In 1985, Albi Rosenthal reported his discovery of a printed libretto for the opera Andromeda, composed by Monteverdi for performance in Mantua in Carnival 1620. This libretto deserves a new examination for its dramatic content, its likely musical setting (now lost) and some fundamental questions of genre. Its patron, Prince Vincenzo Gonzaga, used the librettist Hercole Marliani to broker his self-fashioning by imitating both Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607), supported by Vincenzo's elder brother, and Arianna (1608), which in effect belonged to the prince's parents. Monteverdi was typically slow to produce the score. The customary explanation is his disenchantment with Mantua and his new duties at St Mark's, Venice. However, we now see that both the Gonzagas and Monteverdi used Andromeda, like others of his Mantuan-commissioned works, as a bargaining chip in a complex exchange of obligations and favours typical of the courtly world to which the composer still belonged.

In the 1890s, two musicians travelled between Britain and South Africa. One was the first examiner to travel abroad to examine for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, Franklin Taylor. At the same time as Taylor’s arrival in the Cape in 1894, a black South African composer, John Knox Bokwe, prepared to republish a tonic sol-fa hymnal containing many hymns that eventually became popular in Britain, to which Bokwe travelled multiple times. Although these narratives might appear to reflect highly divergent contexts for musical experience, the fluctuating constructions of imperial authority encountered in the careers of both these men link their stories together more deeply than their geographical and cultural disparities set them apart. The synchronous presentation of their stories in this article thus raises questions of how music emerged as a metaphor for constructions of imperial knowledge across shifting cultural boundaries.

Umkhosi wokukhahlela is an annual ceremony in the KwaBhaca Great Kingdom (Eastern Cape, South Africa) that celebrates virginity among young women and girls. Not regularly practiced for decades, it has recently made a comeback, having been strategically adopted by King Madzikane II as a tool of empowerment in the fight against the HIV pandemic, the rise in teen pregnancies, rape and school dropouts, as well as the abuse of women in general. This article investigates the return of Umkhosi wokukhahlela through Antonio Gramsci’s notion of ‘articulation’. As we shall see, the ritual is a particularly engaging and thoroughgoing example of how local communities intertwine the past with the present to reshape their own identity, borrowing from tradition to articulate specific life lessons germane to the present – and future – of the Bhaca people.

This article examines a range of writings on the status of musical interpretation in Austria and Germany during the early decades of the twentieth century, and argues their relevance to current debates. While the division outlined by recent research between popular-critical hermeneutics and analytical ‘energetics’ at this time remains important, hitherto neglected contemporary reflections by Paul Bekker and Kurt Westphal demonstrate that the success of energetics was not due to any straightforward intellectual victory. Rather, the images of force and motion promoted by 1920s analysis were carried by historical currents in the philosophy, educational theory and arts of the time, revealing a culturally situated source for twenty-first-century analysis's preoccupations with motion and embodiment. The cultural relativization of such images may serve as a retrospective counteraction to the analytical rationalizing processes that culminated specifically in Heinrich Schenker's later work, and more generally in the privileging of graphic and notational imagery over poetic paraphrase.

Some time ago, in collaboration with Professor Read of St. Andrews, I was engaged in the transcription of some music contained in a book on Alchemy by one Michael Maier. The book, entitled Atalanta fugiens, was published near Frankfort in 1618. It contained fifty Discourses on Alchemy, each being preceded by a woodcut, an epigram in doubtful Latin verse and the first couplet of each of the latter set to music in canon; all the canons being written above, below, or around the same Canto Fermo. I had intended to speak of the music to-day, but as most of what I should have said has recently appeared in Professor Read's book Prelude to Chemistry, in which some of the canons are reproduced, I did not feel justified in repeating matter so recently issued in print. I have the book here and shall be glad to show it to anyone caring to see it at the close of the proceedings.

This article considers why septuple metres are so rare in Western music, despite being common in many other cultures. The scene is set by tracing the history of the septuple-time ‘meme’ (an idea that replicates by imitation) from ancient Greece through to Western art and popular music. The following sections consider the psychological, musical and environmental factors in more detail. The scarcity of septuple time in Western music is largely attributable to the development of the time signature, as a vertical conception of music evolved during the Renaissance. Subsequent evolution of the ‘Western music memeplex’ maintained septuple time on its periphery. Analysis of this interaction permits the construction of a meme-centred narrative of aspects of the development of Western music.

On two previous occasions I have had the pleasure of addressing the Members of this Association on the subject of bells, and I have ventured to choose for consideration this evening another aspect of the same subject in which there is a great deal to be done by musicians, and which is of much interest to them.

