The growth of the public concert was, perhaps, one of the most important factors which influenced the course of music in England towards the close of the seventeenth century. A number of music clubs were in existence before the Restoration as we know from Pepys and Anthony à Wood, but these, one gathers, were principally for the mutual delight of their mainly amateur participants. Cromwell, too, invited the members of the House of Commons to hear ‘rare music’ at Whitehall in 1657, but this was a State rather than a public occasion. The public concert, as we understand the term, did not come into existence until after the Restoration, when social conditions were established which were conducive to its success. The centralization of social life in London which followed the resumption of Court activities there created a large new audience, eager for all forms of entertainment. The influence of the King's personal preferences has perhaps been overstressed, but it cannot be denied that his hedonistic inclinations set a pattern of behaviour which was only too readily followed by London society. The theatres, closed during the greater part of the Commonwealth period, flourished once again, and in 1672 John Banister established a series of public concerts at Whitefriars which became the model for many similar ventures, at York Buildings and elsewhere.

In real life as well as on the theatrical stage, the voice is just one out of the many external features of a person such as facial expression, gestures and general appearance which inform us about his inner character. In opera, because of its very nature, the singing voice assumes a more dominant role. In analogy to the visual mask of old (the persona in the original meaning of the word), which conveyed to the theatre audience the character of the dramatic role, the voice type allocated to an operatic part can be regarded as an auditory mask, which through its distinctive tone quality provides an impersonation of the operatic character. In the same way as the visual mask was intended to give a broad idea of the kind of character appearing on the dramatic stage, the auditory mask of the voice type is meant to be expressive of the character type represented by the operatic personage.

The 18 June 1821, the sixth anniversary of the last and decisive battle of the British and Prussian armies against Napoleon, the Battle of Waterloo or Belle Alliance, and the day of the triumphal first performance of Weber's Freischütz, is commonly regarded as the birthday of German Romantic opera, a genre which was to dominate the opera houses of the German-speaking countries until well beyond the middle of the century and which was eventually to create Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, out of Wagner's own German Romantic operas Die Feen, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, which in turn depended directly and to a considerable degree upon Weber's Freischütz and Euryanthe. A day of great importance in the history of music, then, and a day of paramount importance in the history of German music. Again it is Wagner who gave expression to the feelings of what was apparently the vast majority of music-loving and patriotic Germans of his time, in the famous beginning of his report on the first performance of Berlioz' adaptation of Freischütz for the Grand Opéra, the report Le Freischütz. Bericht nach Deutschland, published on 20 June 1841 – and so unfortunately two days too late for the 20th anniversary of the Freischütz première and the 26th anniversary of Waterloo – in the Dresdener Abendzeitung:

The Baroque, which manifested itself in Muscovy during the course of the seventeenth century, has been recognized as one of the most dynamic and influential eras of Russian musical and artistic creativity. When looking at the history of Russian music one has a tendency to equate the new stylistic trends of the second half of the seventeenth century with those of the highly westernized eighteenth, and to dismiss both merely as periods of Western imitation. In reality music manuscripts reveal otherwise, and now that compositions are finally becoming available in transcription we realize that an entire era remains to be recognized and re-evaluated. In art and architecture, that era, known as the ‘Moscow’ or the ‘Naryshkin’ Baroque, is distinguished by a blend of Italian, Dutch, Russian, Ukrainian and Bielorussian features in a style that, although influenced by foreign elements, was none the less distinct from any in existence at the time. The Moscow Baroque embraced many aspects of the arts, from iconography, architecture and the applied arts to literature and music. Endorsed by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (1645–76), foreign influence began to penetrate Muscovy, ushering in a cognizance of Western concepts that began to clash with the rich and long-established spiritual and cultural traditions. In fact Muscovy was just emerging from an aesthetic explosion known as the Golden Age of national artistic expression. Familiar are the magnificent onion-dome churches that were created during the sixteenth century and the flourishing musical centres in Novgorod and Moscow, where composers and singers developed an intrinsically Russian musical style. This was also the age of indigenous Russian polyphony (e.g. strochnoe moskovskoe, strochnoe novgorodskoe, znamennoe and demestvennoe mnogogolosie) which preceded the wave of Western infiltration that inadvertently led to an untimely halt of the evolutionary process of national awakening. Prior to that halt, the Moscow Baroque stands as a brief but unique chapter in the development of the Russian choral tradition.

