Amidst the cosmopolitan, fashion-obsessed concert life of later eighteenth-century London existed a discrete musical counterculture centring on a regular gathering of musicians at the Crown and Anchor tavern on the Strand. Now forgotten, this school of musical thinkers sought through a high-minded intellectual curiosity to further music by proffering an alternative vision. Perceiving only ear-tickling ostentation in the light and showy styles that delighted London audiences, they sought to raise the status of music as an art of profound expression, informed by its past and founded on universal harmonic principles.

An essential role in this story is played by the composer-theorist Johann Christoph Pepusch (1667–1752) on account of the musical ethos he inspired in an entire generation of pupils and associates. Through the careers and achievements of figures such as Benjamin Cooke (1734–93), William Boyce (1711–79), John Hawkins (1719–89), John Keeble (1711–86), Marmaduke Overend (d. 1790), and John Travers (c. 1703–58) Pepusch’s ideas bore fruit as the musical agenda that forms the subject of this study. Common to this group was a studious enthusiasm, unusual in its day, for music’s august theoretical traditions (especially Greek harmonic theory), alongside a deep interest in collecting, studying, editing and performing earlier music. A focus for their eccentric preoccupations was provided by a music society founded in 1726 (at the Crown and Anchor) and known initially as the Academy of Vocal Musick, which had been directed by Pepusch from the early 1730s until his death in 1752. During his leadership it became known as the Academy of Ancient Music and adopted a programming policy now deemed a landmark in the western music tradition on account of its performance of what was termed ‘ancient music’. A principal component of ancient music was vocal polyphony of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This included masses, motets, and madrigals by composers such as Palestrina, Byrd, Marenzio and Victoria, some of which had been little performed since their initial time of composition, and most of which would have been utterly unknown in eighteenth-century London. By performing ancient sacred music in a public secular context the academicians were engaged in a practice virtually unheard of in their day and which, in certain respects, anticipated the emergence of musical classics later in the century.