John Steele was educated at Victoria University of Wellington, and at Cambridge University, where he was a student of Thurston Dart. Steele was the first New Zealander to become a professional musicologist, and the first to achieve international repute, largely for his work on Italian music of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This volume has been undertaken by the New Zealand Musicological Society as a tribute to its most distinguished member on the occasion of his retirement sicological Society as a tribute to its most distinguished member on the occasion of his retirement from Otago U