An Early Music Dictionary

This book is a handsome production: tastefully designed and bound, printed on fine cream paper using elegant typefaces, the text "hung" from a top-of-the-page rule, with generous margins.As a reference and research tool it is precisely what it says it is, namely an exhaustive compilation of musical terms inclusively defined, derived from dictionaries, musical treaties, manuals, and commentaries produced in English be- tween 1500 and 1740.The terminus post quern was established by the date at which A Dictionary of Medieval Musical Terms leaves off, and the closing date corresponds to the publication of Grassineau's A Musical Dictionary, which is the first independ- ently researched and encyclopedic musical dictionary to appear in England, hence a watershed achievement marking the end of a previous era.Strahle' s massive exercise in reading and filing serves a number of potentially useful scholarly functions in regrouping under hundreds of headings a chronological sequence of definitions of musical terms as they were understood by specialists and lexicographers during the period under consideration

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