Often when programme note writers, broadcasters, players etc. introduce ‘unknown’ or ‘rediscovered’ music to an audience they go through great pains to say how it is the product of neglected genius etc. This almost always leads to disappointment. Similar lines are sometimes used when introducing premieres by contemporary composers. I like to listen to this music because it is new and different, not because it is Great (it almost never is).

Not merely does obscure historic repertoire help us to appreciate the really first rate music from the period, it also reminds us — importantly — that something else existed. There is no music quite like Reicha’s fugues. Or consider Malipiero or Sauguet: they’re not the absolute best examples of twentieth-century music, but they are certainly interesting, and ought to improve the musical and historical imagination of anyone who hears their music. And what about the music of the Second Spanish Republic? Very little — if any — of it is Great music. But it is novel and exciting and moving — and seldom played, for reasons cultural and political as well as musical.

For some reason we find it easier to enjoy music that is less than first-rate, or even rather plain, the longer ago it was written. An anonymous Elizabethan galliard has an immediate appeal. We can enjoy songs and dances from that time without getting that hung up about how Great they are. Yet we seem less able to do this as we transport ourselves forward in time. We are more suspicious of a nineteenth-century middlebrow bonbon. Why? Perhaps because, with social discomfort, we think of such a bonbon as bourgeois, while the English galliard is either courtly or rustic.

Here is an excellent example of an anonymous nineneenth-century song, made even better thanks to Grace Davidson’s overwhelmingly beautiful voice: