Casts new and valuable light on English musical history and on
Enlightenment culture more generally.
This is a book guaranteed to make waves. It skilfully weaves the story
of one key musical figure into the story of one key institution, which
it then weaves into the general story of music in eighteenth-century
England. Anyone reading it will come away with fresh knowledge and
perceptions - plus a great urge to hear Cooke's music.' Michael Talbot,
Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool and Fellow of
the British Academy.
Amidst the cosmopolitan, fashion obsessed concert life of later
eighteenth century London there existed a discrete musical
counterculture centred round a club known as the Academy of Ancient
Music. Now largely forgotten, this enlightened school of musical
thinkers sought to further music by proffering an alternative vision
based on a high minded intellectual curiosity. Perceiving only
ear-tickling ostentation in the showy styles that delighted London
audiences, they aspired to raise the status of music as an art of
profound expression, informed by its past and founded on universal
harmonic principles.
Central to this group of musical thinkers was the modest yet highly
accomplished musician-scholar Benjamin Cooke, who both embodied and
reflected this counterculture. As organist of Westminster Abbey and
conductor of the Academy of Ancient Music for much of the second half of
the eighteenth century, Cooke enjoyed prominence in his day as a
composer, organist, teacher, and theorist. This book shows how, through
his creativity, historicism and theorising, Cooke was instrumental in
proffering an Enlightenment-inspired reassessment of musical composition
and thinking at the Academy. The picture portrayed counters the current
tendency to dismiss eighteenth-century English musicians as conservative
and provincial. Casting new and valuable light on English musical
history and on Enlightenment culture more generally, this book reveals
how the agenda for musical advancement shared by Cooke and his Academy
associates foreshadowed key developments that would mould European music
of the nineteenth century and after. It includes an extensive
bibliography, a detailed overview of the Cooke Collection at the Royal
College of Music and a complete list of Cooke's works.
TIM EGGINGTON is College Librarian at Queens'College, Cambridge.
