The received view of the Tudor composer Thomas Caustun is of a minor and relatively uninteresting figure. That view is adjusted, however, by the discovery among his works of contrafacta of music by Nicolas Gombert, Philippe van Wilder, Rogier Pathie and Sebastiano Festa. This article considers the reasons why Caustun made these adaptations, and why they they were published under his name, rather than those of their true composers, in John Day's anthology of Protestant church music, Mornyng and Evenyng Prayer and Communion (London, 1565).

Since God so tender a regard is one of a small number of ‘domestic sacred’ pieces Purcell entered into his manuscript scorebook, London, British Library, Add. MS 30930. Its particular interest lies in its construction over a ground bass, and the range of artificial devices Purcell employs in its setting. Its background in seventeenth-century psalm settings, and its likely performance circumstances, allowed Purcell to turn these features to rhetorical advantage, with highly imaginative and individual results.

In the early nineteenth century, the piano étude was conceived as an outgrowth of the eighteenth-century exercice, perpetuating the idea of mechanical virtuosity devoid of any poetic meaning; but it was also shaped by the Romantic pièce de caractère. Drawing upon the context of Parisian musical life in the 1830s (notably the reception of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony), this article discusses Charles-Valentin Alkan's piano études Souvenirs: Trois morceaux dans le genre pathétique, op. 15 (Paris, 1837). This work shows how virtuoso idiomatic figures can act as genre markers, thereby allowing the encoding of a specific extramusical meaning. It further addresses the issue of the privileged understanding between the composer and his performer that goes back to eighteenth-century tradition.

There is a need for published film-score editions in film musicology, both to preserve the contents of manuscripts and to aid critical readings of films. How to accomplish this, without re-inscribing the Romantic conceptions of authorship commonly associated with edition creation, is the subject of this article. After considering the relevant editorial problems and models, a postmodern ‘anti-edition’ is proposed, using examples drawn from Korngold's score for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).