Among the various materials concerning the life and career of nineteenth-century composer and academic William Crotch in the Norfolk Record Office's substantial collection, is the notebook of an Oxford student named Bertie from the 1830s that contains some ‘Remarks on the Manner of Studying Dr Crotch's Specimens’.Footnote ¹ These ‘Remarks’ are a syllabus for a chronological music history survey that might resemble in some ways the familiar mainstay of canonically-based musical higher education today. Indeed, although Bertie was not necessarily trying to promote the creation of a canon of widely accepted masterworks, some aspects of his syllabus are directly relevant to what research has shown about the development of musical classics in the early nineteenth century. The first classical tradition that extended beyond a narrow circle of professionals or enthusiasts is thought to have developed out of eighteenth-century England's ancient music movement.Footnote ² With this development came a natural interest in tracing music's progress that extends backward from Bertie's syllabus to the first music histories by Burney and Hawkins and much earlier. In order for a retrospective interest in music such as Bertie's to develop into a canon, however, critical attention had to shift from a preoccupation with musical types thought to possess some unusual moral rank or integrity to the consideration of individual works as masterpieces deserving close attention.Footnote ³ There are a few attempts to offer the kind of criticism that might have furthered this process before the early nineteenth century – for example, in Charles Burney's important account of the 1784 Handel Commemoration – but, as Burney's writing demonstrates, detailed criticism is extremely difficult when the reader cannot be expected to have access to the musical score.Footnote ⁴ Bertie seeks more to familiarise than to attempt detailed criticism, but he does perhaps unintentionally manage to shift the focus of attention from broad categories to specific examples, by organizing his syllabus around an anthology of musical scores that was for the time a celebrated innovation but is today almost totally forgotten: William Crotch's Specimens of Various Styles of Music Referred to in a Course of Lectures Read at Oxford and London, in three volumes published separately between 1807 and 1810.Footnote ⁵

Crotch's Specimens deserves a closer look for many reasons. First, this was a new kind of score anthology, deliberately set up for the practical pedagogical purpose of documenting music's evolution from ancient times to the present. The uniqueness of Crotch's approach is underscored when Bertie summarizes options for score anthologies to supplement the Specimens. Among the works named are both well-known collections of church music from the previous century and a few titles that are slightly more inclusive, at least to the extent of offering both English and German or Italian examples.Footnote ⁶ There are even individual works listed that bring Crotch's Specimens up to date on recent composers including Beethoven and Mendelssohn. But where anthologies of classics are concerned, Bertie could list no title available anywhere in the world that combined systematically what was called ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ music in the same collection, and no volume intentionally set up to demonstrate the evolution of musical style, German and Italian, vocal and instrumental, sacred and secular, from chant to the end of the eighteenth century.

The inclusiveness of the Specimens was possible only because the work was clearly not intended as a memorial to some earlier classical tradition. Even if earlier score anthologies are intended to serve a practical utilitarian end, their compilers inevitably also make claims for the canonical status of the music they preserve and validate.Footnote ⁷ In the preface to Cathedral Music, William Boyce says that he ‘was induced to undertake this work from the general opinion of its extensive usefulness’, but he also hoped he could convey ‘to our future composers for the church, these excellent specimens of what has hitherto been considered as the true style and standard of such compositions’. The title of his magnum opus itself proclaims it to be more than a compilation of representative works; it is ‘a Collection in Score of the Most Valuable Compositions for That Service’.

Crotch, however, seems to have had no such intention. His approach, in fact, is in many ways remarkably dispassionate, empirical and scientific, exhibiting the examples with a kind of museum-like detachment only as representatives of types that have historical value in tracing the progress of the art. To be sure, his work was later used for different purposes by others for whom the Specimens in fact were viewed as something like a collection of masterpieces. A concert review in the London Daily News for 24 May 1859, for example, lists Orlando Gibbons’ madrigal ‘The Silver Swan’ among the ‘rare and curious things’ performed at a recent concert of old music. At the end of the eighteenth century Gibbons’ work might have needed no further justification for public performance than its simple membership in the category ‘ancient music’. But by 1859 the developing concept of the musical masterpiece required more than age as a justification for performance of such a work, and the unidentified Daily News writer apparently felt the need to defend this esoterica by observing that the Gibbons’ madrigal ‘is included among Dr. Crotch's ‘Specimens’, a sufficient guarantee for its first-rate excellence’.Footnote ⁸

