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Charles Avison - the forgotten master of the North
When considering musical life in mid-eighteenth century
Britain, it is natural enough to focus attention on London. Handel
had first arrived in 1711, at once storming the London stage with
"Rinaldo", and was based in London from the following
year, producing dozens of operas and oratorios in a career lasting
nearly fifty years. There was the so-called "war" between
Handel's supporters and those of Bononcini, no doubt helping to
increase interest in the music of both composers. Any number of
other continental composers thrived in London at this time: Loeillet,
de Fesch, Pepusch to name but a representative handful. Nor was
London without its home-grown musicians. Handel's one-time friend,
Maurice Greene, a Londoner born and bred, was organist at various
City churches (St. Dunstan's-in-the-West and St. Andrew's, Holborn)
before moving to St. Paul's in 1718. William Boyce, his apprentice,
another Londoner, worked in a number of different London churches,
as well as composing for the theatre, particularly Drury Lane.
Boyce's close contemporary, Thomas Arne, brought up in Covent
Garden, was excluded from church appointments because of his Catholicism,
but was connected with a number of theatres (Drury Lane, the Haymarket,
Covent Garden) producing more than fifty operas in addition to
supplying incidental music for plays. Then there were the musical
entertainments at the popular pleasure gardens of Marylebone,
Ranelagh and Vauxhall, attracting contributions from Arne, Boyce
and, a little later, J. C. Bach and Abel.
But musical life also flourished outside London. The Three Choirs
Festival, the oldest music festival now extant in Britain, originated
in about 1725; Handel's "Messiah" was first performed
across the Irish Sea in Dublin, where Francesco Geminiani was
extremely active for some thirty years. The subject of this article,
Charles Avison, is a composer now largely forgotten at least in
part because his entire career was spent away from the spotlight
of the capital, in his native Newcastle upon Tyne. He was, nevertheless,
a significant figure in Britain's musical life.
Early Years
Avison was baptized on 16th February 1709, making him about
a year older than Arne and two years older than Boyce. He came
from a large family, being the middle of nine children born to
Richard and Ann Avison. Many composers of this period had famous
struggles with fathers who disapproved of their sons' musical
aspirations, but Avison had the good fortune to be the son of
a professional musician and no doubt received his first training
at home. Avison senior, a Newcastle town wait, presumably used
his local connections to advance his son's career, because Charles
had further opportunity for study while in the service of Ralph
Jenison, a local patron of the arts and MP for Northumberland
between 1724 and 1741. There is contemporary evidence to suggest
that he was taught in London by Geminiani, whose musical influence
is manifest in his concerti. It has been claimed that he also
studied in Italy but there is no firm evidence to support this.
Avison was certainly in London in the spring of 1734 and
must already have attracted favourable attention because it is
known that he turned down posts in London, Dublin and Edinburgh,
the three capital cities of the British Isles, as well as the
post of organist at York Minster (eventually going to James Nares),
before taking up an appointment as organist at St. John's Church
in his native Newcastle in June 1736 (the appointment had been
made the previous October but did not take effect for such a long
time because of the installation of a new organ). A few months
later, in October 1736, Avison added the organist's post at St.
Nicholas' Church as well. Now Newcastle Cathedral, at the time
St. Nicholas' was the third largest parish church in the country,
boasting an organ larger than that of Durham Cathedral. Avison
remained at St. Nicholas' for the rest of his life.
Return to Newcastle
In October 1735, the month of Avison's appointment to St.
John's, a series of subscription concerts was organised in Newcastle
under the auspices of the newly formed Newcastle Music Society,
following the pattern of similar concert series in London and
elsewhere. It is unclear to what extent involvement with these
concerts was already a formal part of Avison's duties. Perhaps
it was initially a matter of experimentation, testing public reaction,
building a satisfactory orchestra, but in 1738 Avison duly became
the head of the society and consequently director of the concert
series, a post that he held in tandem with that at St. Nicholas'
until his death.
In the meantime Avison had married (1737) Catherine Reynolds
by whom he had a family of nine, following his parents' example,
though most of the children died in childhood. In addition to
his duties at St. Nicholas' and his duties as concert director,
he taught the harpsichord at home and, no doubt, the organ. He
also found time to write. Over the years, local magazines and
newspapers published numerous book reviews and articles on musical
topics signed with the initials "CA". While it is not
proven that "CA" was Avison, it is generally accepted
that he was, indeed, the author. In 1752 he published "An
Essay on Musical Expression", an expansion of the lengthy
preface on performance of concerti he had published the previous
year with his Op 3 set. Dr. Burney thought this the first work
of its kind on musical criticism in England. Its content was controversial,
suggesting as it did that Geminiani and Marcello were superior
composers to Handel, and caused a response from William Hayes,
Professor of Music at Oxford.
The music
The bulk of Avison's compositional output consists of some
fifty concerti grossi published in six sets between 1747 and 1769,
the year before his death. His overall style is very faithful
to that of his teacher, Geminiani, though he is less Corellian.
He almost always uses the four-movement format favoured by Telemann
(slow-fast-slow-fast), the second movements usually being fugal.
There are often less formal movements based on a broad melodic
line that could almost be derived from local songs. The concertos
were enormously popular with music societies throughout the country,
the published editions finding large numbers of buyers away from
Avison's immediate area.
He also played an important part in popularising the music
of Domenico Scarlatti in this country by arranging nearly fifty
movements by Scarlatti into a set of twelve concerti grossi. These
were published in 1744. Many of the movements, though by no means
all, came from Scarlatti's "Essercizi" (binary one-movement
sonatas) which had been published in London by the Irish composer
Thomas Roseingrave in 1739. (The "Essercizi" make up
the first thirty sonatas in Ralph Kirkpatrick's definitive catalogue
of all Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas.
A representative spread of Avison's original concerti have found
their way into the recording studio at times since the 1960s and
the Scarlatti arrangements have twice been issued as a complete
set. Avison's chamber music has been less fortunate. Four sets
of sonatas were issued, the first possibly as early as 1737, the
last in 1764. Here he basses his style firmly on Rameau; the sonatas
take the form of keyboard sonatas with accompaniments for other
instruments. Somewhat surprisingly for a composer so involved
with the church, there exists almost no choral music.
It is clear that Charles Avison was a very busy man. He
appears also to have been a man of great charm, able to attract
those around him, inspire loyalty and achieve results of high
calibre. Music societies of the day tended to be social organisations
of family and friends more than anything else, playing concertos
on whatever instruments happened to be available at the time,
a matter of who could play what; a combination of wind and string
instruments was accepted. However, contemporary accounts suggest
that the standards at Newcastle were exceptional. It is known
that the choir from Durham, under John Garth with whom Avison
collaborated, visited Newcastle on occasion and that Avison took
players from Newcastle to Durham. Norris L. Stephens, writing
in "The New Grove", claims Avison as the most important
English concerto writer of the eighteenth century. He certainly
has a strong original voice if inclined to be at times more academic
than some of his contemporaries. Of his personality, Charles Burney
stated that Avison was "an ingenious and polished man, esteemed
and respected by all that knew him; and an elegant writer upon
his art".
Chris Shoebridge, Registrar, ASC.
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