Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Tom Dixon
The known facts of musical life in pre-Civil War Cambridge (as in many
other cultures) are susceptible to isolation and analysis, and to approach
them in this way is one aim of the present chapter.1 Behind empirical
material of this kind, however, lie less explicit, often unspoken modes of
experience and understanding. In what follows we shall also see how
patterns of musical interaction could reflect broader connections, divisions
and solutions within Cambridge life. As one of Englands two university
towns, Cambridge shared with Oxford a number of characteristics which in
many ways separated both communities from the culture of the country
as a whole, but in other respects made them a kind of concentrated
microcosm of that culture. While some of what I have to say might be
applied to both universities (and I will use examples relating to Oxford
where appropriate), I also intend to establish aspects of Cambridges
individual context and its unique contribution and response to history
through music.
1
interests. If music was at times perceived as simply functional, both its
performance and the investigation of its underlying principles also
presented competing models of civilised manhood. Secondly, the
universities were in effect stages on which the bitter religious differences
of the time were publicly played out in the wake of Archbishop William
Lauds sweeping religious reforms, and where clashes between supporters
and opponents of those reforms found expression.3 While it may be
tempting to approach disputes relating to the place of music in worship
simply in terms of aesthetic value, we need to be aware that their
protagonists marshalled the full weight of available biblical and doctrinal
scholarship in support of either side. Thus questions of practical musical
proficiency, academic expertise in music and the kinds of music
appropriate to worship all had ramifications extending significantly beyond
the realm of music itself.
3 For a perceptive study of the Laudian reforms and their reception in the
universities, see Hugh Trevor-Roper, Laudianism and Political Power, in
idem, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth-Century Essays, first
published 1987 (London: Fontana Press, 1989), 40-119.
2
The Cambridge Platonists are best thought of, not as a fully or self-
consciously coherent group, but as a collection of individuals broadly
sharing a number of intellectual positions and interests, of which
Platonism is only one of the more obvious although for reasons of
space I shall emphasise their shared values rather than their differences.
Those who are most relevant for present purposes are Henry More (1614-
87), Ralph Cudworth (1617-88), John Smith (1618-52), Nathaniel Culverwel
(c. 1619-51), and especially Peter Sterry (1613-72).4 While the body of
their published work dates from subsequent decades, they received their
academic grounding and encountered their formative experiences at
Cambridge in the 1630s, as students and fellows of the puritan colleges,
and predominantly of the most puritan of all: Emmanuel. Here direct
exposure to music must have been relatively limited, but they were open
to the broader musical culture of the university in ways which will become
apparent. They may even have been among those reported to have
received harm by their frequent going to Peterhouse Chapel, contrary to
the orders and government of the college, partly in order to experience
the music of the Laudian services.5 While not directly verifiable, that
image neatly encapsulates the potentially conciliatory effect of Laudian
music on minds initially conditioned by a far different religious ethic.
3
sweeten human nature.6 The musical language so often employed in their
prose was no arbitrary choice, but was (I shall go on to suggest) firmly
rooted in sacred and secular Cambridge performance practices
encompassing choir, lute and string consort. None of them left writings
devoted directly and exclusively to the subject of music, and for that
reason it is a topic that rarely surfaces in any historical discussion of these
thinkers.7 Nevertheless, as a conspicuous referent in the language they
employed, it did play some considerable role in the formulation and
expression of their ideas, not least in a re-gendering of Christian concepts
that questioned dominant modes of controversy.
7 For further discussion of this context, see Tom Dixon, Music and
Aesthetics in Cambridge Platonism and Beyond, Musica e Storia 15/2
(2007), 475-504.
8 For the background to this point, see Ruth Karras, From Boys to Men:
Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), chapter 3.
4
liberal arts curriculum to the ideals of modern gentlemanly education,
others warned against its dangerously feminising appeal to the emotions.
If some enlisted music as a means of appropriate Protestant clerical
control, others attacked its abuse as an indicator of an irrationality and
abandonment to the passions traceable to the corrupting influence of
Rome.9 For still others, though, its capacity to link mans inner being to the
divine nature, its potential to escape the limitations of verbal
referentiality, above all its validity as a living metaphor for divine love,
lent it another dimension in the context of the time. Music is always in
danger of being appropriated by elements of conflict, but it also has the
capacity to transcend them, to bring together as well as to divide. We
rightly see a source such as the Peterhouse part-books as vitally important
in preserving a fragile repertoire. It is nevertheless true that, at the time,
the music they contained was made to represent one side of a widening
chasm of belief and practice. Yet it is also arguable that the healing power
of music of this and other kinds in pre-Civil War Cambridge made a more
subtle and indirect contribution to English culture through inculcating an
inner musical aesthetic in some of those who experienced it.
9 On the issue of clerical control, see Peter Lake, The Laudian Style:
Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s,
in Kenneth Fincham, ed. The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642 (Stanford CA:
Stanford University Press, 1993), 161-182.
