Religious Music

Extract

The words ‘musicology,’ ‘musicologist,’ and the like will not be found in English dictionaries—sufficient evidence that we lack the science which the words connote.

Since Burney’s day, English musical history has been either a safe following of ‘recognised authorities’ or a self-conscious appraisement of national achievements—plagiarism or parochialism, to be perfectly frank. But the ‘authorities’ have usually been a generation or two out of date, and our national achievements have been too rarely measured with those of other countries; hence our defective sense of proportion and our un-catholic (in the literal sense) outlook.

It is, therefore, refreshing to take up a book embodying the latest research, written by a Frenchman who is also a musicologist, and there to find ordered and logical arrangement as distinct from our own haphazard or individualistic methods, together with a Frenchman’s cultural breadth as distinct from our own musical nationalism.