Ancients and moderns - Howard Irving

Oxford University?s Heather professor of music William Crotch read public lectures at venues in and around London throughout the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. This book makes available in a modern edition an important set of lectures Crotch read at the Surrey Institution in 1818, in which the lecturer offers a retrospective of the previous forty years of London musical life. Crotch describes the birth of values and institutions that are important components of the system of classical music. This system came into being, in Crotch?s scenario, against the background of a great conflict of musical ideologies pitting advocates of so-called 'ancient' and 'modern' music in a struggle for dominance. Crotch indicates that the ancient-modern conflict was finally resolved when the belated introduction in England of works by Mozart including Don Giovanni presented a combination of the best qualities of the ancient and modern approaches.