5
souls.11 This can only have been exacerbated by the fact that university
conditions were generally overcrowded; even if things improved
somewhat after about 1600, multiple occupation of rooms continued to be
the norm, with partitioned studies measuring as little as six feet square.12
Even by the 1630s, only a fellow commoner could expect to have a room
to himself.13 Some of the colleges owned a small number of musical
instruments, but for the most part musically inclined fellows and students
would presumably have been obliged to keep instruments along with their
other personal possessions, and to practice them in the cramped and
anything but private accommodation available.14
6
Sturbridge common, where the necessities of academic life could be
purchased, and where friendships were begun and renewed. If Sturbridge
Fair provided temporary work for some of the less privileged students, it
also enjoyed a continuing reputation for inducing idleness, encouraged by
the less wholesome diversions which immediately presented themselves:
it was later to be the model for Bunyans Vanity Fair.15 This rowdy
atmosphere provided one conspicuous instance of the suspicion music
could engender through its association with the seedier side of life. It was
regularly performed at the towns inns, some of which were owned or
leased by musicians: the association of the Bear with the Gibbons family is
perhaps the most famous of a number of examples.16 Thomas Randolphs
plays, the leading theatrical attraction in Cambridge immediately before
the Civil Wars, abound with references both to the local taverns and to the
fiddlers who supplied their entertainment usually emphasising the
abject penury of these dull scrapers.17 Discourses of authority linked
7
music with strong drink and sexual misbehaviour, and, predictably
enough, such temptations often proved too much for the universitys
growing student cohort.18 Even at Emmanuel despite the statutes of its
Elizabethan founder, Sir Walter Mildmay, imposing severe restrictions on
leaving the college after dark the Admonition Book solemnly noted
instances of students staying out all night and indulging in drinking wine
and clamorous singinge.19 On the other hand, perhaps some early
impressions were of a more serene, poetic nature; it is easy to imagine,
though of course impossible to prove, that some of Peter Sterrys musical
images directly recall his experiences of Cambridge:
31. Cf. Randolphs contemporary Cambridge playwright, Robert Davenport, who refers to
That Tap-
house trick of ffidling: A Survey of the Sciences (CambridgeUniversity Library, MS
Dd.10.30). As
Peter Holman points out, the word fiddle did not always refer to a bowed instrument; he
cites an
instance of fiddler being used for lutenist: Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the
English Court,
1540-1690, first published 1993, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 140.
18 Kirsten Gibson, Music, Melancholy and Masculinity in Early Modern England, in Ian
Biddle and Kirsten Gibson, eds, Masculinity and Western Musical Practice (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2009), 52; Shepard, Contesting Communities?, 228.
20 Vivian de Sola Pinto, Peter Sterry, Platonist and Puritan (1613-1672): A Biographical
and Critical Study with Passages Selected from his Writings, reprint of 1934 edition (New
York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 184.
8
the quadrangle.21 In dEwes account for 1618, the excursion down the
Cam associated with John Ports Latin Day was accompanied by a band of
loud music; presumably, it was provided by the town waits.22 The
presence of these civic musicians must have been well nigh inescapable
to members of the university; as well as playing outside the gates of
colleges, they figured prominently in university events such as the Great
Commencement, held annually on the first Tuesday in July, and the
culmination of a series of award ceremonies.23 Here, current students and
fellows mingled with former colleagues returning for the occasion,
advancing new ideas and discussing prospective career moves or the
question of emigration.24 Great St Marys church, fitted with a new stage in
the 1590s for the performance of music at the Commencement services,
was by the 1630s the subject of censure for being made a theatre where
men, women and scholars thrust together promiscuously.25 On the
relatively rare occasions when a degree in music was to be awarded, the
22 Nelson, ed., Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge, II, 741; Nan
Cooke Carpenter, Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities
(Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), 195-6.
23 John Harley, Orlando Gibbons and the Gibbons Family of Musicians (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 1999), 7; Victor Morgan, Cambridge University and the Country, in Lawrence
Stone, ed., The University in Society, Volume I: Oxford and Cambridge from the
Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press,
1974), 227; Victor Morgan with Christopher Brooke, A History of the University of
Cambridge, Volume II: 1546-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 222-3.
For dates of the commencements, see Nelson, ed., Records of Early English Drama, II,
1037.
9
ceremony would include a Music Act, which combined the performance
of a specially composed piece with a debate on theory.26
27 For music in Caroline Cambridge plays, see Julia K. Wood, Two Latin
Play Songs, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 21 (1988), 47;
Alan H. Nelson, Early Cambridge Theatres: College, University and Town
Stages, 1464-1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 36.
10
essentially dramatic character, though not necessarily intended for the
stage, was also written by Cambridge musicians. The dialogue genre
associated with Robert Ramsey and John Hilton the younger (both
composers represented in the Peterhouse part-books) was particularly
popular, one work even commemorating Hobson the carrier, on whose
weekly wagon of experience many an incipient student made his first
journey to the university town: with a touch of macabre humour, Hobson
was characterised in Hiltons piece as Charon the boatman.31
31 Ian Spink, English Song, Dowland to Purcell (London: Batsford, 1974), 49; Mary Chan,
The Witch of Endor and Seventeenth-Century Propaganda, Musica Disciplina, 34 (1980),
208; Randolph, Poetical and Dramatic Works, 44; David Anthony John Cockburn, A
Critical Edition of the Letters of the Reverend Joseph Mead, 1626-1627, Contained in
British Library Harleian MS 390, PhD dissertation (University of Cambridge, 1994), 51.
