Baroque Band and their conductor Garry Clarke have made a fine recording of music that deserves to be better known. The centrepiece of the disk is the Six Overtures […] in Seven Parts (published in 1745) by Maurice Greene (1696-1755), an obscure part of the output of a composer whose ‘posthumous reputation’, as his biographer Harry Johnstone puts it, ‘almost entirely depends’ on his Forty Select Anthems (1743). That collection represented some of the compositional results of a career spent almost entirely in church music: brought up as a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral, Greene was the organist of several London parish churches before becoming organist of St Paul’s in 1718, organist and composer to the Chapel Royal in 1727, and Master of the King’s Music in 1735. He was made Professor of Music at Cambridge in 1730. The principal reason why such an illustrious figure in eighteenth-century English musical life is so seldom remembered, performed or studied today had been identified just 33 years after Greene’s death by music historian Charles Burney: ‘Greene had the misfortune to live in the age and neighbourhood of a musical giant [Handel]… with whom he was utterly unable to contend’. Handel’s undeniable domination of London musical life was a source of professional frustration to Greene during his lifetime (and seems likely to have been the cause of the two composers’ falling out, gleefully reported by John Hawkins, another contemporary music historian). After his death, Handel’s high critical reputation – which in England at least, has never really fallen since the eighteenth century, just as his music never fell out of the performing repertory – meant that Greene was remembered, if at all, as part of the ‘Handelian orbit’ (the phrase is Johnstone’s): musicians against whose humdrum work Handel’s genius could be measured. For many modern critics the reception history of Handel’s music seems to demonstrate how it transcends its age and speaks universal human truths; that of his contemporaries, on the other hand, is firmly tied to the eighteenth century. The influence of this view – from whose gravitational pull even Johnstone’s work can never quite break free – is apparent in Clarke’s liner notes: ‘The overtures are charming and delightful […] They conjure up the charm of the English countryside and the frivolity of the English 18th century’, and remain ‘very much within the conventions of [their] day’.
Such a view is unhelpful for our understanding of both Handel and Greene. Handel’s work is divorced from the political and social contexts in which it was, as scholars such as Ruth Smith and Suzanne Aspden have only recently begun to demonstrate, thoroughly and fascinatingly enmeshed. The work of Greene and his contemporaries is, paradoxically, associated with an idea of the eighteenth century – inherited, often uncritically, from nineteenth-century thinking – that has little to do with the real contexts in which music like Greene’s was written and first performed. The affinities of Clarke’s comments with Daniel Brewer’s discussion of Voltaire’s nineteenth-century reception are obvious. Voltaire’s writings, Brewer observes, were held to be representative of the eighteenth century’s ‘pleasure-seeking superficiality’; that century, the Romantics scoffed, liked its art ‘frivolous, mannered, and artificial’. According to this view, music like Greene’s overtures is something we listen to when what we require is some pleasantly bland sonic wallpaper: something ‘charming and delightful’ – suggesting, vaguely, images of the innocent, pre-industrial playground of eighteenth-century England – but not something that requires, or rewards, paying too much attention. The real circumstances of the overtures’ composition and first performances (urban, not pastoral; sophisticated, not innocent) are far more compelling than Clarke’s comments might suggest.
It is very likely that Greene wrote the pieces published as the Six Overtures for the Apollo Academy he co-founded with the violinist Michael Christian Festing at some point between 1731 and 1733. Both Greene and Festing had previously been members of the Academy of Ancient Music, a club for amateur and professional musicians which met – initially at least – every other Friday evening in winter, in the back room of the Crown and Anchor tavern on the Strand, to perform and listen to old and new works. Greene and Festing’s Academy, named after the ‘Apollo’ room of the Devil tavern in Fleet Street where they met, was formed after controversy over a plagiarised madrigal caused Greene and his friend, the composer Giovanni Bononcini, to leave the older club. Though John Hawkins, who was a member of the older Academy, was at pains, in his Account of the Institution and Progress of the Academy of Ancient Music (1770), to stress that the club’s members were ‘persons of the first rank in [the] kingdom’ – he elsewhere snootily distinguishes between the Academy, with its subscription of two guineas and a half, from the ‘alehouse clubs, and places of vulgar resort in the villages adjacent to London’, where ‘small proficients in harmony […] were used to recreate themselves’, and admission was ‘six-pence at most’ – we know the reality to have been different. The membership of Hawkins’s Academy (and most likely Greene and Festing’s too) consisted of a few aristocrats, but mostly upper-middle-class professionals including professional musicians, clergymen, doctors, and lawyers. Such associations served the needs of what Simon McVeigh has described as a newly formed ‘leisured class of aristocratic and bourgeois enthusiasts, who yet lacked the means or inclination to maintain their own musical establishments’. Social historian of music William Weber has identified these academies as particularly valuable for their middle class members, who ‘looked to noblemen as patrons and aspired to participate in some manner in their social world’. It is disappointing that Clarke and Baroque Band’s recording, which uses period instruments and performing techniques, and aspires to ‘examine […] the circumstances around the creation of [this] music’, captures so little of the fascinating atmosphere of these societies’ meetings.
