Description

About the Book

Author has endeavored to provide a readable account of the entire history of the art of music, within the compass of a single small volume, and to treat the luxuriant and many-sided later development with the particularity proportionate to its importance, and the greater interest appertaining to it from its proximity to the times of the reader. The entire history of music is classified into five books, placing at the beginning of each book a general chapter defining the central idea and salient features of the step in development therein recounted. Primitive types of musical instruments and an artistic monody without real tonality has been discussed in the first book. The second book examines the apprentice period of modern music. The beginning of free expression in song, opera, oratorio and free instrumental music is described in the third book. The fourth book deals with the flowering time of modern music and the fifth book explains the 19th century romantic music and music of future. The student who will attentively peruse these chapters in succession will have in them a fairly complete account of the entire progress.

About the Author

W.S.B. Mathews (1837–1912), music educator, was born William Smythe Babcock Mathews in London, New Hampshire, the son of Samuel S. Mathews, a Methodist minister, and Elizabeth Stanton Babcock. Encouraged by his mother to study music, Mathews was largely self-educated, a fact that might account for his failure to obtain a permanent teaching position in a college or university. He was broadly educated, however, reading widely in philosophy as well as in music, and his own success in self-education may account for his efforts to establish procedures by which others could become self-educated.