The Eighteenth-Century Origins of the Musical Canon

Author(s): William Weber

Source: Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 114, No. 1 (1989), pp. 6-17
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Royal Musical Association
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 The Eighteenth-Century Origins of the
Musical Canon
WILLIAM WEBER

JOSEPHKerman has suggested a distinction crucial in defining the mean-

ing of 'canon' in musical culture: repertory, he argues, was simply the
performance of old works; canon, by contrast, is their reverence on a
critical plane and in a literary context.' The distinction is a fertile one,
for it challenges us to define when works were not just offered by conven-
tion, but when they functioned as models for musical taste critically and
aesthetically. The distinction can be extremely fruitful in tracing the
early history of the canon - its origins in repertory and gradual evolution
into its modern form. What I would like to show here is how repertories
grew up originally without true status as canon; before canon there was
repertory, and that is where the whole tradition began. In inquiring just
where the modern practice of performing old music regularly came about
we can look into some of the most fundamental social and intellectual
bases upon which the tradition was established.2
Kerman does, however, define the distinction in a manner I cannot
accept: 'Repertories are determined by performers', he says, 'and canons
by critics.'3 By this he does not mean reviewers in the daily papers; it is in-
stead musical commentators working on a high intellectual level. He also
suggests that the concept of ideology is useful in understanding this
problem. But I would argue that the musical canon has been shaped first
and foremost not by literary movements such as Romanticism, but by a
complex variety of forces, ideas and social rituals that grew out of musical
culture. This was not just a critical process; in some instances the literati
have simply laid intellectual blessings upon works revered for quite dif-
ferent reasons. The musical canon had its own origins, and while it inter-
acted closely with tendencies in literature and aesthetics, it essentially
grew out of traditions and new cultural roles that were musical in nature.4

'
Joseph Kerman, 'A Few Canonic Variations', Critical Inquiry, 10 (1983), 107-26; repr. in
Canons, ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago, 1984), 177-95.
2 Among my studies of the emerging musical canon are 'The Contemporaneity of Eighteenth-
Century Musical Taste', Musical Quarterly, 70 (1984), 75-94; 'La Musique ancienne in the Ancien
Regime', Journal of Modern History, 58 (1984), 58-88; 'Classical Repertory in Nineteenth-Century
Orchestral Concerts', The Orchestra, ed. Joan Peyser (New York, 1986), 361-86; 'Wagner,
Wagnerism, and Musical Idealism', Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed. William
Weber and David C. Large (Ithaca, 1984), 28-71; and 'Mentalit6, tradition et les origines du
"canon" musical au XVIIIe siecle', forthcoming in Annales, E. S. C.
Kerman, 'A Few Canonic Variations', 112.
4 The most important recent works on canon in the other arts likewise see indigenous roots in
each field; see Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art. Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting
in Nineteenth-Century England and France (Oxford, 1976), and Frank Kermode, The Classic:
Images of Permanence and Change (New York, 1975).

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THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYORIGINS OF THE MUSICALCANON 7

