City and seaport. It is located on the west coast of England, near the junction of the River Avon and River Frome. It was at the height of its prosperity, which was reflected in its musical life, in the mid-18th century. A festival of St Cecilia on 22 November 1727 included possibly the first performance of Handel’s music outside London. The ‘Utrecht’ Te Deum and Jubilate were performed in the cathedral, and a concert at St Augustine’s Back Theatre featured a number of other works by Handel. Simultaneously the ‘Gentlemen of the Musick Society’ assisted at a concert in Merchants’ Hall. After festivals in 1728 and 1730 the celebrations were replaced by annual benefit concerts, which ran until about 1760. The 1758 event included the first performance in England of Handel’s Messiah in any church apart from the chapel of the Foundling Hospital.
After the opening in 1756 of the Princes Street Rooms the popularity of the St Augustine’s Back Assembly waned. Among visiting musicians at the New Rooms were Charles and Samuel Wesley in the 1770s and the nine-year-old William Crotch in 1784. Regular concerts were given in the New Rooms until the opening of the New Assembly Room in Clifton in 1811. The Victoria Rooms, completed in 1842, staged various musical events including a recital by Jenny Lind in 1848. A triennial four-day festival conducted by Charles Hallé was inaugurated in 1873 after the opening in 1867 of the Colston Hall. The festival, which ran intermittently until 1912, featured lesser-known choral works such as Macfarren’s St John the Baptist (1873), which was specially written for the festival.
One of the earliest of Bristol’s many amateur musical groups is the Bristol Madrigal Society, founded in 1837 and initially directed by John Davies Corfe, and now known as the Bristol Chamber Choir. Other groups include the Bristol Choral Society, founded by George Riseley in 1889, and the Bristol Bach Choir, founded by Alan Farnill and Adrian Beaumont in 1967.
Music has flourished in the two cathedrals at Bristol. The first organ at the Anglican cathedral was built in 1685 by Renatus Harris, who spent his last years in the city, and was rebuilt by Mander in 1989. Organists at the cathedral in the 20th century have included Hubert Hunt (1901–45), Alwyn Surplice (1946–9) and Malcolm Archer (1983–9). The Roman Catholic cathedral in Clifton (consecrated in 1973) has established an active role in Bristol’s musical life under the leadership of David Ogden, director of music from 1990. St Mary Redcliffe, reportedly commended by Elizabeth I in 1574 as ‘the fairest, the goodliest and the most famous Parish Church in England’, also has a strong musical tradition. Its organ was built in 1912 by Harrison & Harrison, the firm who built the organ at the Colston Hall in 1956.
After being destoyed again by fire in 1945 the Colston Hall was reopened in 1951 with a seating capacity of 2180. Much praised for its acoustics, it is visited by many international ensembles and has had a long association with the Bournemouth SO. Other concert venues include the Arnolfini, where contemporary music performances are held, and St George’s, Brandon Hill, a 19th-century chapel renovated and equipped for recording by the BBC. The Bristol Hippodrome, built in 1912, has been host to many touring productions of musicals and in particular has featured performances by the WNO and the Birmingham Royal Ballet. The Bristol Old Vic Company, performing at the Bristol Theatre Royal, was the originator of the highly successful musical Salad Days in 1954, which was tailored to the resources of the repertory company and had music by the company musical director, Julian Slade. Salad Days transferred to London for a run of over five years and remains the only piece originated by the Bristol Old Vic Company to have maintained a prominent place in the repertory, although Slade’s Trelawny, written as the opening show of the redeveloped Theatre Royal in 1972, did transfer to London for a brief spell in the summer of that year. The most notable other musical first seen at the Bristol Theatre Royal is The Card, by Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent, which opened in Bristol in June and in London in July, 1973; the show is one of the earlier ventures of Cameron Mackintosh, who acted as co-manager. The university music department, founded in 1946, moved in 1996 to the Victoria Rooms, where the facilities include a concert hall and a recital room that contains a fine example of a William Drake chamber organ. The city has a specialist music library.
In popular music, Bristol came to prominence in the early 1990s with the emergence from the city’s influential and innovative dance music scene of such artists as Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky, whose collective sound came to be known as Trip hop. The music of the drum ’n’ bass artist Roni Size is an example of the vital black contribution to the ‘Bristol sound’.
J.G. Hooper: A Survey of Music in Bristol with Special Reference to the Eighteenth Century (diss., U. of Bristol, 1963)
H. Byard: The Bristol Madrigal Society (Bristol, 1966)
W.L. Goodman: ‘Musical Instruments and their Makers in Bristol Apprentice Register, 1536–1643’, GSJ, xxvii (1974), 9–14
BETTY MATTHEWS, IAN STEPHENS, JILL TUCKER, JOHN SNELSON