Recently I was advising a small group of students who were preparing to take the national exam that would qualify them for the position of music teacher at a secondary school. One part of the exam involves a comparative commentary on three musical works relating to a topic chosen by the candidate. Everyone involved in music education in France knows that the Music Department at the National Education Ministry (Inspection Générale de la Musique) has always been concerned with combatting social and cultural inequalities, and that classical music must be presented to younger generations with the least possible chronological and historical context in the name of cultural relativism. (This remarkable ideal, filtered through each successive stage of the educational system, sometimes inspires students to write that Louis XIV ordered Lully to compose operas in order to reduce the nobility to slavery – a radical reading of Norbert Elias indeed. But this is not my topic here.)

It is well known that the instrumentation of eighteenth-century chamber music was highly flexible; composers frequently adapted their own works for a variety of instruments, and players often used whatever combinations they had available. One type of arrangement little used today but attested to in both verbal description and musical manuscripts of the period is that of trios and other chamber works adapted for two keyboard instruments. Players often executed such keyboard-duo arrangements on instruments with different mechanisms and timbres – for example, harpsichord and piano together – thus capturing something of the variety of timbres available in a mixed chamber ensemble.

Keyboard duos were often played by members of a single family, or by teachers and students together, a practice that allowed for the construction of a sense of ‘sympathy’ – mutual understanding through shared experience and sentiment – between the players. These players shared common physical gestures at the instruments, which reinforced the emotional content of the music; this fostered the formation of a sympathetic connection even as players retained their individual identities.

Samuel Howard (?1710–1782) has long been a familiar inhabitant of the diligent footnotes of Handel biographers. A choirboy in the Chapel Royal, he was a member of Handel's chorus and the composer of much theatre music of his own; he later became organist of both St Bride's, Fleet Street and nearby St Clement Danes, Strand, where he was buried in 1782. His most significant and ambitious work is his fine orchestrally accompanied anthem ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made’, published posthumously in 1792 with an impressive title page detailing the performance of the work ‘at St Margaret's Church before the governors of the Westminster Infirmary, in the Two Universities, and upon many other Publick Occasions in different parts of the Kingdom’. This article confirms for the first time that this work originated as Howard's doctoral exercise; contemporary press reports and information in the University archives make clear that the composer's doctorate was linked to the provision of music for the Duke of Grafton's installation as Chancellor of Cambridge University in 1769. Surviving information about this event offers a glimpse of musical life in Cambridge on a comparable scale to the much better reported proceedings upon similar occasions in Oxford. This evidence then serves as a starting-point from which to consider Howard's later prominence as a director of high-profile public performances in London and the provinces.

William Bates, who died in 1778, was a prolific and, in his day, successful composer of stage music and concert songs performed in London in the 1760s and 1770s; but a scarcity of biographical information and uncertainties over his position vis-à-vis the new style introduced in the early 1760s by J. C. Bach and others have tended to disadvantage him in modern commentary. New facts about his life and background together with a recently discovered sale catalogue reveal him to have been a cultivated man of wide interests, with a sympathy for the ‘ancient’ style. His most substantial musical contribution, as regards its potential for modern revival, is a remarkable set of six concertos for strings with oboes, bassoons and horns (plus, in two concertos, trumpets and timpani) published in 1762. These concertos, related in style to contemporary overtures to stage works but making much greater use of concertante writing, form a high point in a peculiarly British tradition of concertos employing French horns. The cult of the horn in Georgian Britain that nourished this tradition is the subject of extended discussion.

Antonio Vivaldi's cycle of violin concertos dramatizing the four seasons marked a substantial shift in the way that the seasons were depicted in the arts. Moving away from religious and mythological allegory, they exemplify a growing interest in descriptive representation of nature's power and in humanity's complex physical and emotional relationship with elements beyond its control. Positing new connections to Arcadian reform ideals of verisimilitude, this article addresses important questions concerning Vivaldi's pairing of sonnets with concertos and the aesthetic factors behind his choice of narrative topics to depict in the music. The article also demonstrates how Vivaldi used diverse textures and sonorities to create powerful contrasts that heighten the emotional impact of the aural imagery while underlining recurring expressive and pictorial motifs throughout the cycle. These last aspects, in particular, provide a new understanding of the historical significance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons as a powerful demonstration of both the expressive potential of the concerto genre and the still underappreciated art of orchestration during the early eighteenth century.