The tree upon which the great works have been hung is so formidable,
and so thick in its intellectual foliage, that we must return to its first
shoots to trace its growth. To do this we have to set aside the hallowed
assumptions about the great works and open our eyes to the mundane
realities of the processes by which the canon arose. The argument will be
made that the canon grew up on a quite unintellectual basis, as a set of
practices of performing old music after the deaths of composers. These
practices were inarticulate aesthetically, appreciated simply through
assumptions, through what social historians call mentalit6; they were pro-
ducts of social and political change whose origins were often quite
obscure. There were none the less precedents for these practices, since by
tradition old works had occasionally been incorporated into feast-days.
The canon indeed emerged directly from these precedents. It came about
quietly and inconspicuously, as an extension of long-standing convention.
These tendencies thus grew organically out of musical culture and its
customs, not out of a literary movement or philosophy, and took root
deeply and permanently for that very reason. However much I admire the
powerful pioneering article by Percy Lovell on 'ancient' music - especially
his discovery that the scores used were remarkably accurate - I cannot
agree with his argument that interest in medieval poetry lay at the roots of
this musical taste.5
It has usually been presumed that the modern musical canon emerged
in early nineteenth-century Germany, under the impact of Romanticism.
What little has been written on canonization in music has usually seen the
Romantic ideas of genius and imagination as the foundation of the
canon, and the cult for Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven as its origin. But
specialists in the national music histories have long known of a whole host
of eighteenth-century instances where works remained in repertory. In
the case of England, and on a certain plane France as well, these reper-
tories involved powerful cults for the leading composers, and rituals and
ways of thinking evolved that must be seen as canon. By the 1780s
England had two music histories and a flourishing business in the perfor-
mance and publication of music from Tallis to the present.
This is not to deny the vital importance of the Romantic movement in
the evolution of the musical canon. But if we are to understand how and
why this tradition appeared, we will have to look back prior to Roman-
ticism and get a deeper sense of the original tendencies towards the per-
formance of old music. It is in these early practices of performing old, or
one might better say ageing, works that we must seek the roots of musical
classicism. The idea of a canon did not spring full-blown from the minds
of early Romantic musical commentators; their writings grew out of a set
of processes that had been under way for over a century.
Now, prior to the eighteenth century a few musical works remained in-
conspicuously in performance or in publications in a variety of different
ways. In some cases the reasons why the works persisted are quite obscure.
Scribes occasionally recopied old pieces without any apparent reason
(perhaps just for the practice, or to build up an impressive-looking
'
Percy Lovell, '"Ancient" Music in Eighteenth-Century England', Music and Letters, 60 (1979),
401-15.

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8 WILLIAM WEBER

library). Occasionally a printed edition of music kept works by long-dead

composers without any language or iconography suggesting a canonical
function, as was done for the music of Jacob Arcadelt, whose first book of
madrigals was republished 42 times between his apparent death in 1572
and the year 1654.6 In other cases the reason why works persisted or were
revived had little to do with the work itself. In the Italian opera it was
unusual for a work to last more than five years after its premiere - even
then usually being reworked extensively, with numbers being added and
subtracted - but occasionally problems with new productions led to the
revival of an olderywork. That was probably the reason why II Maurizio by
Domenico Gabrieli was, it would seem, brought back in Florence in 1707,
20 years after its first performance in Venice, an event for which there
was no other parallel at that theatre for the whole first half of the eigh-
teenth century.7
Some genres of popular song also remained in use unusually long. In
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England catches were sung mostly in
taverns, appreciated in large part for their lewd lyrics and 'catchy' echo
effects. Catches of such sixteenth-century writers as Hilton and Ravens-
croft were published right into the eighteenth century, and new ones
composed in somewhat modernized styles.8 Music historians have only
begun to investigate cultural phenomena of this sort; how common it was
remains to be seen.
Other works became embedded in the ritual of a holy day or a secular
feast and were performed regularly within that context alone. In the
Sistine Chapel, for example, the Miserere of Gregorio Allegri was per-
formed consistently at the Tenebrae of Holy Week throughout the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries.9 The Allegri was treated rather on a
more special basis than most other examples of this sort, however, for an
esoteric cult evolved around the work by which was often said (quite in-
correctly) that no one was allowed to see the score or reproduce it. In most
cases, however, such a work was simply an accustomed part of the festival
and had no special artistic status ascribed to it, and indeed the com-
poser's name might not have been known. Ecclesiastical practices also
kept works in use. In Venice Francesco Cavalli, a man of some wealth
from his marriage and his theatrical speculations, left behind an endow-
ment under whose terms one of his Requiem Masses was to be sung twice
a year in his honour. From such a curious act the work came down to the
modem day.l'
Cults also developed around a few composers of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, but it is vital to keep their limits well in mind. The
name of Josquin Desprez lasted well beyond his death in 1520 in the

6 Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 17 vols. (Kassel, 1949-51), i, cols. 603-7. I am in-
debted to Jerome Roche on this matter.
' Robert L. and Norma W. Weaver, A
Chronology of Music in the Florentine Theater,
1590-1750 (Detroit, 1978), 129.
? See the various editions of The Catch Club or
Merry Companion between c.1725 and 1800.
9 'Allegri, Gregorio', The New Grove Dictionary, i, 266-7; Julius Amann, Allegri's Miserere und
die Auffiihrungspraxis in der Sixtina (Regensburg, 1935).
'0 'Cavalli, Francesco', The New Grove Dictionary, iv, 24-34. I am indebted to Michael Talbot on
this matter.

