The Advancement of Music in Enlightenment England: Benjamin Cooke and the Academy of Ancient Music by Tim Eggington (review)

It has been a great pleasure to read a study made in depth into the Academy of Ancient Music in regard to the leadership of its director from 1752 to 1784. Tim Eggington has deepened our knowledge about the subject by finding a wide range of sources and raising major issues regarding musical, aesthetic, and social aspects of this unique English institution. We now have a much firmer sense of what went on in its history and how it came to an end as the growth in public concerts undermined the effort to study old music. Eggington shows that Cooke must be respected for his leadership of so unusual a musical institution in a time of great change, and he also argues for the quality of some idiosyncratic works Cooke composed that blended historicism with forward-looking compositional aspects. I nonetheless have doubts about the book’s persistent labelling of the Academy and musical thought with the problematic term ‘Enlightenment’.

Begun in 1726, the Academy of Ancient Music brought together a group of musicians and amateurs who were dedicated to the scholarly study and performance of old pieces, a repertory called ‘ancient music’ by around 1700. Not only had English choral foundations kept singing music from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also a phalanx of enthusiasts invested a considerable part of their lives to exploring it together, a number of whom are identified in detail here. The seventeen wordbooks still extant of concerts performed at Public Nights given by the Academy include pieces by such composers as Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Luca Marenzio, and Orlando Gibbons; these programmes had no parallel anywhere else in the eighteenth century.

Having been a student of Johann Christoph Pepusch, the Academy’s founder, Benjamin Cooke took the helm in 1752, not yet twenty years old. Eggington suggests how Cooke played a crucial role in maintaining a balance between scholarly and performative activities in the Academy’s life. Appointed Organist at Westminster Abbey, Cooke developed a school for training boy singers that served as a base for the Academy’s programmes. Yet the book also shows that the Public Nights, where non-members and indeed women were admitted, were much less common than regular meetings, where presumably those present would share and discuss pieces of music they had heard or acquired for their collections. Indeed, Eggington suggests that the Academy’s scholarly activities provided a ‘counter-culture’ to the expanding commercial world of music focused on recent music, especially opera (p. 68). Even though the press gave little notice to the society, Eggington argues that its work ‘acted as a crucible in which this taste for ancient music developed into a more concerted agenda for musical advancement’ (p. 13). Thus in 1776 a much more high-ranking group of gentlemen borrowed the term to found the Concert of Antient Music, a public series where all works were at least twenty years old but few pre-dated the time of Henry Purcell.

The book also contributes a valuable quantitative analysis of the known programmes and a hand-list of pieces claimed to have been performed. Much more music by Italian composers was performed than by British, going against what other scholars (myself included) have taken for granted. In that respect the Academy went in a direction similar to the King’s Theatre, though in somewhat less rigid terms. Still, I suspect that the members talked about English pieces quite a bit in the regular meetings. Indeed, pieces by Byrd with Latin texts were typical of the particularly scholarly repertory performed at the Public meetings in the early 1770s.

The Academy was reshaped fundamentally when in 1783 its directing board decided to expand the public concerts with repertory resembling those of the Concert of Antient Music in many respects...