The Academy of Ancient Music (1726–1802): Its History, Repertoire and Surviving Programmes
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Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle (2020), 51, 1–136 doi:10.1017/rrc.2019.1 ARTICLE The Academy of Ancient Music (1726–1802): Its History, Repertoire and Surviving Programmes H. Diack Johnstone Email: [email protected] Abstract It was way back in the mid-1960s that I first became interested in the Academy of Ancient Music, and I have been collecting stray scraps of information relating to them ever since. Fifty years on, methinks it’s high time I shared my findings with the world of eighteenth-century musical scholarship at large. Others meanwhile have dealt with various bits of the story, but no one so far as I know has yet attempted to bring it all together in one place. What follows here is in three self-contained parts and two appendices. The first part surveys the history of the society from cradle to grave so to speak, and deals with all the main personalities and events involved. The second, and by far the longest, part provides details of all the Academy programmes known to have survived together with various references to be found in diaries, letters and other manuscript material of the period; there is also, for the 1780s and 90s in particular, a good deal of supporting comment in the London newspapers. Also duly noted in this section are the present-day whereabouts of all those individual works that can be identified as having once formed part of its celebrated library. Part III is an editorial conflation of the 1761 and 1768 editions of The Words of such pieces as are most usually performed by the Academy of Ancient Music (plus a short and hitherto unnoticed addition to the latter to be found only in some copies), and keyed to it are the dates of all known performances tabled in Part II. Appendix A provides an annotated list of all those who were named as subscribers on 9 April 1730. This is the last such list to have survived, and here, for the first time, an attempt has been made to identify those various City merchants, clerics and others who are not among those well-known musicians usually named as being members. Appendix B refers to an interesting document now in the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale. It contains not only the names of the subscribers to the 1785–86 season but also a list of all those singers and instrumentalists who were employed by the Academy in 1786–87 (and how much they were paid). Only the latter, however, is reproduced here, and its content has been reordered in the interests of greater clarity. Standard RISM sigla are used for all but a very few library references. Part I: The history As the first music club anywhere to devote itself almost wholly to ‘early’ music (in this case, that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), the Academy of Ancient Music was one of the most interesting and important musical societies in eighteenth-century Britain. As such, its place in the history books is assured. According to Sir John Hawkins (who was himself a member), it ‘was instituted about the year 1710, by a number of Gentlemen, performers on different instruments, in conjunction with some of the most eminent masters of the time’. In actual fact, however, its inaugural meeting took place at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand on Friday, 7 January 1726, and for the first 5 years of its existence it was known as the Academy of Vocal Music.1 Of the 13 founder members, most belonged to one or other of 1The first person to point this out was Henry Davey in his History of English Music published in London in 1895 (with a second revised edition in 1921; see 362). His discovery went unnoticed, however, and, until comparatively recent years, the 1710 date has been endlessly retailed by successive generations of armchair historians, many of whom have also confused the © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Musical Association. 2 H. Diack Johnstone the Chapel Royal and St Paul’s Cathedral choirs (or both); a small group of St Paul’s choristers to provide the treble parts was also in attendance.2 Of those who were not, the two most notable were Johann Ernst Galliard and Dr Johann Christoph Pepusch, the latter being an ardent antiquarian who, if not the initial motive force, was subsequently to become the leading light and guiding spirit of the society. By 1730, the Academy numbered some 80 members. Among them, in addition to the nucleus of adult male singers from the three main London choral foundations (Westminster Abbey now included), were Signors Bononcini, Carbonelli, Geminiani, Sammartini and Nicola Haym, with Senesino too briefly a member; also the Lords Plymouth and Paisley, Viscount Percival (later the First Earl of Egmont), the Earl of Abercorn, William Hogarth and Giuseppe Riva, the Modenese diplomatic resident in London, were among the members.3 Hawkins’ Account of the Institution and Progress of the Academy of Ancient Music was published anonymously in 1770, by which time the erroneous date of inception had long since established itself in the corporate memory of the members, as is evident from the fact that it is also the date given on a memorial tablet to Pepusch placed by them in the chapel of the Charterhouse on the centenary of his birth (1767). He had been an organist there from 1737 until his death in 1752.4 A much earlier history, commissioned, as we shall presently see, in May 1731, failed to materialize. Thus, the only documentary evidence concerning the foundation of the Academy to survive is that to be found in the British Library, Add. MS 11732.5 This contains the minutes of the inaugural meeting and the names of those 13 men who (with ‘The Children of St. Paul’s Cathedral’) attended. Each paid 2s 6d towards the expenses of the evening, which were 2s for a coach for the children; 10s 6d for wine and bread; 5s for the use of the room, the fire and candles; and 1s for ‘the Drawer’ (i.e., the man who brought the bread and drinks). This left 14s to be carried forward against the expenses of subsequent meetings. Among other things, it was resolved that the Academy should meet every other Friday (‘solemn days excepted’) and no one should be admitted but members, and also that performances should begin at 7 p.m. and end at 9 p.m.6 Initially, at any rate, membership was restricted to Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal or of ‘the Cathedrals’, and no other persons ‘but such as profess Musick, and shall be approv’d by the Majority’ (see Figure 1). Academy with the later Concerts of Ancient Music founded in 1776. The Crown and Anchor Tavern, which had a large public room and was a favourite meeting place for a number of eighteenth-century societies, stood on the south side of the Strand at the east corner of Arundel Street [see figure 1 in Tim Eggington’s book, The Advancement of Music in Enlightenment England: Benjamin Cooke and the Academy of Ancient Music (Woodbridge, 2014), 5]. 2Dr William Croft, the Organist of Westminster Abbey and Master of the Chapel Royal choristers joined on 21 January and, at the next meeting (on 4 February), he brought some of his boys along with him; other singers from the Abbey choir followed shortly. 3An annotated list of members in April 1730 (the ‘Eighth Subscription’) forms Appendix A here, and shows that, by this stage, there were probably as many instrumentalists as there were singers among their number. The only other listing of the membership to survive is dated 28 April 1785, and is now in the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University (where it is catalogued as Folio LWL MSS vol. 121). This contains the signatures of the 119 persons who were then subscribers, and with it is a listing (again with signatures) of the money paid out to the 69 vocal and instrumental performers employed during the 1787-88 season. I am indebted to Professor William Weber for drawing these documents to my attention. The latter is Appendix B here. A further list of 111 names said to be members of the Academy (although not all were resident in London) can be extracted from the entries in Joseph Doane’s Musical Directory for the Year 1794. A later copy of the 1787-88 payments list appears on the front flyleaves of a copy of Hawkins’ Account … of the Academy of Ancient Music now in the US Library of Congress. 4According to Richard Rawlinson (1690-1755), a non-juring priest and noted antiquarian who left his huge collection of manuscripts to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, ‘the Gentlemen and Children of the Academy … together with some of the Choristers of St Pauls’ sang at his funeral (see Ob Rawlinson MS J, folio 202). 5A transcription by Ilias Chrissochodis is available online at http://ichriss.ccarh.org/HRD/1726-31%20Academy%20of% 20Vocal%20Music.htm. Facsimiles of Hawkins’ Account and of an updated version included in Joseph Doane’s Musical Directory of 1794 form Appendix B of Christopher Hogwood’s essay, ‘“Gropers into Antique Musick” or “A very ancient and respectable Society”? Historical Views of the Academy of Ancient Music’, Coll’astuzia, col giudizio: Essays in Honor of Neal Zaslaw, ed. Cliff Eisen (Ann Arbor, 2009), 127-82. A separate facsimile of the whole of Doane’s Musical Directory was published by the Royal College of Music in 1993.