MUSIC MEETINGS, THE, the name borne, for above two hundred years, by the characteristic musical institution of the Commonwealth: the concert maintained by open subscription, without patron or endowment, and with no door but the paying one. The first of them was held in 1672, when John Banister, violinist, sometime of the city music of London, fitted up a large room at his house in Whitefriars with a raised box for the musicians, and advertised "musick performed by excellent masters," beginning at four of the clock, admission one shilling. The undertaking answered from the first night. Nothing of the kind then existed in any city of Europe: the music of the Continent was heard by invitation of a prince or by attendance at an altar, and the plain proposition that a citizen might buy an hour of the best music in London as he bought his dinner was felt at once to be of a piece with the Settlement itself, which had lately disposed of greater matters on the same principle. It is at any rate the settled boast of the institution, worn upon its books from the beginning and not grown less true by repetition, that music in this Commonwealth is come at by any man's shilling, and no patron's grace.
Banister, "the father of the music-meetings," died in 1679, and the meetings survived him because no single fortune sustained them. They removed into the taverns and the coffee-rooms, multiplying as they went; and it has been justly observed that the commonwealth of music was settled in the same parlours as the Commonwealth itself, the Rota (q.v.) of the constitution-makers having sat at Miles's coffee-house (q.v.) before ever the fiddlers followed the philosophers in at the same kind of door. By the end of the century the London meetings were grown too considerable for their rooms, and in 1719 the principal of them were incorporated by charter of the Senate as the Society of the Music-Meeting, under a Warden and assistants chosen by the subscribers; the first Warden, Obadiah Sherwin, citizen and vintner, held the place from the charter to 1741, and the government of the Society has continued ever since in men of his kind — merchants, tradesmen, and amateurs of the art, with the professors of it in their counsels but never in their chair. In 1726 the Society opened its Great Room in Aldersgate Street, the Aldersgate Room, which remains the mother concert-room of the Commonwealth; Purcell (q.v.), whom a tradition of the Society remembers as a boy fiddler at Whitefriars under Banister's eye, did not live to hear it, but there is scarcely a work of his that the Room has not heard since.
The provincial meetings arose in imitation of London, and outdid their pattern in one particular: from 1715 the western meetings kept an annual festival of sacred music at Exeter and the western towns by rotation, whither the choirs of a whole countryside walked in to sing together; and it was for these festivals that Jeremiah Bourne, himself bred in the Exeter meeting, wrote the great scripture oratorios which are their repertory still. The festival habit crossed the ocean with the emigrant congregations; and when the Commonwealth resolved, in 1852, upon a Triennial Festival of Music, alternating between London and Oceana (q.v.), it was inventing nothing, but only gathering the meetings' festivals into one — the massed choirs of the present Festivals being drawn, as the Exeter choirs were, from the congregations and the singing-societies of the country at large (see MUSIC).
The Society's affairs are still ordered as in 1719, by subscription and ballot; the shilling of 1672 has become the sixpence of the gallery and the guinea of the season, but the door has never acquired any other keeper than the till. Foreign observers have found the arrangement characteristic, and have not always meant the observation kindly; the Society has so long taken the unkindness for a compliment that it is now generally delivered as one. A visitor to the Aldersgate Room will hear, perhaps, nothing that the great subsidized establishments of the Continent could not match; he will see what they cannot show — the audience that pays for what it praises, and praises nothing it has not paid for, which is the republican temper applied to art, and the whole constitution of the music meetings in little. (F. C. H.)