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THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYORIGINS OF THE MUSICALCANON 9

minds of learned musicians, and several of his chansons remained in

Flemish editions until the 1660s. But the cult was narrow and
"
fragmented, with a weak comparison to any modern parallels. A more
coherent cult evolved around Giovanni Palestrina after his death in 1594.
His works remained in performance at the Sistine Chapel, though as far
as one can presently tell nowhere else with any regularity. The tradition
that grew up supposedly in emulation of his music has been found to have
had quite different origins. The stile antico involved the composition of
music in an antique polyphonic style, sometimes for church music and
sometimes for purely academic works that were not written to be per-
formed. If the rules came from any one composer it was Frescobaldi, and
even then they quickly absorbed newer traits so that by the turn of the
eighteenth century the practice had only vague similarity to music of the
sixteenth century. In Bologna in the early eighteenth century there was a
society - the Accademia dei Filarmonici - whose members were admitted
upon proof of their ability to write in this style.12 Thus do we see how the
past persisted in musical life not so much through reverence for great
composers but rather through practices linked to specific institutions or
festivals.
The most clearly defined reverence for individual composers that kept
music in use occurred in musical study and pedagogy. It was not unusual
for musicians to keep using works by a prominent composer in their
teaching and their own private study for a generation or even two after his
death. For example, the keyboard works of J. J. Froberger - a well-
travelled musician active in Germany, France and England - turned up
in collections of manuscript or printed editions from his death in 1667 to
about 1720.13 But then when style changed with particular rapidity such
a composer's music would seem too far outmoded and would no longer be
used, as happened to Froberger's keyboard works when in the 1720s
Rameau's publications shifted the field into a considerably new direction.
It was also common for a composer of note to be extensively eulogized
after his death. We must, however, recognize that these honours almost
always disappeared within a generation, after which his music was no
longer performed. Singing the praise of a composer did not mean that his
music was to become immortal in actual fact. Arcangelo Corelli, for ex-
ample, was greatly honoured shortly after his death by the long-awaited
publication of his concertos, and John Hawkins claims that in Rome his
students put on concerts in his honour. But little if any performance or
" Bonnie
Blackburn, 'Josquin's Chansons: Ignored and Lost Sources', Journal of the American
Musicological Society, 29 (1976), 30-76; Robert Stevenson, Josquin in the Music of Spain and Por-
tugal', Proceedings of the International Josquin Festival, ed. Edward Lowinsky (Oxford, 1976).
217-46; Henri Vanhulst, 'Un succes de l'edition musicale: Le Septiesme livre des chansons a quatre
parties, 1560-1661/3', Revue belge de musicologie, 32-3 (1978-9), 97-120.
12 Christoph Wolff, Der stile antico in der Musik J. S. Bachs: Studien zu Bachs Spatwerk
(Wiesbaden, 1968); Karl Gustav Fellerer, Der Palestrinastil und seine Bedeutung in der vokalen Kir-
chenmusik des 18. Jahrhunderts (Augsburg, 1929); Thomas Day, 'Echoes of Palestrina's Missa ad
fugam in the Eighteenth Century',Journal of the American Musicological Society, 24 (1971), 462-9;
Anthony Newcomb, 'When the Stile antico was Young', paper read to the American Musicological
Society Convention, November 1986.
"
See, for example, the inclusion of a piece for clavecin by Froberger in a recueil dated London,
1702 (British Library, Add. MS 39659). I am indebted to Bruce Gustavson for this information; see
his French Harpsichord Music of the Seventeenth Century (Ann Arbor, 1979).

