As printed music became a valuable market commodity in late eighteenth-century England, it became a significant part of debates over the interpretation of the first copyright law (1710). In particular, compositions by Charles Dibdin and John Garth became the focus of several lawsuits filed by the attorney Charles Rennett challenging the traditional interpretation of the clause that granted composers a second 14 years of protection after the first had expired. These suits detail the status of music as intellectual property and offer new information about the businesses of major music-sellers like Longman & Broderip, the Thompsons and John Welcker.

Throughout the nineteenth century, musical instruments were seen as embodiments of a country's distinction, useful in ‘the study of man, the diverse races, and their degree of civilization’. This article, focusing on the illustrated French press between 1870 and 1900, examines popular colonial representations of instruments in the context of the complex racial ideologies and the material as well as ideological struggles underlying imperialism. Images of exotic instruments, I argue, served not only to teach about foreign cultures, but also to shape French perceptions of Africa and Indo-China during imperialist expansion there. As such, they help us to situate ethnomusicology's prehistory within French colonialism.

This article explores the filmic relationship between music, text and image through an intertextual reading of Herzog's two Amazonian films, Aguirre: Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. When Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo encounter each other in the rainforest, 300 years apart, a complicated interplay of history and legend, truth and fiction, is initiated. Awash with magical occurrence, the forest has its own endlessly repeating soundtrack (written by Popul Vuh). The ability of both explorers to defend themselves from the forest depends on their relationship to this music: Aguirre, the earlier explorer, is deaf to the circular sound and attempts to overlay it with a written account of their journey. Fitzcarraldo, on the other hand, enters the forest equipped with a gramophone that plays Verdi arias; he comes with his own soundtrack. Comparison between the two journeys exposes the conventional uses of text/speech and music/song in film, to reveal music as the predominant driving force behind filmic narrative.

A number of authors, including John Covach and especially Edward Macan, have investigated the links between art music and progressive rock. This article builds on and extends such work by positing, defining, discussing and dissecting a hybrid genre I term virtual opera. Exemplified by such albums as The Who's Tommy (1969) and Quadrophenia (1973), Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) and Frank Zappa's Joe's Garage (1979), each of which is subjected to detailed examination, virtual operas find their ideal site of performance between the ears of individual listeners, rather than on stage or screen. In each case, the aural and visual dimensions of the albums combine to create multi-layered musico-dramatic narratives, freed from the usual performance constraints associated with either opera or rock.

This article investigates the contribution that musical participation makes to people's lives by reporting on a study carried out at the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in August 2001 in Buxton, Derbyshire. The audience are shown to have a strong commitment to the musical genre and its preservation through live performance, whilst the performers are more likely to value membership of their society and the personal satisfaction that comes from successful performance. The festival therefore serves diverse purposes for those who attend it, and raises further questions about the interaction between social, personal and musical experience at events of this kind.