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Joseph Mainzer (1801–51), priest, music teacher and composer, had an important influence on the development of the choral movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. Forced to flee his native Germany in 1833 because of his political views, he arrived in London in 1839 via Brussels and Paris, where his singing classes for labourers were immensely successful. Although his musical compositions are largely forgotten, his mission to bring singing to the masses is not: he published a number of works on the subject and established Mainzer's Musical Times, which later became The Musical Times. First published in 1841, this short singing textbook for an English audience is a classic resource in music education, presenting the basics of the fixed sol-fa system together with a generous quantity of musical examples. Mainzer's 1848 work, Music and Education, has also been reissued in this series.

always a man to put his finger on a point) sonorously explained that Knolles had only himself to blamefor choosing to investigate 'a subject about which none desired to be informed 2 Today it is not just the history of the Turks, but historical studies generally that are out of favour. Many peoplea surprising number of teachers among themseem eager to make a boast of their scorn for the past. And now that watching television has largely replaced reading, little more than the occasional simplistic cameo offered by the media remains to extend the average man's iawareness of his roots. Misled by the resulting rag-bag of anecdotes and calamities, many of the susceptible prefer to close their ears to yesterday's catalogue of disasters for fear of damaging tomorrow's aspirations.A blinkered existence of that sort is surely insufferable. We cannot isolate ourselves in a time-vacuum. To defy the past and shrug off the experience of our predecessors may seem to offer an invigorating challenge to the disaffected; but when solidly pursued it condemns its devotees to learn only what painful experience teaches. Meanwhile, as Polybius neatly puts it, 'History matures judgement painlessly'. But there is another, less portentous aspect of historical resource: one that allows us to share with our predecessors their aspirations and achievements. As an historian of our own day has expressed the matter:The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone ...3 3 It is in that spirit, as members of one generation in a seemingly endless chain of human endeavour, that we sometimes find ourselves discovering how our predecessors dealt with some selfsame problem that confronts us now. The experience may sometimes assist us in turnby suggesting either what we should or should not do. It may even reveal that some newly introduced technique is not as novel as we supposedindeed, that it has already been tried and failed. But the fruits of experience of this sort are not limited to such gainful discoveries. Less obvious but no less rewarding is the sense they provide of our belonging to an ageless but age-old fraternity: of recognising an affinity with others of our own trade whose purpose, no matter how much their circumstances may have differed, was at heart very like our own.

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