In 1732 the directors of the Academy of Ancient Music grandly announced in a published letter ‘great Things in Design’ for the ‘Advancement of the Harmonick Science’. No idle boast, this reflected an intention to raise the status of music via a concerted historical and theoretical reassessment of it. Throughout much of the eighteenth century the ambition evident in this statement would resonate in the activities of the Academy and those associated with it.

As one of the earliest organisations to perform a repertory of old music as part of a semi-public concert series, the establishment of the Academy has long been deemed a milestone in music history. On account of this repertory the Academy has justifiably been credited with having helped set the conditions for the emergence of the classical music tradition which would dominate western music from the late eighteenth century onwards. Yet, to consider the Academy only on account of its programming of old music is to misread and underestimate the aims and activities of those who first assembled in 1726 to sing and study ‘Grave ancient vocell Musick’. From the outset, these academicians engaged in a range of interrelated activities which over time would develop into something approaching a discrete philosophy of music. Collecting, theorising, historiography and a perception of the past as a means of artistic advancement all underlie an ambitious design to reposition music as an art form. The extent to which these activities assisted the ‘advancement’ of music will be evident in our discussion of the academicians’ achievements as theorists, editors, compilers, and composers. In all these areas academicians trod new ground. Whilst their historicist predilections were, of course, reflected in wider Enlightenment life, it was their application of them to music that was unusual and prescient at this time. In this chapter we will examine the beginnings of the Academy of Ancient Music, and how its founder-members set the conditions for the achievements of Cooke and his associates later in the century.

The early academicians may well have been inspired in their activities by that celebrated eighteenth-century figure Thomas Britton (the ‘musical small coal man’), who from 1678 until his death in 1714 hosted concerts in a loft above his Clerkenwell shop.