There has recently come to light a rich heritage of music that was composed and cherished in Scotland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—from the first dawn of the Renaissance under James IV down two hundred years to the Union of the Parliaments under the last Stuart monarch Queen Anne. And here may I, speaking as a Scot, remind you briefly of the state of affairs that obtained north of the border during these two centuries. While the Englishman's view is a historical continuity from the reign of Henry VIII through the age of Elizabeth to James I, the Scot's picture is somewhat different: the Renaissance did not touch Scotland until the reign of James IV, who died in 1513. James was connected with the royal house of England, for he married Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, in 1504. Indeed it was this link that finally brought about the Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland almost exactly one hundred years later. James V twice brought a French queen to Scotland (in 1537 and in 1538) and his daughter Mary, Queen of Scots, spent thirteen years at the French court—the last of them as Queen of France—before returning to Scotland in 1561. The Reformation arrived late in Scotland (in 1560) and its effects on music there were more profound and far-reaching than elsewhere. Whereas in England composers remained very much as free as they were before, in Scotland the Reformers called the very existence of music into question. Mary's son James VI left Scotland with his court in 1603 to become James I of England. Disunity ensued in his homeland with religious strife and civil war and throughout the seventeenth century civilisation languished. Finally, in 1707, in an effort by our two countries to achieve further unity and prosperity in this island, Scotland lost her nationhood and her parliament. This is a sketch of the background against which the early music of Scotland was composed.

The growth of the public concert was, perhaps, one of the most important factors which influenced the course of music in England towards the close of the seventeenth century. A number of music clubs were in existence before the Restoration as we know from Pepys and Anthony à Wood, but these, one gathers, were principally for the mutual delight of their mainly amateur participants. Cromwell, too, invited the members of the House of Commons to hear ‘rare music’ at Whitehall in 1657, but this was a State rather than a public occasion. The public concert, as we understand the term, did not come into existence until after the Restoration, when social conditions were established which were conducive to its success. The centralization of social life in London which followed the resumption of Court activities there created a large new audience, eager for all forms of entertainment. The influence of the King's personal preferences has perhaps been overstressed, but it cannot be denied that his hedonistic inclinations set a pattern of behaviour which was only too readily followed by London society. The theatres, closed during the greater part of the Commonwealth period, flourished once again, and in 1672 John Banister established a series of public concerts at Whitefriars which became the model for many similar ventures, at York Buildings and elsewhere.

Today London is pre-eminently the centre of the English musical world, but how different was the position at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the present century.

When, in 1935, Sir Richard Terry was editing the Scottish Psalter-tunes and was looking for information concerning the Revd. Neil Livingston, whose monumental recension of the Psalter he so greatly admired, he found the nearest surviving relative of this divine and scholar, Anne Gilchrist, living outside Lancaster in a spacious Victorian house high above the estuary of the Lune. Its windows looked westwards to the lakeland mountains, the sea, and the countryside where as a girl she had walked, sailed and fished, and exchanged plants with the future Regius Professor of Botany, and where she made the archæological discoveries cited at her election to the Society of Antiquaries. At that time she was just over 70, still in the prime of her intellectual life, and with another twenty years before her.

In November 1862 the Provisional Theatre was opened in Prague for the performance of Czech plays and operas, an event which provided a strong stimulus to native composers. Besides the revival of František Škroup's The Tinker, the oldest of Czech operas, new operas by Skuherský, Šebor, J. N. Škroup, Blodek, Karel Bendl, Vojáček, Rozkošný, and by the conductor of the theatre, Smetana, were performed during the first seven years. As principal violist in the orchestra, Dvořák took part in all these performances, and it was only natural that he also wished to try his hand at opera composition. The surprise is that he did not do so until 1870. When he made a start there was still no Czech operatic tradition, but Smetana, whose Brandenburgers in Bohemia, The Bartered Bride and Dalibor had been performed, was well on the way towards creating one.

In a paper read some years ago before this Association, Thurston Dart included Okeover's name amongst those whom he described as almost unknown. It is my purpose to attempt to throw some light on this musician's activities and career.

Music in mediaeval drama is, to some extent, a ghost subject. I hope in the course of this paper to enable you to hear nearly all the surviving music from the vernacular drama of late mediaeval England—from the cycles of religious plays known variously as the Miracle Plays, the Mystery Cycles, the Corpus Christi plays. My chief endeavour will be to build up a picture of a lost musical world. But—and this is why it must be described as a ‘ghost subject’—the actual musical remains are tantalizingly small: two English songs in the ‘true-Coventry’ plays; some Latin polyphony in the York cycle; a snatch of plainsong in the Chester cycle. The paucity also of stage-directions about music in some plays (especially of the Towneley cycle) is much to be regretted. But as there are over thirty clear directions in the Chester cycle and the same number in the Hegge plays, we do not work entirely in the dark.