Rhetorical studies of Mozart have assumed a rationalist conception of language, ignoring the empiricist model that actually dominated the Enlightenment. The two models, comparable structurally to the stile antico and style galant, collide in Mozart's learned finales. A study of three finales, from the Mass in C minor, the Concerto in E♭, K.449, and Die Entführung aus dem Serail, shows how Mozart negotiated irreducible contradictions within Enlightenment thought by switching between the two models.

Analysis of the contents of Jānis Cimze's harmonized folksong collection A Garland of Songs (1872) and the cultural context in which it was published reveals its musical portrait of an emergent Latvian nation to be a synthetic construct. Drawing upon aspects of the German nationalist choral movement, the quasi-Herderian work of Baltic German folklorists and new opportunities for cultural expression afforded by mid-century Russian imperial reforms, Cimze's work inspired heated and increasingly xenophobic debate among his contemporary Latvians about the destiny of their community in pre-Revolutionary Russia.

In 1876, the National Training School for Music was established by the Society of Arts as a model of advanced music education after the pattern of leading European conservatoires. But, despite having Arthur Sullivan as Principal, the School failed amidst the rumblings of an academic scandal that dogged George Grove's attempt to establish the new Royal College of Music. The article sets this failure against the successful start of the Royal College and explains how conservatoires, after being in all practical senses virtually an irrelevance to professional concert life, managed to reinvent themselves as vital incubators of British musical talent.

Béla Bartók was an intensely private man who avoided politics throughout most of his life. At the same time he was so passionately devoted to his Hungarian nation that, even during the difficult years of his American exile, he felt compelled to become involved in pro-Hungarian activities. At one point he accepted the leadership of an organization that had started out as a political lobby and a base for a possible Hungarian government-in-exile.