Ferruccio Busoni could be called an advocate of absolute music because of his frequent description of music as ‘absolute’ and his discussion of music as consisting of pure tones and rhythms found in the vibrating universe. However, he developed idiosyncratic theories about the term, its usage and its ideal manifestation in Tonkunst that remain largely unexamined in scholarly literature. True, Carl Dahlhaus noted Busoni's use of the concept to refer to music unconstrained by traditional forms, but this is merely one aspect of Busoni's views, which also, paradoxically, allowed for and included the visual and explicit connections to culture. The hybridity of Busoni's notion, which this article explores through an examination of writings and representative compositions, is especially relevant for current musicological discourse about absolute music. Sitting uneasily with Dahlhaus's more consistent view of absolute music as music apart from text or programme as well as with new musicological approaches that seek to refute the notion of music's autonomy, Busoni's view of absolute music offers a fascinating middle ground between compositions as discrete artistic artefacts on the one hand and as representations of their immediate culture on the other.

After the First World War, some musicians embraced ‘international’ identities in novel ways, requiring novel strategies.6 During the 1920s, internationalist initiatives were launched in musicology, music education, folk music and more, joining a more general proliferation of institutions devoted to cultural internationalism.7 In the domain of Western art music, the most high-profile internationalist organization of the era was the ISCM, founded in Salzburg in 1922.8 The ISCM’s principal activity during the interwar period was to organize an annual contemporary music festival. This peripatetic event, hosted in a different European city each year, served two intertwined ambitions: to promote contemporary music and to further international cooperation. The latter aspiration gave rise to an unofficial nickname – the ‘musical League of Nations’ – encapsulating the ISCM’s perceived affinities with other, heftier internationalist endeavours.9 A ‘musical League of Nations’ was, however, an ambivalent and precarious project: the moniker recognized, through analogy, a necessary proximity to the era’s chief prototype of an international structure; but it clung, by way of its adjective, to a degree of detachment from the treacherous waters of politics and diplomacy.

This article explores music’s role in radio drama. While musical aspects of early experimental radio dramas have often been explored, the music that figures in the Anglo-American radio play tradition has remained under-theorized. Borrowing interpretative tools from audiovisual discourses can help to elucidate some of the subtleties of the medium, but methodological inadequacies soon become apparent. As exemplars of modern radio dramatic technique, the BBC’s complete adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories (1989–98) are explored, their music interwoven into the drama with consistent levels of subtlety. I draw primarily from Michel Chion’s application of the ‘acousmatic’, showing how the ambiguity concerning the location of the enveloping solo violin music – Holmes’s instrument – offers twists and turns to the agency of the unfolding narrative. I examine further how a sustained technique of intertextual allusion creates what I call a paradiegetic space, in which pre-existing music, heard within the dramas, provides a parenthetical narrative that unravels in parallel with the primary narrative, reflecting back on its themes, changing its meanings and moreover challenging our preconceptions about radio’s particular acousmatic zone.

The discovery of a new anthology of secular songs from Madrid fills an important lacuna in our understanding of secular music in seventeenth-century Spain. The Biblioteca Xeral of the University of Santiago de Compostela — near the romanesque cathedral for which the famous Codex Calixtinus was written — preserves a manuscript of 111 folios (E-SCu MS 265) which has hitherto escaped the attention of both musicological and literary scholars. It contains 100 anonymous songs, all but two for solo voice and continuo, and was copied by a certain José Miguel Guerra, scribe of the Spanish Royal Chapel. The manuscript is undated but, as we will argue later, it appears to have been compiled around 1680. If this estimate is correct, it would make this anthology the earliest collection of its kind, a significant missing link between the latest polyphonic cancioneros of the mid-seventeenth century and the numerous anthologies of solo songs and cantatas from the 1690s onwards. This article represents a preliminary investigation of the manuscript, its contents and the circumstances of its compilation, though many of the questions surrounding the collection will have to await further study.

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.

