Talk:Cecil Sharp

Discussion

A critique of Sharp based mainly on Harker can be found on this website is no longer available, although the chapter is available in a free ebook https://payhip.com/b/pCoZ Szczels (talk) 10:40, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for noticing this. After looking at it, I thought, bleah, leave the poor guy alone. Yes indeed, Sharp made a living off of preserving folk music, and in fact I'm very glad he did, because otherwise a huge amount of really beautiful material would have been lost forever. I guess a balanced Wikipedia article should include room for the nasty, carping point of view shown on this link, but I have no interest in writing it up myself.

Cheers,

Opus33 20:17, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Here's some more information about the sorts of criticisms linked above, which rightly struck Opus33 as unfair, and even bogus. Cecil Sharp was critiqued at great length in 1985 by Dave Harker, a self-described Trotskyite Marxist, who took Eric Hobsbawm's notion that tradition was a construct (See The Invention of Tradition) to the point of absurdity and savaged Sharp's methods, character, and integrity. It's too bad that in the 1980s & '90s, some pop journalists and unfortunately quite a few scholars accepted Harker's premises uncritically and even subjected other pioneers of folk music scholarship to the same sort of treatment. Recently, however, Harker's own methods and conclusions have been called into question. An answer to Harker by C. J. Bearman can be found here:

Abstract:

David Harker’s criticism of Cecil Sharp’s work [published as Fakesong: the Manufacture of British "Folksong" 1700 to the Present Day, 1985, and elsewhere] has been called the “beginning of serious critical work” on the early folk music movement, and it has become an orthodoxy which later commentary has accepted without question, taking its accuracy and the validity of its research base on trust. This article shows that the trust has been misplaced. It uses a fresh, more complete and more rigorous analysis of the Sharp MSS to show that Harker’s criticism is inaccurate, innumerate, flawed in its methods, and unjustified in its assumptions. It forces a reassessment both of Sharp’s work and of Harker’s, and renders untenable many of the assumptions upon which modern interpretations of the early folk music movement in Britain are based.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2386/is_1_113/ai_86063326

• and here:

WHO WERE THE FOLK? THE DEMOGRAPHY OF CECIL SHARP'S SOMERSET FOLK SINGERS by C. J. Bearman

Abstract:

The folk music movement was among the most important influences on English cultural life in the years immediately before 1914. Its major figure, both in terms of volume of material collected and published, and in terms of organization and publicity, was Cecil Sharp. Historical understanding of the movement and modern appreciation of the material have been hampered by a Marxist orthodoxy which sees folk music as the cultural property of the working class and which attempts to discredit the folk music collectors, particularly Sharp. This article summarizes the trends in scholarship and employs the first biographical survey of a large group of folk singers to

A discussion in the British net journal Musical Traditions about the exposure of Harker is here. 71.183.181.230 (talk) 15:36, 4 July 2008 (UTC)July 3, 2008

I will be glad to read any more objective appreciation of Sharp's work. As one contributor above says, most of the folksong corpus would have been lost forever were it not for Sharp. For Harker to claim that Sharp portrayed his findings as folk music for political reasons is pure hypocrisy. For what other reason does Harker argue against his work? He is trying to fit Sharp's contribution into a Marxist (now thankfully largely discredited and dead) social theory. Of course there was an oral tradition - which occasionally found its way into high culture - and of course it was becoming defunct with the decline of rural society. And of course there are particular characteristics to the melodies (at least) of many English folk songs, modality (Dorian, pentatonic) among them. Any self-respecting musicologist would support this view. However, to try and represent an interest and passion for English folksong as 'appropriation by the bourgeoisie' of a culture owned by the 'rural proletariat' (itself a non-concept), is highly misleading, almost farcical. Harker's criticisms belong solely to the 'debunking' tradition, one which satisfies Marxists as it knows no national boundaries.

Therefore I would argue the criticism section of this article is out of proportion to the rest of this article and should be abbreviated or, alternatively, more positive emphasis and detail should be given to Sharp's contribution. One aspect missing is precisely how Sharp collected his songs, and how many melodies went on to be used in different contexts such as hymnody. Sharp's successors also need mention (the Shaws and Vaughan Williams).

National Identity'

One thing missing from this page is the link to the construction of a modern British National identity. Its not a matter of undermining Sharps achievements but looking more sagely at the context in which he worked. Szczels (talk) 10:40, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 10:46, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Cover-TheMorrisBook-CecilSharp-2ndEd(1912).jpg

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BetacommandBot (talk) 13:34, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Views of later folklorists

