The Mysterious Matthew Novell: An English Imitator of Corelli

Abstract

Matthew Novell has hitherto been one of the more obscure of the English musicians who wrote trio sonatas based largely on Corellian models in the years around 1700. His set of twelve sonatas, self-published in London in 1704 and reprinted in Amsterdam by Estienne Roger in 1705, is unusual for conforming to the ‘da camera’ rather than the ‘da chiesa’ type. Although their musical quality is modest, the sonatas contain several interesting features, including the use of the still-rare key of B major. Their debt to Corelli emerges clearly in the paired grouping by key of the sonatas, their movement types and titles, and in the appearance of several stylistic hallmarks such as the ‘Corelli clash’ and walking bass. New biographical investigation reveals Novell to have been an amateur player of the bass viol, who was probably born around 1678 into a geographically mobile family that in previous generations had included a prominent churchman and a leading physician. He was apprenticed in 1692 to a vintner, and appears to have plied the same trade until his death in 1728 in Oporto, where he had lived for many years. His intense but seemingly short-lived engagement with musical performance and composition typifies the world of English amateur musicians of his period and milieu.