IX. MATTHEW LOCKE
1630 (?)—1677
A prominent personage in the seventeenth-century musical world was Matthew Locke. The exact date of his birth is not known, but it was approximately 1630. Matthew Locke laid the foundation of his art as a chorister in an English Cathedral, and at Exeter there is evidence that he occupied that position in 1638. The evidence cannot be disputed, as it is graven in the very fabric of the old Cathedral. The embryo musician took the trouble, upon two occasions, to inscribe his name upon the walls of the Cathedral, together with the dates. Upon the inner side of the old organ screen runs the legend "Matthew Lock, 1638," and in a more abbreviated form at a later date "M. L., 1641." As a boy he seems to have been content with a name of four letters Lock; in his later years he always attached a final "e" to his patronymic. At Exeter he had the advantage of being trained by Edward Gibbons, brother of the great Orlando, and, in addition to Gibbons' share in his training, he owed much to William Wake, Organist, for whom he wrote one of his first published works.
The period following Locke's later inscription—1641—was one not calculated to encourage or foster the art of music; the country was in a state of civil war, the soldiers of Cromwell wrought sad havoc in the Cathedrals, and the musical portions of those establishments came in for no small share of their destroying wrath.
At Westminster Abbey we are told "the soldiers brake down the organs for pots of ale," and the Cathedral at which Locke served his pupilage fared very badly at the hands of the Roundheads.
It is natural, then, that during the stormy times which marked that period we have little intelligence concerning the doings of Locke. We have the dates of some of his compositions, one as early as 1651. The chief interest, however, which attaches to his work between 1650 and 1660 is that it is so much connected with the stage, and in that way marks the progress towards the Opera, of the English form of which Locke is sometimes credited with being the originator. As instances of this kind of work we might, perhaps, draw attention to his association with Christopher Gibbons in Shirley's Masque Cupid and Death (1653), and the music he wrote in 1656 for Davenant's Siege of Rhodes, in the production of which he himself shared—playing the part of the Admiral. Henry Lawes wrote some of the music of this Opera, and Purcell's father was one of the actors.
The next item of importance that we have concerning him is in the Diary of Samuel Pepys; there, under date February 21st, 1659/60, we read:
"After dinner I back to Westminster Hall. Here met with Mr. Lock and Pursell, Master of Musique, and with them to the Coffee House, into a room next the Water by ourselves. Here we had a variety of brave Italian and Spanish Songs, and a Canon of eight voices which Mr. Locke had lately made on these words 'Domine Salvum fac Regem,' an admirable thing."