3 - The Universities

Summary

All four of the individuals with whom I am concerned attended one or other of the English universities of their time: Oxford and Cambridge. In this chapter, I examine the kinds of music-related experience they likely encoun-tered in their student and fellowship careers, encompassing musical life in both institutional and informal contexts. Official provision for musical education was always limited, but this did not inhibit the presence of a range of opportunities for the strictly masculine members of the universities to familiarise themselves with music on a number of levels. Allowing for fluctuations and developments over time, these broadly comprised theoretical concepts and practical skills, but, for those keen to seek it out, might also extend to engagement with music's more spiritual or arcane aspects. This chapter will seek to outline three ‘still lifes’ of the university milieu in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries based on my subjects’ respective careers. The most detailed will coincide with Sterry's time as a student and fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge immediately prior to the Civil Wars, establishing a pattern that, allowing for the constant flux of change, can be followed through our other contexts too. As well as examining the everyday practicalities of music making I aim to suggest ways in which musical experiences could help shape the distinctive worldview developed by Sterry and his Cambridge Platonist contemporaries. I shall then look rather more succinctly at Roach's career at St John’s, Oxford half a century later during the scarcely less traumatic 1680s. Finally, a brief overview of the first decades of the new century will take us into the Cambridge experiences of Stukeley at Corpus Christi and, a little later, of Hartley at Jesus College.

The premise I shall adopt is that university life in all its facets exerts an influence on these individuals and their responses to music, even if other factors clearly came into play. Of course, all university entrants were notionally open to the same influences, but we are looking for something beyond broad generalisations. I contend that, in rare cases such as those of Sterry and Roach in particular, who shared a receptive mindset along with a keen musical intelligence and a strongly aesthetic apprehension of the divine in nature, university experience was a necessary though hardly a sufficient factor in forming a conception of music rarely articulated prior to Romantic literature.