Since the Royal Musical Association was founded in 1874, it has heard five papers on Mozart. Perhaps the most notable was read in 1932 by C. B. Oldman, under the title ‘Mozart and Modern Research’. As this gave me the idea for the present paper, and as Oldman's name will recur in it, I might briefly recall what he did for the Association and for Mozart. He was a member of Council for 37 years, and a vice-president for 21. Shortly before he died, in 1969, he gave up the chairmanship of the Proceedings Committee which he had held since 1953. From the mid-1920s, for nearly three decades, it was he in the British Museum, even during the arduous years of his Principal Keepership of Printed Books, to whom visiting musical scholars came for advice, particularly on Mozart, but on much else as well.

The principal aim of the present paper is to bring before the Musical Association some results obtained last autumn from numerous and very careful experiments by Dr. W. Preyer, Professor of Physiology in the University of Jena, because those results are not accessible in an English form, and seem to have a very practical bearing upon tuning and singing. My subordinate purpose is to exhibit a method of representing pitch and intervals, which shall be more consonant to the habits of musicians than that adopted by Dr. Preyer for the statement of his results. For the idea of this method I am indebted to Mr. Bosanquet, though I have worked it out somewhat differently from him.

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen,—When you did me the honour of asking me to exhibit my metronome this evening I was in hopes of having a new instrument made for the occasion, but my model-maker has found it impossible to get one completed in time. I must, therefore, ask your indulgence for some want of neatness, in size and other matters, in the one on the table, it being the first one of the kind made.

Far more attention has been given over the last century to the polyphonic compositions of Adam de la Halle and his plays than to his courtly chansons. Yet, if the number of surviving manuscripts is a guide, it was as a trouvère in the high courtly style, a courtly ‘maker’ in the tradition of la grande chanson courtoise, that his contemporaries chiefly valued him. His courtly chansons survive in eight main manuscripts and several lesser ones. In the manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fir 25566) containing his Collected Works, as it were, the chansons have pride of place and are notated in a different style from the polyphonic rondeaux and motets and from the monophonic refrains of the same manuscript. Their notation is the square, non-mensural notation analogous to that of contemporary Gregorian chant and traditional for vernacular monophonic song.

The subject of this paper, “Beauty of Touch and Tone,” is one which however admirably it may be exemplified in the public performances of many—unhappily not all—of our leading artists, however conscientiously it may be inculcated by our most eminent teachers, is, in the playing and singing of too many of our amateurs, conspicuous only by its absence; and I can but think that, from the generality of the members of the musical profession, it does not receive that amount of attention which its importance demands, and which the rapid extension of musical education in some other directions might lead us to expect.

More than fifty years since a violoncellist, who was distinguished for his discernment and the desire to encourage rising talent, gave to a young composer, who, though making his mark, was still little known, and quite in the struggling stage, a commission to write some small works for the violoncello, with pianoforte accompaniment. The means of the violoncellist were but limited, and the honorarium was probably of no great amount, though I feel sure the principle was acted on that “the labourer is worthy of his hire.” But it was the young composer's first commission, and right proudly did he go home that day at having a commission to write anything at all on any terms. The works produced were twelve Ariettes and three Rondos, very fresh and charming, although little known now. It was from a business point of view the commencement of a long, honourable, and though chequered and marked by many disappointments which had to be patiently borne, an eminently successful career as a composer. He looked back to it and referred to it with grateful recollection of the timely recognition and kindly held out helping hand. The appreciative violoncellist passed away forty years ago, but the young composer lived on, with recognition of his powers gradually accorded to him, and with increasing honour and acknowledgment, not only by his own countrymen, but wherever music is known throughout the world. He also has passed away full of years, and by a pleasant, though melancholy co-incidence, by quite the reverse of what is sometimes termed the irony of events, the son of that violoncellist has been honoured with the commission to offer the first publicly spoken tribute to the memory of him whom his father was one of the first to recognise. The violoncellist was Henry Joshua Banister, remembered by very few here, but remembered with respect and honour; the composer was George Alexander Macfarren, and the tribute offered with great diffidence this evening is offered with a desire to be in sympathy with the old injunction—“Thine own friend and thy father's friend forsake not,” or, as one may justifiably amplify it, “forget not,” for he to whom my father was a friend, was a friend to me all along his professional course, and it is peculiarly grateful to me that in consideration of these facts I have had entrusted to me this task, one of the greatest professional honours ever conferred upon me.

The historians of music, in so far as they have discussed the relations of the art with the rites and doctrines of the Christian churches, have expatiated chiefly upon the works of such composers as Palestrina and J. S. Bach—to name two instances only: I mean those composers about whose greatness there can be no dispute, and whose claim to that reputation is based principally if not entirely upon works of an ecclesiastical character. If in the survey of any particular period it becomes necessary to mention composers of sacred music whose works are of a definitely inferior quality, that inferiority is generally ascribed to a want of true religious feeling either in the composers as individuals or in the age or the country in which they happened to live. It is the natural temptation of the musical historian to view these matters from a standpoint that is mainly aesthetic; but there is another aspect of the subject which must not be left out of account. If we turn to the ecclesiastical writers, we shall find that aesthetic and artistic considerations receive a very different treatment. The subject of music finds frequent mention in the early Christian Fathers, and although they recognize to the full the powerful influence which music may have upon the human mind, they are preoccupied with two aspects which to the pure musician have little significance. One of those aspects is the alleged moral danger of the art when not under the strict control of authority, and the other is its undoubted practical utility.