32 George Atwell, The Faithfull Surveyour (Cambridge, 1658), 5. This reflects the
common opinion of unsympathetic critics such as Owen Feltham (1620), who considered
that a mans inordinate skill in music argue[d] his neglect of better employment, and
that he ha[d] spent much time on a thing unnecessary: Holman, Four and Twenty
Fiddlers, 140. There was a distinction to be made between spending a considerable
amount of time and money on music in order to develop some degree of expertise...and
treating it as an occasional pastime and acquiring the ability to play for recreation:
Porter, University and Society, 70.
11
choral foundations. The singer and instrumentalist Thomas Mace,
associated with Trinity College for several decades from the 1630s and an
important link between the Platonists and practical music, taught
privileged students such as Robert Bolles, but demand for his services
also came from career academics. The future vice-chancellor, John
Worthington, a close associate of the Platonists, was one of Maces pupils,
while it may be significant that More and Cudworth were among the
subscribers to the Trinity musicians eventual publication venture,
Musicks Monument.34 Teaching was central to Maces activities; many of
the lute pieces in Musicks Monument seem to have been composed as
exercises for this purpose, and indeed the whole work was directed toward
passing on the fast disappearing musical idioms of the ageing musicians
earlier Cambridge years.35 Before the Civil Wars, at least, Mace and his ilk
seem to have had no shortage of customers. Purchases of instruments,
strings and music books on behalf of students, recorded in the accounts of
Joseph Mead (or Mede), tutor at Christs College between 1618 and his
death in 1638, provide evidence of their participation in music.36 Perhaps
the rate of 6s.8d. per month paid out for their tuition was directed to waits
or local instrumentalists like Michael Palmer or the chronically
impecunious Seatree, since it is somewhat lower than the 10s.
commanded by the more reputable Mace.37
36 Harris Francis Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2 vols (Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 1956-61), II, 77ff and 553ff. For the responsibilities of tutors
in managing the financial affairs of their aristocratic students, see Morgan, History of the
University of Cambridge, Volume II, 326-7.
12
association with the university town, and renowned Elizabethan lutenists
such as Anthony Holborne and Thomas Robinson may have been
Cambridge-educated.38 The connection had been signalled as early as the
1560s, when John Alford of Pembroke College published a translation of
Adrien Le Roys treatise on playing the instrument, and the tradition was
confirmed retrospectively by the nostalgic Mace (recalling eminent
Performancesby divers very Worthy Persons), as well as in the mid-
century celebration of musical Cambridge in Nicholas Hookes poem
dedicated to John Lilly.39 Hookes oblique reference to the hybrid style
characteristic of 1630s Cambridge lute music also captures Maces
particular idiom: English or French way few or none out-go Our
Lutanists.40
13
popular culture continued to associate it with the female sex. While a
man delights in arms and in hearing the rattling drums, wrote Joseph
Swetnam in 1615, a woman loves to hear sweet music on the lute, a
prejudice that continued in circulation for as long as the lifespan of the
instrument itself.41 The lute carried negatively gendered connotations
associated with love and dalliance: the reputed skill of Jacques Gaultier,
Queen Henrietta Marias court lutenist, to charm his way into the Royal
bed through his music was one of many such stories.42 It is perhaps
unsurprising that the Cambridge surveyor, George Atwell, assigned
greater value to pacing out land boundaries than to the implicitly less
masculine pastime of plucking lute lessons, but his dismissive response
typifies a persistent strand of opinion.43 The lutes defenders were no less
aware of its questionable associations. Even in the university environment
Mace felt obliged to mount a defence against the aspersion that the lute
was a womans instrument, while Nathaniel Culverwel praised it in terms
which, though sympathetic, still suggested the connection: it made the
sweetest yet the stillest and softest musick of all.44 The lutes physical
shape might itself be interpreted as a sign of refined grace or of feminine
temptation, and as David Kuchta points out there was a fine and
invisible line...between the proper and improper use of signs, leaving the
41 Linda Phyllis Austern, Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminacie: Music and the Idea of the
Feminine in Early Modern England, Music and Letters, 74 (1993), 351. In 1722 John Essex could
still include the lute among instruments most agreeable to the ladies: Richard D.
Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity,
Ideology, and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge:
Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 122.
14
instruments cultural significance open to a number of sometimes
conflicting interpretations.45
Later in life, More continued to find lute playing a proper solace in this
drudgery I labour under.47 Ralph Cudworths evocation of the motor skills
of the performer may even suggest his own involvement in a similar
pastime:
(One recalls Roland Barthes distinction between the music one hears and
that which one plays, the latter involving the body as inscriber, a music
with no other audience than its participants.49) Culverwels choice of
language often suggests a close familiarity with the lute, as in his
45 David Kuchta, The Semiotics of Masculinity in Renaisssance England,
in James Grantham Turner, ed., Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern
Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 239.
