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Paying the Piper: Music in Pre-1642 Cheshire.

Article Excerpt
By Elizabeth Baldwin, with David Mills. (Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series, 29.) Kalamazoo, MI: The Medieval Institute/ Western Michigan University, 2002. [xii, 287 p. ISBN 1-58044-040-1. $30.] Maps, illustrations, bibliography, index.

Paid pipers and, to a much lesser extent, called tunes feature prominently in this focused contextual study of the musical life of a provincial English town and county before the civil wars. But the musical world illuminated here by Elizabeth Baldwin displays a striking variety that quickly disabuses the reader's expectations of an orderly world of client-patron contracts, or of consensus of conformity. In Baldwin's concluding words, "music and musicians had not one role but many, both positive and negative, in the country of Cheshire" (p. 186). Not all pipers were paid; many called their own tunes, and some played a decidedly disorderly role, even on occasions when they were specifically enjoined to desist from playing tout court.

Baldwin's history depends on the nature of the available sources, whose patchy survival and problematic interpretation are covered in her lucid discussion of contexts and sources in the introduction (pp. 1-13). Paying the Piper stems in large part from associated research on Chester (the county town of Cheshire) published in the series Records of Early English Drama (Lawrence M. Clopper, Chester [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979]), which has done so much to unearth information on music, drama, and...

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