NEWCASTLE'S MUSICAL HERITAGE AN INTRODUCTION By ...

then even in the villages for musicians to wait on others for a small fee and an
important branch of musical activity for some centuries was that of Waits. These
were known as the Town’s Waits and in Newcastle were dressed in three-cocked
hats and blue cloaks. These municipal musicians strolled the streets at night
playing on some instrument to mark the hours and wakening the chief citizens in
the morning by music before their windows. They also provided music on civic
occasions as they may well have done in Newcastle in 1633 when King Charles
paid a visit to the city on his way to Edinburgh to be crowned King of Scotland
and later, when they most certainly did for Oliver Cromwell. He was wined and
dined as a guest of the city. ‘The people received him with very great
acknowledgements of love and he and his officers were sumptuously entertained
by the mayor. While at dinner in the mayor’s house the town’s waits played
outside on a little bridge over the Lort Burn near Sandhill.‘ The Waits were an
important branch of musical activity in England generally and continued in
Newcastle until in the 1790s when ‘amidst some modern, narrow, and gloomy
schemes of economy, the company was discharged’.
What effect the Reformation had on music in 17 th century Newcastle is difficult
to say but generally it is thought that by the time Charles II returned to the throne
in 1660 musical England was in a morose state. On the other hand one can
imagine that Cromwell was much less concerned about what was going on in the
North East and we had after all entertained him well! Cromwell, himself, was very
musical; he sang psalms after dinner, held musical gatherings, employed a
keyboard tutor for his daughter, and a personal organist. Perhaps the most
revealing aspect of Cromwell’s musical side is to find that at the wedding of his
daughter ‘They had forty eight violins, and much mirth and frolics, besides mixt
dancing’. Musical expression was as much a part of life in Newcastle then as
now, in the church, in the small select musical gatherings of the gentry and in the
boisterous, bawdy music making of the illiterate masses. And behind the
personality of each of these strands lay the common property of all. Since the
Middle Ages music had sought to free itself from the restrictions of the church
and there had emerged around the mid 16 th century a new art form known as
secular music. The term is not really very helpful for the purposes of definition
because with vocal music much of it was written for domestic use and was
unambiguously sacred. But then there was the question of social functions and
circumstances of performance to consider as well as publication. Secular
instrumental music had established itself somewhat earlier than vocal, around
1540, as a fully independent repertory and a self-sufficient art form weaned from
its liturgical dependence.
Travelling musicians were largely responsible for bringing this music to the
attention of the people, and by the seventeenth century the skill and virtuosity of
these minstrels had reached a high standard. Although these purveyors of song
and melody had not always been welcomed by everyone and the Church had
tended towards the view that minstrels were purveyors of filth and sin and who
speaks filth is the servant of Lucifer. The power of music as an incitement to lust
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