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.

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.

It used to be thought that Willaert invented double-choir music, drawing his inspiration from the famous organ galleries in San Marco. That his Salmi spezzati were not unique or even innovatory is now beyond dispute. His predecessors and contemporaries working in other important churches of the Veneto — Albertis in Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, Ruffino and Passetto in Padua Cathedral and the Basilica del Santo, Santacroce in Treviso Cathedral — contributed to a significant regional repertory of double-choir psalms, many of which are more adventurous in their use of the medium than those of Willaert. Ruffino extended the use of double-choir to the ordinary of the mass.

This article is a microhistory of music collecting in eighteenth-century America. It focuses on the life and collection of an elite white woman, Sally Brown, who gathered an amount of music that was unusual for women in the USA at that time. She was able to do so because her family had a successful mercantile business, one that included the slave trade. Sally’s experiences shed light on the gendered history of amateur music-making, which this article posits were connected to other gendered forms of domestic labour in the early American republic. By tracing how Sally acquired music, this article demonstrates the importance both of affective, personal ties and of the anonymized labour of the global trade network, which supplied her and other consumers with music-book materials. This article argues that, in ways with which musicological scholarship has yet to reckon, intimacy and labour contributed to music collecting at both individual and structural levels.

Alessandro striggio was the major composer working in Florence between 1560 and 1590. His musical production, as a whole, has not attracted a just degree of attention up to now, but several scholars have described, and, more recently, critically evaluated his role in the main Medici festivities of the period. Striggio's madrigal books, seven in all, together with selections of his work printed in anthologies of the time, represent an important source of music used in a great variety of festive occasions; and although scholars have dipped into this material, it has not yet been examined systematically. What now survives of Striggio's work in this field consists of over thirty compositions, about one-fifth of his total output. As a percentage, this is higher than that of most other contemporary madrigalists. The surviving quantity probably accounts for less than half of Striggio's festive production, if we remember the almost complete loss of sources for the main celebrations.

Some weeks ago, a paper was read by Mr. Jacques on the “Composer's Intention,” and it struck me, while listening, that a great deal might be said from the composer's point of view to show how his intention might be worked out in his composition.

No foreigner can fail to be struck by the Church music of Russia. Even if his acquaintance with the country be limited to a short visit—say a fortnight spent in St. Petersburg, with perhaps a flying visit for a few days to Moscow, he is sure to be impressed by the excellent unaccompanied singing of the choirs not only in the large cathedrals and monasteries, but also, if he visit them, in the ordinary parish churches. He will be loud in his praise of the marvellous richness and compass of the voices, and more especially of the deep notes sung by some of the basses, going down to the A, G, and even F of the 16-ft. octave of the organ, voices the like of which are to be heard in no other country. Although there is no organ or instrumental accompaniment of any kind to sustain the voices, the singing is never out of tune. Even the clergy seem to be universally possessed of musical ears. In the long ectenæ, which recur so frequently in every one of the Greek Church services, and which in form somewhat resemble our Litany, neither the deacon who sings the suffrages nor the choir which responds ever seem to lose the right pitch, and get flatter and flatter as we so often hear in this country. In fact, I don't think that anyone who has had the opportunity of comparing the ecclesiastical music of the various nations of Europe will refuse Russia the credit of surpassing all other countries in the general excellence of her church singing.

Everybody can imagine the following kind of operatic scene: many characters are on the stage, all singing, pronouncing different words, and expressing contrasted emotions simultaneously – but nothing happens. Action is suspended, the music goes on. The music does not need to be carried forward by action or even text; it has its own formal logic and extension. The last section of Mozart's second finale of Le nozze di Figaro, for instance, takes no less than fourteen pages in the vocal score. Its text consists of only two quatrains of four lines each, which are pronounced and repeated by one group of actors each. The piece comes at the end of a long finale that is full of action; but after the ‘colpo di scena’ provided by the entry of Marcellina, Dottor Bartolo, Don Basilio, with their marriage contract, nobody is able to act or even to speak coherently any longer, nobody causes the other to react to his words, nobody seems to hear the other – and they are all singing loudly and clearly. Not only does the surprise justify the standstill of actions and reactions on the stage: it is typical that in such operatic ensembles the characters behave as if they were not listening to each other.

The name of Johann Adolph Scheibe is at once famous and obscure in music history: famous perhaps for the wrong reasons, and largely as the result of his criticism of Johann Sebastian Bach, which can be found retold and frequently misinterpreted in almost all Bach biographies; obscure because little attention has been focused on his many significant contributions to the historical study of musical thought in the early eighteenth century. In the more than two hundred years since the 29-year-old musician and writer published his rather mild words of aesthetic disagreement with Bach's musical style, Scheibe's opinions regarding Bach have never received an adequate defence. Bach had been insulted, and his Leipzig friends as well as Scheibe's enemies declared him guilty of a heinous crime: he had dared to suggest that the master's music was not without faults. Scheibe has been assumed guilty ever since. He tried to counteract each critical attack aimed at him by Bach's circle of defenders with vigorous logic and at times unfortunate youthful sarcasm, but the war of words which developed never resolved itself positively one way or the other in his lifetime. Rather it faded away after a few years, only to be resurrected by Bach scholarship in the nineteenth century.

