Musicologists concerned with the "London Pianoforte school," the group of composers, pedagogues, pianists, publishers, and builders who contributed to the development of the piano in London at the turn of the nineteenth century, have long encountered a formidable obstacle in the general unavailability of music of this "school" in modern scholarly editions. Indeed, much of this repertory has more or less vanished from our historical consciousness. Granted, the sonatas and Gradus ad Parnassum of Muzio Clementi and the nocturnes of John Field have remained familiar enough (though more often than not in editions lacking scholarly rigor), but the work of other leading representatives, like Johann Baptist Cramer and Jan Ladislav Dussek, has eluded serious attempts at revival. Nicholas Temperley's ambitious new anthology decisively overcomes this deficiency. What underscores the intrinsic value of Temperley's editions is that the anthology reproduces nearly all of the original music in facsimile. Making available this cross section of English musical life – some 800 works by 49 composers – should encourage new critical perspectives about how piano music evolved in England, an issue of considerable relevance to our understanding of how piano music developed on the European continent, and of how, finally, the instrument was transformed from the fortepiano to what we know today as the piano. To be sure, the London Pianoforte school itself calls for review. "School" may well be too strong a word for what was arguably a group unified not so much by stylistic principles or aesthetic creed as by the geographical circumstance that they worked at various times in London and produced pianos and piano music for English pianos and English markets. Indeed, Temperley concedes that their "variety may be so great as to cast doubt on the notion of a 'school.'" The notion of a school was first propounded by Alexander Ringer, who argued that laws of artistic survival forced the young, progressive Beethoven to turn outside Austria for creative models, and that he found inspiration in a group of pianists connected with Clementi in London. Ringer's proposed London Pianoforte school did suggest a circumscribed and fairly unified group – for want of a better term, a school – of musicians whose influence was felt primarily in the decades just before and after 1800. After all, Beethoven did respond to the advances of the Broadwood piano – its reinforced frame, extended compass, triple stringing, and pedals, for example – and it is reasonable to suppose that London pianists who composed music for such an instrument during the critical phase of its development exercised no small degree of influence on Continental musicians. Nevertheless, perhaps the most sensible approach to this issue is to define the school by the period (c. 1766-1873) during which it flourished, as Temperley has done in the anthology.