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Avison and his Subscribers: Musical Networking in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Simon D.I. Fleming Open the ORCID record for Simon D.I. Fleming [Opens in a new window]
Simon D.I. Fleming*
Affiliation:
Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College, Darlington, UK Music Department,Durham University, Durham, UK
*
*Email: s.d.i.fleming@durham.ac.uk
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Abstract

One of the most important and valuable resources available to researchers of eighteenth-century social history are the lists of subscribers that were attached to a wide variety of publications. Yet, the study of this type of source material remains one of the areas most neglected by academics. These lists shed considerable light on the connections that an author or composer had with other like-minded individuals and the support that they received from members of the middle and upper classes. In cases where a single composer published a series of works by subscription, there is an opportunity to gain an insight into the growth of the public's appreciation of the composer and the contacts he or she forged over the course of a lifetime. Charles Avison is one of the best known British composers from the eighteenth century. He issued six works by subscription between 1740 and 1767 and they together provide a unique insight into his growth into one of this country's leading native musicians. Although a respectable number of the associations discussed are already known through other sources, this study not only reinforces the importance of these associations, but additionally gives an insight into those links for which there is no other known evidence. This research ultimately reveals that Avison's location in the North-East of England did not significantly impact on his ability to forge connections across Britain and beyond.

Keywords

Avisonsubscriptioneighteenth-centuryChilcotmusic societies
Type
Articles
Information
Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle , Volume 49 , 2018 , pp. 21 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 The Royal Musical Association

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References

1 See Simon Fleming, ‘The Myth of the Forgotten Composer – The Posthumous Reputation of Charles Avison’, Early Music, 44/1 (2016), 105–17.

2 Caledonian Mercury, 18 April 1754.

3 Newcastle Journal, 20 March 1759.

4 Charles Burney, A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, 4 vols (London, 1789), iv, 670–1; Charles Avison, An Essay on Musical Expression (London, 2nd ed., 1753), 120. The Pla brothers were in London between 1753–4 and Chabran between 1752–3. Beryl Kenyon de Pascual: ‘Pla’, Grove Music Online: Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed January 31, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/42259pg1; Guido Salvetti and Simon McVeigh, ‘Chiabrano, Carlo’, Grove Music Online: Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed January 31, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/05558.

5 Simon Fleming, ‘John Callander and the Avison Connection: A Recently Rediscovered Letter’, Eighteenth Century Music, 11 (2014), 285. Callander purchased two copies of the op. 9.

6 William Jackson, ed., Memoirs of Dr William Gilpin, of Scaleby Castle in Cumberland (London, 1879), 74, 81.

7 William Gilpin, Observations, relative chiefly to picturesque beauty, made in the year 1772, on several parts of England; particularly the mountains, and lakes of Cumberland, and Westmoreland, 2 vols (London, 1788), i, 191.

8 The Correspondence of Thomas Gray and William Mason (London, 1853), 16, 27.

9 The Works of William Mason, M.A., 4 vols (London, 1811), iii, 396–7. The passage appears in the notes on pages 64–5 of the first edition of Avison's Essay (1752), published in London by C. Davis. William Hayes, Remarks on Mr. Avison's Essay on Musical Expression (London, 1753), 113; Charles Avison, A Reply to the Author of Remarks On the Essay on Musical Expression (London, 1753), 4.

10 York Courant, 6 January 1767.

11 Simon Fleming, ‘The Howgill Family: A Dynasty of Musicians from Georgian Whitehaven’, Nineteenth Century Music Review, 10 (2013), 62.

12 Southey believes that William was the brother of Avison, but another possibility is that he was Avison's cousin. See Roz Southey et al., The Ingenious Mr Avison: Making Music and Money in Eighteenth-Century Newcastle (Newcastle, 2009), 24; G.H. Smith, A History of Hull Organs and Organists (London, n.d.), 9.

13 David Hunter and Rose Mason, ‘Supporting Handel Through Subscription to Publications: The Lists of Rodelinda and Faramondo Compared’, Notes, 56/1 (1999), 30–1.

