This work is intended to supply a great and long acknowledged want. A growing demand has arisen in this country and the United States for information on all matters directly and indirectly connected with Music, owing to the great spread of concerts, musical publications, private practice, and interest in the subject, and to the immense improvement in the general position of music which has taken place since the commencement of the present century. Music is now performed, studied, and listened to by a much larger number of persons, and in a more serious spirit, than was the case at any previous period of our history. It is rapidly becoming an essential branch of education; the newest works of continental musicians are eagerly welcomed here very soon after their appearance abroad, and a strong desire is felt by a large, important, and increasing section of the public to know something of the structure and peculiarities of the music which they hear and play, of the nature and history of the instruments on which it is performed, of the biographies and characteristics of its composers–in a word of all such particulars as may throw light on the rise, progress, and present condition of an Art which is at once so prominent and so eminently progressive.