be poor for a' that!

# For a' that, an' a' that

# Our toils obscure an' a' that

# The rank is but the guinea's stamp

The Man's the gowd for a' that... #

What, to you, does that Burns song mean, A Man's A Man,

when you're singing that?

Well, I kind of think it's about egalitarianism.

And everyone's equal, whether you're a pauper or a king,

remember to recognise that at the end of the day we're all the same.

But it's a very modern idea, that, isn't it?

We take it for granted that everyone should be equal.

But in the 18th century,

that must have been a really incendiary song to sing.

Well, it must have been, and quite dangerous, actually, at that time.

# For a' that and a' that

# It's coming yet for a' that

# That man to man the world o'er

# Shall brothers be for a' that. #

Burns' genius was that he transcended the specifics

of what he knew and experienced - his own politics and his beliefs -

to reach out to the broadest possible audience,

as much to an Edinburgh elite as to poor countryfolk and urban radicals.

Burns is born in very humble circumstances

and yet rises to the highest echelons of Edinburgh society.

How much is he a paradox?

We have heaped history onto Burns in one very key way,

which is to think of him as a jolly plough boy, if you like,

as a labouring class poet.

In Burns's last few years, his annual income exceeded Jane Austen's.

Burns, even in Edinburgh, always dressed in boots,

he never took them off,

because he wanted to present himself as a bucolic figure

and that was always part of the plan.

Burns wrote some of his own tunes,

more often he set his words to existing melodies.

Like this song, which has become famous the world over...

# For auld lang syne, my dear

# For auld lang syne

# We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet

# For the sake of auld lang syne... #

Millions of us sing Auld Lang Syne every New Year's Eve.

When we strip off all the kind of modern layers

that have accrued onto that,

what is the 18th-century essence of that song?

Auld Lang Syne has a long history dating back to the 17th,

if not the 16th century.

It first appears in large numbers of variants

in the early 18th century.

Then, it's a Jacobite song, it's about the world we've lost,

but by then, of course, it also encapsulates

displacement for economic reasons,

from the Highlands and from rural Scotland,

which is so much part of the 18th-century Scottish story,

and of course there is also the universal human emotion.

And that's typically how Burns works.

He piles emotional connotations on each other in a hierarchy

which enables people to respond at some level

from very different backgrounds.

# Should auld acquaintance be forgot

# And never brought to mind?

# Should auld acquaintance be forgot

# And auld lang syne

# For auld lang syne, my Jo

# For auld lang syne

# We'll tak a cup of kindness yet

# For auld lang syne

# For auld lang syne, my Jo

# For auld lang syne

# We'll tak a cup of kindness yet

# For auld lang syne. #

That deep emotional connection to singing

was what countless Scots, Welsh, English and Irish emigrants

took with them, when they travelled far from home

to British colonies, like America.

Thousands and thousands of people wanting a better life went there

and they took music with them.

What do you take with you if you're emigrating

on a crowded emigrant ship,

you know, you take songs that you know, you can take those.

If you've learnt them by heart, you take them in your head.

This song, from north-east England,

one of many that travelled to America,

still sounds as vibrant today as it did 300 years ago.

# Di ye ken Elsie Marley, hinny?

# The wife who sells the barley, hinny?

# She lost her basket and all of her money

# A' back o' the bush i' the garden, hinny

# Di ye ken Elsie Marley, hinny?

# The wife who sells the barley, hinny?

# She lost her basket and all of her money

# A' back o' the bush i' the garden, hinny.

# Elsie Marley's grown so fine

# She won't get up to feed the swine

# She lies in bed till eight or nine

# Di ye ken Elsie Marley, hinny?

# Di ye ken Elsie Marley, hinny?

# The wife who sells the barley, hinny?

# She lost her basket and all of her money

# A' back o' the bush i' the garden, hinny

# Elsie Marley is so neat

# It's hard for one to walk the street

# But every lad and lass ye meet

# Says, "Di ye ken Elsie Marley, hinny?"

# Di ye ken Elsie Marley, hinny?

# The wife who sells the barley, hinny?

# She lost her basket and all of her money

# A' back o' the bush i' the garden, hinny

# The farmers, as they come that way

# They drink with Elsie every day

# And call the fiddler for to play

# The tune of "Elsie Marley", hinny. #

And here's a not dissimilar version,

channelling the spirit of today's American country music.

