Now in paperback, Christopher Marsh's well-received survey is broad in definition and coverage. The scale is ambitious, taking in cathedral and church music, balladry, taverns, dance, bell ringing, recreation, theory and discourse. Thus high art is brought into contact with popular traditions, no single genre exemplifying this more than the metrical Psalm, which could be both elevated in the hands of the virginalist Anne Cromwell, and robustly vernacular, as rendered by the flood-struck folk of Dersingham, Norfolk, in the 1670s (tracks 43 and 45 at multimediafluids.uam.elogim.com/musicandsociety). The chronological span has entailed some omissions, especially in cursory coverage of the pre-Reformation parish, some of whose institutions and practices enjoyed long continuity after 1558, and a study on this scale inevitably includes errata: Lieutenant Hammond, for instance, described the daily round of songmen at Hereford Cathedral rather than Worcester (p. 115); and the parishioners of Reading anticipated the arrival of ‘organ takers’ in 1578 rather than 1558, an unpropitious year for organ-taking (p. 396). As Marsh notes, organs came under sustained attack only in the 1570s and 1580s, while some organs remained in situ for longer; the use of the organ to accompany congregational Psalm-singing (for instance at Grantham in 1640: pp. 422–3) might suggest a reason why organs continued in use during the 1560s, until the new metrical tunes became familiarised; the disappearance of organs may also have been connected with the rise of slow, unaccompanied, psalmody (pp. 427–31). Marsh's soundscape is rich, immensely varied, evolving and widely distributed. It will be a standard reference in both musicology and social history for decades to come.