In order to avoid any misapprehension, it may be well to explain at the outset that the term “Colour-music” is used in this paper in a limited sense, as descriptive of the dual nature of the experiments, and not in the sense in which it is generally used, as the title of a separate art, in which the medium of sound is replaced by mobile colour. Such an art is far more nearly allied to painting than to music.

The Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum owns an appreciable number of Beethoven letters and also of musical manuscripts from his hand. These comprise holographs of finished compositions, sketchbooks and sketch sheets, corrected printer's copy, and the like. At one period, from around 1870 to 1895, the Museum would appear to have been in the market for Beethoven material, in a small but discriminating way; and its holdings have been augmented by occasional gifts and bequests, from the time of Vincent Novello (1843) to E. H. W. Meyerstein (1952).

Some people may ask: “Why have centenary celebrations?” My answer must be in the form of a legend of a certain British composer. He was praised by foreigners and called “The Father of Counterpoint.” Most of his MSS. are in Vienna; and about twenty years ago Vienna honoured him and honoured herself by publishing some of them. Here in England, however, his music is absolutely unknown. His name was even confused at one time with that of an early Saint of the Church, who was thus, quite unjustifiably, endowed with miraculous musical powers. Such a thing could only happen in England; and this is sufficient answer to those who decry centenary celebrations. They may be dangerous; but England needs at least one a week. 1923 is a good year to begin; for 1623 saw the death not only of Byrd and Weelkes, but of Rosseter, the Lutenist composer, and the birth of John Playford, the first systematic collector of English folk-dances and their tunes; while in 1523 Merbecke was born, who was the first to write a special plainsong for the (then) new English Prayer Book, and Hugh Aston died, who was called the “Inventor of Instrumental Music in Europe”; but about whom so little is known.

This study addresses listening as a hinge between therapeutic and musical contexts. In the first two sections I examine the productive confluence of Jean-Luc Nancy's thought and Moshe Feldenkrais's somatic practice. I show that the ‘subject’ is configured as both embodied and enactivist. Drawing on Nancy's work, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud and educational and developmental child psychology, I position the listening subject on a fulcrum of balance and imbalance essential to learning and musical practice. In the third part of this study, I concretize Feldenkrais's ideals of correct action and listening in musical practice. Using Glenn Gould and empirical work on musical practice, I explore the significance of listening between acts of playing. Listening is proposed not merely as a phenomenological form of making sense (Nancy), but as a form of self-negotiation and an enactivist and imaginative space that leads to new possibilities of thought and refinement of action.

Analysis of the contents of Jānis Cimze's harmonized folksong collection A Garland of Songs (1872) and the cultural context in which it was published reveals its musical portrait of an emergent Latvian nation to be a synthetic construct. Drawing upon aspects of the German nationalist choral movement, the quasi-Herderian work of Baltic German folklorists and new opportunities for cultural expression afforded by mid-century Russian imperial reforms, Cimze's work inspired heated and increasingly xenophobic debate among his contemporary Latvians about the destiny of their community in pre-Revolutionary Russia.

The most trustworthy contemporary biographer of Joseph Haydn, Georg August Griesinger, interviewing the aged composer, asked him whether it was true that he had composed the Andante of the ‘Surprise’ Symphony in order to waken the English who fell asleep at his concert. Haydn replied:

Of the two types of Italian opera, ‘opera seria’ and ‘opera buffa’, that existed in the eighteenth century, opera seria is the one which has received more adverse comments from modern historians. The artificial division of its text and music into arias and recitative, its stereotyped plots, its concert-like and undramatic character, are easily recognised weaknesses. Musicians, moreover, have not only admired Gluck but sympathised with the sentiments expressed in his preface to Alceste and have therefore concluded that the conditions and standards he rebelled against promoted a decidedly inferior art. Perhaps for this reason a comprehensive study of the aria in opera seria has rarely been undertaken.