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10 WILLIAM
WEBER

study of his music remained in Italy a generation later; it was in Britain, a

country with which he had few contacts, that the Corellian tradition built
up most significantly.14 We thus have to be suspicious of any cult that ap-
peared just after the death of a composer, for it was a time-honoured con-
vention that generally did not lead to deeper and more long-lasting
canonization.
What does all this tell us? We can see that musical culture was not tem-
porally one-dimensional prior to 1700. Practices existed by which older
music, or the repute of older musicians, persisted in a variety of ways,
most important of all within the contexts of church music and pedagogy.
These practices did not, however, add up to a repertory, even less to a
canon. The contexts in which old works persisted were generally quite
isolated from one another, since they had sprung from quite different
social or intellectual origins. People saw no close relationship between the
persistence of Allegri's Miserere and Cavalli's Requiem because they had
stayed around for such different reasons. Most important of all, there was
little theoretical writing about the old works. There were no textbooks, no
syllabuses about how these works were taught, since musical education
was so much an oral tradition. While there were so many editions of
Roman poetry, and so much commentary upon it, old musical works re-
mained in use in quiet, unobserved capacities.
The modern musical canon none the less arose directly out of these
customs. This happened through processes by which the old practices
became more common, took on more significant roles in musical life, and
became appreciated for themselves in their own terms. Old works were no
longer simply encapsulated into contemporary repertories; they became a
major and determining portion of those bodies of works, and eventually
became the highest standard of taste overall. That is why the early
tendencies towards the performance of early music were not seen as novel
or out of place, since they had such firm roots in long-standing musical
practice. The works of Lully, Corelli and Handel were not discovered;
they simply persisted in ways conventional to musical life for centuries. In
the process new roles evolved for old works, roles that were much more
specific to the music than had been the case before. It was only when, in
the second half of the eighteenth century, musical writers started realiz-
ing what had happened that much was said about the old works in print -
and in the process there emerged a true canon. In a few cases, however,
one can speak of canonic valuing of old works even earlier. As Michael
Talbot once suggested to me, Corelli's concertos were truly canonized at
the time of his death since an unbroken tradition began by which his
music was eulogized as musical perfection and given a central function in
musical pedagogy - as can be said of little other music.
The processes by which earlier practices became extended involved a
diversity of social, political and intellectual tendencies - the growth of
"4 Owain Edwards, 'The Response to Corelli's Music in Eighteenth-Century England', Studia
musicologica Norvegica, 2 (1976), 51-96; Dennis Libby, 'Interrelationships in Corelli',Journal of the
American Musicological Society, 26 (1973), 263-4; John Hawkins, A General History of the Science
and Practice of Music (repr. New York, 1963), ii, 676. See, for example, Two Concertos being the 1st
and 11th solos of the late Arcangelo Corelli . . as they are made into concerto's by Mr. Obadiah
Shuttlesworth (London, c. 1725).

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THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYORIGINS OF THE MUSICALCANON 11

capital cities and their concerts, the development of state bureaucracy in

the opera, the declining centrality of the monarch and his musical
ceremony, the transformation of the Classical tradition in literature, and
so on. But what we shall do here is not inquire into these factors but,
more simply, discuss the processes by which the performance of early
music expanded and began to take on new roles. We will now look into
several key examples of early repertory of old works in England at the
turn of the eighteenth century, in particular Purcell's Te deum and
Jubilate.
There were two stages in the development of the musical canon: first,
the expansion of traditional practices of performing individual old works
into regularly performed repertories, and secondly, the intellectual and
ritual definition of works from such repertories as canon. It is, of course,
often difficult to define precisely when a traditional practice became a
repertory of old works, and then when that was redefined as canon. We
should not ask for so clear a line, since it was the very nature of these pro-
cesses that they involved no sharp discontinuity between past and present,
but rather grew gradually and organically.
The most important early example of canon formation in music oc-
curred in the English cathedrals. As John Morehen has shown, a great
deal of copying of old anthems and services was done in the first half of
the seventeenth century, works by a wide variety of composers at the
Chapel Royal and the leading cathedrals. In Kerman's terms this was
repertory, not canon; Morehen sees little selectivity in the copybooks, and
not much of a critical nature was written about the music.1" The practice
followed the tradition by which works of master composers remained in
use for a generation after their death. Still, the scale of the copying is
remarkable, for it would be difficult to find the copying of old works on
anything like that scale in any continental country. The comprehen-
siveness by which music of the master composers of that epoch was
preserved suggests a quite special process going on in England. This pro-
cess derived from the virtually complete abolition of Latin texts in the
Reformation and the consequent need to construct an almost entirely
new repertory of church music. In copying the old works, the men of the
Chapel Royal were consolidating a new tradition, attempting to honour
their masters and define their own roles in an increasingly insecure
political situation.
Much the same ambiguous combination of tradition and innovation is
evident in John Barnard's First Book of Selected Church Music published
in 1641. On the face of it, Barnard's volume looks like a dramatic step
into an historical order of taste. All the composers represented in his
volume were dead by 1641; no comparable edition was to appear in
England until the publication of the first volume of Cathedral Music in
1760, and nowhere else in Europe until the end of the eighteenth century.
His emphasis on the fact that the book was the first comprehensive print-
ing of church music also suggests a step in a new direction. But the
volume did not come about on its own; it was closely intertwined with the
5 John Morehen, 'The Sources of English Church Music, c.1617-c.1644' (Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Cambridge, 1969).