46 Richard Ward, The Life of the Learned and Pious Dr Henry More
(London, 1710), 54.
47 Marjorie Hope Nicolson and Sarah Hutton, eds, The Conway Letters:
The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More and their
Friends, 1642-1684 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 306-7.
15
evocation of a variety of graces, soft and silk touches, quick stings and
pleasant relishes, nimble transitions and delicate closes all feminine-
sounding attributes.50 He stresses, too, the interiority of this most intimate
of instruments, with its propensity to induce mental or noetical
delights.51 Sterry is another writer whose spiritual eroticism often reveals
insights into both the instrumental technique and the subtler performance
skills of the lutenist; for example,
[n]othing is more apt among natural things to delight and ravish our
souls than the music of an excellent hand, carried down in just
degrees by soft and melting strains to the lowest, and there, as it
were, quite silenced; then on a sudden carried up again to a
sprightly and triumphant height.52
Christ and the individual believer are as two lutes, the one sounding in
sympathy with the love-vibrations emitted by the other.54
51 Ibid., 190.
52 Peter Sterry, The Rise, Race, and Royalty of the Kingdom of God in the
Soul of Man (London, 1683), 205.
53 Idem, The Consort of Musick, in N.I. Matar, ed., Peter Sterry: Select
Writings, University of Kansas Humanistic Studies, Vol. 60 (New York: Peter
Lang, 1994), 171.
54 Idem, The Commings Forth of Christ in the Power of his Death (London,
1650), 18.
16
The viol was another instrument well suited to the social
environment of the university, its music being written in the main for
small groups or consorts. As surviving records make clear, it was used
extensively in pre-Civil War Cambridge. The prevalence of viol ownership
among professional musicians in Cambridge is suggested by their extant
wills; for example, Stephen Mace (Thomas uncle) owned eight at his
death in 1635, whilst William Tawyer (d.1640) possessed 5 violls great &
small.55 Like the lute, though, the viol also lent itself to performance by
competent amateurs, and a good deal of evidence survives for this level
of practice in the 1630s. The future Archbishop of Canterbury, William
Sancroft the younger, was already playing in his student days at
Emmanuel, his viol remaining a prize possession through later life, while
at neighbouring Sidney Sussex Robert Bolles also developed a lifelong
passion for the instrument; he was, as we have seen, taught by Mace, who
was proficient on both viol and lute.56 The Trinity musician, as well as
giving lessons to Worthington (somewhat later, in the 1640s), may also
have taught the latters friend, Humphrey Babington: it is recorded that
Worthington, Babington and Sancroft sang regularly together, and
Babington possibly owned a set of instruments.57 John Hutchinson, a
student at Peterhouse in the early 1630s, and later a prominent
Parliamenterian army officer and regicide, got a very good hand on the
viol, which afterwards he improved to a great mastery.58 In the same
58 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. N.H. Keeble (London:
Phoenix Press, 2000), 42. At some point, John Hutchinson was taught by the outstanding
consort composer, Charles Coleman: ibid., 47; David Pinto, For ye Violls: The Consort and
Dance Music of William Lawes (Richmond: Fretwork, 1995), 29.
17
decade, Thomas Brewer taught Roger LEstrange, later a virtuoso on the
bass viol.59 This future Royalist Norfolk family was bound together through
the intimacy of the viol consort: John Jenkins patron, Nicholas LEstrange,
had played while at Trinity a few years earlier, while Hamon LEstrange
was among Meads musically active students.60 At Queens College in the
1620s, Henry Slingsby, later to be a Royalist army officer, played the viol,
whilst a probate inventory of 1634 lists a bass viol among the possessions
of one Glover, a member of the same college.61 At Christs, meanwhile,
Meads account books recorded purchases of violl books, instruments
and strings, and charges for the repair of viols, as well as revealing the
identities of some of his viol-playing students, among them Thomas
Paggitt and Thomas Stuteville.62
18
being repaired.64 At nearby Ely Cathedral, records reveal a consistent level
of expenditure on viol maintenance and tuition in the pre-Civil War
period.65 Secondly, as previously mentioned, changes in the ideal of
gentlemanly education had made the practice of playing relatively
respectable instruments such as the lute and viol in an amateur context
more acceptable to those of higher rank, a pursuit to which, as indicated
by the evidence reviewed here, many career students were no less
attracted. Together, these factors led to a fluid situation in which music
was enabled to mediate between different strata of the social hierarchy
and different shades of religious and political conviction; years later, the
Cambridge graduate Roger North (an ardent Royalist) was to speak of
that respublica among the consortiers.66 Wood identifies the Cambridge
Independents intruded into Oxford during the Interregnum as tending to
value instrumental music (which was relatively free of Laudian
associations), and in some cases as holding music meetings every week
in their chambers.67
64 Robert Willis and J.W. Clark, The Architectural History of the University
of Cambridge, and of the Colleges of Cambridge and Eton, 3 vols
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1886), III, 385.
