As a music cataloguer at the British Library, part of my job involves recording the medium of performance for which a score was intended. This can range from string quartet to brass band, solo accordion to symphony orchestra, and even, as was the case recently, pyrophone with piano accompaniment.  

This unusual instrumentation was chosen by French composer Théodore Lack (1846-1912) for an arrangement of ‘God save the Queen’, published in Paris in the late 19th century. As it was my first time cataloguing a score for pyrophone, I ended up spending a few hours researching what I could about the origins and history of the instrument.  

Front cover of 'God Save the Queen' by Théodore Lack

Invented by Alsatian composer and scientist Frédéric Kastner (1852-1882) in the early 1870s, the pyrophone was an innovation for its time in that it relied on combustion, as opposed to air pressure, to produce notes. Kastner was in turn inspired by Irish chemist Bryan Higgins’ 1777 discovery that a hydrogen flame positioned at the lower end of a glass tube could produce a note. This set Kastner's instrument apart from the traditional pipe organ, which the pyrophone design was based on, leading to the alternate term ‘Fire Organ’.  

There are very few scores written for pyrophone at the British Library, so we can assume that the instrument didn’t take off in the way Kastner had hoped. However, a book published in 1876, Le pyrophone : flammes chantantes (British Library 8706.aaaa.1), details Kastner’s activities in promoting his invention. An excerpt from an article in The Times, published on 11 April 1876, prefaces the book. The writer describes a gathering at Kastner’s residence on Rue de Clichy, Paris, where members of the public were invited to hear a demonstration of the instrument and were “deeply moved at hearing those jets sing with extraordinary power, purity, and correctness.” They go on to state the following: 

The audience was still more astounded at suddenly hearing the gaseliers placed in the centre of the room, and set in motion by invisible electric wires, execute ‘God save the Queen’ in sonorous and penetrating tones.

Black and white ilustration of a pyrophone by Henri Dunant (1828–1910), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

‘God save the Queen’ must have been a favourite of Kastner’s, as according to the same preface, he also performed the anthem for the Royal Society of Arts on 17 February 1875. One can imagine Kastner conjuring up a musical combination of fire, light and sound, the perfect setting for a patriotic anthem like ‘God save the Queen’. It’s possible that Theodore Lack, a French pianist and composer, was in attendance at one of these meetings and felt inspired to pen his own arrangement. Either way, Lack was one of very few composers to have written specifically for the pyrophone. His other related works include an arrangement of ‘Ave Maria’ for soprano voice, pyrophone, and piano, and a choral work entitled ‘Prière’, both available at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Elsewhere at the British Library, the only other searchable piece of pyrophone music comes from Miroslaw Koennemann (1826-1890), a German-Bohemian conductor and composer who published Paraphrase sur un vieil air d'église Italien for pyrophone circa 1879 (British Library h.1850.l.(3.)). 

Kastner’s 1876 book documents an excited response from the scientific community, including the eminent Irish scientist John Tyndall, who was also experimenting within the field of “singing flames”. It was through technological innovations such as the pyrophone that listeners of the time were able to experience something beyond everyday sounds, inviting them into a more otherworldly, spiritual realm, much like electronic synthesizers were to do in the mid-20th century. An 1875 journal article from Popular Science Monthly, written by Swiss humanitarian Henry Dunant, gives a romantic description of the effects of the pyrophone:   

The sound of the pyrophone may truly be said to resemble the sound of a human voice ... like a human and impassioned whisper, as an echo of the inward vibrations of the soul, something mysterious and indefinable; besides, in general, possessing a character of melancholy, which seems characteristic of all natural harmonies...

His words give some idea of how the pyrophone might have first sounded, almost 150 years ago, to listeners who were more accustomed to hearing acoustic instruments. 

Pyrophone from the Science Museum Group Collection, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License, via the Science Museum

And what of the modern day pyrophone? The Science Museum houses a version of the instrument, which according to a blog article from 2012 lies in a dark corner of the Museum’s storage facility, unplayed. Elsewhere, on the internet, thanks to the imagination and persistence of a marginal few, Kastner’s legacy lives on. 