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12 WILLIAM WEBER

copying in the cathedrals and as such was another example of a tradi-

tional practice of honouring master composers after their deaths. The
seven volumes of music by Barnard and his collaborators held in the
Royal College of Music are dated 1625; Morehen warns us not to take the
date of 1641 too literally as the time of publication or the dissemination of
the book, which happened for the most part after the Restoration."6
Indeed, since Barnard intended a series of volumes of music coming
down to his own day, it was accidental that a volume of works by dead
composers was published on its own. One would not necessarily have pre-
dicted that this music would have persisted any longer than a generation.
Barnard certainly did not expect it; he stated in the preface that the book
was to protect the music from 'the danger of perishing, or corrupt-
ing in erronious and manuscript obscurity'.17
It was instead the experience of the Civil War and the Restoration that
more than anything else kept this repertory permanently in existence. I
would agree strongly with Peter le Huray that the banning of sacred
music for over a decade and a half brought a much sharper and more self-
conscious sense of the past to attitudes towards the old sacred works. In
1663 the Rev. J. C. Clifford published the first edition of Divine Services
and Anthems usually sung in His Majesties Chappell, a collection of the
texts to 170 anthems; the second edition a year later contained 400. This
collection, as various others after it, entrenched the music of the Eliza-
bethan composers in the English Church. As le Huray put it, 'it is almost
as if the clock had been put back, and not merely twenty but forty years -
for the Caroline composers are very poorly represented either in Clifford's
lists or in Restoration scores and part-books. One may well wonder
whether the repertory of the 1660s would have been quite such a reac-
tionary one, had there been no long break in the Anglican tradition."'
This is not to deny the powerful continuity that was already present in
the sacred music tradition prior to 1641, as Brian Crosby has demon-
strated so well for Durham Cathedral."9 The extraordinary professionalism
in the Chapel Royal and leading cathedral choirs, as is found in Durham
so clearly, played an important role in perpetuating the music as a way of
honouring master composers. But the political process was critical in giv-
ing the repertory a role beyond musical life on a national plane. Initially
the repertory was closely bound up with royalist politics. The frontispiece
of Clifford's Divine Services depicted Charles II as David playing upon his
harp; the edition of sacred works by Thomas Tomkins published in 1668
(12 years after his death) was dedicated to the Chapel Royal of Charles

16
Ibid., 244-88. The Barnard is in Royal College of Music, MSS 1045-51.
"7 First Book of Selected Church Music (London, 1641), Preface, 2.
" Music and the
Reformation in England (London, 1967), 368. Brian Crosby has likewise found
that the copying done at Durham Cathedral in the 1670s and 1680s excluded all but a few of the
verse anthems such as were so popular in the 1630s.
'~ Brian Crosby, A Catalogue of Durham Cathedral Manuscripts (Oxford, 1986); 'A Seventeenth-
Century Durham Inventory', The Musical Times, 119 (1980), 167-70; 'Durham Cathedral's
Liturgical Manuscripts, c.1620-40', Durham University Journal, 66 (1973), 40-51. I am indebted to
Brian Crosby for his help.

