The Oxford History of English Music Volume 1 From the Beginnings to c.1715 [Hardcover]

This first volume of a magisterial two-volume survey of English music charts its development from its beginnings to about 1715. It looks at the music of early monastic institutions and the development of polyphony, including the extraordinarily advanced mid-thirteenth-century canon, Sumeris icumen in. It deals with the first Golden Age of English music, namely the mid-fifteenth-century composers represented in the Old Hall Manuscript, such as Dunstable and Power. It looks at the remarkable flowering of sixteenth-century choral music, of which Tallis's 'Spem in Alium' is a splendid example. And it charts the rise of the carol, the madrigal, and the seventeenth-century opera and masque and instrumental music, culminating in the genius of Henry Purcell. A well-balanced, judicious survey, with a unity of style and outlook resulting from its single author, the book makes a discussion of the actual music the focus of each chapter, without excluding social and historical comment.

On the evidence of this volume...Caldwell has written the definitive work on British music. Indeed it is likely to remain so until well into the next millennium. --The Musical Times

The signal virtue of this book, over and above its scholarship, is that it never forgets that music is made by human beings for human beings....We wait with the liveliest expectancy for the second instalment of this munificent, music-loving book. --Times Literary Supplement

A truly impressive achievement of scholarly synthesis. --Choice