{"id":960,"date":"2015-11-27T16:10:08","date_gmt":"2015-11-27T16:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=960"},"modified":"2015-11-27T16:22:55","modified_gmt":"2015-11-27T16:22:55","slug":"five-questions-oskar-cox-jensen-on-napoleon-and-british-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=960","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: Oskar Cox Jensen on Napoleon and British Song"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Oskar<\/a><\/p>\n

Oskar Cox Jensen is currently a Research Fellow at King’s College London<\/a> working on the Music in London 1800-1851 project<\/a>.\u00a0 His work focuses on the political, social and cultural histories of Britain and Europe in the long eighteenth century, with a particular focus on balladry, street music and mass culture.\u00a0 Prior to taking up his post at King’s, he completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford, where he worked on the project that became his first monograph, Napoleon and British Song, 1797-1822<\/a><\/em>, which was published in October by Palgrave Macmillan and which we discuss below.\u00a0 As well as researching songs, Oskar is also a performer and recording artist; versions of many of the Napoleonic songs that his book examines can be heard on his Soundcloud<\/a>.<\/p>\n

1) How did you first become interested in the ways in which Napoleon was represented in popular song?<\/strong><\/p>\n

As an undergraduate historian, I was torn between two rather disparate interests: the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary period (which is now so central to my thinking that I tend to forget to put \u2018French\u2019 before \u2018Revolution\u2019, just as \u2018the \u201990s\u2019, to me, means the 1790s…) \u2013 and Viking-age Scandinavia.\u00a0 Lacking the necessary six languages required for the latter, it became 1789 and beyond.\u00a0 Song, meanwhile, has always mattered hugely to me, and I\u2019ve been writing songs for more than a decade: drawn in by the thunder of the Marseillaise, I wondered if the two worlds might collide.<\/p>\n

Of course, they did (for more of which, see question two!).\u00a0 I needed a topic for my Master\u2019s dissertation, ideally British, and while the 1790s seemed well covered, there was this immensely potent figure looming at the decade\u2019s end that no one really had a handle on.\u00a0 Stuart Semmel\u2019s Napoleon and the British<\/em>, the key work, focuses on London society and the press, rather than the people.\u00a0 Folk musicologist Vic Gammon had published on the puzzling fact that later British songs of Napoleon seemed to idolise him.\u00a0 There was clearly a story here.\u00a0 I began with 15,000 words on 1814\u201316 and, encouraged by Mark Philp and David Hopkin, didn\u2019t look back.<\/p>\n

2) In your introduction, you assert that popular song was \u2018the most widespread and influential form of literary expression of the day\u2019, but remark that it has thus far received very little scholarly attention. What do you see as being the main benefits of recovering the importance of popular song?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The great attraction here, and the great danger, is the thought that we are recovering \u2018lost voices\u2019: that the silent, unlettered majority was actually making a lot of noise (or, rather, music).\u00a0 In fact, many scholars from several disciplines have been drawn to the vast number of extant songs, often digitised, that we tend to label \u2018broadside ballads\u2019.\u00a0 The issue is less, why has there been no work done, but rather, why has it proven so unproductive?\u00a0 There remains a good deal of sober scepticism about what we can do with songs: they are ephemeral, and thus unquantifiable; they are usually anonymous; there is too little contextual material to bear their weight.\u00a0 Their aesthetic worth, both musical and literary, has been seen as negligible.\u00a0 The Romantic period was also a great age of propaganda, and many songs are polemical, didactic, seductive: with almost no evidence for their reception, how are we to draw any meaningful conclusions?<\/p>\n

To claw back something more positive in answer to the question: song was the<\/em> ubiquitous mass medium.\u00a0 Generically, it was heterogeneous, assimilating elite poetry, theatrical hamminess, and street doggerel, just as it assimilated sacred, dance, or military music.\u00a0 It simultaneously united and divided society both geographically and along class lines.\u00a0 Its perceived potency was such that political and moral activists of every stripe made use of it.\u00a0 Subject matter ranged from the same day\u2019s news to medieval romance.\u00a0 More people consumed canonical poetry as song than as verse; singing and listening, even in an age dominated by print, was simply what people did.\u00a0 If we can get to grips with this, then we recover a living culture.\u00a0 For how we might attempt this, see question three…<\/p>\n

3) In composing your monograph, how did you seek to deal with the problems implicit in what you describe as \u2018the fractured and contradictory incoherence of popular culture\u2019?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m beginning to go off \u2018popular\u2019 as a useful label (maybe twenty years too late), preferring, if anything, to use \u2018common\u2019, especially for song.\u00a0 But in this book, yes, I was specifically concerned with addressing plebeian experience and perception, which is a massive mess.\u00a0 But there are some basic propositions that help shape things.\u00a0 That quotation comes from a discussion of E.P. Thompson\u2019s point that popular culture embodied a tradition of rebelliousness \u2013 a rather pleasing paradox.\u00a0 And this is central to the book: we find a quite old fashioned top-down\/bottom-up struggle, whereby various actors are trying to impose a set of values upon the people by cultural means that these actors do not quite understand.\u00a0 Whilst being incoherent, especially in terms of party politics and a sense of identity, popular culture had its idioms and conventions, especially in song, and these conventions were cultural rather than political.<\/p>\n

