"One equal music": The Music of Milton's Youth

Most of us are more familiar with and have a higher regard for Western art music of the past than that of the present. It is therefore difficult to assume a mind-set where the music of the present is what matters, where the art music of 50 years ago is finished with, disposable. But that was largely the case before 1800. In Italy in the early seventeenth century, musicians may have had high regard for the music of Palestrina; however, even a “masterwork” such as the Missa Papae Marcelli was re-cast by Francesco Soriano as a work for double choir. Only in the nineteenth century was Palestrina set up as the paramount historical and stylistic model of the Renaissance ideal. ¹

The situation in England in the seventeenth century was strikingly different. English polyphonic liturgical music composed in the second half of the sixteenth century after the Reformation came to form an established canon. It has remained in the repertory of cathedral choirs to the present day, save for the period when they were silent in the later 1640s and 1650s. Whereas Tallis, Sheppard, Tye and Byrd drew on the compositional strategies of earlier composers such as John Taverner, they did not retain the florid aspects of early sixteenth-century style, and little of that earlier music was performed after 1560. By contrast, the English liturgical music of Tallis and Byrd not only provided a model for subsequent generations, but it continued to be performed.

There was a similar trend in secular and domestic music. Fantasias and In nomines for viols written between 1550 and 1620 continued to be performed into the late 1670s: such was the case at the weekly music meetings held in several houses and colleges in Oxford. ² At court the survival of this older tradition after the Restoration can be observed in the re-establishment of the voices, viols and lutes, mostly staffed by old musicians who contrast with the players in the violin band. The duality at court stretches back to the sixteenth century where the new violin band emerged alongside other ensembles. ³

Issues of musical style and taste are significant to Milton studies because some of the recent writing on Milton and music has presented him as a modernist, associating him with the so-called progressive music of Henry Lawes and with Italian music of the seconda practica. ⁴ An alternative view can be put forward. The musical skills attributed to Milton in the early biographies are those of a singer in a consort, and a player of the organ and bass viol. ⁵ These are skills which he acquired early in his life, well before he knew Henry Lawes or went to Italy, and it is possible that they were the most formative. Edward Huws Jones ⁶ suggests that English composers of Lawes’s generation owed more to French than Italian influence, and Michael Wilson reaffirms musicians’ doubts about Lawes’s modernism. ⁷ Recent studies of seventeenth-century English taste for Italian music by David Pinto ⁸ and Jonathan Wainwright ⁹ confirm that for the most part it continued to be as conservative as it had been in the late sixteenth century. Furthermore, Milton’s skills were in part singing not solo singing, in the organ not the harpsichord, in the viol not the violin. There is nothing to suggest that he was ever in the vanguard of English musical taste, or that he was versed in the theories and aesthetics of Italian music of the seconda practica.

Clearly this is a subject for major study and this article can raise only some of the issues. The focus here is on music and its manuscript sources, rather than on literary or philosophical questions. There are three environments to consider: St Paul’s School, London, and the adjacent cathedral; Christ’s College, Cambridge; and the musical circles associated with his father in the City of London.

Practical musical instruction had no place in the curriculum of St Paul’s School: that was the concern of a song school for cathedral choristers, ¹⁰ not a grammar school...