Re:"In the later twentieth century, some folk song scholars, such as Dave Harker, Vic Gammon, and Georgina Boyes, have accused Sharp of dishonest distortion in doing this. These "revisionist," scholars, were doubtless in part motivated by an understandable reaction to the hagiographical treatment of Sharp in the first half of the twentieth century. Dave Harker's harsh criticisms of Sharp (and those of his "revisionsist" followers), however, reflect an idiosyncratic Trotskyist Marxist framework that views any and all folk song collecting, scholarship, and attempts at revival as malign forms of appropriation and exploitation by the bourgeoisie of the working class. The writings of these British writers (and by extension their adherents in the U.S., such as David Whisnant, Benjamin Filene, and Robert Christgau) are now themselves in turn coming under scrutiny as overly harsh, exaggerated, distorted, and unjust.[2]" Citations for the material relevant to Sharp would ideally be included in this article as well as in Ref\2.--Felix Folio Secundus (talk) 01:46, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

balance

As it stands, the article reads as pretty hagiographical in my view. When I have a moment I would like to add some of what Sharp said about music hall and the urban working class, which was very negative. (I am another "self-described" Trotskyist - there are a lot of us about!!) Johncmullen1960 (talk) 10:21, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

In connection with this, Harker may be right or wrong, but is it really relevant that he is a trotskyist. Do we have to say if the different supporters of Sharp were Anglicans or Liberals or whatever? Johncmullen1960 (talk) 10:21, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Before I start, I should declare an interest as a member of the Cecil Sharp House Community Choir. My impression is that the question is irrelevant because it's applying an elatic tape measure, social morality, to one of its lemmas, social perception. Rather, one must place the subject within the framework of his time.

On the one hand, his publication was heavily encouraged by the precedents of Stamford's The National Songbook (1905) and Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Ballads (1907-11). Stamford was a founding Professor of the Royal College of Music and Quiller-Couch highly influential in the highly caste-stratified society of his time: neither could be challenged. Looking further back, Quiller-Couch in particular can be viewed in the framework of the Victorian neo-romantics, encouraged by the Queen's infatuation with an artificially-adapted version of Burns' Scotia. We can also see Marjory Kennedy-Fraser's work in Scottish traditional music and Ralph Vaughan-Williams arrangements as similarly constrained by the social acceptability criterion, they could not publish in the format actually being performed by the common people, they had to adapt the music to a classical form to be marketable. The same problem was faced by Edward Bunting in the Irish tradition a hundred years earlier.

On the other hand, his work was also heavily constrained by the logistical difficulties of noting the tunes down. Indeed, the work attributed to him was rather the work of a team, see the details on the EFDSS website.

To reverse the historical logic as a justification for the use of the people's music as an argument in support of a particular agenda not only infringes NPOV, but also wists the history. That the music should be accessible to Communism is quite acceptble, just as it can equally be claimed by Fascism. But to attempt to reverse the flow of history is not, unless the author could demonstrate that the vast bulk of performers were Communist, which would be rather unlikely in the jingoistic fervour of the UK in the years immediately before WWI.

I would therefore counsel the removal of the values debate either to this page or to another meme. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.41.170.255 (talk) 10:03, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

From an NPOV point of view, a lot of this meme is concerned with questions of interpretation, which belong on these pages and not on the meme's main page: the meme itself should be about the facts of Cecil Sharp's life, and not with the mechanics of interpretations of it: if there are disputes about the facts, the different viewpoints should be presented, but without wagging the dog as they do here - the meme is about Cecil Sharp, not Harker and company or revisionism and reactionism. If the debate is sufficiently important, a separate meme or memes might be needed. Certain obvious lacunae are the absence of a coherent bibliography and discography of his works, which can be greatly facilitated now the EFDSS Take 6/Full English database is available. It might be appropriate to ask Steve Roud and/or the staff of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library to take this in hand, as they are the principal archivists. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.218.131.47 (talk) 15:55, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

External links modified

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Improvements to this article, 2022

When I came across the entry for Cecil Sharp in 2022, it was immediately apparent that there were many problems with the page. The account of Sharp’s achievements as a collector of folk song and music was inadequate, there was no account of his significant theoretical work, the section on his political views included irrelevant information while omitting important evidence from his biography, and the section on the criticisms of his work was seriously unbalanced. Quotations from two reputable authors supportive of Sharp had been deleted without justification in November 2020, and tendentious statements about his alleged sexism had been added without balancing discussion. The article contained two maintenance templates flagging inadequate citation, some of the existing references were cited incorrectly, and the citations leaned heavily on a polemical piece by a non-specialist (Gemie, 2019) published on a non-peer-reviewed website, while omitting reliable sources. Sharp’s work has attracted controversy and there is certainly a need to discuss these arguments in full, but they should be covered according to the Wikipedia principle of neutrality and with appropriate evidence.

I have now begun an overhaul of the Sharp article, beginning November 21, 2022, which I hope will add significant information, beef up the referencing, and approach the controversies in a more balanced way. I will be more than happy to discuss this with any other contributors, on this Talk page. Lord Bateman (talk) 13:26, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

Conservative Rambling

This page was extremely bloated due to extensive defensiveness of Sharp and his legacy after every single point raised. Being over a century old, it's natural that some of Sharp's ideas will be out of date, especially in the then-newborn field of anthropology. We can briefly relate some of the main criticism and responding counterpoints without needing to include the life story and subsequent praise/criticism of each scholar. I have removed significant back-and-forth, but the page could be condensed much further. I find the focus on Fakesong unhelpful - it may have made the biggest splash at the time, but the literature now abounds with much more accurate and measured criticism. Some also seem to be carrying on the frankly fanciful notion that Sharp was the only one collecting folk songs at this time (Lucy Broadwood had published her collection before Sharp collected a single song), that there wasn't criticism of him by his contemporaries (MANY members of the FSS objected to his 'blustering', Anne Geddes Gilchrist complained directly to him of his censorship/bowdlerisation of material, even Vaughan Williams criticised his tendency to generalise), or that the material he collected somehow objects him from any criticism at all.

