Clive: The Man Who Continues to have Just Woken Up

Abstract

Abstract At the age of 46 yr Clive was an outstanding musician, a gifted musical scholar, and one of the world’s leading authorities on Renaissance music. Wilson and Wearing (1995) describe the enthusiastic and exhaustive manner in which Clive would conduct his research, the excitement he obtained from his musical studies, and the manner in which he was able to pass on this excitement to others. Historians of music agreed that Clive’s concerts of early music were researched in the minutest detail and were considered to be the “next best thing to going back in time.” For example, Clive would investigate all aspects of the original performance, including local pronunciation, the manner in which voices carried in the concert room, and the tones of voice used by singers. With the aid of dictionaries and tracts he translated whatever he required, from medieval church Latin as prOnounced in Renaissance Bavaria to sixteenth century Neapolitan dialect. For his part in the British Broadcasting Company’s wedding day celebration of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, Clive chose to reconstruct the 1568 wedding of Duke Wilhelm of Bavaria: he unearthed the original music, translated a contemporary account of its performance, and edited the original score.