The investigations which form the subject of the present communication had their origin in a practical source. It is conceived important that this should be understood, as many musicians regard the problem as a purely theoretical one, undeserving of practical attention. It was in taking part in the tuning of an organ that the effect of the ordinary equal temperament was first realised by the writer as a matter affecting musical sounds in practice, as distinguished from theory. It is the writer's experience that after the ear has once been attracted to this effect, it never fails to perceive it in the tones of instruments tuned in the ordinary way. Some tones show the effect more, some show it less. Among keyed instruments the worst effects are produced by the ordinary harmonium; next to this comes the full-toned modern grand piano, which is often unpleasant in slow harmony, especially if, as is generally the case, the temperament is not very uniform;∗ and the best tones, which show the effect least, are those of soft-toned pianos with little power, and the ordinary organ diapason-stops—especially those old-fashioned, sweet-toned diapasons, which are rapidly disappearing before the organ-builders of the present day. The constant perception of these effects served as an inducement to a study of the subject, pursued in the first instance with the practical object of the improvement of instruments, and afterwards also for the sake of the interest attaching to the theory developed.

The nature of harping before the general use of the pedal harp makes research peculiarly frustrating. Apart from bagpiping—which is to this day so secret a skill that most virtuosi will never reveal the true details of their reed-making and playing—no instrumental technique remained so long a craft, without a written literature. As far as the baroque era is concerned, there is the additional problem that the word harp covered a number of harps with different forms, techniques and functions. This preamble is not, like that of the music-hall juggler, to make the act seem so difficult that the sympathy of the audience is assured at the start, but simply to warn you that the information I have been able to collect on the subject of harps between roughly 1600 and 1750 is drawn from somewhat disparate sources and is rather unevenly spread, both geographically and chronologically.

Embedded into the approaches to their crafts adopted inescapably by the composers and performance directors of church polyphony in England during the century or so before the Reformation were a number of constraints imposed by extraneous factors over which they had no control, but which effected a decisive influence over both the resulting form and the sound of the music which they produced in their respective capacities. Looming large among these was the nature of the performing medium. Over most aspects of this neither composer nor director exercised any influence at all; in terms of, for instance, the simple number of executants, they were obliged to produce music for and from the medium which their ecclesiastical superiors saw fit to provide, and the principal priority of the latter was the realization not of occasional polyphony for the liturgy, but of its standard plainsong and ceremonial as laid down by the authorized service books. Within these predetermined numbers of priests, clerks and choristers, however, the principal musicians presumably enjoyed some scope for nominating the constituent numbers of executants of the various timbres of voice necessary for mounting a performance of polyphony. The decisions taken by the musicians themselves in an area such as this that lay probably within their discretion have much to reveal about the nature of the choral balance and of the vocal scoring that they envisaged as appropriate for their music, and also – by inference from the latter – its sounding pitch.

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.

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.

The music theory of the Middle Ages had its origins in the music theory of late antiquity. As Markovits observes, ‘The fundamental structure of ancient music theory is the tetrachord’; in turn, the medieval gamut had its origin in the Greater Perfect System, and was similarly constructed from conjunct and disjunct tetrachords. The chromatic and enharmonic genera disappeared, but the tetrachord synemmenon remained as the source of the only sanctioned medieval altered note, the B♭.

The Lautenlied from Korngold's Die tote Stadt and the Schlummerlied from Schreker's Die Schatzgräber flaunt their ‘folksong’ style in ways that are clearly similar. Contemporary criticism reveals the significance of this stylization. Folksong symbolized genuineness, but also, in its supposedly degenerate form, emotional manipulation of the masses. Both topics informed critics' reaction to diese two arias. Alongside analysis of the many recordings of Korngold's aria up to 1933, the article suggests how folksong characterization contributed to the opera's plot.

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

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 internationally known Londonderry Air carries the status of a cultural symbol of Ireland. Both its collector and its publisher claimed in 1855 that the music was very old, a belief which has passed into conventional wisdom. In 1934 and 1979 two writers cast doubts on the tune's age and suggested that its collector had more to do with the moulding of the tune than the process of tradition. Subsequently, doubts about the music have prevailed in academic circles but remained unexamined. This article queries the deductions of these writers and explores the musical origins and evolution of the Air. The methodology is historical and musicological. From an examination of collections of Irish traditional music evidence is presented in support of the tune's age and fashioning by tradition. The lost verses of a song known to have been accompanied by the tune in the nineteenth century are revealed as the likely original words to the music.