During the early eighteenth century, and up to the 1760s, the mainstay of every English instrumental concert was the concerto. If one had dropped in on a private ‘musical evening’ at a Gentlemen's subscription concert, one would have been certain of hearing a number of concertos. But after this date, and especially towards the closing years of the century, they figured less often in concert programmes than they had done formerly. The changes brought about by the general acceptance in this country of the galant style were many, and perhaps the most enervating of them was the decline of the amateur music society in favour of the larger professional concert. When in the 1760s British composers joined the avant garde and imitated the lively style of John Christian Bach, they were effectively putting a stop to the amateur music-making which had flourished so vigorously during the previous half-century. Their new compositions were technically too demanding for most amateurs and, because they omitted to write easy ripieno parts for the less proficient of them, the result was not slow to follow. But although many players were distressed at not being able to tackle the new music, it appealed to a far wider audience than music in the ‘Ancient’ style had done—or had been able to, on account of its limited availability or accessibility to the general public. Music was ceasing to be the preserve of select groups in society. It continued to be heard in church and theatre, and now the public concert and the pleasure garden admitted persons of any social standing for the price of a ticket. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century music had become at least a topic of interest, if not importance, for the man in the street.

As very few authentic mediaeval instruments remain, our knowledge of them comes mainly from pictures, references in literature and expense accounts, and from surviving folk instruments. The degree of caution required can be assessed by comparing the terminology of mediaeval word-lists. The Latin word ‘fidis’, for example, denotes a harp-string in the Catholicon Anglicum and a fiddler in an anonymous nominale, while ‘fidecen’ [fidicen] is a harper in the former manuscript and a fiddler in the Promptorium Parvulorum. The word ‘viella’, normally taken to mean a fiddle, appears also in the Promptorium as a lute. John Palsgrave's Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse (1530) adds confusion to the point of ridicule.

‘My Lady Nevell's Book’ is one of nearly thirty manuscripts, mostly dating from the early seventeenth century, which contain keyboard music by Byrd. Unfortunately none of them is in the composer's own hand, and naturally they vary greatly in reliability. There is also the one printed source, Parthenia, dating from 1612–3. This, as one might imagine, is more accurate than any manuscript source, but it contains only eight of Byrd's pieces. My Lady Nevell's Book, on the other hand, contains 42 pieces, all of them by Byrd—that is to say, about a third of his surviving keyboard music. The copyist was John Baldwin of Windsor, who completed his task on 11 September 1591. Among the sources of Byrd's keyboard music, the Nevell book is outstanding in a number of ways. First of all, it is the earliest dated source; indeed, among the undated manuscripts only one is certainly earlier than 1591, and that ascribes but a single piece to Byrd. It is also the only virginal manuscript of any size to be devoted to the music of one composer; furthermore it appears to include all the important keyboard works that Byrd had composed up to that time. Alone among surviving virginal manuscripts, it was intended to be presented to an aristocratic patron, and three of the pieces in the book were composed expressly ‘for my ladye nevell’ herself. The book is exceptional also for its calligraphy. Baldwin was a most careful and conscientious scribe, and, as E. H. Fellowes remarked, no praise can be too high for the beauty of his penmanship.

The question of how the term ‘Expressionist’ relates to certain music can best be answered by reference to the principle features of Expressionism in painting. The word was coined by a German art critic in 1911 to serve as an appropriate antonym to Impressionism. The new art to which it was applied was based not on purely visual impressions of the outer world but on the expression of the artist's inner experience. The Expressionist does not paint an object but his own subjective reaction to it. He recreates it in the light of his emotions, often distorting form to penetrate essence and reveal the truth that lies behind the outward appearance. The results are highly emotive, dramatic, visionary and often violently ugly. They express the fears, real and subconscious, of men who saw materialism eating into society and enslaving the individual. The technical implications of this art meant that traditional principles of ‘beauty’, ‘symmetry’ and so forth gave way to exaggeration, distortion, grotesqueness, startling colour clashes and vehement emotional release; and precisely the same process, and results, can be seen in the work of Schönberg as he turned from the musical orthodoxes of form and key to the instinctive, tortured sounds of atonality. His work in this direction was more or less contemporary with that of the original Expressionist art group, ‘Die Brücke’ (‘The Bridge’), which existed as a community from 1905–13. Its members were Kirchner, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff, and later Nolde, Pechstein and Müller. Schönberg's own paintings bear a strong likeness to the productions of this group. There are the same brutalized portraits and nightmare visions, the same distortion of natural forms parallelled by the angular, disintegrating lines of his atonal music.

