Sir John Hawkins (1719 1789), lawyer, friend of Samuel Johnson and member of the Academy of Ancient Music, published his pioneering five-volume history in 1776 just after the first volume of Burney's. Hawkins' work suffered badly in the resulting competition between the two, partly because of his difficult personality, partly because of the scholarly style of the writing contrasting with Burney's more engaging approach. However, it is Hawkins' accuracy and attention to detail, his appreciation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music and his account of London music society in the early...

Sir John Hawkins (1719 1789), lawyer, friend of Samuel Johnson and member of the Academy of Ancient Music, published his pioneering five-volume history in 1776 just after the first volume of Burney's. Hawkins' work suffered badly in the resulting competition between the two, partly because of his difficult personality, partly because of the scholarly style of the writing contrasting with Burney's more engaging approach. However, it is Hawkins' accuracy and attention to detail, his appreciation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music and his account of London music society in the early...

Sir John Hawkins (1719 1789), lawyer, friend of Samuel Johnson and member of the Academy of Ancient Music, published his pioneering five-volume history in 1776 just after the first volume of Burney's. Hawkins' work suffered badly in the resulting competition between the two, partly because of his difficult personality, partly because of the scholarly style of the writing contrasting with Burney's more engaging approach. However, it is Hawkins' accuracy and attention to detail, his appreciation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music and his account of London music society in the early...

Sir John Hawkins (1719 1789), lawyer, friend of Samuel Johnson and member of the Academy of Ancient Music, published his pioneering five-volume history in 1776 just after the first volume of Burney's. Hawkins' work suffered badly in the resulting competition between the two, partly because of his difficult personality, partly because of the scholarly style of the writing contrasting with Burney's more engaging approach. However, it is Hawkins' accuracy and attention to detail, his appreciation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music and his account of London music society in the early...

Sir John Hawkins (1719 1789), lawyer, friend of Samuel Johnson and member of the Academy of Ancient Music, published his pioneering five-volume history in 1776 just after the first volume of Burney's. Hawkins' work suffered badly in the resulting competition between the two, partly because of his difficult personality, partly because of the scholarly style of the writing contrasting with Burney's more engaging approach. However, it is Hawkins' accuracy and attention to detail, his appreciation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music and his account of London music society in the early...

Sir Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley (1825 1889), English church musician, composer, Professor of Music at Oxford and Precentor of Hereford Cathedral, is best remembered for the foundation of St Michael's College, Tenbury, and its extensive music library in 1856. Here he was concerned to maintain the tradition of sung daily offices and to provide a model for others to follow. This book, first published in 1868, is the first of Ouseley's three works on music theory, and offers a structured approach to the subject, beginning with an explanation of musical notation and the harmonic series, then...

Alfred Day (1810 49) first published this controversial work in 1845 to substantial negative criticism. He was encouraged in his enterprise by the composer George Alexander Macfarren (1813 87) who remained a staunch supporter of Day's theories. The work begins with an introduction to Day's new approach to the figured bass and then moves on to set out his concept of diatonic (or strict) harmony and chromatic (or free) harmony. Each is discussed in depth, with sections devoted to common chords and their inversions, discords, pedals and modulation together with a large number of musical...

Edmund Gurney (1847 88) is today best known for his work on psychical research, but from a young age he harboured the ambition to be a composer and performer. Frustrated in this aim, he began writing on the philosophy and psychology of music. This work of 1880 was an attempt to apply a strictly scientific method of enquiry to music, and it is regarded as one of the most important and original treatises from the nineteenth century on musical aesthetics. Gurney discusses the sensations of pleasure and pain in relation to the senses, and goes on to examine how the listener differentiates between...

The English cleric and writer H. R. Haweis (1838 1901) considers the philosophical side of music and how it is connected with emotions and morals in this 1871 publication. Containing an interesting mixture of musical philosophy and facts, the book is divided into four sections Philosophical, Biographical, Instrumental and Critical each of which comprises a series of short entries or essays on a wide range of subjects. Haweis provides informative biographies of a number of great composers, including Handel, Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn, together with analysis of some of their...

The physics of music has fascinated scholars and scientists since ancient times, from Pythagoras' concept of celestial harmony, to the work of Galileo, Mersenne, Euler and Ohm, culminating in the nineteenth century in Helmholtz's definitive work, On the Sensations of Tone. Daniel Chandler Hewitt (1789 1869) was a piano maker who also devised improvements to the seraphine (a form of reed organ). This idiosyncratic work, first published in 1864, only a year after Helmholtz's German text (also reissued in this series in the 1875 English translation), discusses the mathematics of musical...