Ladies and Gentlemen,—The emotional aspects and sympathetic effects of the sister arts is the title of the paper which I have the honour of reading to you, but it has especial reference to the relationship of the sister arts— poetry, painting, and music. I need not say that any one of these three subjects would require a volume for itself, instead of a paper combining the three. It is therefore necessary that I should state at once the object I have had in view, namely, the throwing together of a few ideas interspersed with anecdotes when appropriate. I assign to music the position of the younger sister which she indubitably holds at the present day, but, in point of fact, in one sense, she is the elder sister, and as such I shall introduce her. I must ask you to define to yourselves this simple question—What is music? The answer must not be a preconceived idea or predilection, without a reason for your belief. A mighty river can be traced to its source, which may be a dripping rivulet; in like manner we must go to the fountain head, and trace music back to its primitive origin. What is music? To my mind music is a deviation from monotonous sound in its strict sense. If I hear the wild sounds which the wind capriciously elicits from the Æolian harp, and which can produce according to its force the softness of a child's slumber or the boisterousness of rage—this I call music. When I hear the gentle murmuring of a purling stream, the breaking of a wave on the seashore, the chirping of birds, or the echoing of a bell borne o'er the plain from distant hills—this I call music. If such be the case, then, music is the elder of the three sisters. Professor Tyndall shows that music differs from noise in that the sound entitled to the definition of a musical note is produced by regular and perfectly periodic vibrations, whereas noise is caused by an irregular succession of shocks. The shaking of a tool-box with its various metal contents can only produce a noise, because the shaking makes an irregular succession of shocks; but the drawing of a violin bow across a string produces music.

“Criticism,” said a friend casually one day to me, “is the salt of life.” I think that is true: as long as man has experiences, he will persist in discussing them. Music is an experience, and about that I will put a preliminary question: — When was the criticism of music born ?—and will offer an answer for your possible acceptance. It was when the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God. shouted for joy?” The inscrutable wonder of creation was then in performance, it was sung to the tune of the music of the spheres, and a selection of mankind—those whose antecedents made it likely that they would have the requisite knowledge— were filled with the love that precedes understanding, and affirmed the glory of that wonder.

The music we are going to hear this evening is really the fulfilment of a desire expressed by this Association nearly thirty-one years ago. After a paper on the subject of lute-music by Miss Janet Dodge, Mr. James Matthew said: “We were many of us rather hoping we might have the pleasure of hearing the actual instrument,” and Dr. Southgate added “We should of course have liked to hear the lute.” But in those days much patient effort had still to be made before the art of lute-playing (distinct from a kind of bastard imitation on the guitar) could be said to have been fully recovered; and so they had to be content with a piano. Even to-day, the sound of the lute will be strange and unknown to most of us here; and as I am convinced that any critical discussion of music for an unknown instrument can only be misleading, I have asked Mrs. Poulton to play the very generous programme you have before you, in the hope that you will be able to gain some clear idea how this music really sounded at the hands of its composers.

The subject of Orchestral and Choral Balance has by no means received the attention due to it from concert-givers, conductors, writers on music, or the public. It has occasionally called forth a casual remark from Press critics when something beyond the ordinary has been noticeable in a performance; writers on orchestration have touched upon it to some extent, and an occasional lecture has been devoted to it; but in nearly every case there has been a mere nibbling at the fringe of a great subject. Even where a general survey has been attempted, it has often taken the form of a sermon preached upon some definite text, such as, for example, the otherwise valuable paper read by Professor Prout before the last Conference of the Incorporated Society of Musicians. In that paper, Dr. Prout showed that his choice of the subject was due to his having noticed a few bad examples of ill-considered balance between choir and band, where the choir was numerically much too strong for the orchestra, such as at the Handel Festivals, to a smaller extent in the Albert Hall, and to a still smaller extent at the Festivals of Birmingham and Leeds. But this is only one aspect of the subject. And though one must admit that the indictment against these performances was justified, I fail to see any justification for a general attack in the same direction upon the relative proportions of bands and choirs in this country. It is sufficient to point out that though the band may be frequently overpowered by the choir at the Crystal Palace and at the Albert Hall, the complaint of many musicians who really know what they are talking about is that many choral societies are painfully overweighted by their accompaniments.

Charles Koechlin showed little interest in silent films, and saw the film industry both at the beginning and end of his musical career as the worst aspect of the debased world of commercial art he so detested. According to his diaries, Koechlin first visited the cinema on i December 1912, and between this and his important visit to see Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel on 29 June 1933 he apparently went only eighteen times. Charlie Chaplin was the only silent film star that Koechlin really respected, for he represented eternal hope in misfortune, an escape from everyday problems into a world of fantasy, the ‘chimérique’ as Koechlin called it; all of this was relevant to his own existence as a composer. From the series of essays entitled Stars which he wrote in 1934 as a commentary to his Seven Stars' Symphony it is evident that Koechlin found silent film subtitles pretentiously banal, their stories conventional and superficial, often mutilating his favourite authors such as Jules Verne and Hans Andersen. With the arrival of the first sound films in the early 1930s, however, Koechlin suddenly found himself drawn to the cinema, and a curious, fascinating period of his life began, which brought to a head his inner conflict between the necessity to exist as a composer in real life despite serious financial difficulties, and his desire to escape into a private fantasy world in which he could compose. A passage from Tristan Klingsor's Scheherazade poem Le Voyage, which Koechlin set in 1922–23 and to which he often referred, summarizes his philosophy. The first phrase is the crucial one.

