An idiosyncratic Victorian account of the musical traditions of the world and their influence on western classical composers.

J. A. Fuller Maitland (1856 1936), whose Schumann in the Novello 'Great Musicians' series is also reissued in this series, had a wide-ranging interest in music. He was music critic of The Times for 22 years, was the editor of the second edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, prepared an edition of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, and also worked on Purcell and on folk song. This book, published in 1894, surveys the then current state of German music, with essays on Brahms, Bruch, Goldmark and Rheinberger. Bruckner is mentioned as a 'Little Master', and Richard Strauss appears in...

Victor Schoelcher (1804 93) was a French writer chiefly remembered for his part in the fight for the abolition of slavery. In America on business in 1829 30, he was so appalled by the conditions he found that he became an abolitionist campaigner, concentrating his writings on conditions in the French Caribbean islands. He became President of the French commission for abolition and achieved his goal when in 1848 the French government abolished slavery in all its colonies. Schoelcher went into political exile for nearly twenty years after the coup d'etat of Louis Napoleon, and during this time...

The British musicologist Henry Davey (1853 1929) was a noted scholar of the manuscript sources of Tudor music. He published the first edition of History of English Music in 1895 with the aim of providing his fellow-musicians with the first clear scholarly account of the full range of English musical achievements. His main focus is the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which he considered the heyday of English music, and he claims that the earliest known free instrumental compositions, as well as the polyphonic style, originated in England during the fifteenth century. In Davey's...

Henry Charles Banister (1831 97) is best-remembered for Music, his textbook on harmony published in 1872 which ran through many editions during his life, and for his biography of the composer Sir George Macfarren. In his capacity as a professor at the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music, a teacher at the Royal Normal College for the Blind, and a member of the National Society of Professional Musicians, he gave many lectures and papers to widely varying audiences. Three of these form this volume, first published in 1887. The first, given to the National Society in 1887,...

Hugh Reginald Haweis (1838 1901) was a clergyman and writer. Published in 1884, this memoir deals with one of his great interests: music. He was a proficient violinist, and his musical writings included books on church bell-ringing, violins, and the best-selling Music and Morals (also reissued in this series), which had reached its sixteenth edition by his death. As curate of St James, Westmoreland Street, he used musical events as a way of turning an empty church into a fashionable one. He acted as music critic for Truth and the Pall Mall Gazette, in addition to lecturing and writing on...

First published by the house of Novello in 1853, and later reprinted, this was one of the earliest treatises to take a scientific as well as a practical approach to the discussion of music. Written before Wagner had begun work on Tristan, this work can be seen as a response to the growing interest from the amateur in the 'science' of music. Little is known about the author, Daniel Reeves, who declares that that 'the idea of music comprises both an art and a science: the art consisting in the power of performing; the science, in an acquaintance with the system on which the constituent sounds...

Adolf Bernhard Marx (1795 1866) was an influential music theorist, critic, composer and pedagogue. He believed that music should be part of everyone's general education and lobbied the Prussian government for a comprehensive national music-education scheme. This English translation by George Macirone of Marx's 1839 Allgemeine Musiklehre was published in 1854 as the first work in the series Novello's Library for the Diffusion of Musical Knowledge. The series, described by the publisher as 'a collection of standard treatises on the art of music written by the most esteemed English and foreign...

The writer, composer and organist Thomas Busby (1754 1838) is best remembered for his highly entertaining Concert Room and Orchestra Anecdotes (1825), which paints a vivid picture of musical life at the time. The son of a coach painter, Busby was originally articled to the composer Jonathan Battishill but found the experience unrewarding. His compositions (many now lost) include songs, theatre music, The Divine Harmonist, and the oratorios The Prophecy and Britannia. Throughout his working life he continued his extensive literary activities, musical and otherwise, contributing to journals...

Scholar and composer Emil Naumann (1827 88) studied with Mendelssohn, and his compositions reflect the style of his teacher. He published several works on musical aesthetics and history, of which Illustrierte Musikgeschichte, written between 1880 and 1885, is his best known. It went through many editions and this English translation, first published in 1888, was prepared by the composer, pianist and writer Ferdinand Praeger (1815 91). To rectify the work's marked neglect of English music, chapters were added by its editor, the eminent Victorian musician Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley (1825 89),...