Chapter 3 - More than a Song and Dance? Identifying Matthew Locke’s Incidental Music for Macbeth

Summary

Once the misattribution to Matthew Locke of some music for Macbeth published in 1770 was finally resolved in the 1960s, it was concluded that just one song and one dance by him could be connected with some certainty to Restoration stagings of the play. In this chapter, I discuss the ‘The Rare Theatrical’ compositions by Locke, which survive in the manuscript US-NYp Drexel 3976 and show how many of them can be identified as dating from the time of the Macbeth productions of 1663/4 and 1667. An understanding of the nature of the instrumental scoring of the English violin band, which at that date reflected French practice with two viola parts, is combined with other evidence to enable a reconstruction of Locke’s instrumental music for Macbeth, which takes the form of pre-performance music, a Curtain tune and Act tunes. While the particular grouping of movements used in the reconstruction remains largely speculative, the methodology devised to create it enables the identification of a significant body of theatre music from the 1660s, shedding light on the role of music in theatre productions of the time while also providing a context for the better-known music of the following decade.