The term collegium musicum first came to prominence in the sixteenth century in Protestant German and Dutch-speaking university towns, where it denoted an organization of capable amateurs which met regularly to sing and play music privately – usually for their own enjoyment – in informal settings such as coffee houses, public gardens and large private houses. As such, these collegia were the cradles of a truly public concert life in continental Europe.
By the early eighteenth century these collegia were already evolving from largely amateur, university-based, music groups into semi-professional bodies that performed in public before a paying audience. Leipzig was home to two of the most celebrated of these public collegia, namely that established there in 1702 by Georg Phillip Telemann (1681-1767) and the one formed in 1708 by Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688-1758).
As the eighteenth century progressed, so amateurs increasingly retreated from the public concert platform in the face of audiences’ preference for fully professional concerts, and the term collegium musicum returned to its academic surroundings, where it came to describe a university music lecture.
During the early twentieth century, the original notion of collegium musicum was revived, particularly in Germany, as a result of an increasing scholarly interest in exploring historically informed performance practices. With the establishment throughout Europe of fascist and communist regimes before and after the Second World War, those escaping their persecution carried the term to the anglophone world. It is entirely fitting therefore, that when the émigré Hungarian conductor László Heltay founded a new London choir in 1972, he gave it the name Collegium Musicum of London – ensuring that the tradition lived on.
