Abell, John (i)(bAberdeenshire,1653;d?Cambridge,after 1716).Scottishcountertenor,composerandlutenist. The first occurrence of his name in official records is on 1 May 1679, when he was admitted extraordinary then in ordinary to the Chapel Royal. From the same time he is listed among the musicians of the Kings Private Musick as one of the lutes and voices and also as a violinist, though the latter post was probably a sinecure. Between 1679 and 1688 he received considerable sums of bounty money for undisclosed services to the king while travelling abroad. Evelyn recorded (27 January 1682):After supper came in the famous Trebble, Mr Abel, newly returnd fromItaly, & indeed I never heard a more excellent voice, one would have sworne it had been a Womans it was so high, & so well & skillfully managd.He graduated MusB at Cambridge in 1684. His marriage to Lady Frances Knollys on 29 December 1685 caused something of a scandal, and he left the country after the revolution in 1688, his sympathies being strongly Catholic. He had been a singer in James II's Catholic Chapel, and a Groom of the Queen's Privy Chamber. For the next ten years or so he was with the exiled court at Saint-Germain as Page of the Queen's Bedchamber (168997), but was allowed to travel widely on the Continent, visiting France, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries and Poland. There are many anecdotes referring to this period of his life. Hawkins quoted the following:Upon his arrival at Warsaw, the king having notice of it, sent for him to his court. Abell made some slight excuse to evade going, but upon being told that he had everything to fear from the kings resentment, he made an apology, and received a command to attend the king next day. Upon his arrival at the palace, he was seated in a chair in the middle of a spacious hall, and immediately drawn up to a great height; presently the king with his attendants appeared in a gallery opposite to him, and at the same instant a number of wild bears were turned in; the king bade him then choose whether he would sing or be let down among the bears: Abell chose the former, and declared afterwards that he never sang so well in his life.Towards the end of the century he hankered after a return to England (his wife had apparently already returned), but heavy debts there delayed him until he could be sure of his financial situation. After some bargaining with the Drury Lane Theatre, in the course of which he lowered his terms from 500 to 400 a year, he was back in London by January 1699. Congreve wrote on 10 December 1700:Abell is here: has a cold at present, and is always whimsicall, so that when he will sing or not upon the stage are things very disputable, but he certainly sings beyond all creatures upon earth, and I have heard him very often both abroad and since he came over.He immediately set about restoring his fortune by giving concerts. He took the title role in Daniel Purcell'sThe Judgment of Paris(1701) and performed in numerous musical entertainments in London and the provinces. He also set himself up as a teacher. His coronation song for Queen Anne (Aloud proclaim the cheerful sound) was performed and published in 1702; his masque-like entertainmentHark, Britain, harkwas given the following year (6 February) at St James's in honour of the queen's birthday (the score (GB-Ob) is attributed erroneously to John Eccles). Later that year he went to Ireland in the household of the Duke of Ormonde, but returned to London in 1704. Newspaper advertisements report concert tours in Britain as far afield as Scotland in 1705; later there are suggestions that he spent further periods on the Continent, though he was back in London by 1715. Mattheson stated that Abell possessed some secret that preserved the purity of his voice into old age. He published in LondonA Collection of Songs in English(1701), dedicated to the English Nobility and Gentry, and in the same yearA Collection of Songs in Several Languagesdedicated to the king, who had been so Gracious as to hear em both in Holland, and on my return Home. The pieces inA Choice Collection of Italian Ayres(1703) were sung to the Nobility and Gentry in the North of England; and at both Theatres in London. Roger of Amsterdam published a small collection ofAirs pour le concert de mecredy, le 12 decembre, au Doule, composes par Jean Abell Anglois(n.d.), presumably a memento of a concert Abell gave in Doullens on one of his continental tours (12 December was a Wednesday in 1694, 1705 and 1711).Abell is remembered principally as a singer, and is usually regarded as a countertenor; however, Evelyn called him a treble, and Jakob Greber in 1704 referred to him as a tenor (H. Samuel: A German Musician Comes to London in 1704,MT, cxxii, 1981, p.592). His range appears to have been from (written)gtod'', but at flat pitch this may have been as much as a tone lower by modern standards. His songs were influenced by the Italian style but are short-winded and hardly rise above the trivial.BIBLIOGRAPHYAshbeeR, i, ii, v, viiiBDABDECMHawkinsHSpinkEST.Brown:Letters from the Dead to the Living(London,1703)J.Mattheson:Der vollkommene Capellmeister(Hamburg,1739/R), 95H.G.Farmer:John Abell,HMYB, vii (1952), 44559E.S.de Beer, ed.:The Diary of John Evelyn(Oxford,1955)M.Tilmouth:A Calender of References to Music in Newspapers Published in London and the Provinces (16601719),RMARC, no.1 (1961), 1107A.Davidsson:John Abell den musikalske vagabonden: commentary toAirs pour le concert de Mercredy, le 12 Decembre, au Doule, av John Abell[facs.] (Norrkping,1967), 1016R.McGuinness:An Eighteenth-Century Entertainment,Soundings, iii (1973), 6684L.Merians:John Abell's Return to England,ML, lxvi (1985), 2414E.T.Corp:The Exiled Court of James II and James III: a Centre of Italian Music in France 16891712,JRMA, cxx (1995), 21631IAN SPINK