These old fellows took down such instruments as they had, not as so many do now, because it was "the thing" to learn music, but because music had found them out for having a love of it, and of the pleasure derived from meeting in a homely circle of kindred spirits. Their instruments were often most dissimilar, but their spirit was one!
There was a good deal of free masonry and companionable relations existing between these old handlers of musical instruments, and as we hear them in imagination, rattling away round the old spirited fugues which had been carefully "picked out" with quill pen and ink into their old cheque-book shaped "tune books"; or, as we see the picturesque group, now with countenances beaming with delight over some well turned corner which brought up the rear, now mopping their brows with a bright red handkerchief, or touching up the old fiddle, after a smart finish, as a man pats a favourite horse, it is not difficult to discover how it was that here and there, and in many places, music took care of itself so well when other things were at a low ebb!
Saxhorn, trombone, flute, cornopean, clarionet, bassoon, fiddle, bass-viol, and others as various as the dress, trades, and characters of the individuals, made up the old chords of long ago; so well hit off by a writer (J. W. Riley) in the Century Magazine:—
I make no doubt yer new band now's a competenter band,
And plays their music more by note than what they play by hand,
And stylisher, and grander tunes; but somehow—any way
I want to hear the old band play!
These old players on instruments were nearly always found in the Church or Chapel Choirs. Thus in the early years of the century John Warren performed the double duty of bass-viol player and parish clerk at the Royston Church, and later on a rather full band of instruments led the service. A similar, but less organized state of things was found in some village Churches. It was the time when the wooden pitch-pipe was in its full glory. This was a square wooden implement, with a scale on one of its sides, upon which the leader blew the key-note, and then running up the octave with his voice—off they went to the tune of some old Calcutta, Cardiff, or other piece of arduous fugal work!
The disappearance of these old village choirs, in which the village blacksmith, the baker, the tailor, and other natives played on the clarionet, bass-viol, bassoon, flute, trombone, and all kinds of instruments, while other grown-up men took their "parts" in those wonderful old fugues that seemed to make the song of praise without end—the absence of all this means a certain loss of that passion for music which has never been thoroughly recovered!
We have many more players and singers now than in the past, but not, perhaps, the same proportion of lovers of music for its own sake.