born April 7, 1726, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Eng.
died April 12, 1814, Chelsea, Middlesex
British music historian.
After being apprenticed to Thomas Arne , he taught music and played the organ. In 1770 he set off on European travels, undertaken to research his seminal General History of Music , 4 vol. (1776–89). His accounts of the many famous musicians and others he met, including Christoph Willibald Gluck and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach , provide an entertaining and invaluable account of 18th-century European musical life and of intellectual life in general. The novelist Fanny Burney was his daughter.