This article examines the early writings of one of Handel's English librettists, Newburgh Hamilton. It describes what seems to be Hamilton's first publication, the little-studied Tory satire The Changes (1711), sets it alongside other early publications and biographical details, and reads this material alongside two of Hamilton's librettos for Handel, Alexander's Feast (1736) and Samson (1743). Hamilton's early writings are approached less as contexts for the oratorios than as texts with their own interest, and as intertexts to be set in dialogue with later productions. The article seeks to contribute to debate over the politics of Handel's vocal music, debate provoked not least by the difficulties of defining the sphere and meanings of politics in eighteenth-century culture, and of conceptualizing the collaborative endeavours and multiple sites of composition, patronage, business, performance and reception that make up Handel's oratorios.

This article explores the role of music in nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts of medieval Italian literature and its relation to the construction of Italian national identity both during and long after the Risorgimento. Tracing music's role in the writings of Giosuè Carducci, Vincenzo De Bartholomaeis and Aurelio Roncaglia, it argues that music somewhat paradoxically became entangled with Italy's literary identity even as scholars worked to extricate the peninsula's most renowned poetry from its grasp. In the realm of ‘popular’ poetry, Italianness depends on the presence of music, which serves as a marker of that poetry's popular origins. In contrast, music's absence from the realm of ‘high-art’ poetry was essential to the construction of an Italian tradition independent of and superior to its French and Provençal predecessors.

In 1913, at the Théâtre des Arts in Paris, a controversial but highly successful ballet choreographed a circus-style pantomime to the music of Fauré's Dolly Suite. With its apparently incongruent relation of dance to music, the ballet displayed, as one reviewer put it, ‘criticisms in action’. This article investigates how we might conceive the production as an act of musical and cultural criticism, by examining its close relation with contexts such as early comic film, music-hall entertainment, the children's literature market, medical and anthropological theories, and surrealist thought. The ballet implicitly challenged conventional interpretations of Fauré's music as reflecting a particular perception of childhood – one which was rather too close to the sentimental attitudes vehemently dismissed in contemporaneous literature. The production was an important manifestation of an emergent understanding of the ‘childlike’ in early twentieth-century French culture – as a condition enlightened by irrationality, with important physiological traits.

One of the less studied aspects of post-war musical life is private sponsorship of American modernist composers, such as that by the Fromm Music Foundation (FMF) established in 1952. Using unpublished letters and documents from the FMF archives at Harvard and interviews with people who worked with the founder, Paul Fromm, this article discusses how Fromm's involvement in his foundation led to ventures that were influential on the development of American contemporary music and its relationship to academia. Unlike the Ford or Rockefeller foundations, Fromm sought the role of patron, fostering close relationships with composers and accepting their advice. Yet composers in Fromm's network often had aesthetic visions that were different from his. This article discusses Fromm's sponsorship of the Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies and the journal Perspectives of New Music, and how the different, complex and contradictory visions held by Fromm and his advisers were representative of those in the larger American music scene.

This article explores the ways in which audio in the home was figured in (and helped shape) changing consumer and gender roles in post-war Britain. It looks at the ways in which innovations in home-furnishing and audio-equipment design and manufacture created an environment with new tactile as well as sonic qualities; it examines the ways in which changing music styles helped develop new markets for audio equipment and new meanings for audio discourse. But before it does so, the article sets out some arguments on cultural-historical method. Extant academic writing on post-war home audio tends to privilege the study of media representation – and the critique of ideology constructed therein – at the expense of other kinds of enquiry and source-work. In making use of a broader range of sources and interpretative approaches, this piece aims for a thick reading of the ‘social’ along with the ‘cultural’.

Peircean semiotics has retained a place in the study of music for more than 40 years. Few studies, however, have focused upon arguably the most important aspects of Peirce's thought: his contribution to logic and his development of a pragmatic approach to epistemology. This article develops a theory of Peircean semiotics in music that is rigorously derived from the key insights Peirce offered to philosophy. It focuses upon his theory of the proposition and posits an approach to music analysis that is sensitive to the importance of music's internal structure while recognizing the enormously significant role played by cultural contexts and social forces in the development of musical meanings. The article introduces Peircean semiotics and develops a theory of musical valency with particular reference to the Allegro of Mozart's ‘Prague’ Symphony. It concludes by theorizing the role of cultural and ideological forces in articulating and saturating a music's valency.