Musicians at Court

Abstract

Most of the research about performance of music at the English early modern courts has been devoted to the grand occasions on which spectacles were required, be they the Stuart masques or the funerals, weddings and coronations of monarchs. It usually focuses on the political use of music to support prestige or establish rapport with foreign visitors. Yet musicians performed daily for king, queen and prince, who each had their own retinue and gave stipends to singers, lutenists and players of many other instruments. This paper aims to examine the material aspects of the daily practice of music at court, from material cultural features such as the instruments, strings and cases used by the musicians to the different sources of income they relied on. It will also seek to investigate the motivations of musical practice at court that took place on a more intimate scale on a daily basis: did it form part of the same type of political pattern as larger events, or was it part of a different type of image fashioning? How did the musicians themselves respond to the requirements of such performance and it which way did it affect their own self-fashioning?