AMERICAN BLUEGRASS MUSIC PLAYS

When you hear American country, bluegrass,

do you feel resonances of the British 18th-century tradition?

Oh, immensely.

The tunes are recognisable, we have similar repertoires,

we have overlaps in repertoire.

Some tunes, you actively recognise as being played here

as well as over there.

Similar instruments, so the fiddle is really dominant in music from here,

and that really drives bluegrass in a big way,

so it's very recognisable, definitely close cousins.

Close cousins they may have been,

but Britain and America fought a bitter war in the 1770s,

when the Americans decided they had had enough of British rule

and paying punitive British taxes.

# Oh, say, can you see

# By the dawn's early light... #

On the 4th July, 1776, America declared its independence.

But the next time you hear Beyonce sing the Star Spangled Banner,

allow yourself a little smile,

because while we may have lost the colonies, as a parting shot,

we gave the Americans one of our dirtier drinking songs.

What became their national anthem began its life

in one Britain's rowdiest and most bawdy institutions -

the gentleman's singing society.

Catch and glee clubs were all the rage in the late 18th century,

from the lowliest taverns

to the most upmarket hangouts of royalty and aristocracy.

And one of the most notorious was the Anacreontic Society.

# To Anacreon in Heav'n

# Where he sat in full glee... #

Named after the Greek poet Anacreon,

whose verses celebrated wine, women and song,

the society's party piece was its signature tune,

a jolly little number in praise of heavy drinking and sex.

You can imagine the members of the society -

the doctors and the lawyers and the bankers -

must have loved singing this song,

with its debauched and rather risque lyrics.

# ..No longer be mute

# I'll lend you my name

# And inspire you, to boot

# And besides I'll instruct you

# Like me to entwine

# The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine... #

Now, myrtle was the plant associated with the goddess of love, Venus,

celebrated for its pure-white scented flowers.

In ancient Rome, it was thought of as a potent aphrodisiac,

and the female genitalia, particularly the clitoris,

was known as "murtos" - myrtle.

# And long may the sons of Anacreon entwine

# The myrtle of Venus

# With Bacchus's vine. #

When the Americans came up with new lyrics for the Anacreontic Song,

in 1814, all trace of the rudery was, unsurprisingly, removed.

But that catchy little tune clung on, wryly smiling in the background.

# O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave

# O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? #

Nationalists and romantics, heavy drinkers and evangelicals,

philanthropists and antiquarians -

whatever your political stripes, your personal concerns,

by the late 18th century, one thing was becoming clear.

Music, for many, was a central part of life.

As Britain was becoming increasingly industrial and international,

many began to sense their own history, stories and culture

were being swallowed up.

Holding onto those ancient traditions was fundamental

to the quest for Celtic identity and belonging.

At the same time Robert Burns was seducing the British

with his Scottish music and poetry,

Wales was undergoing a cultural awakening of its own.

Leading the charge was the intriguing figure

of Edward Williams, better known by the name

he chose for himself as a modern-day bard, Iolo Morganwg.

Iolo was an antiquarian, polymath and laudanum addict who saw himself

as a descendant of ancient British bards and druids.

He brought a certain "poetic licence"

to his passion for collecting Welsh verse and song,

forging piles of manuscripts and "ancient" documents.

He claimed to have rediscovered the rituals of Britain's pagan druids,

and decided he would do everything in his power to keep them alive.

He, and only Iolo, could do this,

he's behind this weird and wonderful institution,

the Gorsedd of the Bards of the Island of Britain.

The Gorsedd or "Throne" of Bards was a druidic order

whose mission statement was the elevation

of Wales's distinct poetic and musical traditions.

Wales is in danger of dropping off the cultural map, I think,

during the 17th and 18th century,

of losing its language of losing its own unique culture.

So Iolo sets about trying to turn it into a cultural institution

which will sustain the Welsh language, sustain its literature,

and its music and its oral traditions.

SINGING IN WELSH

Iolo's energy and visionary oddball genius

would kickstart the Eisteddfod -

Wales's annual celebration of poetry and song.

It's still a musical powerhouse today, nurturing fantastic talents

like bass-baritone Bryn Terfel,

a man who has never held back

on an opportunity to celebrate his Welshness.

