6 - Conclusions

Summary

We shall make a great step forward if we stop looking at the authors of old treatises as if they were prophets who reveal infallible verities, and if we start seeing and treating them as what they are at best: very human witnesses who left us an affidavit about certain things they knew, certain things they believed in, certain things they wished their readers to believe.

—Frederick Neumann, 1967

It is clear that John Gunn is a highly unusual figure. The breadth of his interests alone is distinctive. No other writer on music in this historical period attempted as much, apart from those who concentrated their energies on the writing of general music histories, like Burney or Hawkins. His books on the cello and the flute contain significant material, sometimes ahead of their time, and his history of the harp, researched and written in two years, was, notwithstanding its limitations, a significant achievement. His painstaking methods, carefully establishing theoretical fundamentals before moving to topics more immediately relevant to the aspiring player, are unique: there were many theoreticians of music, and more practical musicians, but very few who attempted both. But his priorities are not always those of the intended reader, and he overestimates that reader's level of interest in more theoretical matters. His works of historical research – the Dissertation on stringed instruments from Violoncello 1, and Harp – give the impression of being put together from whatever material was to hand. Overall, his publications show breadth of knowledge but lack depth. He has his limitations. How could this lead us to use Gunn's work now as a source for various details of performance practice? Where does he sit in the musical culture of his time, and in the wider history of ideas?

Gunn was not at the centre of London's musical life, and he was not an influential teacher beyond teaching a certain kind of élite amateur. He had relatively few pupils at any one time, although he was paid reasonably well. He appears to have taught only the children of the aristocracy, but did not publicly advertise the fact, unlike the cellist Giovanni Cirri who described himself as ‘Music Master to his Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester’.