| Abstract |
Originally published 1944 as musical articles from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Those articles, written from 1906 onwards for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia, and revised again, almost rewritten, for the fourteenth edition in 1929, were necessarily cast in the imposed form of treatises under word-headings. Yet they coalesce very firmly into a clear and coherent testament, almost into a text-book of the art of music in its widest meaning. Like the Glossary to the Essays in Musical Analysis, the entries are unconnected, the whole comprehensive, and while not attempting completeness, afford the reader a wider range of musical thought and a fuller discussion of technical problems than most of the exhaustive and laborious theses now available. Tovey himself set great store by these articles. They formed for him the basis of his teaching at the University of Edinburgh. They are the background to those fuller considerations of musical compositions which are his Essays in Musical Analysis. It was his own proposal that these articles should be gathered together into one volume, an idea expressed as long ago as 1926. Means were then taken towards the end of publishing, and it was agreed that Tovey should in his own time make any alterations or corrections necessary for the new method of presentation. This book contains all the articles which Tovey wrote for the VI Editorial Preface of Encyclopaedia Britannica, as they now appear there, with the exception of one on Modern Music and the biographies. The book was set up from printed slips, and thus follows the text finally approved and corrected by the author. The very long musical examples are printed in full. |
