Imagine yourselves in a tropical forest. You see here pendulous trails of brilliantly-coloured flowers; there, bunches of gaudy fruits: high up, above your heads, filmy fronds of foliage wave in the breeze; at your feet gnarled and far-rambling roots wander in every direction. You wonder if you are beholding some fabled creeper of monstrous growth, or whether fruit, flowers and foliage belong to different plants that have become inextricably entangled. You attempt to follow a young shoot to its parent stem, and thence to its root; you find yourself baffled and baulked at every turn. Set yourselves the task of tracing the history of the creations named Intermezzi, Intermedii, Intermèdes, or Interludes to their source or sources, and you will experience similar feelings.

Most of the members of this Association are doubtless aware that from time to time efforts have been made to obtain a permanent record of music played extemporaneously. A little consideration of some of the conditions attached to our art will show the desirability of successfully achieving such an aim. Before this assembly there is no need to dilate on the fact that the trained composer is just as able—so to speak—to hear with his eyes, as ordinary people are to understand the import of words from silently reading them. The musician composes, or should at least write down his ideas, at the desk; indeed, in the case of orchestral or elaborate polyphonic music, no other course is practicable. This is the sound and proper method; and so long as intelligible “form” rather than disconnected rambling is recognised as an indispensable necessity on which to build, so long will the trained composer prefer the comparative slowness of writing at his desk, to dashing off his, perhaps cruder, ideas when sitting at his instrument. But having admitted the advantage of this mode of proceeding, we must not forget that there is also another side of music-art that ought not to be overlooked, and that is extemporaneous playing. I need not waste your time by dwelling on the various grades of this feature. Such extemporaneous playing as consists of fearful and wonderful chords, more or less vague, coming from nowhere in particular, and leading to the same place, that one too frequently hears doing duty as an in voluntary in our churches, or the astonishing preludising of youthful scramblers on the pianoforte, cannot too soon be forgotten. But above and far beyond these immature essays is the playing of true artists, whom nature has richly endowed with the faculty that we term inspiration.

The work of the late Sir Charles Wheatstone was very varied in character, and was not limited to one, or even two, of the branches of physics. He investigated the laws of sound, of ordinary and polarised light, and he greatly advanced our knowledge of electricity and magnetism. But there is one characteristic, at least, which runs through all his investigations: he always sought to embody the results of his study of the laws of nature in a practical form, so that they might be beneficial to mankind. Thus he made use of the polarisation of the light of the sky to determine the correct solar time by means of his solar clocks; and again, in his electric instruments, he has enabled us to make electric measurements, and also to interchange ideas with our fellow-creatures all over the globe.

The Masque of the English Court in the seventeenth century was the vigorous and richly endowed descendant of a long line of gradually developing progenitors.

Both Italy and England had their share in the nurture and improvement of this species of entertainment; its origin and earlier cultivation belonging to Italy, and its final and most successful elaboration to our own country.

The survey which I propose to take of the popular dances of the eighteenth century cannot profess to deal with any but the smallest part of the contents of the dance books which appeared in such numbers during the period now under our consideration.

Mr. Chairman, Ladies, and Gentlemen,—I must first of all apologize to you for presenting a paper which has been, I regret to say, very hastily prepared, owing to my recent severe illness, and to consequent pressure upon the time at my disposal. I must next ask you to believe that I approach my subject with great diffidence for two reasons—-firstly, the inability of any one mind to comprehend the various and multitudinous thoughts and ideas that must from time to time possess the soul of every true musician; and secondly, because of my personal inability to give adequate expression—even to my own views upon so difficult and delicate a matter as the consideration of the relative position of our Art-Science to the unenlightened or popular world.

The last time we had any discussion of aesthetics in our Association was in 1945, when I read a paper written by Dr. Glen Haydon, which related art to theory of knowledge. This intellectual line is favoured by American philosophers. Susanne Langer, a pupil of Whitehead, has in her Philosophy in a New Key (1942) used not so much art in general as music in particular as the key to her theory of knowledge, which is a semantic theory like Glen Haydon's. This trend is worth noting and contrasting with theories of musical aesthetics in which emotion is the kernel. Among musicians it is almost axiomatic that the stock-in-trade in which they deal is feeling in the medium of sound. They apply their technique to sound production in order to do a deal with their audiences in feeling. One of the fundamental problems of the aesthetics of music is therefore to examine this presupposition.

The death, on 14 August 1587, of Guglielmo Gonzaga Duke of Mantua and Monferrato, heralded a sudden shift in the political, economic and artistic policies of the Duchy. His successor, Vincenzo, had notions of a Mantuan role in the peninsular greatly disproportionate to the size of its territory and population, and it was undoubtedly an important part of his conception that the Gonzaga should be seen as patrons of the arts on a scale compatible with these ambitions. During the 1580s, Vincenzo had conspicuously preferred the hedonistic atmosphere of Ferrara and Florence to the Counter-Reformation gloom of his father's court, and in the years immediately after his accession began to import cultural fashions from these other centres. One important change in the musical establishment was the formation, probably completed by April 1589, of a permanent ensemble of virtuoso singers on the Ferrarese model. Another was the rejuvenation of theatre and spectacle at court, culminating in the presentation of opera and ballet during the carnival seasons of 1607 and 1608 and the wedding celebrations of the latter year. The following considers one aspect of this revived interest in music and spectacle, the attempted productions of Battista Guarini's Il pastor fido during the 1590s. The first section deals with the problems surrounding the gestation of the play, the attempted productions and the surviving music. The second considers some of the novel aspects of that music in relation to other traditions.

