Produced by Simon Gardner, Brian Foley and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) Transcriber's Notes Inconsistent spellings and hyphenations have been retained as they appear in the original. With the exception of minor changes to format or punctuation, any changes to the text have been listed at the end of the book. In this Plain Text version of the e-book, the ASCII character set only has been used. For other symbols the followingsubstitutions have been used: [AE], [ae] for ae-ligature ['a] for a with acute accent [^a] for a with circumflex accent [c,] for c with cedilla ['E], ['e] for e with acute accent [e'] for e with grave accent [L] for pound (sterling) [~n] for n with tilde [:u] for u with umlaut [vr] for r with hacheck. Conventions used to represent the original text are as follows: Italic typeface is indicated by _underscores_. Small caps typeface is represented by UPPER CASE. Superscript typeface is represented by a preceding caret (^). Footnotes are numbered in sequence throughout the book and presented at the end of each Chapter. * * * * * [Illustration: HENRY PURCELL. _Frontispiece._] A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH MUSIC BY ERNEST FORD F.R.A.M ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK M^cBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY 1912 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PREFACE This book is not, in any sense, technical. It is an attempt to give a simple and rational, though in a volume of this size, necessarily incomplete, account of events that have led to the complex state of music existing in England at the present time. Should it offer nothing to the musician or historian, I hope it will be found of interest to the general reader. The desire to make each chapter as complete, on the subject with which it deals, as space would permit, has necessitated a certain amount of repetition, but I trust that the object will condone the fault. THE AUTHOR. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. MUSIC BEFORE AND DURING THE REFORMATION 1 II. MUSIC BEFORE AND DURING THE REFORMATION--(_continued_) 20 III. EARLY ENGLISH COMPOSERS 47 IV. THE DECLINE OF ENGLISH MUSIC 67 V. MUSICAL EDUCATION IN ENGLAND 93 VI. PROGRESS OF ORCHESTRAL MUSIC 125