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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Music Library Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Notes. Among many available editions of Purcell songs, no other one that I have seen makes clear just what notes Purcell wrote, much less when he wrote them nor what one should do to perform them. John Harley presents here a selection of twelve songs, previously unavailable except in the Purcell Society's complete edition. He provides an introduction full of good advice about performance and afternotes with information about sources. The realizations are independent and clear, nearly always accurate, and easily expandable according to the accompanist's taste. In a spot-comparison, I found Harley's realizations better (meaning simpler and less contrapuntal) than those in the Purcell Society edition.Harley has arranged his selections in chronological order, hoping to let us see Purcell's "growing mastery and the vigour of his invention." While all of the songs require a high voice in the published keys, some have an expressly female slant and others a male one. Only one has a sacred text, and fortunately only one has an occasional text related to the inner politics of the royal family. "Sawney Is a Bonny Lad" has dialect words and such a saucy tune that one suspects there was a genuine folksong somewhere in the family tree. The gem of the volume is "Oh, Lead Me to Some Peaceful Gloom," an aria in two parts, slowfast; the subject matter is conventional, but Purcell's musical invention shows its full richness.