For Paul Sparks

For the most part, the history of the Spanish guitar in eighteenth-century England seems to be no history at all. There appears to be little to place between Samuel Pepys and the beginning of the nineteenth century when the six-string guitar emerged as a favoured instrument of the parlour musician. Thus it is widely supposed that the gut-strung guitar was little used in England until Fernando Sor and other foreign players made it fashionable in the decades after Waterloo (1815). This article proposes to correct that deeply entrenched view with a chronological checklist of material, much of it presented in this connection for the first time, that illuminates the fortunes of the guitar in eighteenth-century England, principally London.

Thomas Baker's music collection is part of the special collections of the Music Library at Western University, Ontario. Thomas Baker (1719/20–94) lived mainly in Farnham, southwest of London, England, in the County of Surrey. His music collection remained largely intact, which is unusual for the library of an eighteenth-century man who lived in a small town in rural England. The collection at Western consists of 90 separate pieces of music, collections of music, and books of music theory, plus six manuscripts; an inventory of the collection illustrates the variety of musical forms that he collected. His purchase of an organ leads us to conclude that he played the organ and possibly other keyboard instruments; about 25% of his collection is for keyboard. However, he was also interested in a variety of other musical forms, either as a performer or as a collector. From the surviving information, we can create a basic portrait of Baker and his music collection, even if we can draw no definite conclusions about how it was used or if he was merely a collector, or also a performer or an organizer of concerts.

The most historically significant and widely influential pianoforte designs, both for use in public concerts and for domestic music making, first appeared in the later 1760s, mostly as the work of immigrant German-born craftsmen working in London. But their work was preceded by a handful of pioneering instrument makers whose lives have been largely unreported until now. In this paper the authors report on the life and work of three such immigrant craftsmen who made pianofortes and related instruments in London in the period 1740–65. Two of them, Roger Plenius and Herman Viator, met with great personal misfortunes, while the other, Frederick Neubauer, crowned his career with a great triumph which has never been widely reported, though unhappily not one of his instruments is known to survive. The authors' findings are drawn from newly located contemporary newspaper notices and original manuscripts held at The National Archives, Kew and the Bancroft Library, London.

Amongst estate papers in the Letterbook of Walter Powell (National Library of Wales) are six letters or receipts by William Lawes, five of them holograph, dated December 1644 to March 1645 – only six months before his death in battle. Transcription and annotation give a chance to list exhaustively life-records or contemporary testimonia for him, as well as to examine his normative writing hand and in the light of a now better-definable army service, gauge whether outbreak of civil war in England in autumn 1642 marked the end of his composing career, or what minor exceptions there could be.