Points of Interest Connected with the English School of the Sixteenth Century

Extract

It is hardly too much to say that the English School of Music has never yet received the attention to which its merits entitle it. That this should have been the case on the Continent cannot be thought strange, when we remember what obstacles the English Channel placed in the way of free intercourse and communication; but it does seem curious that the English themselves should have taken so little heed and paid so little attention to the past music of their own country. To some extent, no doubt, this phenomenon may be explained by the fact that the natural development of the art has been more than once rudely and forcibly interrupted in this country. We are told by the great antiquarian, Anthony à Wood (“Wood,” D. 19, 12, 9, Bodleian), that the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. inflicted the greatest injury on music, and the proscription of the art by the Puritans of the Commonwealth was probably even more mischievous. Not only were great quantities of musical compositions and books destroyed at these epochs, but, when the practice of the art was revived, it began on new lines, and few cared to look back on the works of a school with whose style and principles they were unfamiliar, whose ideas were expressed in notations that had become antiquated, and whose compositions were in most cases only to be found in the libraries of collectors. Still, even allowing for these unfavourable circumstances, it does seem strange that English musicians have, as a rule, taken so little heed of their forerunners, especially when it does not require much investigation to see that many of these forerunners were composers of the greatest talent and, in many cases, men of actual genius.