Gail Tasker, Music Cataloguer

Kastner, Frédéric. La Pyrophone. Flammes chantantes ... Quatrième édition. (Paris: N.p., 1876). [accessed 8 April 2025].

M. Dunant, 'The Pyrophone', Popular Science Monthly, 7 (1875). [accessed 8 April 2025].

Sommerlad, R., ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kastner’s Miraculous Pyrophone (Part One)’, Science Museum Blog, 2019 https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/pyrophone1/ [accessed 27 May 2025].

 

This week, the British Library is commemorating the 80^th anniversary of VE Day with a series of blogs and social media features highlighting items from our collections relating to the Second World War. Here we spotlight a series of annotated programmes from the legendary series of daily concerts put on by Dame Myra Hess at the National Gallery.

The National Gallery Concerts took place on weekdays for a span of six and a half years, between 10 October 1939 and 10 April 1946. They filled an important gap left by the mass cancellation of concerts in London during the early stages of the war, and brought new artistic life to the National Gallery, which had evacuated most of its paintings. The National Gallery’s webpages provide historical overviews, anecdotes, and photographs of the concerts, and information about the organising team. The concerts were initiated and directed by the pianist Myra Hess (1890-1965); she planned the concerts with the composer-pianist-musicologist Howard Ferguson; her niece Beryl Davies kept on top of correspondence; and her agents Ibbs & Tillett handled bookings and printed the programmes.[i] Ferguson recalled Hess’s summary of their mammoth collaboration: ‘Isn’t it extraordinary, Howardy? We’ve worked together for six and a half years without actually hitting one another!’.[ii] More about Hess’s life with and beyond the concerts during the war can be found in Jessica Duchen’s engaging and detailed recent biography of the pianist.

A montage of three concert programme annotations reading 'News wonderful (weather hot)'

Hess bequeathed a complete set of programmes to the British Museum, together with accounts, lists of works performed, an index of performers, and other related material. These handsomely-bound volumes, which were transferred to the British Library on its foundation in 1973, provide a comprehensive overview of the music performed, together with statistical and administrative aspects of the concert series. Most of the programmes contain minor annotations, in a few different hands, noting attendees (which often surpassed 1000) and income from ticket sales (profits went to the Musicians Benevolent Fund). Many also provide testimony of specific wartime events, the general political climate (‘bad news’, ‘good news’), and even the weather, as seen in the little montage above of concerts from late April and early May 1945. The programmes included below display a cross-section of such annotations, and also serve as examples of the prominent contributions made by women, émigré and Jewish musicians, and international (including German) soloists to the concert series.

Two Elena Gerhardt concert programmes from November and December 1939. All programmes from British Library shelfmark Cup.404.c.1/1. Click to view the full-size image.

The two programmes above present the first two of 16 dates featuring Elena Gerhardt (1883-1961), the German mezzo-soprano and superstar of the Lieder world who had settled permanently in London in 1934.[iii] The first was an all-Schubert programme, the second all-Brahms, and both concerts were given twice. In her memoirs, Gerhardt recalls thinking that the outbreak of war would be the end of her career: ‘all my Lieder recitals were called off […] and I did not believe that the English public would want to hear Lieder sung in German for a long time’.[iv]  When Hess invited her to perform, she was taken aback:

I was so surprised […] I could never sing Lieder translated, and besides, did she not realise that my nationality was still German? […] To listen to the language of the enemy was, in my opinion, to ask too much of an audience.[v]

That Hess was adamant Gerhardt should sing in German seems to have articulated a wider belief in music’s ability to transcend matters of politics and language. In her 7 November performance, Gerhardt sang Schubert’s song ‘An die Musik’ as an encore, the lyrics of which speak of music’s potential to transport its listeners to a ‘better world’. Gerhardt was turning 56 in the autumn of 1939, but here’s an earlier (and therefore out of copyright) recording of her singing ‘An die Musik’, with the pianist Harold Craxton in 1924 (Aeolian Vocalion 03545).

