It was way back in the mid-1960s that I first became interested in the Academy of Ancient Music, and I have been collecting stray scraps of information relating to them ever since. Fifty years on, methinks it’s high time I shared my findings with the world of eighteenth-century musical scholarship at large. Others meanwhile have dealt with various bits of the story, but no one so far as I know has yet attempted to bring it all together in one place. What follows here is in three self-contained parts and two appendices. The first part surveys the history of the society from cradle to grave so to speak, and deals with all the main personalities and events involved. The second, and by far the longest, part provides details of all the Academy programmes known to have survived together with various references to be found in diaries, letters and other manuscript material of the period; there is also, for the 1780s and 90s in particular, a good deal of supporting comment in the London newspapers. Also duly noted in this section are the present-day whereabouts of all those individual works that can be identified as having once formed part of its celebrated library. Part III is an editorial conflation of the 1761 and 1768 editions of The Words of such pieces as are most usually performed by the Academy of Ancient Music (plus a short and hitherto unnoticed addition to the latter to be found only in some copies), and keyed to it are the dates of all known performances tabled in Part II. Appendix A provides an annotated list of all those who were named as subscribers on 9 April 1730. This is the last such list to have survived, and here, for the first time, an attempt has been made to identify those various City merchants, clerics and others who are not among those well-known musicians usually named as being members. Appendix B refers to an interesting document now in the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale. It contains not only the names of the subscribers to the 1785–86 season but also a list of all those singers and instrumentalists who were employed by the Academy in 1786–87 (and how much they were paid). Only the latter, however, is reproduced here, and its content has been reordered in the interests of greater clarity. Standard RISM sigla are used for all but a very few library references.

In March 1799 John White was 20 years old and already an experienced professional violinist and cellist. He kept a detailed account book between March 1799 and March 1800 that provides much information about the economic and professional life of a young musician at the very end of the eighteenth century. White had showed early musical promise, and when he was 15 he attracted the patronage of the future Lord Harewood, who enabled him to take lessons from leading musical figures and appointed him as his director of music. White lived at Harewood House, near Leeds, but he spent some months of the London season each year with the Harewood family in their house in Hanover Square. The accounts show how White earned money in London by playing at private and public concerts and deputising at almost every place of musical entertainment in the capital. In Yorkshire he led orchestras in concerts and oratorio performances, took on pupils and visited Scarborough. White’s meticulous lists of his income and expenditure, from an expensive violin, a harp and harp lessons to silk stockings, waistcoats and hair ribbon, paint a fascinating picture of a young man making his way in the musical profession.