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THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYORIGINS OF THE MUSICALCANON 13

1.20 The Durham bishop John Cosyn was of course a leading supporter of
the king before and after the Interregnum. The political role of the reper-
tory meant that its preservation went a significant step beyond the prac-
tice of simply honouring master composers. The political experience
defined the repertory in sharper, more powerful terms than before; it
now had a stronger reason for its existence. It was simply repertory, of
course, since there still was little printed discussion of the old works. But
the trauma of the Civil War, and the systematic way in which collectors
such as Clifford brought anthems and services back, gave the music a
much more distinctively historical character than it had had before.2'
A major step towards a self-conscious identification of the music as
canon came with the appearance of the term 'ancient music' at the turn
of the eighteenth century. The term acquired two quite different mean-
ings, either (1) as the subject of Greek and Roman music, and the scien-
tific speculation closely related to it, or (2) as music of the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries. The first was literary in its uses; both John
Hawkins and Charles Burney employed it as such. The second was as a
practical reference to the old works that had become so firmly established
in repertories of the cathedrals. An early example of this meaning is in a
sale catalogue in 1691 for a remarkable collection of music since the time
of Tallis: A Catalogue of Ancient and modern Musick, both vocal and in-
strumental, with divers treatises about the same. . . . to be sold at Dew-
ing's Coffee House on December 17, 1691. While this meaning of the
term arose from the words made famous in the Quarrel of the Ancients
and Moderns, musical topics played little part in the debate, and the
term took on a life quite its own, independent of literary life. By 1710 or
so the term had become common currency in the musical world.22
With the establishment of the term 'ancient music' the repertory of old
works took on an important intellectual identity, and the shift from
repertory to canon had begun. It defined a great age of music from the
past in simple and understandable terms; even though the music had
been honoured before as it was copied and performed, it lacked the
linguistic element, and the sense of a great past that is so crucial in the
ritual recognition of greatness. By this time as well the repertory had
become less factional than before in its links to the royalist or High-
Church interest. While the great majority of the proponents of ancient
music were indeed Tories of some sort, the music increasingly took on a
national and artistic meaning above political divisions. The old repertory
had shifted increasingly from a political to an artistic function, and that
further assisted the process of building a canon upon it.
We can see further signs of the emerging canon early in the eighteenth
century in the collection of cathedral music made for the Harley Library
20
Thomas Tomkins, Musica Sacra or Musick, dedicated to the Honour and Service of God, and
to the use of Cathedrals and other churches of England and Especially of the Chapell Royal of King
Charles the First (London, 1668).
21 For related glorification of old music by Catholics, see Philip Brett, 'Edward Paston
(1552-1630): A Norfolk Gentleman and his Music Collection', Transactions of the Cambridge
Bibliographical Society, 4 (1964), 51-72.
22 See Arthur Bedford, The Great Abuse of Music (London, 1711), 183, discussing 'such who
learn our present Songs may be as far to seek in our ancient divine musick, as if they knew nothing at
all'. The collection was John Playford's.

