John Marsh

John Marsh (b Dorking, 31 May 1752; d Chichester, 31 Oct 1828). English composer and writer. Despite his showing an early interest in music, his father, a Royal Naval captain, denied him a musical education during his school years at Greenwich Academy, intending that he too should follow a naval career.

In 1768, however, he persuaded his father to allow him to undertake legal training and he was articled to a solicitor in Romsey. During the two years before leaving home in Gosport, then his father's station, Marsh took up the violin, studying with Wafer, the organist of Gosport Chapel. This was his only formal musical training, but enabled him to become sufficiently proficient to join in the subscription concerts in Portsmouth and Gosport. In Romsey he applied himself as assiduously to music as to law, teaching himself to play the spinet, viola (which became a particular favourite), cello, oboe and organ. These were also the years of his first retained compositions, works written specifically for a series of subscription concerts he founded in the town. Following the completion of his clerkship in 1773, Marsh set up practice in Romsey and the following year married Elizabeth Brown, the daughter of a Salisbury doctor. In 1776 he moved to a partnership in Salisbury, where he took up residence in a house near Close Gate. During the seven years that he lived in Salisbury, Marsh played an active role in the city's thriving musical life: he was a violinist at the subscription concert series, of which he became leader in 1780, a member of the Catch Club and an occasional substitute organist at cathedral services. He had by now become a prolific composer; a number of his symphonies had been introduced both at the subscription concerts and at the annual Salisbury Festival.

In 1783, having inherited an estate in Kent, Marsh abandoned his career as a practising lawyer and moved with his family to Nethersole House, some ten miles from Canterbury. He was immediately offered the directorship of the ailing Canterbury Concert, which he set about reorganizing with characteristic energy, soon transforming the Concert into a successful organization. Marsh recognised that he could ill-afford the upkeep of a large estate and within two years was again making plans to move. Following a short period at a prebendial house in the precincts of Canterbury Cathedral, the family moved to Chichester in the spring of 1787. The house in North Pallant (no longer standing) that Marsh bought from the poet William Hayley was to remain his home for the remaining 40 years of his life. As at Canterbury, his arrival coincided with a period when local concert life was at a low ebb and Marsh was again given the challenge of reviving the subscription concerts as manager and leader. His success ensured that Chichester enjoyed a thriving concert life until 1813, when he retired from concert leadership. Although he never lost interest in music, the last 15 years of his life were mainly devoted to his family and extensive travels, during which he frequently managed to take in one or more of the provincial music festivals. Active and in good health until the final months of his life, Marsh died at his home after a short illness and was buried a week later at All Saints, West Pallant.

Although Marsh took a lively and active interest in music throughout his long life, it was, as he pointed out in the autobiographical sketch he provided for John Sainsbury, ‘not his only pursuit’. The journal that he kept for most of his life reveals a man of extraordinarily diversified interests, ranging from astronomy (on which he wrote two published books) and campanology to a part-time military career as an officer in the sometimes unruly Chichester Volunteers during the Napoleonic Wars. In addition to Marsh's extensive writings on music, his published articles address such topics as religious philosophy and geometry. His writings on musical topics cover a wide range of subjects, and reveal an unusually balanced and sensible approach to arguments such as the relative merits of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ compositions. Marsh was also occupied with the prevailing low standards of cathedral music: in the preface to his Cathedral Chant Book (1808) he laid the foundations for the reform of Anglican psalm chanting.

The most important of Marsh's extant compositions, the Eight Favorite Symphonies published between 1784 and 1800, reveal a composer well-versed in the requirements of the mixed professional and amateur provincial orchestras he encountered. Concertante parts for more able players are judiciously juxtaposed with easier tutti writing, and in a work like the Conversation Sinfonie, for two orchestras, composed in 1778, Marsh also shows a keen awareness of orchestral colour, disposing his two groups so as to pit high instruments against low. He was one of the first musicians in England to appreciate Haydn's stature, and his finest surviving symphony, A Favorite Symphony, no.6 in D major (1796), pays particular homage in a four-movement work scored for full Classical orchestra including trumpets and timpani. In general terms the symphonies are characterised by an open, direct freshness and strong melodic appeal, qualities also in evidence in the five-movement string quartet of 1785. The anthems are confident and effective examples of the later Georgian verse anthem. Marsh's special concern for affective word setting is articulated in his criticism of certain aspects of William Boyce's setting of By the waters of Babylon (Ps cxxxvii) in the preface to his Six Anthems, op.18.