A composer in ordinary

In our next programme we will be starting with music written long before the advent of the string quartet as we know it.  The viol consort music of the early English baroque period in particular has a very strong affinity with the concept of the string quartet – four equal parts interacting and ‘talking’ together.  It seems that as long as there have been chambers (as opposed to big halls), there has been chamber music. Let me take you up the Exe estuary. Topsham, Devon, in 1788, bustling with life and trade. Topsham was a key port with strong trading connections to places as far away as The Netherlands to the East and Newfoundland to the West.  A century and a half before this picture was painted a boy chorister at nearby Exeter Cathedral brazenly inscribed his name in the stone structure of the organ loft. It is not known why he used this spelling.  Maybe he was worried that the correct spelling, Matthew Locke, would have taken him too long to scratch in the stone; he might have got caught vandalising the building and have been severely punished.  One wonders what he was doing in the organ loft anyway.  I suppose he must have had to pump the bellows occasionally. Locke’s tutor at Exeter would have been Edward Gibbons, brother of Orlando Gibbons.  This curious little piece ‘What Strikes the Clocke?’  by Edward Gibbons, originally for three viols but here played on recorders, shows that instrumental chamber music had a place even at that time.     After his time as a chorister Locke broadened his vision considerably, travelling to...