Mily Balakirev, the leader of the small group of Russian nationalist composers nicknamed by Vladimir Stassov the ‘moguchaya kuchka’ (the 'mighty handful'), was a controversial figure in his lifetime, and has remained so ever since. What was it that led him to take such seemingly odd actions as his retirement from music at the age of 35 ? What induced him to quarrel with nearly all his former friends and sympathisers? Was he, as Gerald Abraham put it, a flawed genius ? Why did the great works which were expected from him never materialise in anything like the numbers that all his friends hoped for? Why were they nearly all profoundly disappointed that one whom they knew to be an outstanding composer failed (in their opinion) to achieve in the works he did produce that greatness which he exuded in their presence, 'bewitching' them, as Rimsky-Korsakov put it, with his magnetism and hypnotising them with the ‘incomparable beauty’, as Stassov wrote, of his extemporisations at the piano?

Little enough has been written on the Venetian operas of the second half of the seventeenth century, and to all save a few, familiar perhaps with Hellmuth Christian Wolff's pioneering work on that subject, or with Simon Towneley Worsthorne's more recent study, Carlo Pallavicino can hardly be more than a name. Indeed, doubts have been raised about the name itself. The libretti to three of his operas name the composer as Pallavicini, and perhaps following these, or impressed by his prolific output, Burney and others since have also pluralised the composer. However, there is good authority for the spelling which I adopt for this paper, for two documents preserved in the Venetian archives bear the composer's signature, and without doubt he signs himself, in a neat and confident hand, Carlo Pallavicino.

The modern choirboy is such a familar object, at any rate to those who go to Church, that it is not generally realised that he is in any sense an historical figure, and by some is even regarded as a necessary nuisance or as a person of no serious importance.

Yet in this familar figure we can, perhaps as nowhere else, see the living embodiment of some of those things which are most distinctively national in the music of our country.

My object in reading this paper before the British Musical Association is to describe certain observations I have made concerning the folk-lore and music of the south of Spain. I shall not attempt to deal with the great problem of Spanish musical history: that has been done by Professor Trend in his excellent books such as The Music of Spanish History and Manuel de Falla. My study of the music of the south of Spain is mainly based upon personal experience as a minstrel in the towns and villages of the country, where I had the opportunity of mixing with folk-singers, guitarists, gipsy minstrels and dancers. My main object in studying thus the music of the Andalusian folk was to enable me to arrive at a deeper understanding of that elusive Indian Romany race which has played such an important part in the history of European music. It will, therefore, not be amiss if to-day I consider briefly the history of the gipsies as minstrels.

The subject of this paper is, I am aware, a little outside of the usual programme of the Musical Association, as it deals partly with matters of building and architecture; but it is of some consequence that music should be heard under the most advantageous conditions, and some of those whom I am addressing may have to decide on some occasion on the choice of a plan for a concert hall, and I should be glad if I could think that any of the suggestions I have to make may be of use to them in the future. The construction of theatres for opera I am purposely leaving on one side; opera is a spectacular as well as a musical business, and the theatre is a special class of building, which would demand a paper to itself. We are here considering only the question of hearing music.

The abundant leisure of Eastern life affords ample opportunity for the study of the curious customs, the cultured arts, the profound sciences of the people, who are never slow to extend to the Western, who dwells, though but for a few years, among them, the graciousness of their hospitality; and to open freely the treasure-houses wherein the stores of their learning lie hoarded. But you will well understand that difficulties innumerable impede the acquisition of exact information by those who are ignorant of the languages. So much of Eastern learning is traditional, so much of the practice is hereditary, that it is of first importance to acquire it only from those who are in the direct succession of knowledge. When they are discovered, and the necessary formal introductions have been accomplished in accordance with the rigour of native etiquette, a fresh difficulty arises which is in truth a very labour of Sisyphus, so often has the stone of knowledge to be rolled over the same ground. The interpreter must possess not only a good knowledge of English, but also a quick intelligence to grasp the technicalities of the subject, the double set of art terms used by the questioner and the questioned. In such a subject as music, where each can only use those terms with which he is familiar, you will easily understand the patience necessary to arrive at facts, the prolonged process of sifting to which all statements have to be subjected, and the almost indefinite postponement of conclusions.