It is easy to see how Crotch's anthology could have been misinterpreted. Indeed, for anyone who seeks to understand the confusing British musical culture of the period immediately following the turn of the century, Crotch's original intentions in the Specimens stand out as a dramatic shift from the perspective of the ancient music movement out of which he had emerged as a wunderkind at the close of the eighteenth century; and such a sudden departure begs for some kind of explanation. One matter that needs attention is Crotch's turn in the direction of empiricism, most visibly reflected in his writing in a shift from an earlier tendency to explain musical phenomena in terms of broadly-conceived systems based on single principles in favour of a more subtle and detailed consideration of the specific mechanisms at work within individual pieces. William Weber has suggested that a characteristic British empiricism might be responsible for a transition within music literature to a focus on the particular work but the details of this process have not yet been studied.Footnote ⁹ In fact, such an empirical shift has also been proposed by art historians as an explanation for a turn toward naturalism in British landscape painting in particular, and Crotch, who was something of a polymath, played a role in this area as well as in music.

Just as important is the question of any ideological factors that might have helped shape Crotch's editorial choices. This is an issue of particular importance because ideology has been held up as the most important factor in the process by which repertories of venerable old music, performed out of custom and ritual, developed into a collection of masterpieces that cultivated people might at least be expected to know about. In particular, Crotch's Specimens may shed some light on the ability of the emerging canon to absorb so-called ‘modern’ works by composers like Haydn and Pleyel after the turn of the century, even though this same music had shortly before been viewed as inimical to the aesthetic goals of classical music.Footnote ¹⁰

One final reason for a closer look at the Specimens is the fact that both the work, and for that matter Crotch himself, had an authority in the nineteenth century that would be easy to underestimate today. The Specimens served as illustrations, performed on the piano by Crotch himself, in public lectures at the famous and socially elite Royal Institution in London's West End. Though the Royal Institution was only one of many venues at which Crotch lectured, and his tenure there early in the century was actually quite brief, one can find throughout the century reverential nods toward these particular lectures in both musical sources and the mass media. As late as 1872, fully a half century after the most prominent part of Crotch's lecturing career, the London Examiner remembers Crotch's lectures alongside those of chemist Humphry Davy as a high point in the Royal Institution's early history.Footnote ¹¹ That is saying quite a lot. Not only was Davy a legendary figure who continues to occupy a far more prominent place in the history of science than Crotch does in music, but in addition Davy's popular lectures tend to be treated as the very essence of the Royal Institution's early eminence and the origin of an ideology of science that came to define the institution. More practically, Davy's lectures saved the Royal Institution from financial ruin at a critical juncture in its history.Footnote ¹² The Specimens’ prominence is also underscored by the somewhat remarkable fact that the contents of the individual volumes are reverently listed in the first edition of Grove's Dictionary in 1883. They do not appear in the article on Crotch, however, but under the separate heading ‘Specimens, Crotch's’ by which this famous work had come to be known by generations of music students. For many, then, Crotch's Specimens may have done as much to define the canon as some modern-day critics of both canons and score anthologies would charge is true of the popular works of Fuller, Stolba, Bonds, Apel–Davidson or Palisca–Burkholder.Footnote ¹³

And yet, by the time George Grove listed the Specimens's contents in Grove's some of the works Crotch had immortalized almost eighty years before might have been treated in any other context as deservedly forgotten imitations of Haydn that were scarcely worth preserving much less canonizing. So powerful was Crotch's reputation in England that few – then and even possibly in more recent years – would have questioned his choices. The estimable A. Hyatt King remarks delicately of ‘Crotch's considerable erudition as shown in his three-volume anthology, Specimens of various Styles of Music referred to in a course of Lectures read at Oxford and London’, and allows only that Crotch's eclecticism ‘reveals an immense range of musical sympathies’.Footnote ¹⁴

‘Sympathies’, in this case, may not, however, be the correct word. The irony of Crotch's Specimens, in fact, is that Crotch makes no claim for the absolute quality of the works contained therein or even for their suitability for long-term preservation. At least one figure, Ignaz Pleyel, movements of whose string quartets grace the third volume of Crotch's Specimens,Footnote ¹⁵ had already come to be regarded with contempt in the circles of high art at time Crotch chose his works. As Crotch remarks in what may be an early lecture from before the year 1805, Pleyel's piano music,

As statements of this sort suggest, at this early stage in his career Crotch was a forceful advocate for the validity of canons in the arts and, to an extent that was rare in the generation immediately prior to his, an outspoken defender of the proposition that the superior judgment of the professional is needed to save misinformed amateurs from the seductive but superficial productions of the mediocre. His inclusion of lesser figures in his anthology, then, must have undermined considerably this central message of his early career.