Musicologist Richard Taruskin has argued, forcefully and controversially, that ‘historically-informed’ performances, such as Clarke and Baroque Band’s, have much more to do with our present aesthetic preoccupations than with being truly historical. Evidence is ignored when it does not conform with the performers’ ideas of what the period, and its musical performances, were like. ‘They are not ransacking history in pursuit of the truth’, Taruskin writes provocatively: ‘What they are looking for is permission.’ The performances on this CD certainly strike me as more informed by the view of Greene’s music Clarke’s liner notes set out than by what the ‘circumstances around the creation’ and first performance of the works are likely to have been. To start with, Baroque Band’s performances were recorded in a modern concert hall (overtures 1-5), and a church (overture 6 and the overtures to Greene’s masque Phoebe and his St Cecilia’s Day Ode Descend Ye Nine which conclude the disc). The spacious, resonant acoustic that results from this choice suggests subtly, but importantly, performance venues quite unlike those in which the works were likely to have first been heard. Perhaps it even suggests the open space of the ‘English countryside’ Clarke mentions; what it certainly does not suggest is the ‘long room’ of a tavern, probably full of not-at-all-resonant wood and people. The record of the expenses of what was likely the first meeting of the Academy of Ancient Music – at which Greene was present – reveals that by far the most of the academicians’ money (10s 6d) was spent on ‘Wine and Bread’. As Timothy Eggington has pointed out, ‘the role of drinking in the convivial club environment’ of these societies’ meetings was very important. While I am not suggesting that ambient noise – chinking drinking vessels, companionable chatter and so on – would be desirable on a recorded performance of music, perhaps some of the atmosphere which might have resulted could have been captured. Baroque Band’s playing, while commendable in many respects (infallible in intonation, crisp in articulation, sensitive in phrasing), does convey something of the ‘prim correctness’ Taruskin identifies as typical of such performances.
It strikes me that in an environment such as a meeting of the Apollo Academy – one where people were joined both in rarefied musical taste and in drink – the performers of pieces like these overtures would have indulged in plenty of improvised ornamentation. John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw confirm, in an article surveying contemporary writings on the subject, that orchestral performers in eighteenth-century England frequently added improvised ornaments. While ripieno players’ adding them was pretty much universally condemned (though this does indicate that the practice must have been common), it was not just accepted but expected that soloists and the leader of the orchestra (a violinist) should add ‘such Graces […] as may heighten the expression without varying the time’ (as the composer Charles Avison wrote in 1753). The plentiful solo passages the overtures offer Baroque Band’s wind players – whose playing is uniformly eloquent – could have provided opportunities for improvising ornaments, as could the frequent Adagio half-closes at the end of the overtures’ first movements (perhaps for the leader to improvise some tasteful flourishes between the chords). In both cases, those opportunities are not taken, and the performances are both less exciting than they might have been, and less evocative of what must have been a very special atmosphere at their first performances.
I nonetheless recommend the disc, both for its fine (if slightly unadventurous) playing, and for an opportunity to hear the works themselves, which are stylish and erudite (particularly in the energetic counterpoint which, though a convention of the ‘French overture’ genre of most of these works, is more sustained and inventive than many theatrical examples of the genre): perfectly suited, in fact, for a performance at the Apollo Academy.
Baroque Band’s recording of Maurice Greene’s Overtures is available from Cedille records.
Cited Scholarship
Aspden, Suzanne, ‘Ariadne’s Clew: Politics, Allegory, and Opera in London (1734)’, The Musical Quarterly 85 (2001), 735-70.
Brewer, Daniel, ‘The Voltaire Effect’, in Nicholas Cronk (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 205-218.
Eggington, Tim, The Advancement of Music in Enlightenment England: Benjamin Cooke and the Academy of Ancient Music (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014).
Johnstone, H. Diack, ‘The Life and Work of Maurice Greene (1695-1755)’ (D. Phil thesis, University of Oxford, 1967).
McVeigh, Simon, ‘London (i) §V: Musical life: 1660-1800: 2. Concert Life’, in Grove Music Online.
Spitzer, John, and Neal Zaslaw, ‘Improvised Ornamentation in Eighteenth-Century Orchestras’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 39 (1986), 524-577.
Smith, Ruth, Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Taruskin, Richard, ‘The Modern Sound of Early Music’, in Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 164-172.