On 1 December, Gerhardt was joined by Hess and Lionel Tertis for a programme of Brahms, including his beautiful pair of songs with viola obbligato. As well as telling us the attendance numbers (1,572 at the 1pm concert, 467 at 5.30pm), the annotations include notice that Finland had been invaded the day before. This refers to the Soviet invasion that sparked the so-called ‘Winter War’, lasting three and a half months. Skipping ahead to 13 March 1940, we find reference to the signing of the Moscow Peace Treaty, with a programme marked ‘Russo + Finnish Peace signed 12^th’.

Programme of 13 March 1940: Astra Desmond, Grace Shearer, Stratton Quartet

That this was an all-Sibelius concert seems to have been serendipitous, as programmes were planned, publicised, and printed well in advance. The programme gives opportunity to highlight, briefly, the contralto Astra Desmond, who introduced many of Sibelius’s lesser-known songs to the UK, both through concert platforms like this one, and through essays and radio broadcasts. Desmond was a keen linguist and song translator, and she learned Swedish and rudimentary Finnish in order to specialise in Scandinavian song. The British Library holds Desmond’s papers, which include documentation of her wartime concert tours around Europe and her broadcasts on various BBC foreign services, which formed part of the cultural diplomacy and propaganda strategies of corporations like the British Council and the BBC.

Photograph of Roland Hayes and Myra Hess, copyright Ronald Procter. From MS Mus. 1840/1, reproduced with permission from the estate of Howard Ferguson. We have been unable to find information about the estate of Ronald Procter

The British Library’s small set of letters and papers of Myra Hess collected by Howard Ferguson (MS Mus. 1840) includes ephemera relating to handful of noteworthy concerts, including this photograph of the American tenor Roland Hayes with Myra Hess at their concert of 15 October 1943.[vi] Hayes was one of the most eminent singers of his time, and he was booked for the opening week of the fifth season of National Gallery Concerts. Hayes was especially known for his Schubert, but he was also influential in his use of a programming strategy that combined groups of earlier song and Lieder with a group of spirituals – music he had grown up singing, and which he performed at this concert in arrangements by himself and by R. Nathaniel Dett.[vii]

Programme of 15 October 1943: Roland Hayes, Myra Hess, and Gerald Moore

‘Good news’: Spring 1945

As the end of the war approached in Spring 1945, annotations on the programmes more frequently read ‘good news’ or ‘news wonderful’. The programme of 7 May 1945 states ‘War virtually over in Europe’.

Programme of 7 May 1945: Mátyás Seiber and the Zorian Quartet

The Zorian Quartet had an all-women line-up, led by violinist Olive Zorian; they gave premieres of new quartets by the likes of Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett, Priaulx Rainier, and Doreen Carwithen, and their discography includes many landmark early recordings of 20^th-century music. Here, their Bartók performance was preceded by an illustrated lecture about the quartet by Mátyás Seiber. Seiber was a Hungarian-born composer who left Nazi Germany in 1933 and settled in the UK in 1935; he became a British citizen after the war, and contributed considerably to the shaping of 20^th-century music in Britain as a composer, pedagogue, and new music advocate.[viii] His wide-reaching musical activities can be explored in the important manuscript and sound collections donated by Seiber’s family to the British Library.[ix] Seiber was born on 4 May 1905, and at the time of posting this blog, celebrations marking his 120^th anniversary were underway in London.

The National Gallery was closed for VE Day holidays on 8 and 9 May 1945 – as the programme of 10 May tells us. After paging through all the programmes, taking in both their musical significance and the political twists and turns of the stark annotations, it was exhilarating finally to read: ‘War in Europe over’.

Programme of 10 May 1945: Maurice Raskin and Marcelle Gazelle

Frankie Perry, Digital Music Collections Specialist

[i] Howard Ferguson, ‘A short history of the concerts’, in National Gallery concerts, in aid of the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund: 10^th October 1939 – 10^th October 1944 (London, 1944).

[ii] Howard Ferguson, Music, Friends and Places : a memoir (London: Thames Publishing, 1997), 59.

[iii] Gerhardt (and Hayes, mentioned later on) are two of the several artists whose appearances at the concerts are covered in Duchen’s new book. See, Myra Hess: National Treasure (Kahn & Averill, 2025), 182ff.

