Death Anniversary: Charles Avison — May 10, 1770

He died in Newcastle upon Tyne on 10 May 1770 and was buried at St Andrew’s churchyard. Baptized in February 1709, he studied in London under Francesco Geminiani before serving as organist of St Nicholas’s Church in Newcastle for thirty-five years; his landmark 1744 orchestral concertos based on Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas and his seminal 1752 Essay on Musical Expression established him as a premier figure of the English musical Enlightenment.

A note on this date. The exact day of birth is unrecorded in Newcastle parish records (baptized February 1709); we celebrate his verified death anniversary on 10 May. We publish it with the warning rather than leave the page out, and if you can point us to a register or an archive that carries it we will confirm or correct it.

Dates verified on Roz Southey, Commercial-Music Production in Eighteenth-Century Newcastle: The Activities of Charles Avison, Boydell Press, 2006; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, entry "Avison, Charles" (https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/924).