The twin arts of Music and Poetry, the “sphere-born harmonious sisters, voice and verse,” have met with curiously different fortunes in the history of this country. Our poetry has the most continuous, and except for Greece, the most famous record in Europe: apart from our dark century—and that not so dark but that it produced some of the best of our English ballads—the line of succession is virtually unbroken from Beowulf to the present day: there is no generation, there is almost no decade, in which Englishmen were not at the forefront of skill and invention. But our musical history contains a lamentable number of what Bacon calls the deserts and waste-places of time—indeed, it has one century of lavish fruitfulness, and for the rest has been until now a desert with a few infrequent oases. There was one lyric outburst in the thirteenth century, it was followed by silence for over a hundred years. John Dunstable was the first musician of his time: at his death the sceptre passed, not to his English imitators, but to his Flemish disciples. Then, no doubt, came our glorious period of Tudor and Elizabe than composers, the period at which English music and English poetry attained side by side to the heights of human achievement; but there was no musical Milton to follow that Elizabethan age, only a Dryden, and he short-lived and without successors. It is to no service to make excuse—to say that Handel was an English musician of German extraction or to complain that his brilliance reduced our native genius to darkness. German art was not obliterated by Haydn, or French by Lulli: they were strong enough to accept the foreigner's music and graft it into the parent-stock. We let Handel overshadow us like a beech tree, under whose spreading and magnificent foliage nothing prosperous can grow.
The Music of Spanish History to 1600-J. B. Trend, M.A.To the scholar wishing authoritative information covering a field which has been all too little explored, this book will come as an unalloyed delight. The characteristics of Muslim music, its effect-and its lack of effect-in shaping the characteristics style of Spanish music, and the literature of Muslim music, are cogently treated. A wealth of information that leaves no point vague, sixty-six musical examples, and a finely detailed index, combine to give this book a weight and largeness of value that are quite incommensurate with its modest size. Its type and form of printing are a delight to the eye and a help to the mind of the reader. The English Ayre-Peter Warlock.Like the preceding book, this is small but reviews with breadth and authoritative precision a special field of musical interest. The author puts the matter truly when he says, in his Introduction: "It is a remarkable thing that all the various other kinds of music that were flourishing in England at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries-the Mass, the Anglican service, the anthem, the madrigal, the instrumental fantasia, and the various dance forms-should have received attention at the hands of modern editors and historians before the accompanied song or ayre, the simplest of all musical forms then in vogue and the one most likely to win immediate popularity in another age." Adequately indeed, does he repair the deficiency l Following an interesting and informative Introduction are some eleven chapters or sections, together with a chronological table and "Bibliography of Modern Reprints of the Ayres." The chronological table parallels musical happenings with important events in world history. The chapters or sections treat in succession of the musical work, life, and historical environment of Dowland, John Danyel, Robert Jones, Captain Tobias Hume and many others, including Cavendish, Ford and Morley and less well known composers. Generous musical examples, facsimiles of pages from old prints and manuscripts, many quotations from letters of the FIVE NEW BOOKS FROM THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS The Music of Spanish History to 1600-J. B. Trend, M.A.
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