A Popular History of the Art of Music: From the Earliest Times Until the Present

Published in 1891, this Victorian attempt to distill the entire history of music into a single volume reveals as much about its era as about the art form it chronicles. W. S. B. Mathews, a prominent music critic and educator, traces music from ancient Egypt through to his own late nineteenth-century world, weaving together discussions of instruments, scales, and the great composers who shaped Western musical tradition. What makes this book compelling today is not its completeness Mathews himself acknowledged the impossibility of his task but its window into how educated Victorians understood the past. Here, music evolves from "primitive" origins toward sophistication, a narrative that reflects now-antiquated assumptions about progress and culture. Mathews organizes each era with introductory chapters that frame the "central idea" of that period's development, offering readers a structural clarity that feels almost modern. For anyone curious about the foundations of musicology or interested in tracing how our understanding of musical history was first synthesized for the general reader, this book remains a fascinating artifact.