The Early Music Legend

The Margot Leigh Milner Lecture 2010



Edward Breen
‘Do you feel somehow something that you began with Musica Reservata has somehow
been leapt upon by practically everyone else in sight?’ asked Tony Palmer in an interview
for LBC radio in the mid-1970s. ‘Well I suppose one can’t really say things like that,
[pause] but in fact I do!’ replied Michael Morrow.1 Did Tony Palmer or Michael Morrow


have David Munrow in mind during that exchange? If either of them were thinking of
Munrow it should not have come as a surprise because he was, at that time, the other
towering figure on the English Early Music scene. But does this candid exchange
accurately represent the situation between two of the BBC’s most prolific early music
specialists of the early 1970s? A quick glance through the concert programming of the
ensembles directed by these two men certainly suggests that Munrow was influenced by
his work as a performer in Musica Reservata, and this experience was heavily reflected in
his choice of…

https://www.youtube.com/Searle8


The following may of interest!


http://collections.vam.ac.uk/name/david-munrow/AUTH342361/




One of a series of seven letters, handwritten by David Munrow to his beloved teddy bears and toys while he was on holiday in Cornwall as a young boy in the 1950s. In these affectionate and newsy letters to bears ‘Humph, Ginge and Eddy,’ David paints an exciting picture of his holiday activities for the soft toys left behind in his Birmingham bedroom: ‘We have caught eight fish…we eat them for breakfast’; ‘I really ought to have written before but we have been so busy painting the boat’; ‘The other day I tried to reach a stick in the water and Plosh! In I went with all my clothes on’; ‘I hope you arn’t [sic] too lonely at home but we've only got another week down here’.
David Munrow’s intelligence, imagination and wit shine through. He adds a post script to many of the letters from a toy named ‘Poo’, which he writes in a different hand and with deliberately bad s…

The following is a link to the papers of Munrow's father who was a PE teacher who wanted to spread the word of the need for physical, and  mental health via exercise.


https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/5ea5e605-4201-3670-885f-fdfea47fec99













........The Old Gym is interesting not just for its architecture. Its construction in 1939-41 followed the Physical Training Act of 1937, promoted by the prime minister Neville Chamberlain as part of a drive to improve public health by integrating physical education into daily life. It was built under the supervision of Albert Davis Munrow, who was appointed Director of Physical Education by the university in 1939 and remained in post until he retired in 1970. This full time position was established to make physical education and instruction an integral part of the university curriculum; in the same year, physical education was made compulsory for all first year students......




The above is an extract from the following link
https://c20…

The short but brilliant life of David Munrow blazed a trail for his passion, says Ivan Hewett.

Maestro: in all, Munrow had command of 43 musical instruments Photo: G MacDomnic/Lebrecht Music & Arts/ By Ivan Hewett 6:05PM BST 23 May 2012/Telegraph The following as can be seen is an old article as the date indicates/ Blogger Ref  https://www.youtube.com/Searle8 For most of history, the territory of what people called music didn’t extend very far. It consisted, by and large, of the sounds and styles they grew up with. Anything else was a barbaric noise. Now, the territory seems endless. It stretches outwards to “ethnic” non-Western instruments and beyond them to electronic sound. And part of the reason we can stroll round this infinity with such insouciance is that a handful of explorers got there first. They mapped the territory, captured the sounds, and made them available to armchair explorers back home. One of these intrepid souls was David Munrow. His particular…

Blogger Ref   https://www.youtube.com/Searle8






The following is a pleasant, and wonderful presentation of some of the recorder work of David Munrow....








http://wwno.org/post/continuum-art-recorder-1

Wednesday, 11 February 2015
Genre: Education / Music/Source Curious British Telly
Channel: BBC2
Transmission: 17/05/1976 - 14/06/1976

Believe it or not, but there was actually a time when Curious British Telly's life wasn't consumed entirely by archive television.

It was merely a passion which would briefly manifest itself when we watched old episodes of Dr Who and tried to remember that children's tv show about the artistic dog.

You see, our obsession before this glorious folly was... MUSIC!

We'd attend gigs regularly, bought NME every single week for 9 years and even started a few fan sites on Geocities.

The passion for us, fuelled by our teenage desire to be hip and cool, gradually faded, but for the people involved in Ancestral Voices music was a way of life.

Melodies from the Past
With an amazing title that sounds like the greatest Led Zeppelin album never recorded, Ancestral Voices was the BBC's attempt to educate the masses about the history of music.

Sure, everyone lo…