[iv] Elena Gerhardt, Recital (London: Methuen & Co., 1953), 125.

[v] Gerhardt, Recital, 126. For discussion of Gerhardt’s National Gallery performances in the context of broader politics of singing language at the time, see Laura Tunbridge, Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in New York and London between the World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), Ch. 4.

[vi] These were donated by Hugh Cobbe in memory of Howard Ferguson in 2009, and can be found at MS Mus. 1840. For more on Ferguson, see Cobbe, ‘Howard Ferguson at 80’, The Musical Times, 129/1748 (1988), 507-510.

[vii] On Hayes’s influential programming, see ‘Listening B(l)ack: Paul Robeson After Roland Hayes’, The Journal of Musicology, 32/4 (2015), 524-557. On the racialised reception of Hayes as a Lieder singer, see Kira Thurman, Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), Ch. 5.

[viii] See Florian Scheding, Musical Journeys: Performing Migration in Twentieth-Century Music (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2019), esp. Chapters 2 and 3.

[ix] Music manuscripts and papers of Mátyás Seiber, Add MS 62784-62887; supplementary papers at MS Mus. 1695-1696. Seiber’s own collection of sound recordings is catalogued as the Mátyás Seiber Collection, C1584.

The music placing desk has recently become the temporary home of a fascinating collection of pamphlets from the mid-20^th century. BBC Radio for Schools produced a number of long-running programmes during this period, such as Singing Together and Time and Tune, that were aimed at bringing music education and communal music-making to children across the country.

Although music programming aimed at school children had been broadcast on occasions since the 1920s, the BBC School Radio began to be used significantly and regularly during World War II, when children were experiencing evacuation and the practice of community music-making was considered necessary to support their integration into new schools. Leading this was a programme called Singing Together, which ran from September 1939 to March 2001 and is fondly remembered by many people around the UK. Singing Together (and the accompanying Teacher’s Notes) is well represented in the collections on the placing desk, along with other programmes like Time and Tune, Music Session, Making Music (BBC Television Broadcasts to Schools), and Music Workshop. The pamphlets span a wide period of time, 1955 to 1974, that saw various changes to the radio programme including its home station and its presenters.

A collage of BBC Radio for Schools pamphlets

Due to BBC taping policies, the vast majority of the Schools Radio broadcasting output is lost, save for a handful that exist in the BBC’s archives and other archives (including the British Library’s own Sound and Vision collections).[i] The pamphlets that accompanied each term of programming are the best documentation we have of long-running and culturally significant programmes such as Singing Together, aside from anecdotes and memories from those lucky enough to have experienced them as children or as teachers.

As I explored the BBC Radio for Schools pamphlets, I noticed how rare it is nowadays to find children’s sheet music so beautifully designed and available to all schoolchildren. The collection reflects the vastly changing landscape of music pedagogy in the 20^th century. Inspired by these collection items, the following blog post taps into my own musicological research, and considers how these unique, historic items might relate to broader contemporary attitudes and perceptions of children's music. A later post will explore the many artists and designers behind these pamphlets.

Four illustrated covers of pamphlets

Communal music-making

As nostalgia becomes an increasingly potent cultural sentiment, recollections of shared childhood experiences have seen more media attention. In 2014, BBC Radio 4 broadcasted a documentary hosted by Jarvis Cocker which revisited Singing Together and featured many accounts of people’s experiences of the show in the 1960s and 1970s.[ii] My own experience of regular communal singing and music-making was very different however. I grew up in the 2000s and 2010s, when radio was losing its youth appeal in favour of CDs and streaming, but I was privileged to have access to holistic music-making throughout my childhood at Coda Music Trust, a registered charity, and music and arts school/therapy centre located on the south coast. This was not the case for the majority of my peers and, I suspect, children up and down the country at that time. The collection of BBC Radio for Schools pamphlets at the British Library illustrates a cultural tradition that has largely been left behind: community music-making as a live, nation-wide practice. Singing Together saw thousands of children all, well, singing together at the same time, singing the same song, in classrooms from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, every week.

