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.

This article engages with issues of musical historiography and politics – mainly in the 1930s and 1940s – through the example of Edward J. Dent, a towering figure of international musical and musicological life during that period. Dent's career was tightly interwoven with musical and musicological practice both in Britain and in the wider Western world. It offers a fascinating access point to European musical modernism on the one hand, and to mid-century concerns with the uses of music history on the other. In this article, I focus on these aspects of Dent's career and their intersections by exploring first Dent's involvement with the International Society for Contemporary Music, before turning to two further and closely related issues: Dent's scholarly work of that period – especially his turn to Handel – and his involvement in international cultural politics during the 1930s and 1940s.

Figurations of woods as sites of solitude, political exile and authenticity are drawn upon in a number of John Dowland's songs. ‘Can she excuse’ quotes from the ballad tune Woods so wild, while ‘O sweet woods’ makes reference to Wanstead woods, associated with both Philip Sidney and Robert Devereux during their lifetimes. This article examines how courtly experiences of political withdrawal and exile are articulated through musical and literary references to woods in these songs.

Cornelius Cardew named his monumental graphic score Treatise after Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early philosophical masterpiece Tractatus logico-philosophicus, and this well-known fact has engendered speculation about whether there might be other connections between Cardew’s composition and Wittgenstein’s book. Previous commentaries have focused on possible allusions to the Tractatus in the visual imagery employed by Cardew, and this article includes further suggestions of this type. However, it concentrates on more general affinities between Treatise, as Cardew conceived of it prior to his involvement with the free improvisation group AMM, and the philosophy adumbrated in the Tractatus. Foremost among these is a striking concordance between Cardew’s initial enthusiasm for an isomorphic mode of interpreting Treatise and Wittgenstein’s picture theory of the proposition. The article also excavates traces of the picture theory in the numerological basis of Volo solo, a more conventionally notated by-product of the Treatise project.

On the philosophical side all that I need do is to enter a protest against the prevailing materialism. The earth life is a school. Its first lesson is to draw inferences from the known to the unknown. That way lie faith, imagination and truth. There are three necessary inferences. One is bound to draw them in order to live one's life as it should be lived. They lead, when followed to a logical conclusion, to a belief in three worlds instead of one. These worlds are the world of the body, the world of the sentient soul, and the world of the spirit. As a working hypothesis one may assume that there are three atomic systems in the ether, and that when they are brought together and material from them grows up so as to function as one individual, there is life. The art of music has its roots in mind or spirit. Its basis is intonation, and intonation, like creation itself, comes from the science of numbers. The musician who scorns what he calls mathematics and acoustics and prefers to follow the dictates of his own sentient soul, is likely to be the slave of his environment. He should look higher and learn the properties of numbers as applied to vibrations and the interference of vibrations. He will find that music depends on the contrast between beats or interference and no-beats or consonance. Without heeding that contrast his instrument cannot be tuned. And that contrast is presumably the same in all the worlds of existence.

“The music of Waits—rude as may be their minstrelsy—breaks upon the mid-watches of the night with the effect of perfect harmony.” So writes Washington Irving, and though the experiences of those present will perhaps fail to endorse this description, we may, I think, spend an hour profitably in considering the origin, history, decay and disappearance of this old musical combination.

“The quest of origins,” says a recent writer∗—“the quest of origins seems to have a special attraction for the modern mind.”

The Period following Purcell's death has long been looked upon as one of the Dark Ages of English music. It is unquestionably true that Britain took a long time to produce her next really great composer, but our readiness to accept a musical back seat and our refusal to make unjustifiable claims on behalf of British music have tended to blind us to the true facts of the musical life of eighteenth-century England. The fact that Handel prospered here, that Haydn wrote some of his finest music for London audiences, and that whole hosts of minor masters settled here—J. C. Bach and Geminiani, for example—surely tells us a good deal about the standards of taste pertaining among London audiences. In fact, concert life in eighteenth-century England as a whole had a variety and vitality to which it would be hard to find a parallel. Not only were concerts held in the fashionable London salons, but in the ‘Great Rooms’ of taverns in villages which today are barely large enough to find a place on a map.

The subject on which I am to address you to-day is so wide that it would be impossible to do more than to give a very brief sketch of the whole, or to enter with some minuteness into the details of a special branch. I propose to take the latter course, and, in order to clear the ground before us, I will begin by stating what I do not propose to touch upon.

The manuscript Shrewsbury School VI (formerly Mus. iii. 42), an English liturgical book of the early 15th century, includes texts and music for processions, Passions and plays, some of which may have originated in the late 14th century. It has the format and liturgical order of a small service book such as a processional, but contains single mensural melodies rather than the plainsong melodies usually associated with the texts. Previous studies of the manuscript have concentrated on the plays; besides neglecting the rest of the manuscript as a source of further information about the plays, they have ignored the importance of this source as a collection of English liturgical ritual music. Because of the unique nature of the manuscript, many questions arise besides the usual problems of date and provenance, principally because some or all of the music may not have been monophonic as the extant material suggests, but polyphonic.

It is my duty to commence this lecture with a twofold apology or explanation, if you prefer to call it so.

In the first place I would allow myself the usual privilege of construing the term Eighteenth Century in an elastic sense; in the second place I am bound to admit that in many cases it is all but impossible to give a date, even approximately, to some songs to which your attention is to be directed to-day. One may look through numbers of these “broadsides,” or leaflets, and find that not only are composers' and publishers' names wanting, but that the date and price are very seldom given.

