Anthony Lewis (musician)

Sir Anthony Carey Lewis CBE (2 March 1915 – 5 June 1983) was an English musicologist, conductor, composer, and music educator.

He co-founded and served as the first chief editor of Musica Britannica, producing scholarly editions of British music hitherto unavailable.

[1] There was a military tradition on both sides of the family, which the young Lewis did not follow: his musical talent became clear from his early years and he was sent to Salisbury Cathedral choir school, and at the age of eight he became a chorister at St George's Chapel, Windsor.

[1] At the age of 13 Lewis attended the Royal Academy of Music (RAM), London, studying composition with William Alwyn.

The Times commented, "its famously high musical standards were substantially due to Lewis's combination of scholarly curiosity and painstaking efficiency".

[2] In 1947, at the age of 32, Lewis joined the faculty of the University of Birmingham as Peyton and Barber Professor of Music, a post he held for 21 years.

[5] The Musical Times praised his pioneering recordings of little-known works such as Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine and Purcell's The Fairy-Queen and King Arthur, which the magazine considered set new standards.

But we cannot expect English music to be seen in its true perspective or granted its rightful status if we allow the present enormous gaps in modern printed editions to persist.

His biographer Michael Pope observes that the balance between academic and artistic work that characterised Lewis's life was now tilted away from pure scholarship: "for the next fourteen years he presided over many important developments in an institution where the emphasis was on performance and composition.

In his honour the RAM established the Sir Anthony Lewis memorial prize for student performers using the repertory of Musica Britannica.

For them and others he conducted recordings of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and The Fairy-Queen, Blow's Venus and Adonis, Handel's Semele, Sosarme, Monteverdi's Vespers, Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie, and several sets of operatic excerpts and orchestral and choral music of the 17th- and 18th-centuries.