One of the less studied aspects of post-war musical life is private sponsorship of American modernist composers, such as that by the Fromm Music Foundation (FMF) established in 1952. Using unpublished letters and documents from the FMF archives at Harvard and interviews with people who worked with the founder, Paul Fromm, this article discusses how Fromm's involvement in his foundation led to ventures that were influential on the development of American contemporary music and its relationship to academia. Unlike the Ford or Rockefeller foundations, Fromm sought the role of patron, fostering close relationships with composers and accepting their advice. Yet composers in Fromm's network often had aesthetic visions that were different from his. This article discusses Fromm's sponsorship of the Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies and the journal Perspectives of New Music, and how the different, complex and contradictory visions held by Fromm and his advisers were representative of those in the larger American music scene.

Those familiar with Herman Melville's last novella, published posthumously in 1924 and entitled Billy Budd, Foretopman, will know that one of the most memorable scenes is in fact barely there. In the so-called ‘missing’ scene, all that readers know with any certainty is that Edward Fairfax Vere, captain of the warship Indomitable (later editions rename the ship Bellipotent), communicates to Billy Budd, a sailor, the verdict of a drumhead court. Billy is to die in the early hours of the following morning for the crime of striking and killing the master-at-arms, the malevolent John Claggart. Precisely what passes between Vere and Billy in the crucial scene — one pivotal for the denouement of the story — has remained for ever a literary mystery. Although the narrator provides some conjecture as to what may have happened in the compartment where Billy is held, all he can say for sure, in a sentence endlessly cited by Melville's critics, is ‘Beyond the communication of the sentence, what took place at this interview was never known.’

This article explores the filmic relationship between music, text and image through an intertextual reading of Herzog's two Amazonian films, Aguirre: Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. When Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo encounter each other in the rainforest, 300 years apart, a complicated interplay of history and legend, truth and fiction, is initiated. Awash with magical occurrence, the forest has its own endlessly repeating soundtrack (written by Popul Vuh). The ability of both explorers to defend themselves from the forest depends on their relationship to this music: Aguirre, the earlier explorer, is deaf to the circular sound and attempts to overlay it with a written account of their journey. Fitzcarraldo, on the other hand, enters the forest equipped with a gramophone that plays Verdi arias; he comes with his own soundtrack. Comparison between the two journeys exposes the conventional uses of text/speech and music/song in film, to reveal music as the predominant driving force behind filmic narrative.

This article explores the first attempt to reform Handelian oratorio, by the Revd John Brown, in 1763. Concerned about the waning popularity and literary flaws of Handel's works, Brown launched a reform campaign through his own oratorio The Cure of Saul, performed at Covent Garden Theatre, and the publication of A Dissertation on […] Poetry and Music. He also produced the first monograph of oratorio criticism, An Examination of the Oratorios which have been performed this Season, at Covent-Garden Theatre (1763). Published within weeks of one another, the three works shaped an intellectual offensive with aesthetic and moral goals mounted on an educational platform. Although a failure, Brown's attempt reflected Britain's national anxiety in the wake of the Seven Years War.

In 1913 Milhaud set passages of André Gide's La porte étroite as a song-cycle, Alissa. However, he subsequently left the youthful work unpublished, although it was performed by Jane Bathori and Milhaud at the Sorbonne on 11 February 1920. 18 years after its composition he returned to it, and the revised score was published in 1931 as op. 9. It was rare for him to revise earlier works (and, indeed, he seldom made sketches for any compositions). However, he did return to some other works from the same period, the First String Quartet, op. 5 (1912), and the Suite for Piano, op. 8 (1913), simply indicating sections to be cut from the published score of the quartet, and removing a movement from the suite. That Milhaud chose to intervene more extensively in Alissa indicates his attachment to the work and reveals, within the context of one work, the process of compositional growth more generally discernible in his output between these dates.

In the seventeenth century the process of appointing court musicians was often complicated by struggles between conflicting agendas. Recently discovered letters of Saxon Prince Johann Georg II (1613–80) document the nature of the process in Dresden during the tenure of court Kapellmeister Heinrich Schütz, and the attempts of Schütz and the prince to steer Elector Johann Georg I's hiring decisions in a direction that would further their cause: the cultivation of an awareness of the modern Italian style of singing in the Dresden court musicians. The letters reveal the previously unknown collaborative effort of Schütz and the prince to fill the position of vice-Kapellmeister with the ‘right’ musician (i.e. an Italian or Italian-trained one), and to keep the ‘wrong’ man out of the job. In the course of this enterprise, the prince participated in the negotiations for several appointments, including that of Christoph Bernhard, whom he then sent to a northern court to study with an Italian singer. Although the collaborators' mission ended in failure, the story of their efforts casts light on the musical politicking at a seventeenth-century court and on the implications such campaigns had for the lives of individual musicians.

Musicology has recently re-evaluated the nature, form and purpose of musical biography, reflecting a broader ‘biographical turn’ in the humanities. This article takes up recent challenges to move beyond the traditional model of the ‘life and works’ of ‘great’ composers and joins the search for new paradigms of musical biography. The lives of the Australian microtonal composer Elsie Hamilton (1880–1965) and the British music archaeologist Kathleen Schlesinger (1862–1953), and their collaboration, which spanned three decades, are offered as a case study that demonstrates the importance of international and transnational networks for comparative musicology and modern music, and reveals the role of women as critical agents of scholarship and cultural transmission. It also lays bare the considerable influence exerted by the fin de siècle occult revival upon the search for new modalities of musical expression. It is an example of how a biographical approach allows an expansive examination of a mentalité and can bring together a range of discourses to reveal unrecognized connections and relationships.