Most musicians are aware that Naples was an extremely important musical centre in the eighteenth century. The reasons for Naples’ importance were twofold: it was, firstly, a major centre for the performance of music, especially of vocal music and opera; it was also an educational training ground for a large group of composers who, together with their pupils and others influenced by them, constituted what has been called the eighteenth-century “Neapolitan school” of composers. We are not concerned here with definitions of the term “school” and whether the Neapolitan one was, as some would say, a group united by the style and type of music it wrote, or was as others have claimed, a group whose members were all connected with Naples being taught by Neapolitans. It is a fact that large numbers of composers attached to the “school”, whichever definition one chooses, were trained at one or other of the four music conservatories in Naples. And this study, a case study of just one of these conservatories, may, amongst other things, contribute to a larger examination of the part played by Naples in nurturing or supporting this “school”.

Recently I found myself again singing Weelkes' “Thule, the period of cosmography” from the Madrigals of Six Parts published in 1600 and, not for the first time, wondered where Fogo is:-

The first part of the madrigal refers to Hekla and Etna, both well-known volcanoes of the present day, but the location of Fogo is much less certain. E.H. Fellowes stated that it was a volcano in Tierra del Fuego but gave no evidence to support such an identification. It seems that everyone nowadays merely repeats Fellowes’ opinion, and it is quoted unchanged in the latest edition of English Madrigal Verse.

In 1968 Warren Royal Dawson bequeathed to the British Museum a collection of manuscripts mainly relating to Egyptology and the occult sciences but including some miscellaneous volumes. The unpromising title on the spine of one of these, ‘Aston and sundry MSS. ‘, now numbered Add. MS. 56279, concealed the remains of a volume of some interest for the history of Jacobean music and drama. In a note on a front flyleaf (f. 1) Dawson recorded that he bought the volume (number 22 in his numeration), together with his MS. 19, at a Sotheby sale in 1931. The volume was in poor condition and he had it pulled and rebound with blank interleaves; the foliation entered by Dawson on the latter will serve in this article to identify the several items contained in the volume until it can receive the further attention from the British Museum Bindery which it now requires.