We might also wonder what changed Crotch's mind about the ‘modern’ style that Pleyel represents, since earlier lectures given at Oxford suggest a more militant posture regarding this music than is true of Crotch's lectures in London after 1805. This is particularly true in connection with the music of Haydn, who tends to be treated in earlier lectures as the font of eccentricity for a generation of epigones. In an early lecture on Haydn's The Creation, Crotch's remarks betray an obvious partisan bias that was clearly detected by advocates of the so-called ‘modern’ style,Footnote ¹⁷ but he approached the same subject in 1817 with a decidedly different starting point:

What is most significant about this is the fact that Crotch bases his opinions primarily on first hand experiences of live performances. In the earlier treatment of the same subject mentioned above he is proud to announce that he is able to speak on the work based on having heard only a single chorus from it performed at the music room at Oxford and that his opinions are based on a careful study of the score.Footnote ¹⁹ In fact, the ancient music community tended to regard the printed score as the only unimpeachable version of a work and tended to view the effect of a work's live performance as irrelevant and even potentially a distraction. Crotch, by contrast, is anxious to demonstrate that he has heard The Creation in its entirety live and under real-world conditions, the score being relegated to the status of testing his potentially fallible impressions and as a backstop against possible bias.

In the end, Crotch's assessment of The Creation is recognizably similar in both lectures, but the later example's empiricism, its avoidance of provocative partisan rhetoric and its studied objectivity suggests a new way of looking at music. And since Crotch's Specimens is one of the earliest sources to reflect his new attitude of scientific tolerance and detachment, we will need to look for some transforming experience in London for an indication of what produced a radical shift in his thinking.

From its opening page, the Preface to Crotch's first volume of the Specimens begins to reveal his new philosophy, a philosophy that, compared to his contemporaries, embraces diversity, resists simplistic categories and tries to judge music on the basis of real-world perceptions rather than abstract theories. He claims as his main purpose for the anthology to ‘improve the taste, by introducing the performer to every kind of excellence’, and thereby ‘prevent his being bigoted to particular sorts of music, or particular masters’; this goal is listed even before the more obvious secondary purpose of giving ‘a practical history of the progress of the Science’. But another aspect of the Specimens that is at least as revealing as his new-found tolerance comes from his careful presentation of an aesthetic system that became the centrepiece of later lectures and was eventually incorporated into much of the period's discussions of music by others.

Crotch imagines all music to reflect a division that is common in the visual arts between the sublime, the beautiful and what he initially called the ornamental (later the ‘picturesque’) styles. This division, though not usually applied to music before Crotch and not so applied by him at this level of detail before 1805, is not in itself remarkable. Crotch's explication of the system, however, is. The sublime, he claims, ‘is produced by various and, seemingly, opposite causes’, of which he details four: ‘when a few simple notes are performed in unison or octaves by a variety of instruments or voices in the manner of the ancients’, ‘when the harmony is clear and simple, but the melody and measure dignified and marked’, ‘when the harmony and modulation are learned and mysterious [and] when the ear is unable to anticipate the transitions from chord to chord, and from key to key’ as long as ‘the melody and measure are grave’, and finally, ‘the sublime effect of a multitude of voices and instruments, performing different species of melody and rhythm at once, yet all conspiring in harmony’. To this detailed presentation Crotch adds a still more fine-grained aspect of the system, claiming that these styles ‘are rarely found in an unmixed state’ and giving examples of their mixture.Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, in lectures from this point forward Crotch painstakingly attempts to assess exactly how much of each style is present in a given example.

The ‘beautiful’ and ‘picturesque’ are described in equally elaborate detail. These curiously specific descriptions sound like the results of first-hand experience in the concert hall; in the lectures from which his descriptions of the three styles are presented, in fact, he reveals in greater detail the particular works on which these descriptions are based, works that one senses have affected him deeply. In general, Crotch's ideas are taken from well-worn aesthetic theory by Reynolds and Uvedale Price, but in this Preface he engages in a moment of complete originality, sifting through his own sensory impressions to identify the causes of the phenomena in which he is interested as carefully as a natural philosopher of the period might have described the separate elements of a chemistry experiment. The confidence Crotch exhibits in his ability to filter out any contamination of subjectivity that might interfere with objective truth is an important aspect of his new way of looking at music.