66 John Wilson, ed., Roger North on Music: Being a Selection from his
Essays written during the Years c.1695-1728 (London: Novello, 1959), 222.
67 Bruce Bellingham, The Musical Circle of Anthony Wood in Oxford during the
Commonwealth and Restoration, Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America, 19
(1982), 18.
19
was lacking in the life imparted to the instruments of the consort by their
players:
When God restores men to a new and divine life, he doth not make
them like so many dead Instruments, stringing and fitting them,
which yet are able to yield no sound of themselves; but he puts a
living Harmony within them.69
Cudworth held that continued exposure to the influence of fine music led
to the refinement of taste, and for such a person hearing a consort of
exact musicians playing some excellent composure of many parts would
arouse feelings that a vulgar ear will be utterly insensible of.70 Especially
in his enforced retirement after the Restoration, Sterry gave voice to a
more inclusive musical conception of the divine-human relationship which
surely still stemmed from the development of a comparable sense of
aesthetic discrimination during his Cambridge years. In that relationship,
all play a part in the universal consort, and [t]he divine music of the
whole would be changed into confusion and discords, all the sweet
proportions of all the parts would be discorded, and become disagreeable,
if any one, the least and least considered part, were taken out of the
whole.71 This is in effect a spiritualising of Maces recollection of the
Cambridge consort ideal:
And These Things were Performed, upon so many Equal, and Truly-
Scizd Viols; and so Exactly Strung, Tund, and Playd upon, as no
one Part was any Impediment to the Other... For we would never
allow Any Performer to Over-top, or Outcry another by Loud Play,
but our Great Care was, to have All the Parts Equally Heard.72
68 Inventory attached to the will of John Smith, dated 3rd August, 1652:
Vice Chancellors Probate Court, Cambridge, 111/302 (held in Cambridge
University Library).
20
If this is music in which the individual takes an active part in collective co-
operation, it is also the source of a passive experience of psychological
healing: [o]pen open your ears to hear it, let it sing all your thoughts to a
divine Calme, and rest.73 Altogether, the evidence suggests that those
who experienced the Cambridge viol groups so nostalgically recalled by
Mace, no less than the more visible participants of the Oxford consort
meetings of the Interregnum and early Restoration, represented a
relatively wide cross-section of social, political, religious and intellectual
groupings.74
21
genres were valued.76 The cleric Stephen Bing, part of a group of copyists
of consort music at Cambridge, and a client of Hatton, later found
advancement in the service of the music-loving Sancroft.77
22
evidence for the existence of private alchemical groups at Cambridge in
the first half of the seventeenth century, and their more tangible aspects
have been noted by historians of science and antiquarians.81 In some
cases, music was specifically present; at Queens, in the earlier part the
seventeenth century, John Rodeknight owned a base viall and a little [i.e.,
treble] viall as well as assorted alchemical apparatus.82 Patrons of
Cambridge academics helped to maintain this dual interest; the
Barrington family, leading Essex puritans, collected old alchemical
manuscripts and supported both chymists and musicians.83 But a depth of
spirituality was characteristic of the family, the unworldly Samuel Rogers
recalling his sweet discourse with that precious woman Mrs Barrington, as
well as, apparently, having commun:[ion] with an alchemical client of
hers.84 Rogers, we may note, took part in the regular meetings of a
Cambridge spiritual group in the 1630s, along with the musically inclined
Sterry, Sambrookes friend Moses Wall, and the cultivated mathematician
Walter Frost.85 Others continued to draw spiritual sustenance from the
informal practice of alchemy at the university during the Civil Wars and
the Interregnum. Thomas Jollie, later a Nonconformist divine, was
described as a kind of Rosicrucian or adeptus; like the celebrator of
Cambridge lute culture, Nicholas Hookes, he moved in the circles of the
Chymically given Trinity College tutor Alexander Akehurst, at around the
same time that Charles Hotham, who kept an alchemical laboratory in his
182.
81 See, for example, John Gascoigne, The Universities and the Scientific
Revolution: The Case of Newton and Restoration Cambridge, History of
Science, 23 (1985), 397-8, 403-4; Palmer, College Dons, 188.
83 Hartlib, Ephemerides (1640), Hartlib Papers, 30/4/67A, 30/4/68A; Arthur Searle, ed.,
The Barrington Family Letters, 1628-1632, Camden 4th Series, Vol. 28 (London: Royal
Historical Society, 1983), 155; William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of
Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 220,
225.
23
rooms at Peterhouse, was developing his defining interest in Jacob
Boehmes theosophy of universal harmony.86
24
Cherburys case encouraged students to teach themselves.90 What was
being promoted, however, was the attainment of a variable level of
competence in a gentlemanly attribute, rather than entry to the much
smaller and less culturally favoured categories of future professional
musicians or specialist music theorists.
