Compiled and introduced by A.L. Lloyd

What music sounded like in neolithic times, or in Plato's Greece, or even in early medieval Europe, we hardly know. Yet there still survive in Europe today fragments of music and musical styles whose age can be measured not merely in hundreds but in thousands of years. The folklore collector with his tape recorder can help to fill in a picture that the music historian and the archaeologist have to leave largely blank.
(BBC recording: a new and extended production of the programme originally broadcast on February 11, 1960)