From a technical point of view, the most significant consequence of Crotch's new empirical way of looking at music is its acceptance of the concept of the mixing of his three styles. This acceptance is strikingly at odds with contemporary writing on the arts in general, which tends, at least before the early nineteenth century, to analyse art according to single transcendent principles and to minimize subjective reactions.Footnote ²¹ In his earlier writing Crotch embraced Reynolds’ obviously partisan binary division into a higher approach (the ‘sublime’) and a lower approach (the ‘ornamental’) and, like Reynolds, expressed strong reservations about the possibility of mixing the two approaches. Astonishingly, Crotch was even prepared in his work after 1805 to risk extending his subtle mixtures of musical styles into the domain of sacred music, rejecting simplistic categories that to others were aesthetic dogma and apparently inviting the aesthetic chaos of subjectivity. Thus, Crotch remarks of Der tod Jesu of Carl Heinrich Graun that ‘the movement Te gloriosus apostolorum’ is ‘a happy mixture of the 3 styles’ in that ‘the subject is beautiful, the full passages are sublime, and the instrumental accompaniments are ornamental’ and that ‘the whole is in a very high degree expressive of lively gratitude and holy rapture’Footnote ²². Concerning Handel's Coronation Anthem My Heart is Inditing, Crotch observes that in the first movement

In fact, when Crotch offers his final assessment of the relative value of various composers in this manuscript it is with the assertion that Handel's claim to greatness is based on his ability to offer subtle mixtures of the three styles rather than his success at any one of them, especially the politically and ideologically-significant sublime.

Crotch's success at sifting through his own reactions to these works is less important than the fact that his new empiricism mirrors a similar shift in the culture at large that has not been an area of general interest among cultural historians in music, but has been the focus of a substantial literature that applies to two fields that have an important bearing on Crotch's thinking: landscape painting and science or, as it was usually called, ‘natural philosophy’. Art historians are interested in a British turn toward empiricism in the early nineteenth century because it seems to explain a more naturalistic style of painting that can be seen in the works of figures like John Constable.Footnote ²⁴ This concerns Crotch, who, in addition to his work in music, is regarded as an important artist in this movement, because Constable and Crotch became well acquainted soon after Crotch settled in London in 1806, and the two maintained regular contact until at least 1812.Footnote ²⁵ Crotch, in fact, has been shown to have been a significant enough figure in landscape painting to have influenced Constable in important ways. In particular, Crotch is cited as the source through which the empirical emphasis and methods of John Malchair, drawing master at Oxford and central figure of a school of landscape artists there, were transferred to Constable.Footnote ²⁶

Many see a natural closeness between natural philosophy and the arts in the early nineteenth century that coincides not only with important changes in Constable's approach to landscape painting, but also with the point at which Crotch's perspective on music began to shift. This impression of connectedness between the arts and sciences is the product, first of all, of an era characterized by polymathy, in which many of the most prominent natural philosophers were also artists of some kind.Footnote ²⁷ But Charlotte Klonk has also shown that the methods of the two fields still had an essential similarity, since at this point the sciences still emphasized the disciplined observation of natural phenomena and had not yet fully progressed to a different way of working that favoured experiment and took place in the laboratory.Footnote ²⁸ Crotch himself found time in his busy teaching schedule not only to draw and paint and even to act in a production of Shakespeare's Henry V, Footnote ²⁹ but also to write several contributions to the Monthly Magazine that might qualify as natural philosophy, including articles on temperament, on an early pendulum-based method of recording tempo, on the shape of the earth and on the atmosphere of the moon. Even Crotch's older contemporary Charles Burney published An Essay towards a History of the Principal Comets that have Appeared since the Year 1742, and for that matter a detailed and scholarly account of Crotch as an infant prodigy.Footnote ³⁰

