ABSTRACT
William Crotch's first detailed public acknowledgement of an ancient-modern rift after 1805 can be found in a lecture series begun in February of 1818 at one of the Royal Institution's several imitators, the Surrey Institution. Although Crotch's role as apologist for ancient music actually began at Oxford seven years earlier, it is appropriate to begin the examination of his lecturing career with his first appearance in London in 1805 and with an argument that erupted soon after between Crotch and his erstwhile mentor Charles Burney. Ancient-modern polarity surfaces only tangentially in the most important recent research into the phenomenon of ancient music and the development of a musical canon by William Weber. Moreover, Weber's conclusions minimize the possibility of a pervasive ancient-modern division and discourage Crotch's view that ancient music needs to be examined in binary opposition with the modern style to account for its role in the development of musical classics.
