It so happened that my first acquaintance with English music of the time of Queen Elizabeth was made, not with the madrigal, but with the music of the virginals. I have devoted one of my former books to virginal music, and it is my pleasant duty to admit that the authors really responsible for that work are two members of your Association, Mr. Fuller-Maitland and Mr. Barclay Squire. In fact, without their edition of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, with its great store of learning, I should not have been able to write the greater part of my book.

After the very erudite paper on the Genevan Psalter which was read before this Association (in June, 1918) by Dr. Woodward, there is very little ground left for me to cover.

The whole question of metrical psalmody has been so thoroughly ventilated by so many authorities that but for the little book we are to discuss this afternoon, I doubt if I should have had anything fresh to say to you.

The subject of this lecture, because of its exotic nature, would appear, at first sight, to be of little moment to Westerners. For that reason it may be advisable to indicate why attention should be directed to this question quite apart from any intrinsic worth that it may have. The doctrine of the Éthos, so highly prized in the art of antiquity, has an abiding interest, and therefore one may assume that its history may have a similar attraction. As Jules Combarieu pointed out not long since,∗ the doctrine of the Éthos had its origin in magic, and I take the liberty to draw up for you its genealogy, because, in the subject under discussion, it plays an important part.

In discussing Programme Music one may consider it in relation to those principles which apply to the conception and the expression of an art, whether that art be music or painting or sculpture. But as such a survey of æsthetical questions would demand for its consideration a space of time far exceeding that at our disposal at present, it seems more appropriate that we should limit ourselves to the purely musical aspects of the matter. I will content myself with saying in this connection, that while the most advanced school of music of to-day—that which begins where Wagner left off—insists on the paramount importance of a literary idea being the basis of the composition, the most advanced schools of sculpture and painting, those of Rodin and Whistler and Degas, assert that the literary idea is the least matter to be considered in plastic or pictorial art, and that the chief if not the only end is the display of technique. I may point out a very curious inconsistency in this connection—namely, that among musicians I constantly find men who, while proclaiming the supremacy of absolute music, see no beauty in absolute painting and sculpture, and admire the most flagrant instances of a programme in these arts.

Much of the early history of the musical oratorio is still unknown. It seems that by the 1620s it was customary for religious confraternities to have music at their services before and after the sermon. In Rome the Congregation of the Oratorio, Philipp Neri's group which eventually met at the Chiesa Nuova, preferred music with Italian texts, whereas the Arciconfraternitàdel Santissimo Crocifisso, named after a cruxifix unharmed in a terrible fire at S. Marcello, preferred Latin texts. Apparently it is these two organizations, with their great emphasis on music and their financial support of trained musicians, which provide the background for the creation of the new musical genre and the impetus for its spread to other centres.

Of all musicians, organists have always had the greatest difficulty in getting regular practice on their instruments. Electric organ blowers were first used about 1900 and up to this time big church organs were usually blown by human power. One, or more often several men, called the “calcantores” or “calcants,” had to do this hard work. A big organ built at Halberstadt in 1361 had twenty bellows and ten men were needed to tread them. The church engaged these calcants for the services on Sundays and festival days. Organists had not much opportunity to play the organ except during services; they were always badly paid, could not afford to hire calcants, and, moreover, the Church did not encourage practice on what was probably a costly instrument intended only for use in the worship of God. So organists had to practice at home. In the fourteenth century some of them possessed small organs called positives. Perhaps a kind wife or other member of the family did the blowing, but hardly to such an extent as to make regular practice possible. A still smaller organ was the portative. This could be carried about and was often blown by the organist himself. As one hand was used to work the bellows, playing with both hands was not possible.

I feel that my presence here requires a double apology for I can claim to be neither an authority on eighteenth century music nor a pianist. My interest in eighteenth century music is mainly a practical one and my only claim to your attention is that I have in certain transcriptions and arrangements both for the concert hall and the theatre succeeded, I hope, in popularising certain old music which might otherwise have remained familiar only to the scholar. As a pianist my limitations are even more marked and I can hardly hope to demonstrate that, as a writer for the keyboard, Roseingrave was second only to Domenico Scarlatti. Roseingrave's most striking work, however, lies not so much in his brilliant toccata-like movements as in his more introspective and experimental voluntaries and I hope that later on I may be able to give at least some slight account of these fascinating and original works.

The Movable Do ! Words pregnant with meaning, instinct with reality to the musician ! The text of the sermons in sounds expounding the universal message which the world calls music.

More has been written about why Satie composed than about how he composed; about the aesthetic implications of his precursive art for the present century than about the techniques of his art itself. My aim is to attempt to redress the balance, in part at least; to try to focus on some of the problems Satie encountered as he sought to satisfy the increased demand for his music which followed his sudden rise to the forefront of public attention largely due to the efforts of Ravel, Ricardo Viñes and Jean Cocteau over the years 1911 to 1915. If I look to anything as a model, it is Patrick Gowers’ pioneering paper on ‘Satie's Rose Croix Music (1891–1895)’ which explored Satie's use of systematic harmonic devices, working methods and formal experiments from the evidence of his manuscript notebooks. To the best of my knowledge, no such complementary study relating to Satie's later years has yet appeared in print, though Gowers’ thesis’ does discuss Satie's compositional methods in the Nocturnes of 1919.

