Peter Phillips

In​ the 1938 edition of the Oxford Companion to Music, Percy Scholes defined composition as ‘the culmination of the mental and psychological process of a remarkable and inspired personality’. Even today, the notion of the Great Composer – the individual genius, whose inimitable music is an expression of a singular mind – still holds sway: the composers guaranteed to...

Karl Baedeker​ wrote in his 1868 guide to Venice that when sitting outside the twin cafés of Quadri and Florian in St Mark’s Square, ‘strangers have here to submit to, with the best grace they can, the importunities of flower-girls, hawkers, musicians etc.’ He could have written ‘buskers’ – the word was in use by then – but he didn’t....

One​ of the abiding mysteries in presenting music from the past is what the singers sounded like. There is no evidence for it, apart from written descriptions, all of which fall far short of telling us anything precise. What is one to make of this description of the singing in the Chapel Royal in 1515, written by the Venetian ambassador to Henry VIII’s court and included in Andrew...

The​ death early in 1603 of Maria of Austria, daughter of Charles V, wife of Maximilian II and mother of Rudolf II, called for extravagant exequies. Her catafalque, erected in the monastery of the Descalzas Reales in Madrid, was ‘magnificent and majestic’, according to the artist Diego de Urbina. ‘This catafalque had a width of eighteen feet and a height of fifty-four feet...

On​ 30 January 1540 the monks of Evesham Abbey were singing the Magnificat when messengers from the king interrupted them. ‘The monastery of Evesham was suppressed by King Henry VIII … at evensong time,’ John of Alcester recorded, ‘the convent being in the choir at this verse Deposuit potentes, and would not suffer them to make an end.’ Four years into the...