14 This was certainly true of Avison's Two Concertos. Daily Gazetteer, 7 January 1742. See also Hunter and Mason, ‘Supporting Handel’, 32.

15 The problem with subscription lists is accessibility and, even though there have been huge advances in this area during the past half century, it can be impractical for a researcher to scour lists in search of a single name, unless they are readily accessible through an online database, such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online. A useful starting point for anyone investigating lists is Peter Wallis and Francis Robinson: Book Subscription Lists: a Revised Guide (Newcastle, 1975) and Peter Wallis and Ruth Wallis: Book Subscription Lists: Extended Supplement to the Revised Guide (Newcastle, 1996) but these are far from complete. There is an ongoing effort to produce a new online database of all music subscription lists produced in Britain before 1820, compiled by the author in partnership with Martin Perkins of Birmingham Conservatory. We have so far identified over 700 lists that date from before 1820.

16 Margaret Seares, ‘The Composer and the Subscriber: a Case Study from the 18th Century’, Early Music, 39/1 (2011), 65–78.

17 Michael Talbot, ‘What Lists of Subscribers Can Tell Us: The Cases of Giacob Basevi Cervetto's Opp. 1 and 2’, De Musica Disserenda, 10 (2014), 121–39.

18 Hunter and Mason, ‘Supporting Handel’, 27–93.

19 As Avison's op. 4 concertos were popular enough to warrant a reissue by Johnson, they were clearly far more widely known than the subscription list to this work indicates.

20 Avison might well have been taken aback by the reception of his op. 5 sonatas as, perhaps anticipating that the best-selling domestic music should be flexible, he made them performable in several ways. The keyboard parts are complete in themselves and could be performed as solos. Also, Avison's chosen arrangement with accompaniments, for two violins and a cello, meant that these sonatas could be performed in a variety of different combinations, whether that was as duos, trios or quartets.

21 For this article, these eight lists have been viewed as a unified whole, although each volume has its own unique subscription list, between each of which there is a good amount of variation. However, since it was Garth's name and not Avison's that was given as editor, these lists have only been included in the tables where it is possible to trace subscribers from Avison's own works; any subscribers unique to their edition of Marcello's Psalms have not been included.

22 Set 1 contains the first six concertos and set 2 the remaining six (concertos 7 to 12).

23 I am grateful to Gordon Dixon who provided me with a copy of the list to the second edition of set 1, which came from the collection of Newcastle's Literary and Philosophical Society. I am also grateful to James Smith who allowed me to consult the original document. We do not know why Avison decided to switch publishers midway through the production of his op. 9. Although Ruth Johnson may have decided for some reason not to produce the rest of the set, it could be that there was some tension over the first issue of book 1, brought about by the omission of certain names from the list of subscribers. One suspects that such issues were not unusual. The Edinburgh publisher, John Watlen, added a note to the subscription list attached to his second volume of The Celebrated Circus Tunes (1798) to mitigate any arising problems: ‘As there are several Subscription Papers in the Country, and are not yet come to hand, the Author hopes those Ladies and Gentlemen, whose Names are not here inserted, will excuse the omission.’

24 It is possible that Cuthbert had died but, if he had, he had almost certainly not paid for his copy. It was not unusual for the names of the recently deceased to appear in subscription lists, sometimes with the addition of the word ‘late’. This happens in the lists to Marcello's Psalms, to which Sir John Dolben subscribed. Dolben sadly died in 1756, before the first volume appeared, but his name was included in all eight lists.

25 Rosalind Marshall, ‘Bowes, Mary Eleanor, Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne (1749–1800)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., edited by David Cannadine (Oxford, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3056 (accessed January 31, 2017). Mary Eleanor Bowes subscribed to the op. 9, but as ‘Miss Bowes’ in list G and as ‘The Right Hon. the Countess of Strathmore’ in list H.

26 There are four names added in manuscript to the British Library copy of the first edition of set 1 (GB-Lbl: h72b). They are all included in the list to the second edition.

27 Avison's concertos were performed as quartets in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Fleming, ‘The Myth of the Forgotten Composer’, 110, 112. The flexibility of the op. 9 enabled them to be performed in a variety of other ways; for example, they could easily be performed as duos for violin and keyboard.

