NEWCASTLE'S MUSICAL HERITAGE AN INTRODUCTION By ...

Author’s Note
Since completing the main part of this book it has become known that
Newcastle lost the bid in the runner-up title of European Capital of Culture, 2008
and Liverpool was chosen. The decision was made by a panel of eleven
independent judges chaired by Sir Jeremy Isaacs, former director of the Royal
Opera House, Covent Garden, London. Their decision revealed that Liverpool
was already brimming with culture and was at the leading edge of the visual arts.
It housed the largest collection of modern art outside the capital and it promised
a strong musical programme, which was to include opera and ballet. But a most
potent factor in the judge’s decision was that the whole city had involved itself in
the cultural programme.
Following the decision of the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowett, said that every
one of the six short listed cities would have been a worthy nomination for the title,
but I would go further and say there can be little doubt that of the five semifinalists
Newcastle was the strongest and would have been equally worthy of the
award. Having said that, I think it would be foolish to ignore the concealed
message in the panel’s findings and that was to establish a cultural ethos within a
city calls for the shared participation interests and enthusiasm of the people and
the city authorities.
Newcastle in my opinion, is a city also brimming with culture and all the more
fascinating for the fact that it has taken centuries of pioneering effort to reach its
current unprecedented cultural status. Newcastle may not have won the bid, for
whatever cultural or political reasons, but in the attempt it changed the face of the
city presenting a new image to the outside world. Musically speaking it is the
cultural capital of the northeast and the spirit of Charles Avison lives on. In the
circumstances I canonly see things getting better and better and see no reason
to backtrack on the sentiments I expressed over a year ago.
JWP July 2003
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible but for the untiring patience and
unstinting good natured assistance of the staff of the Local Studies Section of
Newcastle Central Library and the Tyne and Wear Archives, Blandford House,
Newcastle. Piecing together the town’s musical history was made doubly difficult
by the fact that it has been ignored for so long the general thread of the story was
lost ages ago. Retrieving and assembling the facts needed to compile anything
like a presentable chronological sequence of historical events proved very
difficult in that they are mostly fragmentary and littered about all over the place
and often catalogued under some other subject. All the relevant information held
by the two archive sources mentioned above, which is a great deal, but by no
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