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Musical Manchester |
| Section: THE ARTS / MUSIC |
| Author: Herb Greer |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/2000 |
| Size: 2,546 Words, 16,288 Characters |
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The traditional image of northwest England's Manchester is like the picture in folk singer Ewan McColl's famous song: grubby, industrial, a manufacturing inland port where the atmosphere reeks of sulfur, the buildings are low and dirty, and the loudest music is the clattering sound of mills. When I first saw the city, almost half a century ago, it looked very much like that. True, most of the mills had closed, and the Victorian architecture was some of the finest and best-preserved to be found in the British Isles; but in the gritty fifties those elaborate red brick cornices and facings were obscured with a residue from the industrial days of high empire, when the great cotton mills and their chimneys coated the city and surrounding villages, and even the rocks on the moors around Manchester, with a thick (and so it seemed then, eternal) layer of soot. The scene evoked Williams Blake's lines about dark satanic mills.
The Industrial Revolution had transformed Manchester from a minor town in the county of Lancashire into a giant of commerce whose business, in the well-known American phrase, was business--not at all the sort of place you would normally associate with the arts, and especially not with classical music. Indeed, as late as 1929 The Soul of Manchester, a collection of essays on life in the city, said gloomily,
"Perhaps it is impossible for the North of England [Manchester especially] really to live, move, and have its being in music--that is, to project its attitude to life (and the getting and spending thereof) by means of an art so immaterial in its substance as music."
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...triking contrast to, the sleekly modern Bridgewater Hall stands one of the few Manchester pubs to have kept its original decor and name: The Briton's Protection). But the visitor will also discover a fresh, clean urban oasis whose artistic life, and above all the music it has to offer, are second to none in the world, superior to those in most cities of its size and even some that are larger.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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