Removed unfounded speculation that was nowhere near compliant with NPOV, such as the idea Sharp's opposition to women's suffrage was due to their methods - clearly influenced by CJ Bearman's own perception of suffragettes as terrorists. Please just relate his actions and viewpoints as recorded and leave aside the speculative attempts to justify them: he was a conservative Edwardian man, it would've been very unexpected if he didn't oppose suffrage.

I think most of the problems with this page are encapsulated in the notion that liberalism and fascist represent 'all sides of the political spectrum', as a removed citation about the Liberal party's involvement with the Navy League attempted to claim. 81.77.38.183 (talk) 18:38, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia has tagged this edit as ‘possible vandalism’. Under the cover of reducing a supposedly ‘bloated’ text and removing ‘back and forth’, large sections presenting a more positive view of Sharp, or detailing factually his legacy, have been deleted while additional critical comments have been added, leaving the article conspicuously lacking in balance. Important references including Judge, Gregory and a key article by Bearman have been erased. In the case of a controversial figure like Sharp, it is essential that both sides of the story are presented, and even-handed accounts (like Judge’s acclaimed work) referenced, This is not ‘defensiveness’ but basic impartiality - yet this edit expunges the very mention of ‘counter-claims’ (which are many and well-researched). ‘Fakesong’ still informs much negative coverage of Sharp, so it is important that its arguments are discussed and its weaknesses exposed.

In the light of various far-fetched claims about Sharp’s politics, it is particularly questionable to have removed convincing evidence of his socialist beliefs, and a reference to his membership of the Fabian Society, then to have inserted a statement that ‘it is difficult to discern his true [political] views’. It is not difficult at all. This edit’s assertion that his opposition to capitalism represented purely anti-modernist sentiment, as opposed to a hatred of injustice, is contradicted by evidence that has now been conveniently deleted. Sharp was a confirmed socialist and a supporter of the Labour Party, and the insertion of a reference to the Nazi party here is entirely gratuitous. The claim of his ‘patronising attitude towards the rural peasantry’ ignores his respectful descriptions and well-documented friendships with many of them. Sharp’s attitude towards the methods of the suffragettes was referenced from his biography, not from Bearman (and it’s a bit rich for this editor to be citing NPOV).

Regarding Sharp’s work in Appalachia, again passages providing context have been jettisoned arbitrarily, resulting in a slanted account. His (now deleted) account of a meeting with an African-American singer is important in the context of his views on race.

An non-existent citation (Knevett) has been added, and there are now two different citations for ‘The Imagined Village’.

It is hard to see how this partisan erasure of fully-referenced and relevant evidence that happens to be inconvenient for a particular viewpoint, has improved the article, or made it easier for readers to make up their own minds. Further ‘condensation’ is not what this page requires, although there is room for improvement in certain sections. This edit needs to be challenged. Lord Bateman (talk) 17:02, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

Major overhaul to improve content and balance

I returned to this page in order to improve several areas that I judged remained inadequate after my previous edit, notably the main section on Sharp’s work in England, which contained no information about his working practice, his theorising, or his relationship with colleagues. I then found that that a more recent edit had seriously compromised the balance and informational content of the article. I have attempted with this edit to restore those while adding additional material and cutting passages that seemed of dubious relevance (‘The Bells of St. Genevieve’ in the section on classical music, for instance). I have also added references to relevant research articles by Schofield, Knevett, Francimanis, Gammon, Dow and Harvey, and reinstated citations to Judge, Bearman and Gregory, that had been deleted without justification.

Details: Introductory section: Added references to articles presenting counter-claims to the critical narrative.

Return to England: Deleted irrelevant passage about Emma Overd.

Folk Music of England (now retitled ‘English Folk Song and Dance’): Added context; more accurate account of Sharp and Marson’s collaboration; additional detail regarding Morris dance research and the quarrel with Mary Neal; superfluous information re Dorette Wilkie cut.

New sub-sections added: ‘Sharp as a Fieldworker’ and ‘Sharp’s Theories’.

Sub-section ‘Song Books for Teachers and Pupils’ retitled ‘Folk Song in Schools’ and clarified as to Sharp’s motives.

Sub-section ‘Bowdlerisation’: Minor edit for clarity, and citation added.

Influence on English Classical Music: Irrelevant material cut, reference added for Vaughan Williams’ use of Sharp’s material.

Sharp in America: some deleted material restored. Racially-offensive term removed but clearly indicated.

Political Views: Evidence of Sharp’s socialist beliefs restored. Non-political criticism by Broadwood and Vaughan Williams removed on grounds of irrelevance.

Criticism: Fuller account of Bearman’s critique of Harker restored.

I hope to return to this article shortly to add properly paginated citations. Lord Bateman (talk) 17:05, 11 July 2023 (UTC)