The Present State of Music in France and Italy

Robert Fraser follows in the footsteps of the eighteenth-century musicologist Charles Burney (1726-1814) as he travelled across France, Switzerland and Italy in 1770 reporting on the European musical scene. In a parallel essay, Fraser visits the same locations in sequence, describing the European musical scene of the early twenty-first century, and inquiring how the cultural and musical developments and anxieties of Burney's own time relate to those of our own, superficially very different, age.