ABSTRACT
Musical history and criticism as a discipline preoccupied Hubert Parry for the whole of his professional musical life — from roughly 1875 until his death in 1918. Parry attended John Ruskin’s lectures which attempted to confront the issues of art and its relationship to religion and ethics. Parry remained firmly allied to Ruskin’s moral aesthetic throughout his life. Words and phrases such as ‘sincerity’, ‘genuineness of expression’, ‘earnestness’, ‘nobility of character and thought’, ‘exalted emotions’ are prominent components of Parry’s Ruskinian vocabulary. Parry believed that the true inner life of man’s emotions could be equated with notions of organic coherence, the fusing of older methods with new and formal involution through intellectual application. The Art of Music is most representative of Parry’s philosophy of musical history. One of the most conspicuous of Parry’s critical criteria, stemming again directly from Herbert Spencer’s suggestions about race and culture, is the attempt to connect artistic attributes to racial types.
