The madrigalists and virginalists of Elizabethan and Jacobean England have been known and admired ever since the great work of Fuller-Maitland, Barclay Squire, Dolmetsch, van den Borren and Fellowes (to mention only the most important); yet until now the equally accomplished and even more extensive school of lutenist composers has never been systematically studied. The nearest approach to such a study was made by Richard Newton in an unpublished B.Litt. thesis and in a paper derived from the thesis which he read to the Musical Association in 1939, entitled ‘English Lute Music of the Golden Age’. Although his study represents much thorough research, only the bare outlines of his findings have appeared in print.

London in 1500 was not the vast metropolis that we know to-day; it was a small walled city only about one square mile in area. Within that square mile was concentrated much of the wealth of the whole kingdom. The city's prosperity reached a peak in Tudor times when foreign wars closed up avenues of foreign trade upon which Norwich and Bristol relied; as a result of this, London alone, which had built up strong commercial ties with the Netherlands, was able to maintain any substantial continental trade; and here it naturally expanded rapidly. It is important to emphasise this accumulation of wealth in the City, for at a time when the uses of money were much more restricted than they are to-day, the effect was an ever-increasing splendour of religious observances and secular entertainment.

This Quotation Concerning Lully, from North's Memoirs of Musick, is the key to a whole century of musical history, for it was not only London town which was ‘strained to imitate Baptist's vein’ but almost the whole of Europe as well, and in this paper I hope to trace the influence of Lully's ‘vein’ in the development of the modern orchestra. Our story begins just before his time, when the Italians were composing the first operas, when the English were experimenting with the masque and the French had already made a very good beginning with their Ballet de Cour.

The Music and instruments of any century generally have their roots in the past, so it should surprise no one that, to assess the relative positions of recorder and flute during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I begin by stepping well back into the sixteenth. One of the first historical figures which comes to mind in this century is Henry VIII, whose diverse activities included a practical interest in the art of music. His reputation as a collector (in more ways than one) is greatly enhanced by the formidable list of ‘Instruments of Soundrie Kindes’ which was compiled after his death. Recorder enthusiasts will at once recall his seventy-five recorders, while possibly overlooking seventy-two transverse flutes and six fifes (an almost balanced score), not to mention the many other wind, stringed, keyboard and plucked instruments in this lavish collection.

It is nearly ten years since I had the pleasure of addressing this Association, and during that period the present and future uses of electrical methods of music production have resolved themselves into reasonably well-defined fields. Firstly we have the commercial instruments, nearly all of the organ type, which have separated themselves into different ways of doing the same thing. Little progress has been made in the design of these instruments, for no new methods have been discovered, and thus we find instruments for serious music and entertainment making use of superior methods of manufacture and the increasing improvement in electronic components. The result is, to the user, a better made instrument and one which will stand in tune for long periods—certainly far longer than any pipe organ. Advances in methods of tropicalising parts have also improved the sales abroad.

The last time we had any discussion of aesthetics in our Association was in 1945, when I read a paper written by Dr. Glen Haydon, which related art to theory of knowledge. This intellectual line is favoured by American philosophers. Susanne Langer, a pupil of Whitehead, has in her Philosophy in a New Key (1942) used not so much art in general as music in particular as the key to her theory of knowledge, which is a semantic theory like Glen Haydon's. This trend is worth noting and contrasting with theories of musical aesthetics in which emotion is the kernel. Among musicians it is almost axiomatic that the stock-in-trade in which they deal is feeling in the medium of sound. They apply their technique to sound production in order to do a deal with their audiences in feeling. One of the fundamental problems of the aesthetics of music is therefore to examine this presupposition.

Some time ago at a Council Meeting I was asked to do another Paper for this Association. Under this barrage, I did not like to refuse, but knew that I should have very little time for new research. However, there was one thing I have been doing steadily for thirty years or more which I think is possibly unique; and that is to collect English harpsichord music, and to study and play it on the harpsichord. Although my collection is not, and probably never can be complete, it seemed to me that much of the music was so rare, and never heard even on the Third Programme, that a lecture-recital on the subject might stimulate interest. And I thought that I would try and add to that interest by bringing for you to hear two quite different harpsichords.