In 1879 Hubert Parry wrote, in Grove's Musical Dictionary, that: ‘Secular music has long displayed the very free use of chromaticisms similar to the modern style of writing’ (by which he meant musical composition). In turn, the Oxford English Dictionary has quoted this entry to demonstrate how the idea of ‘chromaticism’ is used: for Grove's is still, as it was when Parry contributed to it, the key reference encyclopaedia for British musicians. Sure enough, thinking of tonal or harmonic variations in terms of colour – as chromaticism does – may have its literal origins in synaesthesia, but such thinking is now so much part of the language of Western Classical music that it's barely audible to musicians, even as metaphor.

When he wrote his entry Parry was not yet the established composer, in particular of church music, who would so famously set William Blake's poem ‘Jerusalem’. He was still the youthful protégé of the Musical Dictionary's founder, George Grove, and was struggling to escape a career in business and as a Lloyds underwriter. Nevertheless, the more than one hundred entries he wrote as a Groves staffer would secure him the Professorship of Composition and Musical History at the Royal College of Music. They also influenced generations of British musicians. Among them was Edward Elgar; who told his old friend, the violinist William H. Reed, that he had found Parry's articles particularly helpful because of his own lack of formal musical training.

Elgar himself was to evolve into the pre-eminent British chromaticist composer. His characteristically sensuous sound gains both its edge and its tendency to slipperiness from chromaticism's rapid movement between musical keys, and inclusion of notes from outside any given key. There is something touching about an establishment figure, such as Sir Edward became, characterising his musical education as ad hoc. It also implies a process cozily resembling traditional British pragmatism. Reed, who had undergone the usual formation (studying the violin at the Royal Academy of Music with Émile Sauret, among others), will have been aware of this. Nevertheless, it is apt and suggestive that a composer who went on to use the feel of harmony in new ways might have felt his way into professional musicianship: a process with echoes of the ‘legitimate play’ we saw at work in Chapter 2.