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14 WILLIAM WEBER

by Thomas Tudway during the 1710s.23 While Barnard was honouring

composers of a recently deceased generation, Tudway approached his
project from a much more explicitly historical standpoint. He stated his
purpose with remarkable succinctness in a letter to Humphrey Wanley,
his supervisor in the library, in September 1719, in speaking of the
preface to the final volume: 'I must give my lord some Historicall account
of Church Musick and when it first came to be us'd in ye Church, what
sort it was, till ye Reformation.'24 That may seem obvious to us, but in his
time it was a bold step into a wholly new manner of thinking about
musical culture. In his prefaces and letters Tudway also spoke in critical
as well as historical terms. In a letter to Wanley in 1716 he said that 'I
have taken care in making a list of Compositions of such Authors as car-
ried on a Series of Compositions of Church Musick, from ye Restoration
to ye Accession of Queen Anne, to reject any inferior and common
pieces'.2 In so doing he was part of the larger selective process that was
going on in the cathedrals in the half-century after the Restoration, as
the number of old works was gradually reduced to a core repertory. The
publication of music histories by Burney and Hawkins was later to pro-
vide a key intellectual legitimacy to the canon in the last decades of the
century, and Tudway's prefaces were one of the most important steps in
that direction.
Another major signpost in the progression from repertory to canon
came in the founding of the Academy of Vocal Music in 1726, and its
effectual renaming as the Academy of Ancient Music five years later.
Made up of musicians from the Chapel Royal and the metropolitan
choirs, along with a few like-minded amateurs, the club presented a
repertory that was unique in its time. While it derived from the chamber
music repertories of Italian academies, where taste tended to be more
learned than at the opera or more informal musical gatherings, the
London Academy gave special prominence to sacred works of the six-
teenth and early seventeenth centuries - motets of Marenzio, Palestrina
and Byrd most prominently. Other elements of the developing repertory
of old music - Purcell's Te deum and seventeenth-century anthems -
were included at these meetings as well.26
The self-conscious use of the word 'ancient' in the title of a music club
gave the repertory a canonic function that no other concerts could claim
"3 Edward Turnbull, 'Thomas Tudway and the Harleian Collection', Journal of the American
Musicological Society, 8 (1955), 203-7; Christopher Hogwood, 'Thomas Tudway's History of Music',
Music in Eighteenth-Century England: A Festschrift to Charles Cudworth, ed. Christopher Hogwood
and Richard Luckett (Cambridge, 1984), 19-47.
24 Tudway to Wanley, 20 September 1719, Portland Loan 29/257. This series of letters in the
Portland Loan deserves the close attention of scholars; see, for example, the letters on Tudway's sup-
posed dismissal from the university in 1706 in 29/159. I will be publishing a brief discussion of these
letters in a forthcoming issue of the British LibraryJournal devoted to the final acquisition of the
Portland Loan.
25 Tudway to Wanley, 4 June 1716, Harl. 3782, f. 58.
26 Programmes of the Academy are to be found in the Leeds Public Library, the Bibliotheque Na-
tionale, Paris, the British Library and the collection of Mr Christopher Hogwood; a set of scores from
the first programme of the Academy are in the library of Durham Cathedral; and the Minutes of the
Academy, 1726-31, is in British Library, Add. MS 11732. See discussion of its history in H. Diack
Johnstone, 'Maurice Greene: His Life and Work' (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1967),
i, 96-110; and Colin Timms, 'Steffani and the Academy of Ancient Music', The Musical Times, 119
(1978), 127-30.

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THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYORIGINS OF THE MUSICALCANON 15

anywhere else in Europe. The repertory, which did not change in its
essentials until the 1770s, showed a careful selectivity quite different from
the traditions by which works had become incorporated into contem-
porary repertories. Yet we must use the term 'canon' in a limited sense
here. The small size of the club's membership, about 80 at its peak, and
the small influence of its meetings, especially after its leader J. C.
Pepusch died in 1752, suggests that this kind of taste was limited to a
small and isolated part of the musical world. It is dubious to call a reper-
tory 'canon' in the full sense if it does not enjoy the acceptance of the
larger public.
That was to happen with the establishment of the Concerts of Ancient
Music in 1776. Though having no formal relationship with the Academy,
some of its singers and its scores must have been the same. Directed by
members of the peerage and enjoying a remarkably prestigious set of
subscribers, the society gained a strong prominence in musical life im-
mediately after its founding, and even more after its sponsorship of the
Handel Commemoration in Westminster Abbey in 1784. Yet this hap-
pened only because the nature of 'ancient' music was redefined. It now
meant, in effect, any music more than two decades or so old; the term
quickly took on a synonym, 'Classical' music. The programmes did not in-
clude the sacred works of the Elizabethan age that were so prominent in
those of the Academy; the only music from that period was madrigals.
Still, the softening of the esotericism of the focus of the programmes
brought the notion of 'ancient' music a popularity it had not formerly
had. The balancing of learning with public acceptance was to be crucial
to the consolidation of the modern canon in the early nineteenth
century.27
We can see how the public acceptance of the canon evolved in another
major area of its history in England: the music of Henry Purcell, and
most particularly his Te deum and]ubilate. The previous discussion has
important implications for how we treat the literary cult of Purcell, the
many comments on him in the press for 30 or 40 years after he died,
which Richard Luckett has analysed in such careful fashion.28 We now
see, of course, that it was fairly common to revere a master composer for a
while after his death. That is all the more true since Purcell died rela-
tively young, at the height of his powers, and while his composing style
was still very much in vogue. Moreover, much of the comment on Purcell
was factional in its motivations. He was championed in large part by
literary men as a useful means by which to attack Italian opera, which
was threatening their theatrical interests and about which they had
strong aesthetic reservations. Applauding Purcell the Briton - like sneer-
ing at the castrati - provided them with a handy polemical device in this
context, all of which did not have much to do with his music. It was quite
27 The programmes are widely available in Words of the concerts of Antient Music at Tottenham
Square Rooms for the Year 1776 and so on. See James E. Matthew, 'The Antient Concerts,
1776-1848', Proceedings of the Musical Association, 33 (1906-7), 55-79. I plan to publish a detailed
analysis of the first 15 years of the programme at this series in my book in progress, The Musical
Canon in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.
28 Richard Luckett,' "Or rather our Musical Shakspeare:" Charles Burney's Henry Purcell', Music
in Eighteenth-Century England, 59-77.