Constable observed in an often-quoted lecture at the Royal Institution that painting should be considered a science, though exactly what he meant by that remark has been controversial. Andrew Hemingway's highly respected study argues that Constable's remark is not ‘a statement of the need for a disinterested observation of natural phenomena’ but merely a commonplace observation concerning something that Crotch himself often said about music: that painting is scientific (much as music might also be considered scientific) in the sense that it is a teachable skill employing concrete principles and requiring theoretical knowledge.Footnote ³¹ Hemingway is reluctant to embrace a connection between art and science because ‘science’ in this context has a history of being associated with rejected Eurocentric notions of progress in the arts for which music, with a similar history of claims both for progress and the superiority of cultivated (‘scientific’) forms of the art, has not yet developed a comparable sensitivity. And yet, Constable's remarks in this case are consistent with his advocacy of a teaching method, passed to him from John Malchair by Crotch, that is both rational and grounded methodologically, in much the same way as contemporary natural philosophy, in the disinterested observation of nature. ‘What’, Constable asks in his first lecture at the Royal Institution in 1836, ‘are the most sublime productions of the pencil but selections of some of the forms of nature, and copies of a few of her evanescent effects; and this is the result, not of inspiration [i.e., the imagination], but of long and patient study [i.e., observation], under the direction of much good sense’. Constable concludes this lecture with the sentence to which Hemingway objects, observing that, ‘[p]ainting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?’.Footnote ³²

Klonk describes a fragile moment in the early nineteenth century in which arts and sciences alike adopted a disciplined approach to perception that, ‘attempts to capture reality faithfully, not as it is in itself, or in its underlying essence (if it has one) but as it appears’ so that ‘the role of the observer is consciously confined to being a screen for the way reality is given’.Footnote ³³ As many including Klonk herself have noted, this artificial way of viewing reality was necessarily short-lived and subjectivity inevitably soon transformed the act of perception. For the present purposes what is most important about Klonk's ‘phenomenalism’, as she calls it, is that for a brief period corresponding exactly with the publication of Crotch's Specimens the arts of music and painting were temporarily able to suspend value judgments and suppress the ideological responses that otherwise contaminated the observation of nature. Constable's biographer and friend Charles Leslie records, concerning Constable's own dispassionate approach to art, that, ‘To a lady who, looking at an engraving of a house, called it an ugly thing, [Constable] said ‘No madame, there is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, – light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful’.Footnote ³⁴

Did Crotch, then, practice a similarly disinterested observation of music in the Specimens, one that would be ‘scientific’ in the sense of being based on studied objectivity and disciplined perception but at the same time would avoid a value system in which ‘science’ is an essential indicator of musical progress and aesthetic worth? If so, the area of so-called ‘national music’ might be expected to offer the greatest challenge to his new objectivity. For an indication of what a ‘scientific’ musician of the period might have thought of this music, and an indication of the extent to which the traditional music of Scotland and Ireland in particular presented an ideological minefield that needed to be approached with caution, one need only look at the writings of Crotch's older contemporary Charles Burney.

Burney was usually more circumspect in his General History of Music than he was in reviews of literary works for the Monthly Review or Critical Review, in which he could remain anonymous. Still, he could openly observe in the General History that he did not wish ‘to speak here of those wild and irregular Melodies which come within the description of National Music; such as the old and rustic tunes of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland’, preferring instead confine himself to ‘real Music, arising from a complete scale under the guidance of such rules of art as successful cultivation has rendered respectable and worthy of imitation’.Footnote ³⁵ He was slightly more cautious writing directly to Joseph Cooper Walker, author of Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786). Here he complained that most of his audience cared ‘so little about the Theory, or history of what they call barbarous melodies’ that ‘whatever pains I might bestow on a work which [you] yourself may wish, & perhaps at most a hundred more curious enquirers’, there still would not be ‘a sufficient number of readers to defray the expence of printing’.Footnote ³⁶ In an anonymous review of Walker's Historical Memoirs, in the Monthly Review, however, Burney was much less charitable toward both Walker and the music his book considers. The book is said to be filled with ‘lame and scanty information’, and Walker's comparison of Irish music to the fabled music of antiquity is ridiculed with the observation that ‘the chief part of our Author's information seems wild, fabulous, and conjectural’ and ‘his knowledge of music [is] as small, as his credulity in Hibernian antiquities is great’.Footnote ³⁷

