IN the early nineteenth century it was possible to make a decent living as a musician in the English provinces, doing so in one of four or five different ways that had been available since 1700 or earlier. One type of livelihood was that of the waits, liveried municipal musicians paid for since the middle ages by the mayor and corporation of the older boroughs. A second was to be apprenticed as an instrument maker or organ builder. A third living, that of the itinerant singing master, going around the rural districts teaching choirs of young men in weekly rotation and selling psalmody publications, may by then have died out or been subsumed into amateur activity (such singing masters sometimes had another, non-musical occupation, as did musicians in other categories). A fourth livelihood, that of the military bandsman, rose with the Napoleonic wars and the second British empire, but prior to recent scholarly work it was easily missed by historians, for military musicians spent much of their time abroad; indeed, one of John David Loder's violin pupils in Bath, Alexander Rowland, had been born in Trinidad, the son of a clarinettist bandmaster ‘who served through the Peninsular campaign’. But it was a fifth model, sometimes combined with elements of one of the others, that had the most widespread potential for profit. This was to establish oneself as the musical equivalent of the medical general practitioner who survives to this day, by setting up in one of the towns benefiting from the urban renaissance of the Georgian period identified and analysed by Peter Borsay. I include cathedral organists and lay clerks among the general practitioners.

The general practitioner in music was for at least 150 years the professional norm in England and, one might venture to add, on the Continent and in the New World. But by 1850 it was a role subject to radically and rapidly changing expectations, resulting in an altered perception that has persisted until the present, to the detriment of historical understanding. The perfect example is the way composition has come to be seen as the primary activity defining a musical life, to the extent that the textures and contexts of musical lives prior to 1850 (including those of composers) have been misconceived.