In the spring of 1770 Marie-Antoinette, the 14-year-old daughter of Empress Maria Theresa, arrived at the court of Louis XV. Her marriage to the dauphin (later Louis XVI) on 16 May was the cause of general celebration. In the event, the French saw a guarantee of the alliance with Austria and hope for peace after decades of very costly wars. For such a major state occasion, operas played an important part in the festivities. New works were given, and lavish productions of those in standard repertory entertained the court during much of the year. The first that Marie-Antoinette saw (on the day after her wedding) was Lully's Persée (as revised by François Francoeur, François Rebel, Antoine Dauvergne and Bernard de Bury – all court musicians as well as successful composers for the Académie Royale de Musique [the Opéra]). Papillon de La Ferté, the intendant des Menus-Plaisirs du Roi (the government official in charge of court entertainments among other duties) recorded in his diary that in general the court were very pleased with the magnificence of the spectacle. But with a touch of chagrin, he noted that ‘Madame la Dauphine did not seem to have acquired a taste for it. It is true that it is a rather too serious opera for someone who is not yet familiar with the genre and who does not like music’. During her stay at Versailles, Marie-Antoinette also had the opportunity to see Rameau's Castor et Pollux and Dauvergne's new opéra-ballet, La tour enchantée (which made use of several pieces by Rameau and his contemporaries), as well as three tragédies (Racine's Athalie and Voltaire's Tancrède and Sémiramis), but only one comédie (Poisson's L'impromptu de campagne). The choice clearly was intended to present masterpieces from the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV.

When I speak of the recorder as a musical instrument, I do so knowing that you cannot fail to have heard the instrument at some time, as it is now once again an integral part of our musical life.

When the meal drew to a close the lady who had served the wine produced a harp and began to play it so sweetly that it was a wondrous thing to hear. So Sir Gawayn listened to her very willingly for a while until he began to feel the cold, for his tunic was not at all well dried. And when the cold got to him he rose up and went to the great fire which was in the middle of the Hall and took a stool and sat down before the fire, turning his shoulder and his back [to the flames] and warmed himself until he slept, as one who had been afflicted the whole day with the rain and the wind.

In 1892 Bernard Bosanquet wrote:

As a Hegelian, Bosanquet had every reason to believe in the strength of the German idealist tradition, even if its supremacy was seriously challenged in the second half of the nineteenth century; as an Englishman, and brought up in the English philosophical tradition, he was fully aware of the important British contribution to both speculative and experimental psychology. However, bringing various intellectual and philosophical traditions together is no easy task and we can witness a continuing division in the orientation of many scholars who, although not philosophers themselves, felt the need to strengthen their critical theories with ideas which originated in the domain of philosophy.

For most of us, singer and musicologist alike, English song from the death of Purcell to the Victorian ‘renaissance’ nearly two centuries later is represented by a few of the Shakespearean settings of Arne, and a small handful of such perennial favourites as Leveridge's ‘Black-ey'd Susan’, Boyce's ‘Heart of Oak’, Dibdin's ‘Tom Bowling’, and Horn's once-ubiquitous ‘Cherry ripe’. As for our knowledge of the cultural environment in which such pieces naturally have their place, that is generally more limited still. Though theatrical in origin, we may take as typical of the sort of vocal melody which was popular with early Georgian audiences, Arne's charming ‘O come, o come, my dearest’ from The Fall of Phaeton (1736). If we agree, with Ernest Walker, that such a song is, in its way, ‘a sparkling polished little gem’, then it may be fairly maintained that English song during the first half of the eighteenth century is a veritable treasure trove of delightful music—none of it very ‘great’, certainly, but much of it worthy of a better fate than the oblivion to which it has been carelessly consigned.

The reception history of Ludwig van Beethoven's symphonies in America offers striking evidence of multiple, previously unidentified, Continental and English connections to the musical thought of John Sullivan Dwight (1813–93), the first American-born critic of art music, and therefore to early American conceptions of the symphony in the 1840s. These direct links illuminate the history and criticism of the first performance in America of Beethoven's Symphony no. 9 in D minor, op. 125, which took place in New York in 1846. From the many sources associated with Dwight's musical learning and aesthetic education, I have chosen in this article to examine Dwight's literary interest in Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller's poem ‘An die Freude’ and in Thomas Carlyle's biography of Schiller, to document his knowledge of commentary on the symphony by the German critic Adolf Bernhard Marx, and to describe Dwight's response to the initial American performance of the Ninth Symphony.

The Committee of the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation possesses material indicating that Mendelssohn wrote passionate love letters to Jenny Lind entreating her to join him in an adulterous relationship and threatening suicide as a means of exerting pressure upon her, and that these letters were destroyed on being discovered after her death. The notion that Mendelssohn would have written such letters conflicts strikingly with the received view of his character. Nevertheless, the veracity of the material is beyond doubt, and, while it does not include specific evidence that Mendelssohn and Lind began an affair, it points more clearly than has hitherto been possible towards an answer to this question. Thus it necessitates a radical revision of perceptions of these two major musicians. For Otto Goldschmidt, Lind's husband, destroying the letters was crucial in protecting the reputations not only of his wife and Mendelssohn but also of himself and his family.

‘Multivalence‘ and ‘ambiguity’: these are the words that serve as the rallying cry in a recent group of essays that, with their strident, polemical tone, seem intent on dictating what is and what is not proper and acceptable in present-day opera analysis, at least as it is practised on opera from about Mozart's time to that of Puccini.