Author: Tony Barton

Orders of the day, Volume 36, Issue 5, 2004

The 17th century world was a very quiet place. Even in major towns the clamour of the biggest market would seem a murmur to our ravaged senses. People at the time were literally stupefied by the sound of a cannon, such was the shock to those living in a pre-mechanical age. Music was a rarity: no means of reproducing it, and precious few musicians. When people heard good music, it was often an overwhelming experience. We are the first generation ever to be able to listen to any music, from almost any period or country, at the touch of a button. As I write, the radio is playing some splendid wind music written around 1600 by Gabrieli for St Mark's in Venice. Enthusiasts at the time travelled across Europe to hear such things, and marvelled in rapture at them.

One place where such music could be heard was at court: the King, like every prince in Europe, kept a professional body of musicians for his own 'magnificence'. These were hereditary jobs dominated by families first employed by Henry VIII and included a dozen trumpeters, a loud wind band, a violin band, a consort of viols and various keyboard and string players. Their repertoire partly survives, much of it being composed by the ablest amongst them, and they were thoroughly aware of Continental ideas. They played at whichever palace the King was occupying at the time, but had enough leisure to hire their services to rich citizens in London.

Also attached to the Court was the Chapel Royal, a choir of boys and men, kept for singing the Anglican services to a very high standard. Similar choirs, with their accompanying organs, existed at the major cathedrals, as well as the Oxford and Cambridge colleges. These choirs were (and still are) major training establishments for musicians who started as choristers, learned their craft and moved on to teaching or the Church as they grew up.

The Laudian policy of the 1630s had much encouraged such choirs, but outside the cathedrals or college precincts - in the ordinary parish church - they were almost unknown. Since the Elizabethan reforms church services were very plain, the only music being psalm singing by the whole congregation. Organs were very rare. Puritan disapproval extended to ornate music in church; outside it was a matter of indifference to them. The more extreme might regard it as sensual and therefore dangerous, but danced to fiddlers without a second thought for their souls.

Both the court and the church employed between them perhaps 300 musicians. All were swept away, to seek employment where they could, during the course of the war. Some would have ended up in a grandee's household; this had been a possible living since Elizabeth's time, tutoring the family in music. The war intruded here however, since depending on the household’s allegiance, many were swept away by the economic rigours of the period and the sequestration of Royalist estates afterwards.

The cathedrals were amongst the first to go - many were assaulted by unruly mobs before the fighting started: in Exeter, for instance, a mob of drunken soldiers invaded the cathedral, smashed the organ and carried some of the pipes outside ‘blowing rudely upon them, crying out to the (now jobless) choristers “you must now go sing hot pudding pyes"'. The royal bands were left behind and dispersed once the King moved to Oxford. Neither Church nor court musical establishments were revived until the Restoration.

At the other end of the social scale, in the villages where most people lived and spent their whole lives, music was something of a rarity. Most could get a fiddler to play for a wedding, or a bagpiper, who was traditionally the blacksmith. The popular tunes of the day were probably universal, ‘of the folk'. Presumably people had local traditions of work songs, May Day songs and such, but they are all unrecorded to our (possible) great loss.

We know more about music in towns. The selling and singing of ballads (printed with words, a cheap and often irrelevant woodcut, and an indication of which tunes would fit the words) was commonplace, and a common employment for the destitute. Street singing was usual, and alternately despised as ‘rude’, or enjoyed as picturesque by the genteel. Many stallholders ‘sang’ their wares at markets, and traces of this still linger today. The ‘cryers of London’ were sufficiently well known for witty composers to write complex madrigals using their material. Most towns had a bellman or a town drummer who, for a fee, would shout or sing public announcements or advertise your horse to the market place.

The universal musical figure, apart from the ballad-singer, was the fiddler. Every tavern seems to have been able to find one, and they seem common enough to have been regarded as a social nuisance. They were drawn from the poor but (one hopes) talented, and scraping a living was better than proper work. Their repertoire probably survives in Playford's ‘Dancing Master’, with which many of us will be familiar; Dr Pettinger follows splendidly in this tradition. The fiddle, an old instrument, had been entirely remodelled in Italy to achieve essentially its modern shape before 1600. Always rather fragile and expensive to make, one wonders where the poorer sort got their instruments. Although the fiddle was regarded as low-life, bands of different sized instruments had been used at Court since Elizabeth’s time, and Cromwell's daughter’s wedding caused a minor stir by featuring a band of them - presumably the dead King's band revived for the Protectorate court.

One step above the fiddler was the Town Wait. Every town of any size paid a small band to add lustre to its Mayor and Corporation. They were professionals, often hereditary, apprenticing the sons in the manner of any trade. Basically wind players, by our period they could provide loud outdoor music or soft indoor strings as occasion demanded. Normally between four and six men, they were liveried, wore silver chains and were expected to learn by heart a set repertoire, both of tunes and songs - this music has almost entirely vanished, alas. The job involved playing for the corporation on feast days, welcoming dignitaries to the town gates, playing in the marketplace at noon and around the town at night, mostly in the winter, to mark the hours and guard against fire, a survival of their original role as musical nightwatchmen. They played shawms, trombones, cornets, bassoons, recordes, flutes and many other things, including bagpipes. They could be hired for weddings or feasts by private citizens, and some travelled to entertain at great houses in the summer. One suspects that their competence varied somewhat: from those of London, who included some notable composers in their double band of twelve, to the town piper of Carlisle, of whom it was said ‘he knew three tunes: the first everybody knew, the second nobody knew, and the third he didn't know himself’. The war virtually destroyed them over much of the country, Corporations besieged or strapped for cash having other things to worry about.

The playing of music in private houses depended on wealth and inclination. As touched on earlier, some Grandees kept their own musicians and might play themselves. Printed music since about 1580 was available in London to those able to read and afford it, and we read of families singing part songs or playing viols in consort. (Viols were bowed string instruments superficially resembling 'cellos, normally played in different sizes together. They made a rich reedy sound, and some wonderful, rather gloomy, music was written for them).

The lute was still the gentleman's instrument, though starting to undergo a change of style and enlargement to incorporate more strings, eventually fading to obscurity by 1700. It was also expensive to buy and maintain, a luxury available to very few. Masses of music survives for it and also for keyboards, meaning at this date harpsichords or small chamber organs, which featured in many rich houses. As Protector, Oliver kept one John Hingeston as a composer and organist, who played for him at Hampton Court.

Parties of gentlemen might foregather to sing, either at home or in the tavern, witty part-songs with variously sentimental or obscene lyrics. Some of these survive, alas being mostly hard to sing! Some accomplishment in music was regarded as a social grace, and much cultivated amongst wealthy young women.

The experience of music thus varied according to one’s status - all would have heard fiddlers, pipes and ballad singers, and all would have sung psalms in church. Very few would have access to the rarified music at Court or in the cathedrals. However all would have known, if they had anything other than a tin ear, various popular tunes and some of the words to them.

This article first appeared in ‘True Relation’ the magazine of the Fairfax Battalia, and is reproduced here with the permission of the Editor and author.