ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that there are parallels to be drawn between promotional opportunities and procedures in London of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the present day. In both periods, technological advances gave rise to new possibilities for communication. In the eighteenth century the musical scene was newly focused on the public concert, also a shifting social and cultural phenomenon, functioning in a milieu in which court patronage was virtually non-existent and private patronage rare. Public concerts, particularly benefits, were ideal as a supplementary source of income for the many musicians drawn to London. By the early years of the eighteenth century they were one of the mainstays of musical life in the metropolis. It has long been fashionable to attribute the rage for music in eighteenth-century England mainly to the aspirational ideals of a rising mercantile class, with their wealth and time for leisure, as well as to the growth of London.
