How did a third-century saint and virgin martyr come to be associated with secular celebrations of music in early modern Europe? This is a puzzle that historians of music, religion, and culture have yet to solve, and, indeed, one that haunts the latest and most extensive foray into the poetry and music written to celebrate St. Cecilia’s Day in England. Music for St Cecilia’s Day explores the lifecycle—the diffusion and development, the structures, and significance—of the Cecilian performances that marked the final decades of Stuart rule. Beginning with the first known entertainment (a feast featuring the musical setting of an ode, hosted by the Musical Society of London on November 22, 1683) and arriving nearly 400 pages later at Handel’s august concert settings of Dryden’s Cecilian odes (1736 and 1739), this study reconstructs the performance history of St. Cecilia’s Day celebrations, with equal attention to the texts and textures of music and verse and to the institutions and social networks that brought together the nation’s best poets, composers, and musicians in the production of these annual events. Throughout this story of cultural origins and demise, White considers how Cecilian celebrations shaped and were shaped by a culture of music—by what Harold Love has called a “musical public”—that was just emerging in late seventeenth-century England.Music for St Cecilia’s Day presents a finely woven, if not quite seamless, history of Cecilian performance practice. Despite gaps in the archive—we are missing texts, settings, scores, and details about venues and personnel for many of the performances—White has gathered a vast array of printed and manuscript sources as well as examples of visual art and architecture from dozens of library collections and editions of music and poetry. Indeed, the book itself might function as an archive, a finding aid for future study by musicologists, cultural historians, and literary scholars. Like many of the volumes in Boydell’s “Music in Britain” series, Music for St Cecilia’s Day reproduces a rich store of its documentary material: 15 plates, 39 music examples, and 15 tables accompany generous quotation of written sources. Some of this can seem extraneous—lists of sermon titles and comparisons of variants in ode texts might have been relegated to an appendix—or can teeter into confusion (Table 2.1, with its twelve columns and cramped alphabetical arrangement, was a particular challenge for this reader.) But the book’s music examples are superb and elegantly printed, and its images of tickets, concert venues, paintings, and drawings add to our sense of what Cecilian celebrations looked and felt like for those in early modern London.Using methods and approaches from musicology, book history, and literary analysis, White moves fluidly from structural analyses of London’s Musical Society and its decision to begin an annual feast (chapters 1 and 2) to formal analyses of the odes and musical settings prepared for these events from 1683–1700 (chapter 3). His attention to the interplay of music and word and to the innovative use of voice and instrumentation in these pieces gives us new understandings not only of such virtuosic compositions as the Dryden-Draghi collaboration (1687) and Purcell’s luminous “Hail, bright Cecilia” (1692) but also of subtler shifts in late-Stuart music: elaboration of the court ode, experimentation with trumpets and kettledrums, and a culture of imitation and competition among composers of varying ability. The depth and reach of the book’s research demonstrate just how many forces—social, political, and especially economic—combined to shape these events. Such fortunate coincidence explains as well the rather swift demise of Cecilian celebrations. But on the puzzle of the feast’s arrival in England, White’s pragmatic decision to focus on English celebrations forestalls the possibility of a Continental solution. It is clear from texts like Essay of Dramatick Poesie and Marriage-à-la-Mode that Dryden and his contemporaries knew all about the theater, music, and culture of the Continent, especially of France and Italy. And it is striking that in England the Cecilian moment should arise so proximate to the installation of a Catholic monarch. Could a more sustained attention to such influences have helped to explain the “sudden appearance of a celebration of the patron saint of music”? The alternative explanation for this “late” appearance hinges on a reductive account of England’s “Protestant orientation” and its allergy to all things Roman Catholic—an account that papers over the strong strains of Catholic spirituality in this period, as well as the cracks and fissures in English Protestantism.Music for St Cecilia’s Day does not quite dispel the problem of origins, but the study is excellent on the feast’s diffusion and demise. In the book’s second half, White explores connections between and among London and provincial celebrations (chapter 5) and traces the effects of these performances on the sacred and secular music of the early eighteenth century (chapters 4 and 6). By comparing the iterative musical and poetic texts used in the entertainments and unearthing the institutional and social networks that linked the celebrations, these chapters show how Cecilian music spread among the cathedral towns of England into Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and even to the American Colonies. Occasionally, these connections feel a bit too neat, as in the instance of a sermon by Dublin minister Benjamin Hawkshaw, who, White argues, because of shared ecclesiastical language “must have had in front of him a copy of Thomas Naish’s sermon for St Cecilia’s Day in Salisbury in 1700.” No doubt an overstatement, but on the whole the book presents a compelling argument for the exchange of art and ideas, indeed, of writers, composers, organizers, and musicians that facilitated the spread of Cecilian celebrations and produced new forms and cultures of music, even the elaborate concert music that would, in the end, precipitate the demise of St. Cecilia’s Day.Building on this sturdy frame, others will be equipped to discover new connections and to enlarge the book’s thumbnail sketches of historical performances. John West’s recent work on Dryden and Enthusiasm and Lori Branch’s study of eighteenth-century sentiment and secularism, Rituals of Spontaneity, might, for instance, be brought to bear on the transformations of Cecilian music from secular to sacred, taken up in White’s fourth chapter. Indeed, the central claim of the chapter—that the services designed by Purcell and others for St. Cecilia’s Day “played a crucial role in the development of Anglican church music”—is one of the book’s most provocative. If the appropriation of Saint Cecilia for secular musical celebrations follows a standard narrative of secularization, then the reintegration of secular and spiritual unsettles that narrative. Perhaps by understanding the nature of these transformations we might also better understand such relations as those between hymns and popular, secular music.The last study of Cecilian celebrations was published more than 150 years ago. Music for St Cecilia’s Day is a much needed contribution to the fields of musicology, history, and literary studies. But White’s rigorous engagement with the music and verse written for these occasions does more than provide an updated scholarly account. It aims also to inspire new Cecilian performances, recordings, and editions—of Purcell and Handel’s majestic settings and of Dryden’s brilliant verse, to be sure, but also of lesser known works like John Eccles’s setting of William Congreve’s ode, William Norris’s setting of Samuel Wesley’s verse, and John Blow’s setting of the Canticles. For drawing us back to such important works of poetry and song, perhaps we should join with Purcell, Dryden, and the others, to “Hail White’s Cecilia.”