7 - Musical Capitalisation II: Institutions

Summary

❧ An Institutional Peak? Sacred Polyphony Before the Reformation

MUSIC, even folksinging, only happens with institutional support. Performers need to learn, to teach, to join together, and to network, acquiring or exchanging artefacts as well as experience. Audiences need gathering places and occasions, agreement as to how and when these should be activated, and frameworks within which they are willing to pay with their money or with their effort to hear music, doing so to a set of shared and understood values that render the experience worthwhile for them. Beyond private patronage and individual enterprise, the institutions facilitating and regulating these equations have been the Church, the military and civil authorities, educational establishments, and the entertainment industry. They have sustained music in places where one worships, where one prepares to fight or consolidate one's citizenship, where one learns, and where one enjoys oneself. The music may be subsidiary to some other institutional function (a church service, a march, a civic procession, a ball, a show), or may be an end in itself, as with concerts, musical interludes in theatres, and singing in pubs. This chapter will examine the Church, educational establishments, and entertainment networks (including broadcasting) as institutional providers. The military and civil authorities have already been considered in the context of bands in chapter 3, although the development of municipal orchestras requires separate treatment here, providing as it does the touchstone for the aspirations and limitations of regional musical culture in the case of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

By far the most pervasive musical institution in any English region, over a period of hundreds of years, has been the Church. Greatly disrupted as its musical provision was at the Reformation, and again during the Civil War and Commonwealth, its provision of cathedrals was never entirely lost, indeed was enhanced when the Augustinian abbey in Bristol was suppressed and its church became the city's ‘new foundation’ cathedral. (Bath Abbey was the new name for what had already been a monastic cathedral, Bath Priory. The other three mediaeval cathedrals in the west country, Exeter, Salisbury, and Wells, were ‘secular’, i.e. they lacked a community of monks.)