The Excellencies of Musick

Enter the musical world of Stuart and Georgian Britain, of concert-going, music makers and thinkers, printers and publishers. Written to accompany the upcoming collections-in-focus exhibition at the National Library of Australia, this book invites you into that life. A delight for lovers of music and print history, it features rare works by famous composers, theorists and philosophers, as well as portraits, exquisitely engraved tickets and trade cards. All items are drawn from the collection of musicologists and philanthropists Jamie and Michael Kassler. This book includes discursive captions, about such names as Rene Descartes, Henry Purcell, Johann Sebastian Bach and Joseph Haydn. Highlights include a broadside advertising an 1817 performance of Handel's masterpiece, The Messiah, and a libretto of Haydn's oratorio The Creation, still in its original sewn binding of 1803.

About the Kassler Collection

The Jamie and Michael Kassler Collection contains a significant collection of books on music and printed music published in Britain from the mid-17th century to the 20th century. It includes books on the practice of music, intonation and acoustics, theories of harmony and composition, histories of music, biographies of musicians, dictionaries of musical terms, and music periodicals. Many items have marks of ownership and annotations showing how they were used. The Collection is being transferred to the Library in stages. Current holdings can be found in the Library's catalogue as the series Collection of Jamie and Michael Kassler.