Never, perhaps, did a new country begin in circumstances so unpromising for its musical development as did Australia. To the normal difficulties attendant upon cultural activities in a young country must be added the state of creative music, and especially the attitude of society towards it, in the Motherland during the later eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth. Musical composition was drifting rapidly to a condition of unredeemed bathos; not until the end of the nineteenth century was music being written in England which could provide a point of departure, a basis of any kind for the building-up of a worthy indigenous tradition of composition.

In spite of the wealth of literature dealing with the history of the medieval organ, surprisingly little of this is concerned with the use of the instrument in a liturgical context. The subject is mentioned, of course, but usually only in passing, as a matter of subsidiary importance compared with the details of construction, names of organ-builders, and so on, which constitute the main part of such publications. Even so noteworthy an article as that by Apel on ‘The Early History of the Organ’ conveys its extremely valuable information on the liturgical aspects in the context of an overall survey which begins by considering the instruments of classical antiquity. It is part of my purpose to try to reverse the process and to think of the mechanical details as subservient to the main topic: how the organ was actually used in the services of the Church.

This paper is particularly about only one part of the music of Antony Holborne: his lute music. I should like this evening to discuss this music, to state what exists, to describe it and some of the problems that arise in connexion with it, to play you some of it, and also to put it into its context both as one aspect of Holborne's varied output and as one part of the considerable repertory of English lute music of the Renaissance.

Let us picture an average parish church of a north Italian city at the beginning of the seventeenth century—a church not of cathedral status, and one run on a fairly limited budget. What kind of music might one have heard there of a Sunday? Here there would be none of the pomp of Counter-Reformation Rome and its suave, sonorous polyphony; none of the stereophonic splendours of Venetian polychoral music. The total assembly of musicians could probably be counted on the fingers of the hand, and performance of sixteenth-century polyphony even in the least feasible number of parts (usually four) would have been poor. It was impractical for this type of choir.

To judge from the number of programmes devoted to the music of Schubert as well as numerous occasional performances of his works in other programmes on the BBC Third Network in recent months, Schubert must be one of the most popular composers at the moment. This apparent popularity is of course also evident from the extent to which his music is heard in public concerts—the ‘Great’ C Major Symphony in orchestral concerts, the quartets, the songs, the late piano sonatas and so on in recitals. Like Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, Schubert never seems to go out of fashion, but the vogue for his music certainly could not be much greater than at present. And yet, despite this popularity, and the accompanying unearthing of many of his lesser known works, one large section of his music, the music he wrote for the theatre, remains almost entirely unknown. The scores of this music for the stage are to be found in seven large volumes of the Breitkopf und Härtel Gesamtausgabe and in piles of unpublished sheets in various collections, most of them in the music libraries of Vienna.

The root cause of Francesco Cavalli's importance in the history of opera lies, I believe, in the fact that he was the first composer to write almost exclusively for the professional public theatre. That he did so with outstanding success for twenty-seven years, enhancing the reputation and consolidating the supremacy of Venetian opera throughout Europe, is a testimony to the sheer quality of his music and theatrical ability which, of course, must count for more than anything else in a final assessment.

The Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum owns an appreciable number of Beethoven letters and also of musical manuscripts from his hand. These comprise holographs of finished compositions, sketchbooks and sketch sheets, corrected printer's copy, and the like. At one period, from around 1870 to 1895, the Museum would appear to have been in the market for Beethoven material, in a small but discriminating way; and its holdings have been augmented by occasional gifts and bequests, from the time of Vincent Novello (1843) to E. H. W. Meyerstein (1952).

In sixteenth-century choral music there are two problems of performance that prove most vexing to sensitive choirmasters and to those musicologists who are hot tone deaf: they are the twin problems of pitch and vocal scoring. There are, of course, those ostriches who cannot see such difficulties, having a touching belief in the absolute quality of the written pitch. Such a fundamentalist faith is not exceeded by the claims of the Jehovah's Witnesses or by the dear old lady who protested against a new translation of the New Testament with the words: ‘The Authorized Version was good enough for St. Paul, and it's good enough for me’. Assuming the present gathering to be rather more scientific, I shall illustrate these problems by concentrating on English music of the period, not because of parochialism, but because of the limitation of time and my belief that our prophets deserve honour even in their own country.