I cannot pretend that the adjective ‘cavalier’ in my title has much significance beyond colouring what would otherwise have been an even more drab title. Nevertheless, I believe that ‘cavalier’ is perhaps a fair description of the most important song-writers of the period; Nicholas Lanier, the Lawes brothers and John Wilson (if not of the probably pro-Cromwellian Colemans); and their performing and listening public, including the occasional roundheads. As in other spheres, the musical origins of the developments later in the century can be traced to the early part of the reign of King James I. Many surviving manuscripts as well as printed collections leave little doubt that the Italian madrigal—not monody—was well known in England from 1588 onwards. The only monodies printed here were those in Robert Dowland's Musical Banquet (1610) which included two by Caccini, one by Megli, and one anonymous piece. Notari's book of 1613 was also printed in England, though probably composed in Italy for the most part. Neither of these books can have exerted much influence, although Caccini's ‘Amaryllis’, which Dowland printed, became popular.

At the end of the seventeenth century a Venetian chronicler by the name of Pietro Antonio Pacifico drew attention to the music in two of the Venetian ospedali with the words ‘… these young ladies make a great study of music, with singular success, and to the amazement of foreigners, who wonder at their art in the singing of the divine Office’; and again ‘instructed by the best salaried teachers, they sing with various instruments on all the great feasts of the year Mass, Vespers and Compline — especially in Lent, when many people come to hear’. If Mass and Vespers were principal liturgical functions, this particular mention of Compline — the final Office of the day which almost certainly took place at the same sort of time as today's secular concert and was thus convenient for people of culture and devotion to turn out to — gives a guide to its relative importance as a liturgical act. This is confirmed by a glance at the catalogues of music in stock which the Venetian publisher Vincenti issued in 1621 and 1649, both of which list a considerable number of musical settings of Compline in both old and new styles, with and without continuo — an indication of steady demand. Yet by comparison with Mass and Vespers Compline and its music have been little studied, whether in Italy in the Baroque or elsewhere in other periods, and there is scarcely any substantial information about it in the major musical or religious reference works. It may be less because the repertory consists largely of music by relatively little-known figures (though Legrenzi, Cazzati and Colonna hardly belong in that category) dian because the musical requirements of the liturgy are on the whole straight-forward, not offering musicological conundrums that call into being polemical tracts of the Monteverdi Vespers variety; in essence the Office of Compline is a religious act on an intimate scale, not a potentially grand liturgical occasion with showy ritual. Indeed, the virtual absence of ritual in this final act of tie day probably encouraged its development in seventeenth-century Italy into the spiritual concert of which our Venetian chronicler speaks. Such a development was facilitated, too, by the simplicity of its liturgy — unlike Mass and Vespers, nothing basic changes from day to day, be it Sunday or weekday, feast or ferial day; there is no Proper, nor are there any complex stipulations about psalm groupings, antiphons, and Gregorian tones. Only the concluding Marian antiphon (which did not belong specifically to Compline but was in practice often attached to it) changed four times a year according to the liturgical season. From the outset, therefore, a composer could devise a complete, self-contained ‘package’, either allowing the intrinsic variety of the liturgy to give balance and contrast to bis setting or, as with the more adventurous, to build upon the liturgical foundations a colourful construction that could succeed as a spiritual concert on its own terms.

With my present paper—the fifth which I have had the honour to read before this Association—my first idea of offering you an outline sketch of the Development of National Opera in Russia is carried to a conclusion.

Having occasion recently to study the early history of instrumental music, I was struck by the different course that those first developments took in the chief countries of Europe. I found that it was impossible to deal with the whole subject in one gulp. Each country had to be taken separately and approached from a different point of view, for in each what I might term the vital stream took a different course. To illustrate my meaning, the backbone of German music in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the deep-rooted tradition of amateur music-making, which has lasted up to the present day in Germany as in no other country. The professional musicians of that period were largely foreigners, and although the exotic influences that they brought with them undoubtedly left their mark, it was the comparatively simple and essentially German music, written for the amateur, that bore the germ from which the great classical period sprang.

Jonson's remark that in 1617 a whole masque ‘was sung (after the Italian manner) Stylo Recitativo’ poses a riddle of nomenclature. When did the Italians first use the phrase ‘stile recitativo’, and from what time on was the term used fairly consistently?

This article addresses a subject long overlooked by students and scholarship – the musical annual. Emerging in London in 1829, this was an enormously popular brand of commercial publication conventionally produced for holiday sales. One particular copy – given as a present to an 11-year-old girl that year – proves a useful starting point from which to interrogate these items as a whole. Several avenues of inquiry suggest themselves: ideas of gift exchange and commerce, histories of the role such music played in adolescent upbringing and pianism, accounts of period notions of ‘the fair sex’, and considerations of the relation between authenticity and deception in annual poetics. In the end, the author attempts to recuperate some enigma or aura for the musical score -not by appealing to some allusive or metaphysical ‘work-content’ immanent in the text, but by exploring the sense in which these volumes were and are souvenirs – perhaps remote from traditional intellectual concerns, but redolent of a bygone and elusive ‘social life’.

Rubato has for centuries been linked with the idea of compensating tempo modulation. Despite the wealth of references to this idea in writings by famous performers and teachers over the ages, scholars investigating the idea have so far emphatically dismissed the notion as a myth, or at best a rationalization. In this article, I take as a starting-point these performers' writings, and show that it is scholars rather than performers who have reduced the idea of compensation to an abstract principle. Using Debussy's 1913 piano-roll recordings as examples, I show with the aid of empirical timing data and close listening that compensating rubato is far from a myth in the performance practice of the early twentieth century.