The design of this paper is to draw attention to the mode in which our minds work in the act of sight-singing. The subject is one mainly for the consideration of teachers, but it should be of interest to musical students generally. Every rational attempt at an educational classification of the details of such a subject as music must be governed by a knowledge of the way in which the mind develops its latent powers. As singing has exclusively to do with conceptions of sound, I have ventured to style this modest investigation the “Psychology of Sight-singing.” The title may appear to promise a more deeply philosophical enquiry into the elusive subtleties of mental phenomena than I contemplate, or am capable of making. But I trust I may succeed in avoiding a path where discreet angels fear to tread and that I may be able to appeal throughout simply to the every-day musical experience of my audience. There are hundreds of books upon sight-singing, Some pay their possible disciples the compliment of assuming that their capacity is so great that the whole matter can be mastered in a very short time and may be presented in a nutshell. These nutshell methods conveniently assume the skill they affect to impart, and, consequently, are hard for common folk to crack. More elaborate methods claim to ensure success if you only succeed in succeeding. If you do not succeed, the individual is to blame, not the system, which is infallible. It has already been remarked that every system of teaching worthy the name must assume in pupils the existence of certain potential capacities that can be developed. So every teacher is a psychologist, or at least he ought to be if he is worth his salt. It is far from my intention to discuss or advocate any particular method. I design simply to endeavour to tabulate the faculties which all methods assume their pupils to possess in a greater or lesser degree. I propose to omit all reference to rhythm and to confine myself to the relationship of musical sounds to one another.

Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, James II and the Stuart royal family lived in exile as the guests of Louis XIV at the Château de St-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. James II died in 1701 and was succeeded as king-in-exile by his son, James III. The court of these two kings remained at St-Germain-en-Laye for well over 20 years, until James III was expelled from France at the demand of the British government.

Slåtter, op. 72, was composed in 1902-3, and is thus among Grieg's very last works. It is also one of his least familiar. ‘Here [in Norway] my early position is still being promoted, praised at every available opportunity at the expense of my current one’, he wrote in his diary on 21 March 1906. Earlier that day he had played six of the 17 slåtter at a concert in Kristiania (now Oslo), and he was disappointed by the lukewarm response. Grieg did, however, live long enough to witness the successful reception of the work, not least in France where avant-garde circles talked about ‘le nouveau Grieg’. Nevertheless, the widespread perception of Grieg - even today - is based on his lyrical pieces, the ‘wheat buns’, as he himself called them. Yet Slåtter is without doubt one of Grieg's most fascinating works. We do indeed meet a ‘new Grieg’ here, and there is good reason to believe that the work played some part in Béla Bartók's development. There was a copy in Bartók's library, and in an article in the Hungarian journal Zeneközlöny from 1911 (a year before he visited Norway) he mentions Norwegian slåtter and Romanian joe as distinctive types of instrumental folk music. According to the Norwegian Grieg scholar Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe, he probably became aware of Grieg's Slåtter in Paris in 1910.

I hope that you will forgive me for passing over as rapidly as possible the early history of experiments with recorded sound. I am more anxious to call your attention in this paper to some of the problems that confront us in the present, and to offer you the results of my own practical experience with the gramophone rather than a hotch-potch of other people's acoustical theories which I lack either the ingenuity to exploit or the scientific training to appreciate.

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.

While biographical studies of British composers' experiences in the Second World War abound, little attention has been paid to how the demands of ‘total’ war impacted on music's ideological status. This article sheds new light on how composers and critics negotiated the problematic relationship between art music and politics in this period. John Ireland's Epic March – a BBC commission that caused the composer considerable anxiety – provides a case study. Drawing first on the correspondence charting the lengthy genesis of the work, and then on the work's critical reception, I consider how Ireland and his audiences sought to reconcile the conflicting political and aesthetic demands of this commission. With its conventional musical style, Epic March offers an example of a ‘middlebrow’ attempt to bridge the gap between art and politics.

The concept of music as science, still a vital part of the natural philosophy of the seventeenth century, found a strong advocate in the early Royal Society, whose agenda frequently embraced musical topics. From the organization's inception in 1660 to the early eighteenth century the Society's minutes recount acoustical experiments performed at meetings and describe papers on topics ranging from string vibrations to music's medicinal powers.

