History of English Music

The British musicologist Henry Davey (1853-1929) was a noted scholar of the manuscript sources of Tudor music. He published the first edition of History of English Music in 1895 with the aim of providing his fellow-musicians with the first clear scholarly account of the full range of English musical achievements. His main focus is the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which he considered the heyday of English music, and he claims that the earliest known free instrumental compositions, as well as the polyphonic style, originated in England during the fifteenth century. In Davey’s view, these controversial findings were his most important contribution to general musical knowledge. His work was widely discussed in his own time, attracting both praise and aggressive criticism, and continues to be read with great critical interest today, not least because of its parallels with the socialist utopianism of Ruskin and Morris.