28 In c.1750, the population of London was around 675,000. The next biggest town, Norwich, had a population of around 50,000. See E. Anthony Wrigley, ‘Urban Growth and Agricultural Change: England and the Continent in the Early Modern Period’, The Eighteenth-Century Town: A Reader in Urban History 1688–1820, ed. Peter Borsay (London, 1990), 42. The book trade was London-centric, with well-developed links that enabled the spread of books out into the provinces, but it was not geared for transportation in the opposite direction. See David Shaw, ‘Canterbury's External Links: Book-Trade Relations at the Regional and National Level in the Eighteenth Century’, The Mighty Engine: The Printing Press and its Impact, ed. Peter Isaac and Barry McKay (Winchester, 2000), 110–11.

29 Daily Gazetteer, 7 January 1742. Cooke also published the first edition of Avison's op. 1 trio sonatas.

30 William Smith and Peter Ward Jones, ‘Cooke, Benjamin (i)’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed December 30, 2016, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/06393.

31 This is known to be true of the op. 9 first pressing of set 1, where subscriptions were also taken by both John Walsh and Robert Bremner. East Riding Archives: DDGR/42/16/23: a printed notice advertising the publication of the op. 9 concertos. I am grateful to Helen Clark who provided me with a copy of this document.

32 These were published as Eight Concertos for the Organ or Harpsichord. Of the two remaining ‘Walsh’ organ concertos, one was based on the second concerto from his Two Concertos and the other on a now lost published concerto. Revised versions of all eight concertos were included by Avison in his op. 6.

33 In the dedication to his op. 1 sonatas, Avison wrote that ‘I had then no thoughts of their ever being made Publick, but beyond expectation meeting with some applause in private and being importun'd by the Musical Society in Newcastle to publish them, I could no longer refuse to comply.’

34 Simon Fleming, ‘The Musical Activities of the Spalding Gentlemen's Society’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 48/1 (2017), 74.

35 Simon Fleming, A Century of Music Production in Durham City 1711–1811: A Documentary Study (PhD diss., U. of Durham, 2009), 61–70, 112.

36 Henry Farmer, Music Making in the Olden Days: The Story of the Aberdeen Concerts 1748–1801 (London, 1950), 13–15.

37 Henry Farmer, A History of Music in Scotland (London, n.d.), 309.

38 Simon Fleming, ‘Charles Avison's Dirge for Romeo and Juliet’, Early Music Performer, 36 (2015), 14.

39 Further evidence that those groups that appear twice are the same can be observed in that they never subscribed to the same work.

40 The concerto grosso was a popular form in Britain due to the nature of concert orchestras, which would perform with little rehearsal time beforehand. The main body of the orchestra would play the simpler ripieno parts leaving the more difficult concertino parts to the concert organizers or other billed performers.

41 Susan Wollenberg, Music at Oxford in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Oxford, 2001), 44–9.

42 Susan Wollenberg, Music at Oxford; Peter Ward Jones and Simon Heighes, ‘Hayes’ Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed January 21, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/12621pg1.

43 John Mee, The Oldest Music Room in Europe: A Record of Eighteenth-Century Enterprise at Oxford (London, 1911), 49–50. I am grateful to Simon Heighes for his advice and for pointing out this reference to me.

44 Peter Holman and Richard Maunder, ‘The Accompaniment of Concertos in 18th-century England’, Early Music, 28/4 (2000), 646.

45 This assumes, as per modern practice, that two performers could share one part placed on a stand. However, it is also possible that, if more parts were required, these could be produced in manuscript. See Holman and Maunder, ‘The Accompaniment of Concertos’, 645–6.

46 It is unlikely that Avison bought the extra copies for resale purposes as, for most works, he only subscribed to a single copy.

47 Tim Rishton, ‘Chilcot, Thomas’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed January 14, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/05581.