Can music really be said to exist without someone to listen to it? Anyone reading the works of musicologists – and even of social historians of music – might be forgiven for thinking so. Listeners had no place on Guido Adler's original agenda for musicology and they have had little attention since. While we have learnt much about composers and composition, performers and performing practice, patrons and impresarios, publishers and publishing, the ordinary listener has hardly had a look-in. (William Weber's pioneering work, Music and the Middle Class, is an important exception.) In the current vogue for analysis they are replaced by a kind of ideal listener, or in effect disappear altogether; whatever else it is, analysts' music is not music as it is heard by most actual listeners, with their ‘favourite passages’ and emotional reactions. And if not simply ignored, listeners are often regarded as pitiably unadventurous, indifferent to ‘form’, easily seduced by catchy tunes, extra-musical programmes and flamboyant personalities; the notion that music history is made by listeners as well as by composers and performers seems almost perverse. Almost the only audiences which have been studied with anv degree of sophistication are those for rock and pop. We have learnt much about the producers of music; the listeners remain a great unknown.

It is a commonplace that the nineteenth century witnessed a flowering of provincial musical life, and nowhere was this more pronounced than in the field of concert promotion. However, with a few notable exceptions, such as Michael Kennedy's work on the Hallé, little close scrutiny has been given to the topic. This paper seeks to give the provinces the attention they deserve.

What lover of eighteenth-century music, hearing Burney's characterisation of the Mannheim orchestra as ‘… an army of generals, equally fit to plan a battle, as to fight it’, or upon reading Schubart's description of that group,

has not been filled with curiosity to hear such an ensemble? Recently a few performing groups have begun to try to satisfy that curiosity. We are reminded of the pioneering nature of such undertakings by recalling that a respected music dictionary defines ‘Performance Practice’ as ‘the study of how early music, from the Middle Ages to Bach, was performed and the many problems connected with attempts to restore its original sound in modern performance.

Writing a year before Mozart died, Joseph Ritson prefaced the earliest attempt to summarize the history of medieval English song with the comment:

Nearly two hundred years later it is still necessary to begin any such survey on a note of extreme caution and with a declaration that the picture must be built on a series of widely separated stepping-stones—or more precisely, on a scattered group of stones peeping up from the river and perhaps never intended to pave a way across. Perhaps I may continue the river metaphor for a moment by saying that a landing place is now fairly solidly established on the far bank thanks to the recent publication by John Stevens of the Fayrfax Manuscript (GB-Lbm Add. 5465), dating from around 1500, and of the English songs in the Ritson Manuscript (Add. 5665), some of which must have been copied around 1470. Further, a little way up the river, there is a more or less continuous path across provided by the English carol tradition, also fully published by John Stevens and surviving in a series of five manuscripts that are miraculously fairly even in their chronological and stylistic spacing over the years from 1430 to 1500.

With the forthcoming publication of volume xxxi of Purcell's works, comprising his famous Fantazias and other Instrumental Music, the Purcell Society will at last have completed its edition of all his known chamber music. The Society's scores of the two printed sets of trio-sonatas were issued more than half a century ago, but, like most scholarly editions of the nineteenth century, they do not always accord with our current views of how such editions should be prepared and presented. Indeed, it seems to me that musical scholars would save themselves a great deal of mental anguish if they worked on the assumption that any publication or history of earlier music will at best hold good only for about thirty years after it is first published. This assumption is demonstrably true for the two centuries that have elapsed since Padre Martini wrote the first volume of his Storia della Musica, and I do not think any of us will live to see it change.

If we were to judge of the state of violin-playing and technics during the second half of the sixteenth and the whole of the seventeenth century from the didactic works published before 1700, we should be forced to the conclusion that the standard must have been very low indeed. The documentary evidence which we possess concerning the achievements of such virtuosi as Heinrich Johann Franz von Biber, Thomas Baltzar, Nicola Matteis, Davis Mell, etc., does not agree with that relating to the tutors printed during the period at which these players were active. We cannot imagine that the results obtained by the performers just enumerated were derived from the works published contemporaneously.

A study of Johann Christian Bach's keyboard music prompts the obvious and important question: which of his sonatas and concertos were composed for harpsichord, and which for the piano? (Indeed, did he think of them as two distinct instruments at all?) And what sort of pianos did he have available on the occasions when he played them in public? Did he really play his ‘Solo on the Piano Forte’ at the Thatched House on 2 June 1768 (in a concert that consisted mainly of orchestral music) on a little Zumpe square, or was he already using a prototype English grand? When were these various models of piano first made in London, and what musical use did other composers and performers, as well as J. C. Bach, make of them?