Over the course of a playing career that spanned roughly fifty years, John Mahon (pronoucned M’hone) introduced and popularized the clarinet as a solo and chamber instrument throughout Britain. He performed extensively in London and in many provincial towns. This article presents biographies of John and William Mahon, illustrations of contemporary clarinets and a basset horn, Mahon as a teacher, his music, and his influence and legacy. William Mahon’s concerts and reviews and a conclusion end the article.

The account book of the London Academy of Vocal (later Ancient) Music (1726-31) forms the first part of a manuscript acquired by the library of the Paris Conservatoire in 1858. It went missing when, a hundred years later, it was transferred to the Bibliothèque Nationale and the second part catalogued as MS F. Rés. 1507. It did not surface again until the spring of 2020, too late to be included in the author’s long article on the history, repertoire and surviving programmes of this important eighteenth-century institution in Research Chronicle no. 51. As a postscript to that article, it is transcribed here prefaced by a short introductory essay together with such explanatory notes as the document requires.

Music was widely used within lunatic asylums in nineteenth-century England as part of the ‘moral management’ of patients via entertainment and occupation. The asylum at Ticehurst stood apart on account of its patient body, drawn from the upper classes of society. Documents relating to music at Ticehurst shed new light on the place of music within mental health treatment in the nineteenth century, and particularly on the perceived role of music in understanding the function of the brain in listening, emotions and the intellect. The main body of the article draws on the Ticehurst archives together with patient accounts of their musical experiences to investigate the ways in which music was used at the asylum. The final part takes as its focus an article published by the asylum’s manager and medical officer, Herbert Hayes Newington, in which the appreciation of music by patients comes under scrutiny.

Searches through the plea rolls of the Court of Common Pleas have revealed a number of actions involving, separately, the Tudor composers Christopher Tye and John Taverner, and Taverner’s widow, Rose. These yield the earliest sighting of Taverner so far, the date of his marriage, and two transactions in which he is involved in the transfer of property. Rose is shown defending a claim of debt incurred by John Copley, her previous husband, and attempting to recover debts owed, in one case, to her late son and, in others, to John Taverner. For Tye, no fewer than twenty-seven cases have been discovered, in almost all of which he is the defendant in a claim of debt. They shed light upon his contacts outside music and suggest that his principal places of residence were in Ely from 1547 to at least 1556, and at Doddington after 1561. They also reveal that he was claiming to be a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal much earlier than previously realised. Rose Taverner and Tye also feature in cases brought in the Court of Chancery, one of which reveals the name of Tye’s mother and the town in which she had lived.