48 Gwilym Beechey, ‘Thomas Chilcot and His Music’, Music & Letters, 54/2 (1973), 184. I am grateful to Tim Rishton who suggested the Masonic link. There is no firm evidence that Avison was himself a freemason although Garth certainly was, as was Avison's youngest son Charles. See Simon Fleming, ‘Charles Avison Jnr and his Book of Organ Voluntaries’, The Musical Times, 153/1918 (2012), 99; Simon Fleming: ‘John Garth and his Music: an Important Provincial Composer from 18th-Century Britain’, The Musical Times, 153/1921 (2012), 66.

49 Robert Hyman and Nicola Hyman, The Pump Room Orchestra Bath: Three Centuries of Music and Social History (Salisbury, 2011), 3–4.

50 For more on Milgrove see Matthew Spring, ‘Benjamin Milgrove, the Musical “Toy Man”, and the “Guittar” in Bath 1757–1790’, Early Music, 41/2 (2013), 14.

51 This orchestra in 1767 consisted of eight musicians. Hyman and Hyman, The Pump Room Orchestra Bath, 16–19.

52 Catherine had a ‘lingering indisposition’ which ultimately led to her death in 1766. Simon Fleming, Charles Avison (1709–1770) An Important and Influential English Composer, Musician, and Writer (MMus diss., U. of Liverpool, 1999), 47.

53 A copy of this list was supplied with the courtesy of Otto Haas. I am also grateful to Colin Coleman who arranged for this copy to be made.

54 Edward was presumably Avison's older brother rather than his eldest son. Roz Southey, Music-Making in North-East England during the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot, 2006), 211.

55 Fleming, A Century of Music Production in Durham City 1711–1811, 66, 69.

56 Fleming, A Century of Music Production in Durham City 1711–1811, 164, 171.

57 Fleming, A Century of Music Production in Durham City 1711–1811, 97–9; Newcastle Courant, 28 December 1754.

58 London Chronicle for the Year 1763, 446. See also Simon Fleming: ‘Music and Concert Promotion in Georgian Stamford’, The Consort, 73 (Summer 2017), 61–83.

59 Daily Gazetteer, 7 January 1742. Avison also placed advertisements for works to be published by subscription in the local press. See, for example, the Newcastle Courant, 1 September 1750 where there appears an advertisement for the op. 3.

60 In the source, the words ‘may be’ are crossed out in ink with the word ‘is’ written above.

61 East Riding Archives: DDGR/42/16/23. Christopher Roberts, Music and Society in Eighteenth-Century Yorkshire (PhD diss., U. of Leeds, 2014), 141.

62 Jackson, Memoirs of Dr William Gilpin, 74–81.

63 The positions of these subscribers were ascertained through the Clergy of the Church of England Database, http://theclergydatabase.org.uk/, accessed 23–24 January 2017.

64 Norris Stephens, Charles Avison: An Eighteenth-Century English Composer, Musician and Writer (PhD diss., U. of Pittsburgh, 1968), 61; Fleming, ‘John Callander and the Avison Connection’, 285.

65 London: L. Davis and C. Reymers, 1763. Brown refers to Avison's Essay on page 214.

66 Stephens, Charles Avison, 60.

67 Hunter and Mason, ‘Supporting Handel’, 32.

68 Although it appears from the table that Sir Ralph and Lady Anne Milbanke subscribed to most of Avison's publications, neither of these subscribers is likely to have been the same person. Sir Ralph Milbanke, 4th bart. died in 1748 and was succeeded by his son who was also called Ralph. Lady Anne Milbanke died in 1765; her daughter-in-law was called Elizabeth. Malcolm Elwin, The Noels and The Milbankes (London, 1767), 13.

69 Charles Rogers, Genealogical Memoirs of the Family of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. of Abbotsford (London, 1877), xix; see also the subscription list to Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy in Three Books (Glasgow, 1755), i.

70 Fleming, ‘John Callander and the Avison Connection’, 287–8.

71 Jessica Kilburn, ‘Shafto, Robert (c.1732–1797)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004); online ed., ed. David Cannadine, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/75159 (accessed January 31, 2017).

72 Mary Eleanor Bowes was a pupil of Avison. Presumably many of the other unmarried young ladies who appear in the lists were also his students.

73 The Works of William Mason (1811), iii, 385.

74 See Fleming, ‘The Myth of the Forgotten Composer’.