Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain (review)

This volume of essays had its origins in a three-day symposium held at Wadham College, Oxford in July 1998 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Holywell Music Room. As the earliest purpose-built concert hall in Europe, the Holywell Music Room is a building of the greatest importance, and its opening in 1748 was a major landmark in concert history. It was thus particularly appropriate to commemorate the anniversary, and Wadham College, adjacent to the Holywell Music Room (which was itself used for two concerts that formed part of the symposium), was the obvious venue for the commemoration.

Revised versions of many of the papers appear here, together with further contributions specially commissioned from scholars working in this area. The volume reflects the large amount of research in the area that has been such a striking feature of British musicology over recent years. Simon McVeigh's introduction, expanded from his keynote address, moves smoothly from the Oxford context to survey the concert scene across the country. The remainder of the volume is divided into three parts, each containing four or five essays: 'Towns and Cities', 'Sources and Genres', and 'Contexts for Concerts'. They range widely from the general to the highly specific, covering aspects of concert life both in London and in the provinces. Notwithstanding the promise of the title, there is very little on Scotland and Wales, and Roy Johnston's contribution is the only one to consider concert life in Ireland.

The strength and variety of the contributions gathered together here prompts a reminder that the current high level of interest in concert life in Britain, and indeed in the social history of music more generally, is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Those with long memories will recall the dearth of activity and scholarly literature in these areas in the 1960s and the general unfashionability of the subject. In this desert, Eric Mackerness's A Social History of English Music (1964) was a welcome oasis; significantly, its author was not a musicologist, nor even a historian. Other notable publications marking the beginnings of an interest in concert history at around this time were the listings by Brian Pritchard and Douglas Reid of concert programmes in various provincial centres in early volumes of the R.M.A. Research Chronicle, from vol. 5 (1965) on. These listings, subsequently expanded and corrected by a number of different hands in later numbers of the Research Chronicle, largely arose from Pritchard's doctoral research at Birmingham, which in 1968 resulted in his thesis 'The Music Festival and the Choral Society in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Social History'.

Since those early days, of course, the social history of music in Britain has come of age, and with it the study of concert life and concert institutions, both in London and in the provinces. There have been many studies of concert life in particular centres and of concert-giving organizations, of the lives and careers of individual musicians, and of the music profession as a whole. Many research findings have been published in the Research Chronicle, the various volumes of Michael Burden and Irena Cholij's A Handbook for Studies in 18th-Century English Music (from 1985), or presented at the annual Eighteenth-Century English Music Study Day, founded in 1984. More recently, the Department of Music of the University of Leeds has set up the Leeds University Centre for English Music (LUCEM). Its inaugural conference, on music in the English provinces, was held in May 2001, and selected papers from the conference are to be published in due course.

To the fore in much of this activity have been the two editors of this volume: Susan Wollenberg with her many contributions on Oxford musical life, culminating in Music at Oxford in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Oxford, 2001), and Simon McVeigh with his Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn (Cambridge, 1993), the Calendar of London...