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Chelys 7 (1977), article 2
[24]
Richard Mico
JOHN BENNETT AND PAMELA WILLETTS
Introductory
Richard Mico is one of the most elusive figures of the golden age of English
music. Both Christopher Simpson (Compendium of Practical Music, 1665) and
Roger North (Memoires of Musick, 1728) named him alongside leading consort
composers like Alfonso Ferrabosco, Coperario and Jenkins. Mico’s surviving
works support their judgement; and although he published nothing, the
distribution of manuscripts of his consort music shows that it circulated quite
widely. Yet his life has been forgotten; even his dates. Our ignorance was
acknowledged in Professor Robert Donington’s article on Mico in the 1954
edition of Grove. 1
Oblivion set in early. Simpson tells us nothing about Mico except that he was
dead before 1665, 2 and Mace (Musick’s Monument, 1676) nothing at all. Mico
is nowhere mentioned by that viol-playing antiquary Anthony Wood (1632-95),
either in the passages about music in his own Life and Times 3 or in his
manuscript biographies of English musicians. 4 Roger North, who in youth had
sat at Jenkins’s feet, apparently knew nothing more than Mico’s name, and
speaks of his works as lost in ‘the oblivion that is come over all’, although
some might still be found in ‘gentlemen’s old collections’. 5
Interest in Mico’s music is reviving. An example of his four-part
compositions, edited by Trevor Jones, was published in 1976 as a supplement
to Early Music. In 1977 came the publication of Mico’s five-part works, edited
by Richard Nicholson, in the English Consort Series. It may interest both
musicians and social historians to have some account of an English composer’s
life during the troubled seventeenth century.
The present article is based mainly on original research into contemporary
manuscript sources. Facilities given in the Public Record Office, London, the
Essex and Somerset Record Offices, the Westminster City Archives, the
Bodleian Library, Oxford, the Royal College of Music, and the archives of the
English Province of the [25] Society of Jesus are gratefully acknowledged. The
1 Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 5/1954), v, p. 742.
2 Christopher Simpson: A Compendium of Practical Msuic (reprinted from 1667 edition,
Oxfrod, 1970), p. 78.
3 A. Clark ed.: The Life and Times of Anthony Wood … described by himself (Oxford, 1891),
passim, especially I, p. 204-6 and 273-5.
4 Ob MS Wood D.(19)4.
5 Roger North: Memoires of Musick (printed from original MS., ed. E. F. Rimbault, London,
1846), p. 83-84.