The Burrows Lecture: past speakers have included Andrew Motion, Simon Lyster,
John Tusa, Margaret Drabble, Ruth Rendell, Shirley Williams and Sir Nikolaus
Pevsner.
The Burrows Lecture: 2012
‘After Byrd: Music in eighteenth-century Essex’
Professor Peter Holman
In association with the Essex Book Festival
If music features at all in histories of Essex it is usually in connection with
the Elizabethan composer William Byrd, who settled in Stondon Massey and worked for
the Petre family at Ingatestone Hall, and his younger contemporary John Wilbye, who
lived in Colchester towards the end of his life. However, Essex’s musical life was
much richer in the eighteenth century, when public concerts flourished in the main
towns, a number of music clubs were formed for the performance of orchestral music,
and groups of singers and instrumentalists performed elaborate composed music in
churches and chapels, often written by local composers.
In this lecture Professor Peter Holman will focus on musical activity in the
Colchester area in the second half of the eighteenth century, looking in particular
at the activities of an orchestra that met at East Hill House in the 1770s and 80s.
Its members included Thomas Twining, Rector of St Mary at the Walls, violinist and
friend of the music historian Charles Burney, and William Jones, Rector of Nayland,
philosopher, church reformer and author of A Treatise on the Art of Music
(Colchester, 1784). He will also look at the activities of the composer Joseph
Gibbs, born in Colchester in 1698, and his role in teaching composition to amateur
musicians; local composers included Twining and Jones as well as Joseph Eyre of
East Bergholt, John Carr, a grocer in Boxford, and William Cole, Colchester land
surveyor, astronomer, mathematician and psalmody teacher.
After the lecture there will be a short concert given by soprano Claire Tomlin
and Essex Baroque Orchestra of eighteenth-century music composed or performed in
the Colchester area.