As an adult, I have rediscovered long-distance (or rather, time-displaced) communal singing through uploads of Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest on YouTube. This was an educational show from the mid 1960s featuring Seeger and various guest musicians including legends like Johnny Cash, Elizabeth Cotten, Mississippi John Hurt, and Buffy Sainte-Marie. A favourite of mine was the episode featuring Bernice Reagon, and I had a particularly transformative experience singing along with Reagon, Seeger, and other guest Jean Ritchie from my student digs in Leeds during the pandemic, 60 years after the episode’s first broadcast.

These practices are incredibly powerful, community-building activities that both children and adults alike can benefit greatly from participating in. The BBC Radio for Schools pamphlets at the British Library document an extremely effective curriculum for communal music-making that has had a huge impact on those who participated in those classes as a child, as can be heard in the Singing Together documentary.[iii]

Children’s music

Children’s music sadly remains a genre greatly overlooked by the general public and musicologists alike. Its cultural significance is often forgotten, and contemporary children’s music is dominated by the Kidz Bop series that has been criticised in recent years for its overly censorious tendencies.[iv] But there are examples of older recorded children’s music that gained cult status upon re-release. One such example is The Langley Schools Music Project album, a collection of pop song covers recorded by Canadian school choruses in the 1970s. Reissued by Bar/None Records in 2018 under the title Innocence & Despair, the album garnered critical praise from many of the artists covered.[v] For example, Fred Schneider of the B-52s described the music as “a haunting, evocative wall-of-sound experience that is affecting in an incredibly visceral way.” Likewise, David Bowie spoke on the cover of ‘Space Oddity’: "The backing arrangement is astounding. Coupled with the earnest if lugubrious vocal performance you have a piece of art that I couldn't have conceived of".

In fact, the haunting effect of children’s voices, with all their associated innocence, cheerily singing songs like ‘Space Oddity’, Barry Manilow’s ‘Mandy’, the Eagles’ ‘Desperado’, the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’, and ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’, creates a dissonance of affect that can be incredibly moving. In the aptly re-titled Innocence & Despair, musical simplicity is combined with communal music-making, children’s voices, and powerful lyricism in an aesthetically significant way. There is surprisingly little musicological research into the affective experience of hearing music made by children.

Like the Langley School Music, another release that highlights the haunting quality of recorded children’s music is Trunk Records’ Classroom Projects, a compilation of music made by and for British schools in the latter part of the 20^th century. Similarly to the BBC Radio for Schools output, many of the pieces featured on this album have a more educational tone, as opposed to the pop music of Innocence & Despair. There are classroom experiments in aleatoric music and musique concrete as well as “public service broadcast”-style songs about drink-driving. The introduction track with narration by Robert Gittings as well as the voice featured in ‘Examples of 12 Note Melodies’ feature the clipped, received pronunciation associated with wartime BBC radio broadcasts like those represented in the British Library collection. However,  Classroom Projects takes the “haunting” descriptions we have already seen to a whole new level. Its focus on discordant and atonal contemporary classical music of the era has a disquieting effect that is only amplified when you remember that it was made by children (‘Music for Cymbals’, ‘An Aleatory Game’, ‘Musique Concrete’, and ‘Duet for Two Flutes’). Other tracks featuring vocals reveal what can only be described as a dark imagination in the children making them, such as ‘The Lonely Coast’ and ‘Autumn’. Traditional ballads and contemporary folk songs like ‘Jimmy Whalen', ‘A Soalin’’ and the utterly terrifying ‘The Lyke-Wake Dirge’ illustrate the capacity of children’s music to elicit horror in listeners.

Even cheerful or mellow tracks have a temporally uncanny quality to them as a result of the noise and low fidelity sound that accompanies the intended music (‘Portland Town’, ‘Puppets’, ‘Alleluia’, ‘Strawberry Fayre’). The stand-out track for me on Classroom Projects is The Small Choir of St. Brandon’s School’s cover of ‘Bright Eyes’. It is hard to describe accurately the experience of listening to this song, other than to say it is, to me, the sonic equivalent of a rictus grin. At once deeply sinister, saccharine, and peculiarly melancholic, I find this example of children’s music incredibly moving.

