ABSTRACT
There are four German words that everyone concerned with English music has to live with: das Land ohne Musik - the land without music. This chapter argues that eighteenth-century England was not a land without music, and that the products of its musical culture are worth studying and performing. This has been argued eloquently in print a number of times in recent years, notably in the eighteenth-century volume of the Blackwell History of Music in Britain. The phrase das Land ohne Musik often appears in books on English music, though its origin is a mystery. It was used by Oscar Schmitz for the title of a book published in Munich in 1914, a significant date. English eighteenth-century music has suffered more than most other areas of musicology from the German-American hegemony of musicological thought, in which Handel, a German, was thought to have dominated English musical life.
