The Concert of Ancient Music

In eighteenth-century London, ticket buyers heard music a century old, and repertory hardened into a canon.

Related

BaroqueMadrigalOratorio

Eighteenth-century London acquired a new habit: listeners bought tickets for music decades old instead of waiting for the new.

Time and place

London, 1726, where noble amateurs founded the Academy of Ancient Music in a tavern. In 1776 the Concert of Ancient Music began selling subscriptions. In 1784 Westminster Abbey held a Handel commemoration with a large choir and orchestra. Half a century separates the three, yet they point to one kind of venue and one body of repertory.

What happened

Members of the Academy copied and sang sixteenth- and seventeenth-century madrigals, motets and church music from partbooks, without a full score. They called these works ancient, meaning distinct from the fashionable style of the day. Madrigals and church music dominated, Italian opera of the moment rarely appeared, and that choice was itself a position; an old work was treated as something to recover rather than rewrite. Professional singers shared the platform with amateur gentlemen; rehearsals took place above a tavern, membership carried an annual fee, and seasons ran week by week. After Handel died in 1759 his oratorios quickly became ancient too, and commemorations expanded choir and orchestra. Publishers began reprinting old music, private collecting and copying became a fashion, and the Academy's copies later served editors as sources.

What changed

The past became a repertory that could be consumed again and again, and programmes split into ancient and modern halves. Performing old music required editing, collation and research, and the ancestor of musicology appeared. The idea of a canon took shape, with Palestrina and Handel installed as masters and new composers writing consciously after them. Listening gained a historical dimension, as audiences began to care what a work had originally been.

Listen for the turn

Begin with Lasso's Matona mia cara, a light five-voice texture whose phrases follow the words, the kind of piece the Academy copied into its partbooks. Then Byrd's Miserere mei Deus, with modal cadences and long lines, the sound of English recusant polyphony. Finally Handel's Zadok the Priest, a coronation piece for orchestra and choir, more than a century younger yet absorbed by the same machinery of the ancient. The difference between them is how old stopped being a description of style and became a historical label. Before the turn, concerts were mostly new music with an old piece slipped in; afterwards the old had evenings of its own, and audiences listened with a sense of period.

Related

The turn belongs to Baroque; the old repertory is at Madrigal and Oratorio, with the Bach revival following a century later.

Sources

• Grove Music Online 的 Academy of Ancient Music 与 Concert of Ancient Music 条目，用于核对成立年份与曲目范围
• William Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England（Oxford University Press），用于核对经典曲目的形成

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.