It may be time to reevaluate the aesthetic significance of children’s music, and, to return to the collection at the heart of this post, a good place to start is with the BBC Radio for Schools collection of pamphlets. This collection represents more than simply the paper accompaniment for long-cancelled radio shows. They reflect profound experiences of music and community felt by children from all corners of the UK for many decades, experiences that are held dearly in the memories of 1000s of adults today and that have not successfully been replicated for children growing up now. The fullness of the musicality held in the pamphlets of Singing Together as well as the albums mentioned above cannot be overstated: a full spectrum of complex and intense emotions channelled in the communal and nurturing medium of music education. 

Lou Baynes, Collections Support Assistant, Music Collections

References

[i] BBC Archive, ‘BBC Archives - Wiped, Missing and Lost’, BBC Archive Service (online, n.d.) <https://www.bbc.co.uk/archiveservices/wiped-missing-and-lost> [accessed 8 April 2025].

[ii] Jarvis Cocker, Singing Together, produced by Ruth Evans, BBC Radio 4 (November 2014) <https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b04stc6c> [accessed 8 April 2025].

[iii] ‘Singing Together: the radio show that got schoolchildren singing’, BBCNews, (28 November 2014), <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30210485> [accessed 8 April 2025].

[iv] Aditi Shrikant, ‘Why Kidz Bop’s “censored” songs aren’t just annoying – theyre problematic’, Vox (online, October 2018) <https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/3/17930132/kidz-bop-censorship-music> [accessed 8 April 2025].

[v] The Langley Schools Music Project, Innocence and Despair, Bar/None Records (2001) <https://bar-nonerecords.bandcamp.com/album/innocence-and-despair> [accessed 8 April 2025].

Further reading and links

barnonerecords, ‘The Langley Schools Music Project - Space Oddity (Official)’, YouTube (15 October 2013 [2001]) <https://youtu.be/YWjTbB4ONeM?> [accessed 9 April 2025]

BBC Archive, ‘BBC Archives - Wiped, Missing and Lost’, BBC Archive Service (online, n.d.) <https://www.bbc.co.uk/archiveservices/wiped-missing-and-lost> [accessed 8 April 2025]

Borstal Boy, ‘The Small Choir Of St Brandon' s School - Bright Eyes’, YouTube (15 December 2015 [2013]) <https://youtu.be/ahJUAU0zzlY> [accessed 9 April 2025]

‘Classroom Projects - Incredible Music Made By Children In Schools’, Discogs (online, n.d.) <www.discogs.com/release/4956614-Various-Classroom-Projects-Incredible-Music-Made-By-Children-In-Schools> [accessed 9 April 2025]

Cocker, Jarvis, Singing Together, produced by Ruth Evans, BBC Radio 4 (November 2014) <https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b04stc6c> [accessed 8 April 2025]

Coda Music Trust, <https://www.coda.org.uk/> [accessed 8 April 2025]

Gilles Spadari, ‘Sounds & Silence – The Lyke Wake Dirge’, YouTube (2 October 2015 [2013]) <https://youtu.be/KchxCQlzqwY> [accessed 9 April 2025]

The Langley Schools Music Project, Innocence and Despair, Bar/None Records (2001) <https://bar-nonerecords.bandcamp.com/album/innocence-and-despair> [accessed 8 April 2025]

Rr R- Folk Music Channel, focusing on Pete Seeger, ‘Episode 5 - Rainbow Quest by Pete Seeger: Jean Ritchie and Bernice Reagon’, YouTube (online, 29 January 2022 [1965-1966]) <https://youtu.be/XaNHD371py8?si=pUdVnRMsb79v7dCi> [accessed 9 April 2025]

Shrikant, Aditi, ‘Why Kidz Bop’s “censored” songs aren’t just annoying – they’re problematic’, Vox (online, October 2018) <https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/3/17930132/kidz-bop-censorship-music> [accessed 8 April 2025]

‘Singing Together: the radio show that got schoolchildren singing’, BBC News, (28 November 2014), <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30210485> [accessed 8 April 2025]