ABSTRACT
In the context of Georgian England, one might be forgiven for assuming that Wiltshire, with its thriving agricultural economy and notorious ‘rotten boroughs’, would have little to offer the study of music in society. Yet its situation, between the great cultural cities of Salisbury to the south, and Bath to the west, was one of several factors that rescued it from its otherwise lowly status as an inconsequential rural backwater. Based on extensive archival and fieldwork investigations, this chapter offers a documentary profile of musical activities in the area, encompassing the music composed and directed by a former chorister of Salisbury Cathedral at the Parish Church of the market town of Chippenham; widely differing attitudes to church music among the clergy of nearby villages; thriving instrumental and vocal music at Lamb’s Acre, the Moravian settlement at East Tytherton; and further south, aristocratic patronage from the Lansdowne family at Bowood; the philanthropy of the Flower family at Potterne, whose colonial activities made possible the gift of an organ to the church, and an endowment for an organist’s salary.
