Chapter 9 - ‘Performed upon the Original Instruments for which it was Written’: the Viola da Gamba and the Early Music Revival

Summary

UNTIL the eighteenth century music was essentially a fashionable novelty that hardly outlived the composers who brought it into existence. Thus Monteverdi, Schütz and other early Baroque composers were quickly forgotten after their deaths. Palestrina was remembered throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but that was largely because his music was held up as an ideal exemplar of stile antico counterpoint; embodied in Fux’s Gradus adparnassum (Vienna, 1725), it was used as a model by generations of Austrian composers, including Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Lully was perhaps the first composer whose music continued to be performed by later generations: his operas remained part of the repertory of the Paris opera in altered form until the late eighteenth century. Corelli was probably the first whose music never entirely fell out of use, though that too was partly because it was regarded as a compositional model.

The Early Music Revival in England

HOWEVER, England was the place where the early music revival really began. William Weber argued that it can be traced back to the Civil War, when Anglican institutions were under threat and cathedral choirs had been disbanded. John Barnard’s First Book of Selected Church Musick, an anthology of cathedral music by Elizabethan and Jacobean composers, was published in 1641 on the eve of the Civil War, though it was only disseminated after the Restoration. The retrospective nature of the repertory is illustrated by James Cli“ord’s Divine Services and Anthems (1663, 1664), consisting of the texts of mainly pre-Civil War works; Henry Aldrich’s adaptations of Palestrina and Carissimi as Anglican anthems; Henry Purcell’s score copies of anthems by Byrd, Tallis, Gibbons and others, largely taken from Barnard; or Thomas Tudway’s manuscript collection of’ancient church music’, compiled for Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford in the early eighteenth century. Pre-Civil War anthems and services were initially copied after 1660 because no one had been writing church music for nearly twenty years and the repertory was in danger of being scattered and lost, though in time works by Humfrey, Blow, Purcell, and their contemporaries joined them in what gradually became a cumulative repertory.