The Early Music Legend

David Munrow, and the Early Music Consort did some work for The Tears of Night by Elizabeth Lutyens whose bio is below. Lutyens, (Agnes) Elizabeth (1906?1983) English composer. Her works, using the twelve-tone system, are expressive and tightly organized, and include chamber music, stage, and orchestral works. Her choral and vocal works include a setting of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus and a cantata The Tears of Night (1971). She also composed much film and incidental music. The youngest daughter of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, she married the BBC director of music Edward Clark. In a lecture at Dartington in the 1950s she coined the term ?cowpat music? to describe the work of those early 20th-century English composers who had turned to pictorial pastoralism in their music. Her works include the opera Infidelio (1956) and Fleur du silence for tenor and ensemble (1980). Her autobiography A Goldfish Bowl was published in 1973. She studied viola and com...

A Sagbutt, a Minnikin, and a Flemish Clackett was a short but unusual radio programme which took a Pythonesque "look" at early musical instruments. It is believed to have been written by David Cain, and I recall hearing it once, or twice a long while ago. Undoubtedly, Munrow would have heard it too. Here is an article in connection with this matter, and "related "topics... R.Searle Old before their time Independent, The (London) ,  Mar 3, 1995   by Bayan Northcott Late one evening, towards the end of the 1960s, the BBC Third Programme broadcast a mysterious little feature entitled - if memory serves - The Shagbutt, the Minikin and the Flemish Clackett.  These turned out to comprise a consort of exceedingly obsolete instruments from the 15th century. According to the announcer, the minikin had a keyboard action so slow that the performer - on this occasion, the redoubtable Tatiana Splod of the Schola Cantorum Neasdeniensis - was obliged to start playing f...