In 1850, after five years of planning, Liszt began composing music for his Italian opera, Sardanapalo, after Byron. It was central to his ambition to attain status as a European composer, but he abandoned the project halfway through. La Mara (1911), Humphrey Searle (1954) and others declared the manuscript fragmentary and partially illegible, but in 2016 this verdict was categorically overturned when work began on an edition of what Liszt notated: almost the entirety of Act 1. This article draws on an array of sources – published and unpublished – significantly to update our knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Liszt's composition and abandonment of Sardanapalo. In light of his inconsistently Italianate music and idiosyncratic treatment of the libretto, it also reinterprets Liszt's mid-century aesthetic orientation, as a confidant of Wagner and would-be pillar of Franz Brendel's future neudeutsche Schule. By contextualizing key aspects of the uncovered musical score and libretto within Liszt's mid-century writings on aesthetics, it posits character, declamatory melody and the visuality of the stage as (initially) critical criteria in the communication of a literary narrative, and suggests that Liszt's impulse towards symphonic poetry may first have been kindled within the aesthetic potential of opera.

‘There is no music in Chinese music history.’ This paradox is often expressed by music scholars in Hong Kong, a modern metropolis in which Chinese and Western musics and music scholarship mingle and thrive. Highlighting the contrasts between traditional Chinese and contemporary Western views of music and music historiography, the paradox refers to the scholars' observation that Chinese music histories include few descriptions of actual music, and that performances of early Chinese music are often inauthentic. Published accounts of China's musical past include little hard evidence about the structure and sounds of specific musical works. Thus, the scholars argue, the accounts are more theoretical than factual, and their musical descriptions disputable. Public performances and recorded examples of early Chinese music reveal obvious use of Western tonal harmony and counterpoint, and thus cannot be authentic music from China of the past. The scholars' arguments, however, cannot refute that in Hong Kong many Chinese music masters and audiences find the so-called early Chinese music authentic and its histories credible.

This paper looks at some aspects of the expansion of the role of the orchestra in the early decades of French operatic history, especially after the death of Lully, and in particular at the orchestra's increasing involvement in, and enhancement of, the spectacular and the dramatic. It focuses on three types of scene, in each of which the orchestra plays a key role in the construction of the scene and in supplying its distinctive musical features. The paper is based on part of a thesis which, for reasons' of manageability, set a terminal date of 1715, but I have where appropriate stepped outside diis self-imposed limit

The first important centre of viol making and viol playing in the late fifteenth century was the Mediterranean city of Valencia, capital of the southernmost province of the Kingdom of Aragon. From Valencia the viol quickly spread to nearby parts of the Aragonese kingdom such as the Maestrazgo region, the provinces of Aragon and Catalonia, and the islands of Majorca and Sardinia. Late fifteenth-century paintings of the Madonna and Child serenaded by music-making angels clearly reflect the growing popularity of the viol throughout this area of the western Mediterranean. One of the earliest depictions of the viol, probably dating from the 1470s, appears in the work of a Catalan artist active in a northern district of the province of Valencia known as the Maestrazgo. Photographs of this painting (plate 1) show it to have been in a very poor condition, but it has since been restored (perhaps even completely repainted) and can now be seen in the church of San Felíu just above the town of Játiva.

The Sanskrit word tāla, and its common vernacular forms tāl (Hindi) and tālam (Tamil), denote, in musical terminology, both rhythmic organization in general, and specific patterns of organization. Among various non-musical meanings the most significant, perhaps, is ‘slapping the hands together or against one's arm’ (Monier-Williams), since in Indian art-music, patterns of claps and silent gestures with the hands are traditionally used for beating time. The earliest Indian musicological texts show that this practice was already elaborately developed by the early first millennium a.d. In modern practice, tāla implies a steady pulse-beat: no fluctuation of this pulse is permitted, apart from a tendency to accelerate in the north Indian tradition, and music in free tempo (such as ālāp) is not considered to exhibit tāla. Tālā further implies a pulse organized into measures, each measure containing the same number of pulse-beats; the first beat of each measure, called sam, is accented, and is regarded as the culmination of the preceding measure as well as the beginning of a new measure. The measure is therefore conceived, in Indian terminology, as a cycle (āvārd or āvartanam).

Music in mediaeval drama is, to some extent, a ghost subject. I hope in the course of this paper to enable you to hear nearly all the surviving music from the vernacular drama of late mediaeval England—from the cycles of religious plays known variously as the Miracle Plays, the Mystery Cycles, the Corpus Christi plays. My chief endeavour will be to build up a picture of a lost musical world. But—and this is why it must be described as a ‘ghost subject’—the actual musical remains are tantalizingly small: two English songs in the ‘true-Coventry’ plays; some Latin polyphony in the York cycle; a snatch of plainsong in the Chester cycle. The paucity also of stage-directions about music in some plays (especially of the Towneley cycle) is much to be regretted. But as there are over thirty clear directions in the Chester cycle and the same number in the Hegge plays, we do not work entirely in the dark.