Crotch, however, found it necessary to devote fully one-third of his anthology to such music – admittedly concentrating on the practical aspects of the field more than its theory or history. He acknowledges in the concluding paragraph of the preface to the Specimens that ‘it may seem necessary to apologize for having dedicated so large a portion of the work to a subject hitherto considered of but little importance’, but argues instead for the value of national music. In fact, Crotch may be unique among the writers who discuss this music in his ability to view it as a matter of importance in itself with no connection to the philosophical, nationalistic or political ideologies that Margaret Dean-Smith has identified in the writing of Edward Jones and John Parry.Footnote ³⁸ Burney, by contrast, seems unable to deal with this music without at the same time taking a stand on a cultural issue that troubled him deeply: a strain of primitivism, found not only in writing on national music but in the writing on music of literary men in general, that is reflected in his ridicule of Walker's ‘fabled music of antiquity’. Burney tends to associate this mode of thinking with political liberalism and rarely passes up an opportunity in the pages of the Monthly Review to take aim at the ideas of figures like Walker or William Jackson of Exeter who seem to extol both musical simplicity and liberal thought.Footnote ³⁹ If Crotch, on the other hand, had no apparent prejudices against the popular advocates of national music, Dean-Smith also finds that he approached this music with an admittedly simplistic agenda but at the same time a remarkable freedom from the kinds of prejudices concerning both this music's ‘unscientific’ qualities and its oral transmission that one might expect from a nineteenth-century writer.Footnote ⁴⁰ The lectures upon which the Specimens were based reveal still more about his thinking on these issues than the very helpful Preface to the first volume of the anthology on which Dean-Smith relies.

Concerning oral tradition Crotch's sympathies, in line with a general tendency at this point in his career to value the perception of talented musicians and to distrust contributions on music by non-specialists, are very much with oral tradition as practised by skilled but not necessarily well-educated musicians of all traditions; he is deeply suspicious of printed scores of the kind that are discussed and occasionally reproduced in the popular works of enthusiastic but unskilled amateurs including Walker. Crotch observes:

Bunting, it should be noted, was a gifted professional who was hired to write down the tunes played at the famous Belfast Harp Festival of 1792. Crotch had a high regard for Bunting as a musician even though, significantly, he feels that ‘no musical characters [are] sufficiently delicate to convey the innumerable delicacies of performance’ of this music.Footnote ⁴² He in fact regrets that oral tradition is ‘nearly set aside’ since ‘from the unwarrantable & absurd alterations made by early editors there was reason to fear lest notation should defeat its own purpose’. This last observation assumes that notation's purpose is to preserve the music in its authentic state. Crotch believes that because of the wanton corruption of popular collections the ‘entire extinction [of national music] would have been a comparatively less evil’ if oral tradition could not have preserved it.

Burney, on the other hand, distrusts oral tradition at least as much as he fears the wilful corruption of melodies by arrangers. He advises Walker that he should ‘procure the most ancient & genuine copies that are extant of [Irish melodies] – as national melodies remaining so long traditional [i.e., unwritten] can hardly escape change & corruption’ to say nothing of what happens to them once they are published. As far as Burney was concerned, the ‘chief value and merit of these native effusions of a whole People consist in their simplicity & marked Character, by w^ch they differ so essentially from artificial & refined music’.Footnote ⁴³

It is significant that Crotch's tolerance of national music extends into the realm of the earliest ‘scientific’ music and that in important ways he makes no distinction between the two genres. Concerning organum, for example, Crotch takes issue with a common sentiment of ‘musicians [obviously Burney] unaccustomed to these pure strains, namely that they are not sublime but savage – not refined but dry & insipid – not the result of matured invention but of the penury & imperfection of the art in its infancy’. Crotch argues, on the contrary, that ‘music itself was not a new art – a new invention’ when science was added to it, since ‘the Sublime the Beautiful & the Ornamental styles were all pre-existing in National Music’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Burney objects to early polyphony because, in true eighteenth-century fashion, he thinks it violates immutable rules.Footnote ⁴⁵ Crotch, however, resists such an analysis based on a single principle and seeks a way to understand the music that takes perception into account. Thus, he allows that an example of organum at the fourth below in Guido's Micrologus is ‘contrary to rules of harmony because it had 5ths etc in parallel’ and admits that ‘this as I have performed it is disagreeable to modern Ears, and is indeed contrary to the rules of composition’ but adds that ‘if this accompaniment were played considerable softer than the plain chant the effect would be no more offensive than that of the stop called the twelfth on an organ which very much enriches the quality of its tone’.Footnote ⁴⁶