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16 WILLIAM WEBER

to be expected that talk about him as the English Orpheus would fade out
as the controversy over Italian opera declined after about 1740.
It is instead in the social bases where his music was performed that we
find a permanent Purcellian tradition very much under way early in the
eighteenth century. This work had a vaulting importance as the corner-
stone of the 'festival' tradition in music meetings. Originally performed
by the St Cecilia Society in 1694, it became standard repertory at the
festival of the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy, and from there
radiated out into music meetings throughout England. No other work by
a dead composer had such a performing history in these meetings; for all
the respect given to John Blow and Jeremiah Clarke, none of their works
persisted to anything close to the extent achieved by the Purcell Te
deum.29
As such its role in repertory was another example of the long-standing
tradition by which a single piece became incorporated into contemporary
repertory. One might compare it with the Allegri Miserere as a work per-
formed at a specific annual feast. But it was quite unusual for such a
work to be performed in so many places; as far as we know the Allegri was
sung only in Rome. Moreover, the tradition of festival performance of an
old work begun by the Purcell Te deum was extended to the settings of
the Te deum and the oratorios of Handel. The diversity of composers and
genres involved in this tradition by the 1770s meant that it had gone far
beyond the old practice. One would not want to name a specific time
when that ended and the new one began; the continuity between them
was essential to the process. Most important of all, if in the past the work
had persisted only by virtue of the festival context, one can say that by
1800 the festival was focused upon the works themselves and indeed
existed ultimately because of them. That meant that they were now
canon.
The festival tradition suggests an important point about the growth of
the musical canon generally. It shows that this was not strictly a critical
process, a separating out of the musical wheat from the chaff, but a much
larger and more complex set of processes that kept a few works in perfor-
mance. To put it briefly, the Sons of the Clergy emerged as a gathering of
the minor clergy in a time when they felt under severe attack from the
enemies of the Church, most important of all the Whigs in their efforts to
limit the role of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. While the Corporation took
on a broader public in the early eighteenth century, it remained a kind of
professional gathering and a means of raising funds for its members'
families. Many of the early festivals - especially the Three Choirs Festival
- had similar social and political functions. It was in this context that first
the Purcell Te deum and then the Handel oratorios became rooted in
performance permanently. In such a manner the festival tradition gave a
key component of old repertory a deep social base, and thereby endowed
the larger musical canon with its widest social outreach.

29 Ernest Harold Pearce,

History of the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy (London, 1904);
papers of the Corporation and the Festival, London Record Office, Northampton Row; Nicholas
Cox, Bridging the Gap: A History of the Sons of the Clergy (Oxford, 1978).

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THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYORIGINS OF THE MUSICALCANON 17

These, then, are the basic propositions by which I think we need to

study the early history of the musical canon. The development of reper-
tories of old works had a central importance in the rise of the canon; this
was the essential starting-point of the modern tradition. The repertories
then evolved into what we must call canon in England in the course of the
eighteenth century, growing in quiet, remarkably unobserved ways.
Neither the repertory nor the canonic estimation of key great works
sprang from a broad cultural movement such as Romanticism. In later
publications I plan to show how English empiricism, the influence of
Longinus, and the weakening of the literary canon played major roles in
this process. But first and foremost the canon had deep roots in musical
traditions, specifically in the tradition of learned sacred music, roots in
the cathedrals and the Chapel Royal. The process by which music ac-
quired a canon - centuries after the other arts, let us remember - was
slow, gradual, and not at all obvious. Change from the past came
through continuity with the past.

California State University, Long Beach

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