1812–1884 · United Kingdom · Romantic
John Pyke Hullah (1812–1884) was an English composer and music teacher. He wrote operas and ballads, but he is remembered above all for teaching large groups of people to sing from notation and read at sight. For players he is the author of the ballad "The Three Fishers", available on this site in a version for voice and piano.
John Pyke Hullah came into the world on 27 June 1812 in Worcester. He studied music with William Horsley and counted as his pupil from 1829. Horsley taught vocal music and harmony in London and was conductor at the Royal Academy of Music.
After entering the Royal Academy of Music, Hullah went on to study folk tunes.
Hullah wrote the comic opera The Village Coquettes to a libretto by Charles Dickens. Two further operas, The Barbers of Bassora and The Outpost, date from 1837 and 1838, and both were staged at Covent Garden.
Hullah collaborated with Charles Dickens and was acquainted with Felix Mendelssohn.
Hullah went to Paris in 1839 to study various ways of teaching music to large groups. He became an adherent of Wilhem's system, where "do" is a fixed note, unlike the moveable "do" of Tonic sol-fa. He adapted Wilhem's method for English use, and between 1840 and 1860 it was taught very successfully.
Hullah gave his first lesson on this system in 1840 at Battersea College, which trained teachers, at the prompting of the educationalist James Kay Shuttleworth, who was the principal there. In 1841 his handbook Wilhem’s Method of Teaching Singing came out, and in 1843 The Psalter, set in four parts.
In 1849 William Sterndale Bennett, who founded the Bach Society and chaired it, invited Hullah onto its committee. The aim was to give the first English performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and that concert took place on 6 April 1854. For sight-singing Hullah brought out the series Vocal Scores (1846) and Part-Music (1867).
In 1861 Hullah lectured at the Royal Institution and in 1864 in Edinburgh; the year after, he applied for the Reid professorship but was turned down. In 1866 and 1867 he conducted concerts in Edinburgh.
Dr Horsley's post as organist of the Charterhouse in London passed to Hullah in 1858, and he kept it to the end of his life. King's College made him an honorary fellow, and he was professor of vocal music at Queen's College and Bedford College, both in London.
The Royal Academy of Music elected him to its committee of management in 1869, and he led the academy's concerts from 1870 until 1873. The Council of Education appointed him in 1872 as inspector of music for the teacher-training schools of the whole United Kingdom. Edinburgh University gave him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1876. A trip abroad followed in 1878 to examine how music was taught in schools, and he reported on his findings.
Paralysis struck Hullah in 1880, and a second attack came in 1883. John Pyke Hullah died in London on 21 February 1884, and his grave is at Kensal Green Cemetery. His widow, Frances Rosser Hullah, published a memoir of him in 1886.
Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, a writer, modelled a figure called Lenhart Davy on Hullah in Charles Auchester, a book she published in 1853.
As a composer Hullah wrote mostly ballads, for example "Three Fishers", a setting of a poem by Charles Kingsley. Such pieces stayed popular for some years after the author died. Besides ballads, he also wrote operas.
Yet his standing in music history comes not from the compositions but from his drive to popularise musical education and from his steady resistance to the Tonic sol-fa system, which went on to succeed in a way he had not anticipated. Part of his case against it concerned the music favoured by the system's first teachers. He was also an author of books: The History of Modern Music appeared in 1862, A Grammar of Musical Harmony in 1852, and A Grammar of Counterpoint in 1864.
For players, the site offers "The Three Fishers" in a version for voice and piano; the edition is of upper-intermediate level.