If Crotch's approach to national music reveals a certain freedom from value judgments and ideology, his treatment of ‘scientific’ music is less consistently successful at carrying out a programme of value-free scholarship. That is partly because this music has a very different purpose from the national music he studied with Malchair. Its purpose is one that Crotch associates with an evolving, mostly secular genre of concert music that seeks to entertain as well as edify. The demands of this genre inevitably conflict with Crotch's natural inclinations, and the conflict is most clearly visible in the ideologically charged area of sacred music that is intended for performance in church rather than the concert hall. On the one hand, Crotch seeks to protect sacred music from contamination by secular styles, his remarks quoted above concerning Graun's Der tod Jesu notwithstanding. Thus, the Luca Marenzio madrigal Dissi a l'amata mia lucida stella is offered as a regrettable instance of the adaptation of a madrigal to sacred uses, and William Byrd's Ne irascaris [Domine], adapted as Be not wroth by Aldrich and as Bow thine ear in Boyce's Cathedral Music vol.II, is offered as a better example of the adaptation of earlier material to English words.Footnote ⁴⁷ In fact, several works appear to have been included in the Specimens as much to make specific pedagogical points such as this that are readily apparent in the lectures for which they served as examples as to provide historical completeness.

For all of Crotch's protective instincts toward sacred music, however, the genre as a whole is significantly under-represented in the Specimens and some varieties are all but non-existent. The most conspicuous lacuna if the Specimens is to be conceived as a set of representative works is sacred polyphony of the Renaissance. Josquin and his generation are represented by a single work and Palestrina by only two brief examples.Footnote ⁴⁸ English sources fare little better. Even though Crotch remarks that ‘no choral composers of equal antiquity are superior to Tallis & Bird [sic], the fathers of our genuine & national sacred music, the pride of our country & honor of their profession,’ he still includes only one work of the former and two brief examples of the latter.Footnote ⁴⁹ This presumably reflects a value judgment found in one of Crotch's lectures (though this sentence was later crossed out and no similar observation can be found in any other lecture) that ‘the music of this age is so dry & void of melody that the performance of it would afford no amusement to my audience & it is only by comparison that their merit can be perceived’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Elsewhere Crotch complains that ‘in church music the melody and harmony are so uniform & similar that many professed admirers of this species of music are unable to perceive the difference between the works of Palestrina, Tallis, Purcell & Blow, or Croft & Kent’.Footnote ⁵¹ Much as Crotch might appreciate this music, then, it has no place in the secular concert world he envisions, for which the Specimens served as examples. This conception of music's appropriate purpose seems to trump any motivation on his part to offer the historical balance suggested in his Preface to Volume one or to promote the sacred music he venerates as music's most important contribution.

Further evidence of Crotch's new understanding of music's purposes is his substantial over-representation in the Specimens of Italian secular music, especially that of the seventeenth century. The 17 cantata movements and 21 Italian arias that make up a substantial part of volume two of the Specimens are identified by Crotch as being from the bequests to Christ Church of Dean Henry Aldrich and Richard Goodison; but the wealth of available material is not the only reason the works are included. Crotch was concerned enough about the appearance of favouring Italians over Germans in the strongly partisan environment of the early nineteenth century that he the felt the need to defend his concentration on this music in one of his lectures. He observes that his

Indeed, Crotch's list of ‘the finest classical authors’ is very heavily Italian and includes, ‘Palestrina, Carissimi, Aless^o Scarlatti, Stradella, & Cesti’ as well as ‘Durante, Pergolesi, Vinci, Corelli, Tartini, Leo, Purcell, Handel, Hasse, Jomelli, Sacchini, Galuppi, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Kozeluch, Sarti, Piccini, Cimarosa [and] Paisiello’.

