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.

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.

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.

Sibelius’s only balletic pantomime, Scaramouche, composed in 1913, remains one of his least-known works, even though it is one of his longest dramatic scores and belongs to his period of compositional re-evaluation. This article explores the pantomime in the context of its first production, performed in 1922 in Denmark and 1924 in Sweden. It argues that the pantomime’s reception both illuminates the importance of dance as a formative ‘modern’ genre within the Nordic countries during this period, and demonstrates that the score is defined by stylistic plurality, which was key to its theatrical success. The article calls for increased musicological attention to Nordic theatrical music, a genre that was extremely popular among early twentieth-century Nordic composers. It provided musicians with musical spaces that were more liberating than the concert hall or the opera house for the purposes of cultivating their musical language.

Incidental music of the early twentieth-century has received little musicological attention, despite its widespread use during this period of history. Theatres were a popular means by which audiences could interact with new music, and composers could experiment with new ideas and build collaborative relationships. Using a 1926 Swedish production of August Strindberg’s Till Damaskus (III), directed by Per Lindberg with music by Ture Rangström, this article argues for the importance of analysing incidental music as collaborative performance. It explores the use of ‘reflexive performance’ as a method of analysis, combined with semiotic and intermedial approaches.

This article explores the content, scope and impact of an annual contemporary music festival in South Africa, the first of which was presented in 2000 by New Music South Africa (NMSA), the South African chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). It explores the New Music Indabas of 2000–02 against the background of the political and cultural transformations that characterized South Africa, especially in the aftermath of the end of apartheid. Research into the archive of NMSA provided an entry point into understanding South African cultural, social and political life in the early years of the country's democracy. The ‘separate development’ rhetoric of the totalitarian apartheid regime, in power from 1948 to 1994, prevented cultural exchange and connection between musics and musicians in South Africa for decades; this article explores the ways in which the New Music Indabas attempted to right these historical imbalances, and to forge new directions for South African art-music production and practice.

Drawing on writings concerning the cyborg and the posthuman, this article considers songs by Radiohead, Moby and others that use processed voices, digitally generated speech and sampled vocal loops. In these songs the technological sphere is made the locus of expression, while the human voices are mechanized and drained of subjectivity. These pieces – products of a rock band that relinquishes its voice to a computer, and of a ‘techno’ DJ striving to make mechanized dance music sing – can illustrate some ways musicians have used posthuman voices to chart and destabilize the boundaries of race, gender and the human.

The focus of this study is an anonymous four-voice chanson of the early sixteenth century. On its own the piece is enigmatic at best, a densely contrapuntal arrangement of a simple monophonic song. The importance of Pastourelle jolie, however, transcends the apparent simplicity of these musical materials. Its ‘meanings’, according to this argument, are multiple, dwelling at once in the lyric traditions on which it draws, in its place in the history of French secular music around the year 1500, and in its important links with popular and aristocratic cultures of the day. This essay, therefore, reads and rereads this song in a series of related contexts. It dwells, for instance, upon the conventions of French pastoral poetry and the habits of composers who reworked the popular tunes with which songs like Pastourelle jolie are associated. But the piece has a highly specific meaning, too, one suggested by the only source to preserve this particular chanson and by the literary tastes of the ducal household that was its special audience.

This article examines the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick's reception of the music of Bedřich Smetana during the 1880s and 1890s. In three case studies, it suggests that the critic's reviews are best understood in terms not of Smetana's Czech nationalism, but of Hanslick's German liberalism, and of the critic's memories of the youthful background he shared with Smetana in German-speaking yet nationally indifferent Vormärz Prague.

The ‘cultivation of the self’, which Carl E. Schorske has identified as a characteristic of the Viennese bourgeoisie, establishes a ‘link between a devotion to art and a concern with the psyche’. Such a life ‘appropriated the aesthetic, sensuous sensibility’ leading to ‘narcissism and a hypertrophy of the life of feeling’. Szymanowski, who was for many years fascinated by Viennese culture, reflects many of these characteristics. He was, furthermore, greatly influenced by the work of Pater and Wilde, central figures in the English ‘decadent’ scene which, in Arthur Symons's words, was marked by ‘an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity’. It is unsurprising, therefore, to find narcissism appearing as a prominent theme in many of Szymanowski's works.

Whereas earlier Italian baroque cantatas usually began arias in the key in which the preceding recitative had ended, there was an increasing tendency after 1700 to create a tonal disjunction between recitative and aria and to utilize for affective purposes the harmonic progression linking the last chord of the former to the first chord of the latter. Vivaldi, who almost invariably placed his arias in a contrasting key, was a leading exponent of this technique and employed a surprisingly large variety of key relationships at the recitative–aria interface. For illustration, the article draws on cantatas by Vinaccesi, Albinoni and Vivaldi.

Mercure, a ballet in three tableaux with scenery and costumes by Pablo Picasso and choreography by Léonide Massine, created a scandal on a par with that of Parade (1917) when it was first performed at La Cigale Theatre in Montmartre on 15 June 1924 as part of the ‘Soirée de Paris’ season mounted by the wealthy Comte Etienne de Beaumont. Although Mount Etna, as it transpired, featured in the scenario but not in Picasso's stage sets, the première was certainly the scene of a volcanic eruption, a deliberate demonstration orchestrated by the Surrealists (led by the poet André Breton), who tried to drown Satie's music-hall score with their cries of ‘Long live Picasso! Down with Satie!’ The reasons behind this were complex and inseparable from Satie's enthusiastic support for the Dada movement and its founder, Tristan Tzara, from 1919 onwards. After the failure of the Congrès de Paris (convened by Breton to establish a Dada constitution and himself as leader), Satie took great delight in assuming the presidency of Breton's public trial at the Closerie des Lilas restaurant on 17 February 1922. Their enmity was further intensified by Satie's participation in the ‘happening’, known as La soirée du Coeur à barbe, which Tzara mounted at the Théâtre Michel on 6 July 1923. In what might be regarded as a dress rehearsal for Mercure, the newly founded Surrealists under Breton mounted a campaign in support of Picasso, which led to Breton being expelled by the police.

Although Ralph Vaughan Williams's operas Hugh the Drover (1924) and Sir John in Love (1929) both prominently feature English folk and traditional tunes, the dramatic ends such music serves differ significantly between the two works. This article compares the ways in which Vaughan Williams uses folk music in both operas, with the larger aim of providing a more nuanced perspective on the changing musical and dramatic potential the composer saw for indigenous English music within the context of opera.77

Although the modern conception of ground-bass did not emerge until the seventeenth century, its historical antecedents are not only in themselves of considerable importance and interest but vital to any comprehensive review of the subject of this paper.

At the outset, I should perhaps explain why I'm going to play the illustrations to this talk on the piano rather than on a harpsichord. In the first place, I only play the harpsichord as an amateur, and would feel abashed to display my shortcomings before an audience containing many eminent professionals. And secondly, since harpsichords are still comparatively few and far between, I'm anxious to suggest that students and performers can give great pleasure to themselves, and to others, by playing these works understandingly on whatever keyboard instrument happens to be available.