Roger North

Roger North's The Musicall Grammarian 1728, first published in 1990, is a treatise on musical eloquence in all its branches. Of its five parts, I and II, on the orthoepy, orthography and syntax of music, constitute a grammar; III and IV, on the arts of invention and communication, form a rhetoric; and V, on etymology, consists of a history. Two substantial chapters of commentary introduce the text, which is edited here for the first time in its entirety: Jamie Kassler places his treatise within the broader context not only of North's musical and non-musical writings but also their relation to the intellectual ferment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and Mary Chan describes physical and textual aspects of the treatise as evidence for North's processes of thinking about musical thinking.

Roger North was an English writer, lawyer, and polymath. In this autobiography, he wanders the intellectual, political, and cultural fields of Restoration England, mapping the state of his country and the state of his selfhood. By describing the multifarious currents affecting his life, North (1653-1734) makes lively forays into the worlds of natural philosophy, Christian stoicism, Cartesian science, architecture, music, education, and James II's treatment of the Protestant courtiers, while recounting his upbringing in an impoverished noble family, his education at Cambridge, and his career as a successful lawyer. Modern readers will find his sympathetic account of witch trials particularly intriguing. This document, fascinating as a part of the history of self-awareness as well as the history of the period from a Tory, anti-Newtonian, high-church perspective, has, until now, only been available in a corrupted nineteenth-century publication. Peter Millard's edition contains full annotations that provide historical context and include references to North's other works. The introduction elucidates the current scholarly interest in North's precocious development of a more integrated theory of the psycho-physical nature of human cognition, and reveals the autobiography as the key necessary to understanding North's ideas.

Roger North's The Musicall Grammarian 1728, first published in 1990, is a treatise on musical eloquence in all its branches. Of its five parts, I and II, on the orthoepy, orthography and syntax of music, constitute a grammar; III and IV, on the arts of invention and communication, form a rhetoric; and V, on etymology, consists of a history. Two substantial chapters of commentary introduce the text, which is edited here for the first time in its entirety: Jamie Kassler places his treatise within the broader context not only of North's musical and non-musical writings but also their relation to the intellectual ferment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and Mary Chan describes physical and textual aspects of the treatise as evidence for North's processes of thinking about musical thinking.