As every musician knows, John Field invented the Nocturne, and by doing so earned for himself his small but secure niche in music's Pantheon. The word Nocturne was not entirely new to music. Haydn, Mozart, and many lesser composers had used its Italian or German equivalents for vocal and instrumental works intended for performance at night. But the notturni and Nachtmusiken of the eighteenth century have little in common with the wordless love-songs which Field called Nocturnes. His invention was something more important than an evocative title; it was the crystallization of an idiom, and through this idiom a new aspect of the romantic movement could be channelled into the mainstream of music.

For most of us, singer and musicologist alike, English song from the death of Purcell to the Victorian ‘renaissance’ nearly two centuries later is represented by a few of the Shakespearean settings of Arne, and a small handful of such perennial favourites as Leveridge's ‘Black-ey'd Susan’, Boyce's ‘Heart of Oak’, Dibdin's ‘Tom Bowling’, and Horn's once-ubiquitous ‘Cherry ripe’. As for our knowledge of the cultural environment in which such pieces naturally have their place, that is generally more limited still. Though theatrical in origin, we may take as typical of the sort of vocal melody which was popular with early Georgian audiences, Arne's charming ‘O come, o come, my dearest’ from The Fall of Phaeton (1736). If we agree, with Ernest Walker, that such a song is, in its way, ‘a sparkling polished little gem’, then it may be fairly maintained that English song during the first half of the eighteenth century is a veritable treasure trove of delightful music—none of it very ‘great’, certainly, but much of it worthy of a better fate than the oblivion to which it has been carelessly consigned.

It is inevitable that any branch of historiography should in its early stages submit itself to the discipline of severe objectivity. Nineteenth-century political historians saw it as their duty to present ascertainable fact; and it is only in this century that their successors have begun to take the facts for granted, and have gone on to make inferences, to express opinion on unanswered questions, and, to some extent, to use their imagination. Musicology, being a much younger branch of the art, is still at a relatively objective stage. There are such formidable gaps in our knowledge of music before 1600 that scholars have shown a natural caution about filling those gaps with anything in the nature of speculation or guesswork. The standard work on English music before the Reformation is, of course, Frank Harrison's Music in Medieval Britain, a brilliant presentation of archival material and of liturgical and musical analysis. It is precisely that objectivity and caution that make the book so valuable. However, I am prepared to argue that, once a book of that kind has been written, it is perhaps justifiable to go beyond it and make inferences which, though they could well be proved wrong, may stimulate argument and so help to arrive at right answers. Much of this paper, therefore, is frankly discursive and conjectural, deficient in corroborative detail, and clearly open to the Scottish verdict of ‘not proven’.

It has been said that by naming him Hector, Berlioz's father determined his fate, marked him out for glory and tragedy, heroic deeds and the bitterness of failure and mutilation. A fanciful idea, no doubt; but the more one considers Berlioz's life, the more it seems almost mystically inevitable that his crowning work should be an epic on the Trojan war and its aftermath, the wanderings of Aeneas and the myth of the founding of Rome, and the more one comes to see his discovery of Virgil during adolescence and his precocious response to the passion and tenderness of the Aeneid as the most important single event of his imaginative existence. As Gounod justly remarks, Berlioz, like his great namesake Hector, died beneath the walls of Troy; for the final blow in a lifetime of vain struggles against a hostile musical environment was its rejection of the very work which he knew to be his culminating achievement and artistic justification. When we read the letters written during the two years of its composition we cannot help sensing something special about them. In their mood of exhilaration and their sense of destiny fulfilled they recall the passage at the end of The Gathering Storm where Churchill describes his feelings on taking power in May 1940: ‘I felt … that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial’.