This paper is basically a study of some of the numerous textual divergencies which exist between the first printed edition of the libretto of Die Zauberflöte, and Mozart's autograph score. I begin, however, with some remarks about a peculiar forgery which purports to be a letter from Schikaneder to Mozart, bearing a date which has led scholars to believe that the composition of Die Zauberflöte was already far advanced by September 1790, over a year before the opera was first performed.

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’.

The tendency to accept that music has a social context while resisting its definition as a social commodity is not particular to the conservative wing of British musicology (albeit influenced by Carl Dahlhaus). The aesthetics of European musical idealism have consistently, and since well before Hanslick, opposed any suggestion that ‘serious’ music should be seen or heard to engage with the market-place, let alone that it might, willy-nilly, be in one. The cherishers of musical purity, however, are to be found not only amongst reactionary critics, with their specific culturally inherited involvement with the Classical style. Pre-1914 modernists and decadents saw the market-place as the creation and province of a philistine bourgeoisie and expressed an often uncompromising, anti-popular idealism of their own. Debussy in 1901 stated:

The enthusiasm of society spoils an artist for me, such is my fear that, as a result, he will become merely an expression of society

- a fear that would have been comprehended by the Viennese Schoenberg, who later formulated the belief that

no musician whose thinking occurs in the highest sphere would degenerate into vulgarity in order to comply with a slogan such as ‘Art for all'… . If it is art it is not for all, and if it is for all it is not art … .

This paper summarises the progress of my work on the Henrician set of musical partbooks belonging to Peterhouse, Cambridge. These books will be best known by their old catalogue numbers as Peterhouse manuscripts 40, 41, 31 and 32; recently, however, they have been reclassified as Peterhouse manuscripts 471–474. Along with all of the Peterhouse music manuscripts they are now kept in Cambridge University Library, where, because of their increasingly fragile condition, they are not normally made available to readers. I should like to record my thanks to the Librarian of Peterhouse for permission to examine and handle the partbooks, and to the College Archivist for allowing me to consult the account rolls, registers and other documents of the college.

One of the more nefarious generalizations of popular musical history is that which asserts a change from ‘modality’ to ‘tonality’ around the year 1600. The old canard is nowadays scarcely met with in its pure form, but it is surprising how much it still influences even sophisticated discussions of tonality both before and after that date. Lowinsky in his epoch-making Tonality and Atonality in Sixteenth-Century Music is largely concerned with the ways in which sixteenth-century music foreshadows the tonal procedures of the baroque and classical periods. In his articles on ‘Tonality’ and ‘Harmony’ in The New Grove, Carl Dahlhaus, while offering a series of widely-ranging definitions of tonality, and while recognizing also the capacity of melody to be tonally organized, nevertheless regards the major and minor scales as the essential pre-requisites of ‘harmonic tonality’, and its growth as a phenomenon of music composed since 1600. I find myself in sympathy only with the wider definitions of tonality there given, principally that of Fétis, and it will be the function of this paper, first, to argue against the retention of narrower definitions, and, secondly, to put the case for recognizing that the development of harmonically controlled tonality occurred much earlier than 1600. A reading of Dahlhaus's articles (which I take to be an authoritative digest of his considered standpoint as well as an informative summary of the points of view expressed by many theorists down the centuries) has also reminded me how much I am opposed to theories of melody and harmony which depend on acoustic absolutes, and to functional theories of harmony, principally that of Riemann, which assert a rigid hierarchy of chords, or fail to recognize the historical development of harmony from counterpoint. Some of these prejudices will surface in this paper, but they are not its primary purpose.

What distinguishes Italian oratorio from Italian sacred opera in the period from around 1700 to around 1825? The question arises from the significant difference between the use of the term ‘oratorio’ by Italian writers and composers at the beginning and end of this period. About 1700 nearly all Italian writers and composers applied the term to works performed without stage action. A century later, on the other hand, Italian writers and composers frequently applied the term to works that were presented as sacred operas. By the early nineteenth century the application of the term to a sacred work with stage action had become so common that it found its way into an Italian musical dictionary. In Lichtenthal's Dizionario ‘oratorio’ is defined as 'A species of drama, the subject of which is a theme selected from sacred history, performed by singers with the accompaniment of an orchestra, either in a church, or in a hall, or indeed on a theatrical stage - in this last case one means Opera sacra, and it bears the mark of the usual Opere in musica, having the same form and conduct.

Until comparatively recently the history of musical notation has been synonymous with the desire of the composer to exercise an increasing degree of control over the performance of his works via the medium of the written score. Viewed in historical perspective, it will be seen that during the last thirty years virtually every aspect of this complex composer/performer relationship has been radically changed—in many instances the outcome has been an almost total reversal of roles.