The Weston Park Music Collection: Five Generations of Family Music-Making in Eighteenth-Century Staffordshire

The activities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music collectors help to chart the development of the period’s canon and understand the connections between consumers as amateur musicians and collectors and the composers and their music. In 2014, a collection of music came to light at the ancestral seat of the Earls of Bradford, Weston Park in Shropshire, which reveals a scenario of amateur music-making intrinsically linked to the wider professional scene. This collection has been largely ignored due to its unbound state in a private residence. It is of importance for its association with the five generations of the Bridgeman family, and for numerous manuscripts of previously unknown cello works; but crucially, the presence of four manuscript catalogues, a teacher’s bill for music, and an auction sale catalogue dating from the time, helps to fill in the gaps of what was being performed in the house, by whom, where, and when. This article describes seven sources connected with family music-making and presents a catalogue of the current music collection at Weston Park as supplementary material in the form of a data set in an Excel spreadsheet. Readers can consult the collection as it stands today and how it developed over 150 years.