One of the outstanding applications of psychology to education during recent years has consisted in the development of methods of measuring intelligence and the results have been so successful that intelligence tests now form part of the normal procedure in selecting pupils in school for higher forms of educational training. If intelligence tests had no other value, their use would be justified in that they have enabled us to find out many facts regarding the nature of intelligence; for example, we now know that “The observed facts indicate that all branches of intellectual activity have in common one fundamental function (or groups of functions) whereas the remaining or specific elements seem in every case to be different from that in all the others.” (Spearman.) Now it is well known that aesthetic abilities are generally regarded as standing quite apart from say ordinary vocational aptitudes. The musician and the artist have often been treated by educationists as being a class by themselves, an attitude which has been fostered by the musicians who have let the idea become current that their subject is not capable of being assessed in the same terms as those of the other school subjects. This is amusingly illustrated by the case of the musical adviser to a certain education authority who refused to attend schools at the same time as the inspectors of the ordinary school subjects.

This short extract from Professor Housman's Introductory Lecture delivered before the Faculties of Arts and Laws and of Science in University College, London, in the year 1892, is set down here to help me to disencumber my mind and to tell a plain tale in simple words; indeed, you too will have pondered upon those things which appertain to Music Studies. Throughout this Paper “I tell you that which you yourselves do know,” and I shall hope to be instructed in the Discussion.

The study of a musical manuscript for its purely physical features—the paleographic and diplomatic study of a manuscript—may seem a far cry from the music it contains, which ought to be our main focus of study. But such investigation can inform us very precisely about the preparation and purpose of a manuscript. It can suggest a great deal more about the ways in which the minds of scribes, performers, even composers worked. (A second thought, for example, can be twice as significant if you have deciphered the first thought erased beneath it.) It is, in other words, the archaeology of music, and relates to the music itself as excavation does to our understanding of civilisation.

It has been said that by naming him Hector, Berlioz's father determined his fate, marked him out for glory and tragedy, heroic deeds and the bitterness of failure and mutilation. A fanciful idea, no doubt; but the more one considers Berlioz's life, the more it seems almost mystically inevitable that his crowning work should be an epic on the Trojan war and its aftermath, the wanderings of Aeneas and the myth of the founding of Rome, and the more one comes to see his discovery of Virgil during adolescence and his precocious response to the passion and tenderness of the Aeneid as the most important single event of his imaginative existence. As Gounod justly remarks, Berlioz, like his great namesake Hector, died beneath the walls of Troy; for the final blow in a lifetime of vain struggles against a hostile musical environment was its rejection of the very work which he knew to be his culminating achievement and artistic justification. When we read the letters written during the two years of its composition we cannot help sensing something special about them. In their mood of exhilaration and their sense of destiny fulfilled they recall the passage at the end of The Gathering Storm where Churchill describes his feelings on taking power in May 1940: ‘I felt … that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial’.

A central theme of Nietzsche's Wagner criticism is the theatre and acting. Nietzsche professes a deep suspicion of the ‘herd mentality’ promoted by theatre and the shallowness and persuasive power of the actor. Wagner and Bayreuth, he claims, embody these characteristics in their most intense form, compounding the theatre's worst features with a thoroughly modern set of blind contradictions. But Nietzsche's writings can also embrace theatrical masks and ‘histrionics’, presenting them as the key to a conception of identity as plural, mobile and random. In fact the very form of his writings, with its weave of multiple authorial identities, reinforces this view. This article argues that Nietzsche's anti-Wagnerian rhetoric is a mask that conceals more sympathetic attitudes. While repelled by Wagnerian theatre on many levels, Nietzsche also positions Wagner and the experience of music drama as a model for new definitions of identity.

For there can be no doubt that a great part of art lies in imitation. Discovery clearly came first, and is of first importance. But it is none the less profitable to follow up other people's successful discoveries. And every technique in life is founded on our natural desire to do ourselves what we approve in others. Hence children follow the shapes of letters to attain facility in writing; musicians look for a model to the voice of their instructors, painters to the works of their predecessors, countrymen to methods of growing that have been proved successful by experience. In fact, we can see that the rudiments of any kind of skill are shaped in accordance with an example set for it. Certainly we must either be like or unlike those who excel. It is rarely that nature makes one man like another: but imitation often does.

Throughout most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a three-act structure prevailed in Italian opera. Spoken plays in Renaissance Italy had been in five acts, a structure which was maintained both when music was inserted into them (as in Guarini's Il pastor fido of 1584) and, later, when they were set entirely to music (as was Rinuccini's Orfeo of 1600). Whereas spoken plays generally continued to follow a five-act structure, the favola in musica soon assumed a different, three-act structure (T. de Cupis's Eumelio of 1606 set by Agostino Agazzari and Ottavio Corsini's Aretusa of 1620 set by Filippo Vitali were among the first to be in three acts) and this remained the norm until the 1770s.

Brahms's dedication of his op. 51 string quartets (1873) to the surgeon Theodor Billroth provides a window into Brahms's musico-political views in the 1870s that has hitherto been unexplored by music scholars. Analysis of correspondence, performance traditions and the scores of these two quartets demonstrates that Brahms chose to align himself and his works with the learned connoisseurs of the domestic chamber-music-making tradition, represented by Billroth and his frequent musical soirées. Brahms's music also shows the influence of Joseph Joachim, his oldest and dearest friend and Europe's premier chamber musician. Brahms's compositional choices in these two works combine public and private musical styles, to offer a touching memorial to earlier composers and friends, and to provide a teachable moment for the musical public.