SINGS IN WELSH

Welsh attempts to explore and resurrect traditional culture

were echoed across the British Isles.

People started collecting and publishing local ballads

and folk songs, putting them down in print

to give them an air of authenticity and authority.

That urgency to preserve the past as a model for the future

reached its high-water mark in 1784.

25 years after Handel's death, a celebration of his music was staged

in the symbolic heart of political, cultural

and religious British life - in Westminster Abbey.

Handel's position as a demi-god was complete.

There is a sense for a need for a national identity in Britain

and that's expressed not only through interest in Handel's works

but also the Shakespeare revival led by David Garrick.

So Handel's canonisation really needs to be seen

as part of that broader interest, growing interest,

in musical antiquity and in creating a cultural canon of British greats.

To me, Handel's genius is not just

about the notes that he wrote on the page.

He completely redrew the map of what it meant to be an artist.

In refusing to be the servant of any one master,

he utterly reimagined what a composer could be.

The status of musicians had changed utterly

over the course of the century.

Once thought of as pedlars of musical amusement and entertainment,

they were now semi-divine figures, channelling the spirit of God

through their own invention and creativity.

This profound change in attitude towards the value of music

and musicians had been spearheaded in Britain, so it was no wonder

that the very best composers from across Europe pitched up here.

Joseph Haydn arrived in London in 1791

for the first of two long visits.

He'd had spent most of his career working for his wealthy patrons,

the Esterhazys, shipped around their various palaces

and made to dress in their household livery.

In England, he was toasted at grand dinners,

given gold snuff boxes set with diamonds,

even a parrot specially shipped over from the West Indies.

In return, he wrote some of his greatest pieces of music

including 12 London Symphonies, as well as concertos and chamber works.

Haydn would repay the grace and favour of his hosts

by writing the last great piece of British music of the whole century.

Handel had died three decades earlier

but his influence was still felt across Britain.

And now Haydn was to feel the full force of that legacy

when he was taken to hear Handel's oratorios for the very first time.

And what he heard was Handel's Messiah,

that magical union of music and charity,

uplifting moral virtue and barnstorming choruses.

Haydn immediately told a friend he wanted to write something

on the same ambitious scale, but that he was stuck for a subject.

The friend advised him to take the Bible and begin at the beginning.

He did, and the result was arguably his finest work of all -

The Creation.

The Creation begins in complete darkness.

It's music that stares out into the void.

The opening section is called Chaos

and it depicts the birth of the universe.

And the really radical thing about it is that there are no cadences -

these are the moments where music naturally comes to a rest,

where there's a sense of closure.

Instead, what Haydn does is to keep his music unfolding

and unfolding in front of us, stretching into nothingness.

The Creation was published simultaneously in both English

and German - performed first in Austria in 1798

and two years later at the King's Theatre in London.

I'd argue it was the last great British

piece of music of the 18th-century inspired by Haydn's trip to London.

It set English words - Milton's Paradise Lost

and the English version of the Bible.

It followed in the wake of Handel's great English oratorios

and it took a very British musical model - mass choirs,

public concert halls and improving religious music.

The Creation was the high point of music as spiritual revival,

part of the same movement that had inspired hymns and oratorios.

But crucially it was also a commercial venture -

not one sponsored by church or state

but rather a triumph of that British invention, the public concert.

When Haydn comes to London,

he is taking part in what is a forcing house of culture,

that money can be spent to put on culture to a degree

that isn't going to happen anywhere else in Western Europe.

Now this looks towards the modern age.

The world of the entrepreneur, the world of the impresario,

the world of the great concert which is the world you see

in the 1780s and 1790s for both choral and orchestral music.

Looks towards 19th and 20th century music-making.

By the end of the 18th century,

music had become an agent of social and moral change.

It had played its part in promoting national identity

and spiritual improvement.

It had helped to make Britain a better society

but also one that knew how to enjoy itself.

Every time we click on a playlist today, we are benefiting

from that musical revolution.

We are living that 18th-century dream of freedom, choice

and cultural democracy.

What this music reflects back at us across the centuries is a vivid,

energetic and diverse world where taste and fashions changed quickly.

Stars were made and broken, whole new forms were invented

and an enterprising army of publishers, artists

and promoters created what, today, we call the music business.

It was 18th-century Britain that produced

the soundtrack to the modern world.