Archive Item of Month – June 2021

New Musical Fund

The Royal Society of Musicians (RSM) was set up as an institution to help its Members and their dependents in moments of need. From its inception in 1738, the Society welcomed Members irrespective of their place of birth or faith and was therefore representative of the music profession in London of the eighteenth century; there were many Members from Italy, the German states and elsewhere, and many of them would have been of Catholic faith. Catholics were viewed with suspicion in Britain in this period before the Papists Act of 1778, which allowed them to own property, and before the influx of Catholics following the French Revolution. Female musicians, on the other hand, were excluded from joining the Society. In 1840, a time when Britain had a female monarch, the Royal Society of Female Musicians (RSFM) was founded; they amalgamated with the RSM in 1866, much to the benefit of the RSM as the RSFM’s funds over their twenty-six years of existence had hardly been used.

Ticket for performance in aid of the New Musical Fund, given at the King’s Theatre Music Room on 28 March 1811. Image courtesy of the Gerald Coke Handel Collection.

Despite such early diversity, the RSM excluded musicians who did not reside for at least part of a year in London, and those who had additional occupations. Edward Miller felt the RSM discriminated against “country musicians” and at the time of the 1784 Commemoration concerts, he called for a separate fund to be set up for those who lived entirely away from London. Through the lead of the music publisher George Smart (d. ca 1805) the New Musical Fund was set up on 16 April 1786, with similar aims of the RSM but with the additional aim to help musicians and their families outside of London. As with the RSM, the New Musical Fund relied on subscriptions from its Members, honorary subscriptions from wealthy supporters, and an annual benefit concert held in London which attracted the fashionable audience.

Alongside the Choral Fund and the RSM, the New Musical Fund shared in an equal split of the takings from the Royal Musical Festival held in Westminster Abbey in 1834. That Festival was delivered through the instigation and energy of Sir George Smart (1776-1867), the son of the NMF’s founder and the man who conducted their annual concerts from 1815 until the Fund was dissolved in 1842.