German composers are not only under-represented in the Specimens, but Crotch's choices of works by Germans seem to be based on a particular agenda that would enable them to fit into his notion of what might be called ‘classical music’. This is especially noticeable in the way he treats composers who were currently popular or who at least enjoyed an enthusiastic even if in some cases limited following. He includes only one work by J.S. Bach, a fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier, and his choice might seem an unusual one: the E major Fugue from Book II.Footnote ⁵³ This is a remarkably bland example that indicates a particular way in which Crotch would like Bach to be received. In his lecture notes Crotch is surprisingly hard on Bach, asking rhetorically, ‘are his subjects always either grand or beautiful? Are they not sometimes eccentric & ornamental? Are not many of them singular & grotesque when performed upon any keyed instrument, & especially unfit for a voluntary in the course of Divine service if indeed they were intended for this purpose?’Footnote ⁵⁴ Crotch complains of the difficulty of performing Bach's music and says this is not a result of the excellence of music but is an affectation that appeals to ‘those who admire music in proportion to the difficulty of performing it’. Accordingly, the E major Fugue is one of the most susceptible to performance on the organ, and this quasi-sacred aspect of Bach seems to be the side of the composer Crotch would like to promote.

Similarly, with all of the symphonies of Haydn to draw upon, Crotch chose as his only complete example of a Haydn work in the Specimens the Symphony in E-flat, Hoboken I:74. This unexpected choice deliberately bypasses the very popular London symphonies and seems intended to cast Haydn as a classical figure rather than a popular icon. Crotch's lecture notes concerning Hoboken I:74 reinforce this view. He takes up this symphony in the context of a lecture comparing Haydn with Mozart that is clearly one of his later efforts, possibly prompted by Mozart's relatively sudden surge of popularity in the 1820s. The literature has not documented a decline in the prominence of Haydn that would parallel a corresponding increase in the performance of Mozart at this point in the century. This, however, is exactly what Crotch implies when he begins this part of his lecture by observing that he has no real hope that his remarks could ‘alter the generally received opinion of the comparative merits of these great masters’, but that he hopes to illustrate an opinion that ‘if not general is held by many of the most enthusiastic admirers of both these composers by some of the most experienced judges of modern instrumental music & of the warmest champions for the ornamental style’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The proposition he has in mind is that students who take the time to study both Mozart and Haydn he will prefer Haydn.

‘The superiority of [Haydn's] melody will in the first place be obvious, Crotch observes, adding that its ‘playfulness & variety will gratify & amuse his ear’. He continues,

In this case Crotch wants to stress Haydn's place as a master of the formal procedures of music – an attribute, he suggests, that is more often assigned to Mozart. But Crotch also wants to show that Haydn does this without, as he perceives it, Mozart's affectation: ‘[T]he several subjects are in themselves excellent & judiciously opposed to each other’, Crotch observes, ‘& the unostentatious manner in which they are successively presented in the former part of the movement is no less remarkable than the skill with which they are afterwards treated in the latter part of the same strain’. He summarizes by offering a statement that reverses some of his own earlier judgments of Haydn:

The various categories into which Crotch forces the music of different composers have the effect of allowing him to find value in music he would otherwise disparage, each work having some element of excellence even if the category it represents ranks low in his overall scheme. Thus, he finds it possible to praise the music of harpist J.B. Krumpholtz,Footnote ⁵⁷ observing that his works

Similarly, although Crotch complains about ‘the intricate mazes of chromatic melody, extraneous harmony & unconnected modulation w^ch so peculiarly characterise the style of the present day’ he also finds a way to approve of exactly this. He notes that ‘from their excessive wildness & incoherence [such passages] seem to convey an idea of insanity’ and are therefore ‘well made use of by monsieur Champigny in his overture to Don Quichotte (Specimens III:16) and it would have been well if such extravagances had always been confined to subjects so appropriate.’Footnote ⁵⁹

Sarah Fuller begins the Preface of her anthology The European Musical Heritage by announcing her goal of providing ‘a treasury of great music from the past and a guide to the formative millennium of Western musical culture’. An approach more representative of professional historians in the post-modern world might he that of Claude Palisca, who stresses the historical value of the works that fill the first edition Norton Anthology of Western Music and the utility of his selections as representative examples. Palisca, in fact, seems to argue for a very different value system than Fuller when he claims that his choices ‘mark important turning points and shifts of style, historical phenomena that are interesting if not always productive of great music’. Crotch, in theory if not always in practice, could be viewed as a progenitor of Palisca's approach and an important figure at the beginning of the professionalization of the arts. He is certainly not, however, entirely free from bias or ideology, and despite his carefully scientific attempts to eliminate subjectivity he still slants his anthology in ways that are designed to influence composers’ receptions in connection with a developing conception of a new kind of secular concert music. Crotch was without question an influential figure, but the extent to which he succeeded in promoting his new professional ideology in England is a matter that will require further investigation in the historiography of the later nineteenth century.