From Pepusch’s death in 1752 until its transformation into a professional concert society in 1784 the Academy led a shadowy existence, there being few references to it in newspaper reports or indeed anywhere else. Yet in many ways it was during this period that the founder academicians’ promise of ‘Great Things in Design’ for the advancement of ‘Harmonick Science’ achieved its most significant results. We will see evidence of this in a variety of developments which together point to a reappraisal of music both as an art form and as a theoretically grounded discipline. In Benjamin Cooke’s innovative Academy compositions of this period we will see how an awareness of earlier styles invoked ancient gravitas in accordance with later expectations concerning expression and clarity. Likewise, we will observe how the theorising of Cooke and his associates appropriated longstanding theoretical traditions as a means to resolve musical issues of their day, in so doing engaging with philosophical debates that exercised Enlightened minds across Continental Europe. Such ambitions also informed a further sphere of activity associated with the Academy: music historiography. Pursued via various projects, the most visible was John Hawkins’s monumental General History of the Science and Practice of Music (1776). Although somewhat reactionary in tone, Hawkins’s avowedly Baconian, sources-based approach that sought empirical evaluation of all phenomena looked to future musicological developments. The involvement of Cooke and other associates in Hawkins’s History bears testimony to the Academy’s status as a focus for theorists, composers and collectors of music. It is with this in mind that we will explore the little-known history of the Academy during the third quarter of the eighteenth century, when Cooke was its conductor and musical director.

Before we can turn to this narrative we must first consider the musical environment against which the Academy ultimately defined itself. It has previously been observed that the academicians’ agenda increasingly amounted to a musical counterculture, at odds with London’s fast-developing, cosmopolitan concert life, dominated by new instrumental genres. The picture is, however, by no means clear cut: we need look no further than Cooke’s extended works composed for the Academy to discover his own interest in certain modern stylistic elements. We must also remember that there were substantial areas of mainstream musical life with which academicians could have had little dispute during the years from 1752 until 1784.