25
performed, those who exercised rationality from those who were merely
governed by the senses, and thus those who were men from their less
than fully human (or less than properly masculine) contemporaries.93 The
distinction survived challenges to traditional scholastic values, and was
very much alive throughout the seventeenth century, when experimental
philosophers such as William Holder educated at Pembroke College,
Cambridge, in the 1630s simply adapted the position of their medieval
predecessors in asserting the precedence of the natural part of
harmony...[which] lies deep in nature and requires much research...to
unfold it over the mere delight and pleasure of the ear.94 A Professor of
Musick, explained the Baconian William Petty, need not so much to teach
his Auditors actually to [play] or make Melody as to explaine the grounds
thereof, to teach Men to know the differences of & distances of Tones the
Natures of concord and discord the Nature of sounds and sounding
bodies.95 Even William Heythers endowment of a theoretical lectureship
and a practical masters post at Oxford in 1627 served to underline the
distinction although its recognition of the status of musical performance
is more often stressed.96
93 Elizabeth Eva Leach, Music and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, in Ian Biddle and
Kirsten Gibson, eds, Masculinity and Western Musical Practice (Farnham: Ashgate,
2009), 27.
26
interest.97 All those who studied at the universities would certainly have
been confronted with the fundamental significance of speculative musics
historical status as part of the quadrivium, but the extent to which
anything beyond a modicum of familiarity was gained is difficult to
measure.98 Certainly it was of considerable significance for those who, like
the Cambridge graduates John Wallis and Henry Peacham, exhibited a
particular interest in music as part of mathematics.99 More broadly, it
continued to inform the culture without necessarily being a defining
feature for those who were musically inclined.
100 See, for example, Sargent Bush, Jr and Carl J. Rasmussen, The Library of Emmanuel
College, Cambridge,1584-1637 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 133.
27
appropriated to intellectual spirits, who alone are capable of them
as their proper operations and objects.101
102 Peter Toon, Gods Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen, Pastor,
Educator, Theologian (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1971), 44.
103 Mordechai Feingold, The Humanities, in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., The History of the
University of Oxford, Volume IV: The Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 236. It should be noted that, before the Restoration, there is more evidence
for Baconian acoustical investigations being followed at Oxford: see Mordechai Feingold
and Penelope M. Gouk, An Early Critique of Bacons Sylva Sylvarum: Edmund Chilmeads
Treatise on Sound, Annals of Science, 40 (1983), 140, 156.
28
supporters dismissed their opponents as anti-harmonical snarlers.105
Behind the insults, however, lay a background of scholarly exegesis and
doctrinal disagreement dating back to the Reformation and beyond. To
what extent, if at all, were vocal polyphony or the presence of instruments
in church appropriate to Protestant worship? Critics throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often classed intricate music as
enervating and morally suspect, exerting an appeal aimed only at the
senses. Later commentators could cite the view of Erasmus, who
dismissed complex vocal music as a confused noise of voices, signifying
nothing.106 No one could overlook the references in the Old Testament to
the presence in worship of elaborate singing with a variety of instrumental
support, but the circumstances in which this had taken place, and the
meanings to be attached to it, were very much open to interpretation.
Many of the godly were especially uncomfortable with the depictions of
instrumental forces in ancient Hebrew services, which following Calvin
they rationalised as a concession to the spiritual weakness and religious
immaturity of the Jews.107 Moreover there was scant detailed record of
music in the earliest years of the Christian Church, and plenty of evidence
to suggest that it had been introduced in complex form only after
Christianitys corruption by worldly Roman power. Even the sympathetic
Augustine had famously shrunk from musics emotional appeal, preferring
to keep it functionally subordinate to the all-important message of the
text.
106 Stephen M. Buhler, Counterpoint and Controversy: Milton and the Critiques of
Polyphonic Music, Milton Studies, 36 (1998), 21.
107 H.P. Clive, The Calvinist Attitude to Music, and its Literary Aspects and Sources: Part
I, Bibliothque dhumanisme et Renaissance, 19 (1957), 91-2.
29
raising the affections to a state of mind receptive to divine thoughts.108 In
this view, provided the music set prescribed texts and followed a suitably
grave and sober pattern, avoiding inappropriately secular associations, it
could only be an aid to religion. After all, the defining blueprint for English
Protestantism, the Elizabethan settlement, had offered considerably more
encouragement to music than its more austere continental counterparts.
What is perhaps most likely to strike a chord today is the sheer
reasonableness of the case for Laudian chapel music. Seeing music is one
of the liberal arts, how could it be quarrelled at in an university, if they
sang with understanding both of the matter and the manner thereof?,
asked Thomas Fuller, adding incredulously: [y]et some uttered great
distaste thereat, as a tendency to superstition.109
108 Smith, Select Discourses, 238; Foulke Robarts, Gods Holy House and Service
(London, 1639), 54. For more on this latter source, see Graham Parry, Glory, Laud
and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican Counter-
Reformation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 28-9.
109 Thomas Fuller, The History of the University of Cambridge, since the Conquest, in
idem, The Church History of Britain (London, 1655), 232-3.
