Even though no medieval chivalric order was known to have patronized musicians, there was reason to believe that music had played a prominent role in the ceremonies of the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece in the fifteenth century. The first two sovereigns of the Order, Dukes Philip and Charles of Burgundy, were enthusiastic patrons of skilled composers and performers. And the meetings of the Order were unusually splendid, to judge from contemporary accounts, chronicles and paintings. Chronicles describing the Feast of the Pheasant organized by the Order in Lille in 1454 to launch a crusade are especially full of details about the performance of polyphonic music.

Mille regretz is today one of the best-known chansons attributed to Josquin des Prez. That fame is no doubt due in part to its inherent musical worth, but also owes not a little to the intriguing title which Luys de Narváez attached to it in the vihuela anthology Los seys libros del delphin de musica (Valladolid, 1538): ‘la cancion del Emperador’ (‘the emperor's song’). Narváez's testimony should certainly not be dismissed out of hand, for two reasons. First, he may already at the date of the publication have been close to the court of Charles V. Second, there exists corroborative evidence of a connection between the chanson and Charles in the form of Moralės's six-voice parody Mass based on Mille regretz: although the book in which this Mass was published is dedicated to Cosimo de’ Medici, the Missa Mille regretz opens with a decorative woodcut showing Charles's coat of arms.

A manuscript of late seventeenth-century English harpsichord music was sold to an anonymous private collector at Sotheby's in London on 26 May 1994 for £276,500, a record price paid for any British music manuscript. The 85-page oblong quarto, in its original covers, includes 21 pieces in the hand of Henry Purcell (1659–95), five of which were previously unknown, and a further 17 works by Giovanni Battista Draghi (c.1640–1708), also probably autograph, four of which were previously unknown. The manuscript is important because of the rarity of Purcell autographs: this is the first to be sold at public auction since the great collection of fantazias and sonatas (now British Library, Add. MS 30,930) was offered in 1826, and the only major source to surface this century.

In 1773 Johann Christian Bach filed a bill of complaint in Chancery for breach of musical copyright, initiating what was to become a landmark case in British copyright law. Bach claimed that the publishing firm of Longman, Lukey & Co. had brought out unauthorized editions of two of his compositions: a ‘new lesson for the Harpsichord or Piano Forte’ and a ‘new Sonata’ for keyboard and viola da gamba.