FOR some time there has been an increasing demand for good music, greatly augmented during the war when it emerged in no uncertain fashion. To meet this need in East Anglia, with its scattered population, and in some of the East Midland towns, a Regional Council, fostered and promoted by the Arts Council, is in process of formation, having as its object the establishment of a permanent Symphony Orchestra. Such an orchestra would have Cambridge as its centre; it would serve the towns in the region from September to May, while during the summer it would be concentrated mainly on the coast.

With this growing interest in music for the community and the special attention given to Elizabethan music, it may be worth while to look back to the period, lasting for at least three hundred years> when ‘Town Music’ supported by the municipality had a prominent place in Cambridge civic life. It was a very different type of music, for symphony and string quartet were then unknown, but it developed into something exquisite of its kind, and in the later Elizabethan period Cambridge could claim an important share as the home and training ground of Orlando Gibbons, the brilliant son of one of the Cambridge Waits or musicians, who formed the Town Music.

The Waits, again, form a link with the still earlier minstrels, whose name they often share, and minstrelsy itself has had a long history.