110 Gray and Brittain, History of Jesus College, 56; Bendall et al, History of Emmanuel
College, 44.
30
disturbing variety of wildlife) in his chamber.111 By the early seventeenth
century the musical establishments and practices of individual colleges
tended to reflect their history and character, ranging from the old-
established choral foundations of Kings and Trinity to the minimalism of
Emmanuels unadorned psalm singing.112
112 For more on the musical constitutions of the individual colleges, see
Payne, Provision and Practice, 173.
114 Thurston Dart, Henry Loosemores Organ Book, Transactions of the Cambridge
Bibliographical Society, 3 (1959-63), 150; Miller, Portrait of a College, 21-2; Gray and
Brittain, Jesus College, 76; Willis and Clark, Architectural History, II, 142, 294.
31
is set upon the altar, and as the smoke ascends the organs and voices in
the chapel are raised.116
118 Peter Smart, quoted in Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour, 2. Smart
complained about Cosins encouragement of Anthems...which none of the
people understand, not all the singers themselves: Correspondence of
John Cosin, I, 183.
32
in church, Laudians noted that Solomons temple itself had been
dedicated using Cytterns and Harpes and Cymballs.121 Indeed, the
Hebrews had always graced their worship with fitting music, with the
exception and here we should note the typological, not to say prophetic
connection to current events of when the Philistines to the disgrace of
Israel led it captive.122 Where their opponents valued the congregational
solidarity of plain psalm singing, Laudians linked the beauty of holiness
to the decency of proper worship, placing a premium on musical
excellence, even if it seems clear that in practice some college choirs fell
somewhat short of the ideal.123
123 Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour, 23. Laud is reported to have said at his
trial that [a]ll that I laboured for...was that the external worship of God in
this church might be kept up in uniformity and decency, and in some
beauty of holiness: Mullinger, Cambridge Characteristics, 81. For the
shortcomings of Cambridge college choirs, see for example Cooper,
Annals of Cambridge, Volume III, 282.
33
engagement within the strictest of bounds. Laudian musics allegedly
unchecked arousal of the affections whether spiritual or otherwise
threatened to let in both the corrupting influence of Rome and the no less
insidious persuasions of the feminine. Laudians, however, were capable of
turning this masculinising discourse against their opponents. For
Sydenham, the harmony of fitting music was an emblem of unity in the
church, a unity capable of encompassing a balance of its gendered
qualities, whereas the antagonism of puritans to music was mired in a
narrower and less civilised construction of masculinity, representing their
chiefe engin of warre and discord.125
34
instruments and voices as figures of the angels; the inner music of the
heart as a strain of the heavenly music of the Christian gospel message.127
For its critics, elaborate church music merely diverted the attention
of the congregation from its proper focus on verbal meaning, with first
half the choir, then the other, tossing the word of God like a tennis ball,
then all yelling together with conjoined noise. More positively, Sterry
recalled heavenly choral sounds, as if all ye angells, & Spheares in two
Quires had plaid, & sung in parts to each other.128 In this instance,
memory supplied the material for a dream sequence whose main object
was psychological healing through the music of divine love. On one level,
this simply reflected a standard discourse; it was of course widely
perceived that there was something intrinsically musical about the
essence of human beings that the soul itself by nature is or hath in it
harmony.129 The harmonious mathematical proportions on which both our
inner and outer worlds were constructed formed the basis of the musica
speculativa of the quadrivium. For the Platonists, however, this was not a
question of paying lip service to tradition but of appropriating a living
language of inner harmony to express the all-pervasiveness of the divine
message of reconciliation of both inner and outer conflict. For Cudworth,
the new law of Christs gospel, the law of love, was a kind of musical
127 Sterry, Commings Forth, 3; idem, Rise, Race, and Royalty, 285.
128 Nathaniel Homes, Gospel Musick; Or, The Singing of Davids Psalms
(London, 1644), 19; Peter Sterry, untitled treatise, MS 292 (Emmanuel
College Library, Cambridge), f. 136. (My thanks are due to the Librarian
and staff of Emmanuel College Library, Cambridge, for their kind
assistance in making available the Sterry mss; all quotations from this
source are included with the permission of the Master and Fellows of
Emmanuel College.) Tennis was played at early seventeenth-century
Cambridge; a court was built at St Johns in 1573, and John Hutchinson
was among those who learned to play at Peterhouse in the 1630s: Miller,
Portrait of a College, 27; Hutchinson, Life of Colonel John Hutchinson, 42.
Homes may have borrowed this conceit from Thomas Cartwrights
exchange with Richard Hooker on the subject of church music: Hollander,
The Untuning of the Sky, 247.
129 Richard Hooker, quoted in Mishtooni Bose, Humanism, English Music and the
Rhetoric of Criticism, Music and Letters 77 (1996), 15.
35
soul, making our hearts of their own accord delight to act
harmoniously.130
36
experience.134 It was out of step with Lauds authoritarian strain, and by
moving the emphasis away from the physical circumstances of performed
music, paradoxically allowed music to have a greater conceptual
autonomy, albeit one ultimately rooted in Cambridge performance culture.