That is to say, for example, that it\u2019s no good advancing the cause of temperance by publishing mass editions of teetotal songs, because these songs will not be fit for purpose: their lyrics will be sermonising, unsuitable to sing, and their functionality will be minimal: when would you sing them?\u00a0 It is this idea of the fitness of songs that proved to be my way through the mess.\u00a0 Were the words sympathetic?\u00a0 Was the choice of tune, in particular, appropriate, and could the words be sung to it in the first place?\u00a0 In the end, it was only by turning to contemporary aesthetic and performative considerations that I could evaluate this mass of material, and advance theories about its reception.\u00a0 Thus the book begins with a contextual analysis of song as a practice, considering its writing, publication, performance and reception by real people in specific times and spaces, as a necessary precondition of any close readings.<\/p>\n

4) To what extent might musical responses to Napoleon be systematised in chronological or class-based manners?<\/strong><\/p>\n

For convenience, I\u2019ll take \u2018musical\u2019 to mean \u2018song\u2019 here, as the book does not look at instrumental music.\u00a0 It all depends on whose response we are looking for: do we mean what was produced, or what was consumed?\u00a0 The former is achievable. 1797: the first responses, mostly admiring.\u00a0 1798: Napoleon as the worthy adversary to Nelson.\u00a0 1799: he becomes a heathenish, usurpatory butcher.\u00a0 1801\u20133: ambivalence.\u00a0 1803\u20135: the blustering Ogre.\u00a0 1806\u20139: silence.\u00a0 1810\u201312: domestic comedy.\u00a0 1813\u201314: triumphalism.\u00a0 1814 and after: the disappearance of anti-Napoleonic propaganda and the mass assertion of a sympathetic song tradition.\u00a0 Underneath, it\u2019s far more complicated, and that goes for class too.\u00a0 Geography is also central.\u00a0 If sweeping generalisations are permitted, then take England south of the M4, and Wales: staunchly loyal and anti-Napoleon.\u00a0 Everything north of that, including Scotland and Ireland: far likelier to hold Bonapartist sympathies.\u00a0 And there is an obvious narrative of elite disdain versus popular affinity.\u00a0 But press too hard and it all falls down.\u00a0 Look at Cobbett or Byron, and they change year by year.\u00a0 Look at the contested performance of song in almost every major city and town.\u00a0 Most importantly of all, look very hard at any individual song, the relation of words to music, and the multivalent interpretations that could be read into both: the same song in two mouths could carry two opposing messages, which might be heard as half a dozen more.\u00a0 This is not a medium that encourages systematisation.\u00a0 Indeed, this would be my central plea.\u00a0 Just because there are thousands of songs, and just because most of them don\u2019t appear to be any good, doesn\u2019t mean we should turn them into big data.\u00a0 In the first place, it doesn\u2019t work, because what is extant is entirely unreliable as a sample of what circulated at the time.\u00a0 And in turning songs exclusively into statistics (not that statistics can\u2019t be great when done properly), we both belittle their value as cultural objects, and lose any sense of what they actually meant to audiences.<\/p>\n

5) What new projects are you currently working on?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Music in London 1800\u20131851 is keeping me very busy.\u00a0 I\u2019d like to echo James Grande\u2019s invitation in these pages<\/a> to visit the website<\/a> if you are interested in being involved.\u00a0 Along with David Kennerley and Ian Newman, I am co-editor of a volume of essays, The Art of Miscellany: Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture<\/em>, which looks at the world of Charles Dibdin the Elder with the aim of suggesting a new model of thinking about cultural production in the period, one that spans all sorts of media and networks.\u00a0 This book is currently with readers.\u00a0 I am also writing my second monograph, The London Ballad-Singer, 1792\u20131864<\/em>.\u00a0 In writing the Napoleon book I moved from political to cultural history, and this is where I\u2019ve come to: a belief that we can best understand society and its texts by looking at the lived experience of culture, in this case on the London streets.\u00a0 The book focuses on the representation, politics, performances, and repertoire of street singers \u2013 and ends (tragically?) with their ultimate disappearance.\u00a0 Which seems like a good place to finish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oskar Cox Jensen is currently a Research Fellow at King’s College London working on the Music in London 1800-1851 project.\u00a0 His work focuses on the political, social and cultural histories… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/960"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=960"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":964,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/960\/revisions\/964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}