Burney, Charles

Burney, Charles, 1726–1814, English music historian, composer, and organist. His General History of Music (1776–89; 2d ed. 1935) was one of the first important music histories in English. He wrote The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771) and The Present State of Music in Germany (1773). They were published together as Dr. Burney's Musical Tours in Europe (1959). The work describes European society, life, and customs as well as music and important musicians. His daughter, Fanny Burney, compiled his memoirs (1832).

Bibliography

See biographies by P. A. Scholes (1848) and R. H. Lonsdale (1965).

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Burney, Charles

(born April 7, 1726, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Eng.—died April 12, 1814, Chelsea, Middlesex) British music historian. After being apprenticed to Thomas Arne, he taught music and played the organ. In 1770 he set off on European travels, undertaken to research his seminal General History of Music, 4 vol. (1776–89). His accounts of the many famous musicians and others he met, including Christoph Willibald Gluck and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, provide an entertaining and invaluable account of 18th-century European musical life and of intellectual life in general. The novelist Fanny Burney was his daughter.