Whereas for the Laudians music itself was always subordinated to the
more pressing demands of appropriate worship, for the Platonists it
became an inward experience of the divine that could arise from a wider
and less restrictive range of circumstances. Sterry in particular seemed to
favour an ideal music independent of the word and rooted instead in the
capacity of voice, lute or viol to ravish the spiritual senses by musical
means alone.
A line is being carefully drawn here. On the one hand, Sydenham endorses
a very ordered, rationally controlled form of temporary experience of
musical soul-loss brought about through the use of music appropriate to
the divine service; on the other, he obviates the dangerously irrational,
feminising outcome of submitting to musics uncontrolled sensuality the
gendered language of the opposition of gravity, sobriety and moderation
(male) against sensuality, wantonness and curiosity (female) is
134 I adapt this distinction from Kathleen Raine, Defending Ancient
Springs (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 118.
37
unmistakable. It was vitally important for Laudians, in the context, to
construct or reaffirm a position of cultivated, masculine, authentically
Protestant civility, equally distinct from boorish puritan anti-aestheticism,
the superficiality, irrationalism and effeminacy of Rome, and the excesses
inherent in music itself when left uncontrolled by doctrinal priorities.
Even so, there is much here with which the Platonists would have agreed,
although, ironically, they might have baulked at Sydenhams citation of
Plato in the same passage to the effect that music should not be
multiplex and effeminate; that is, it must be subjected to rational
masculine control. But then, the diversity of positions taken across the
range of the Platonic oeuvre, and expressed in dialogue by a variety of his
protagonists, is notoriously difficult to reconcile. For the Cambridge
thinkers the most compelling strand of Platonism was that of Plotinus and
other ancient Neoplatonists, or the Plato of the Phaedrus and the
Symposium, where music is the knowledge of that which relates to
love.136 Still, Sydenhams evocation of the achievement of ecstatic states
through music was very much in sympathy with their values. On the face
of it, too, the refined musical taste crystallised in Cudworths prose might
be expected to have coincided with Sydenhams tone of aesthetic
discrimination. But this is counter-balanced, I think, by the conception of
music as a divine force that eludes or transcends merely human priorities
and circumstances; to return to Browne, even vulgar and Taverne Musick
was capable of inducing a deepe fit of devotion, recalling that harmony,
which intellectually sounds in the eares of God.137 The Beautifull Order, &
Harmony of the universal spirit, explains Sterry, descendeth into, &
passeth through all perticular [sic] fformes, reaching even as far as those
38
fformes of sense, which in themselves seeme most offensive to sense.138
The ultimate measure is not the requirement of proper Protestant worship
with its rational, reasonable image of sober, moderate masculinity,
defining and constraining music but the unconstrained, androgynous
divinity of music itself. Similarly, the internalised conceptualisation of the
lute and the viol consort escapes social instrumentality, the imperative of
the cultured gentleman, in order to realise a more disembodied musical
aesthetic of divine love. As such, it transcends the gender boundaries
imposed by preconceived models of masculinity even one which is itself
set up in opposition to the old idea of warrior-masculinity (with its clichs
of warlike music) and the newer concept of masculinity as utility (with its
implicit degradation of music to the level of mere pleasing entertainment).
In other words, the Cambridge Platonist musical aesthetic rejects the
whole gamut of views of music variously aimed at keeping the female in
its place, in favour of a response to music that gives full recognition to a
broad spectrum of male and female qualities within the ambit of divine
love.
139 Percy A. Scholes, The Puritans and Music in England and New England: A
Contribution to the Cultural History of Two Nations (London: Oxford University Press,
1934).
39
whatever nomenclature we choose to apply to either side. It is these
battle lines that the Platonists can be seen to transcend. Sterry, their most
thoroughly musical representative, was Parliamentarian, Cromwellian and
eventually Nonconformist in his loyalties, and is described as puritan in a
significant proportion of the handful of scholarly works devoted to his life
and thought.140 While the epithet is not generally helpful in relation to the
complexity of his religious position, he was arguably in tune with a
broader puritan tendency to spiritualise, and thereby render
transcendently divine, the outward pomp of religious worship. The stance
is encapsulated by his Parliamentarian colleague William Sedgwicks
vision of the spiritual resolution of conflict in the later stages of the Civil
Wars: Religion shall be adorned with solemnity, state, pomp, glory, ease,
music, all heavenly and earthly together, such as may allure and please
the minds of men.141
141 William Sedgwick, The Leaves of the Tree of Life for the Healing of the
Nations (London, 1648), 117.
142 See, for example, Costello, The Scholastic Curriculum, 141; Gouk,
Performance Practice, 287.
40
some of it has been assembled for the purposes of this chapter. I have
also tried to show that, to help us move significantly beyond a priori
assumptions about the relative insignificance of music in Cambridge in
this period, it is necessary to read between the lines and to see how forms
of musical practice could interact with a more abstract but no less vital
strand of thought which valued musics capacity to heal division.
41