Donald Francis Tovey Born in 1 875, Donald Francis Tovey was a
British musicologist and composer. He took classical honors with
his B. A. at Ox ford in 1898, and became a pianist of the first
rank, though he never sought a virtuoso career. From 1914 to 1940
he was Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University. He died in
1 940. His other books include Normality and Freedom in Music, The
Main Stream of Music, A Musician Talks, Essays in Musical Analysis,
and Beethoven. ivx Meridian Books edition first published October
1956 First printing September 1956 Second printing June 1957 Third
printing July 1958 Fourth printing April 1959 Fifth printing
December 1959 Reprinted by arrangement with Oxford University Press
Originally published 1944 as Musical Articles from the
Encyclopaedia Britannica Library of Congress catalog card number
56-10015 Manufactured in the United States of America EDITORIAL
PREFACE THE desire to set down upon paper a comprehensive system of
musical education was present in the mind of Donald Tovey for the
greater part of his life. In 1896, when he was 21, he wrote in a
letter to a friend that he had begun a great work quot on the means
of Expression in Music quot If ever I finish the thing, into print
it shall go. Thirty years later, he was talking about a series of
four text-books on music. But into print neither the one scheme nor
the other went the final expression of his ideas on music was never
written. It never could be written, because it was never final in
the mind of that incessant discoverer in music. Nor was his method
of writing that of finality. The nearest point to finality which
Tovey ever reached in his expression of a formal philosophy in
music is tobe found in the articles on technique and aesthetics of
music as he called them himself in the list of his writings
supplied to Who s Who which he contributed to the Encyclopaedia
Britannica. Those articles, written from 1906 onwards for the
eleventh edition of the Ency clopaedia, 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 to me 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 correc tions necessary for the new
method of presentation. But many other fresh and no doubt more
important ideas and schemes came bubbling up into that wonderfully
fertile brain, and nothing was done about the book of musical
articles. I say more important because, though he was in life so
fully occupied, it has now been foundpossible to publish these
articles after the author s death. This book contains all the
articles which Tovey wrote for the VI EDITORIAL PREFACE
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...
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