Purcell's Chamber Music

Extract

With the forthcoming publication of volume xxxi of Purcell's works, comprising his famous Fantazias and other Instrumental Music, the Purcell Society will at last have completed its edition of all his known chamber music. The Society's scores of the two printed sets of trio-sonatas were issued more than half a century ago, but, like most scholarly editions of the nineteenth century, they do not always accord with our current views of how such editions should be prepared and presented. Indeed, it seems to me that musical scholars would save themselves a great deal of mental anguish if they worked on the assumption that any publication or history of earlier music will at best hold good only for about thirty years after it is first published. This assumption is demonstrably true for the two centuries that have elapsed since Padre Martini wrote the first volume of his Storia della Musica, and I do not think any of us will live to see it change.