ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the music used in David Starkey's acclaimed Monarchy series, which traces the history of English rulers from the Anglo-Saxon era to the present day. Alongside newly composed scores by Andy Price (Series 1 and 2) and David Sinclair (Series 3 and 4), Monarchy also uses numerous ‘period music’ extracts taken from readily available (but uncredited) commercial recordings of early music. The juxtaposition of these two different bodies of music in a genre where entertainment and ‘informing the viewer’ are typically assumed to be of equal importance to one another raises key questions about how we appreciate the past today, as well as how music contributes to that understanding.
