C. Hubert H. Parry (1848-1918), knighted in 1902 for his services to music, was a distinguished composer, conductor and musicologist. In the first of these roles he is best known for his settings of Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ and the coronation anthem ‘I was glad’. He was an enthusiastic teacher and proselytiser of music, believing strongly in its ability to widen and deepen the experience of Man. In this book published in 1893 (and later revised as The Evolution of the Art of Music, also reissued in this series), Parry examines the universal impulse to create musical sounds, traces the origins of music in ‘primitive’ societies using the research of contemporary anthropologists, and surveys the rise of western music from the ancient Greeks to the Victorian age.