Books in the Music Theory in Britain, 1500-1700: Critical Editions series

Elway Bevin''s A Briefe and Short Instruction of the Art of Musicke begins with rudimentary instruction on consonance, dissonance and proportions but quickly turns to a presentation of examples of plainsong-based canonic writing of increasing complexity and remarkable diversity. Bevin''s book was well known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was quoted or commented upon by Christopher Simpson, Henry Purcell, Charles Burney, John Hawkins and Augustus Kollmann. In the introduction to this modern edition of the work, the first edition to appear since the original was published in 1631, Denis Collins establishes the great importance of A Briefe and Short Instruction of the Art of Musicke in the history of canon. He assesses Bevin''s relationship to English theories of canon and to manuscript collections of plainsong canons from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and he proposes a typology for canonic processes and structures which is applied in the discussion of Bevin''s canons.

Comprises instruction on understanding notation and intervals, descriptions of common vocal ornaments and instruction in the process of learning to sing. This work also consists of a selection of psalms, songs and catches. These pieces provide insight into the way music might have been performed by amateur musicians in the Restoration period.

Regarded as one of the most important English music treatises in the 17th century, this work reveals progressive ideas about the latent theory of inversions, the fundamental bass, cadences and tonality, and the major-minor octave scale. The text is annotated, and has an introduction and appendix.

John Wallis (1616-1703), was one of the foremost British mathematicians of the seventeenth century, and is also remembered for his important writings on grammar and logic. An interest in music theory led him to produce translations into Latin of three ancient Greek texts - those of Ptolemy.

Thomas Ravenscroft is best-known as a composer of rounds owing to his three published collections: Pammelia and Deuteromelia (both 1609), and Melismata (1611), in addition to his harmonizations of the Whole Book of Psalmes (1621) and his original sacred works. A theorist, composer and editor, Ravenscroft wrote two treatises on music theory.

John Birchensha (c 1605-1681) is chiefly remembered for the impression that his theories about music made on the mathematicians, natural philosophers and virtuosi of the Royal Society in the 1660s and 1670s. This book allows scholars to see how Birchensha's rules and theories developed over a period of fifteen years.

Edited from a set of music lectures delivered by Taverner at Gresham College around 1611 (British Library. Sloane MS 2329).