It was in 1842 that John Curwen, a Congregationalist minister aged 26, began his life's work as one of the most notable pioneers of popular musical education. For fully fifty years his was the dominant single influence on music in the state schools of England, Scotland and Wales, and hence upon the large mass of the community. Even today, at the end of a period of more than twenty-five years during which the trend of musical education has tended to discredit his teaching, his figure still broods over the teaching of vocal music, and quantities of school songs continue to be published with the Tonic Sol-fa ‘interpreting’ notation along with the standard Staff notation. Nevertheless, except in Scotland, the true essentials of his teaching are no longer an effective force—a fact which makes possible an attempt at an analytical re-statement of his principles today in a less controversial atmosphere than formerly. Curwen's own writings will be examined in an effort to get behind the numerous adaptations, modifications and dilutions which his method underwent before being discredited.

In introducing for your consideration this afternoon the subject of memory in connection with piano playing, I can hardly doubt that my subject is one in which every earnest student and every competent teacher of the piano must feel no slight or passing interest. From the time the beginner learns the alphabetical names of the notes of the keyboard, by remembering their position in relation to the groups of two and three black notes, until he reaches — if he ever does — the highest summit of his profession as a pianist, does the cultivation of the power of memory, in one form or another, enter in no small degree into his studies.

Here we have the indigenous definition of folk-music, given to mark the distinction between this music and mãrga-music; that is to say, classical or art-music, a different thing altogether. This mãrga music is not primarily for the enjoyment of the people, but is considered as a means to salvation, namely, the breaking of the endless succession of birth, death and re-birth. It is of divine origin, brought down to our times by an unbroken succession of teachers, not only considered as music masters but definitely as spiritual preceptors. The superior attitude of the exponents of classical music towards deçï, popular or country-music, finds its origin in this spiritual claim of mārga-music. Nevertheless folk-music naturally is one of the parents of art-music whether the latter acknowledges this parenthood or not.

The changed position of music in English life during the present century should profoundly modify accepted views of history. Even conservative historians are placing more and more emphasis on what we may call the progress of civilisation; on the formation and disintegration of cultural traditions. Political history is being dwarfed not only by economic history but by the study of the important aspect of man's mind that is represented by the arts. In this tendency there is still a time-lag from the 19th century in that music has so far played only a minor part. The Victorian period knew little of music and cared less: musicians were specialists who were hardly ever invited to join in any discussions on general culture. We recognise the importance of musical history, but have not yet gone far towards digesting it with other kinds of cultural history. When we have accomplished that process it will probably cast fresh light on the traditions of English culture and on our judgment of its present position.

In 1585 a set of Vesper psalms for four voices by Paolo Isnardi, a choirmaster at the cathedral and court of Ferrara, was brought out by the printer Giacomo Vincenzi. In the dedication to the abbot of Santa Maria della Charità in Venice, Vincenzi states that the psalms are composed ‘con nova maniera di consonanza, over come dicono falsobordone’ (‘in a new style of consonance, or, as it is called, falsobordone’). Falsibordoni had been published before, for in Isnardi's Vesper psalms for five voices, printed in 1579, wordless falsibordoni in all eight tones were appended at the end of the partbooks, obviously designed as easier alternatives to the conventional contrapuntal settings; but with the 1585 volume, a publication, for the first time, was devoted exclusively to examples of the style, with specific verbal underlay for each voice (ex. 1). The dedication to the abbot probably indicates an intended market of non-professional choirs made up of resident clerics or musically less-proficient monks and juvenile novices, who preferred some variation to the unison plainsong recitation of the Office: it is significant that the falsibordoni are scored for four voices, as opposed to the ubiquitous five-voiced psalm settings of the late Renaissance.

As recently as two decades ago it was generally assumed that the liturgical music of fourteenth-century Italy consisted of only a few Mass movements in madrigal style, and that the motet appeared—with a few exceptions—only in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, that is, at the time of Ciconia. Such a view can no longer be maintained, now that scholars like F. Alberto Gallo, Ursula Günther, William Layton, Nino Pirrotta, Dragan Plamenac, Giuseppe Vecchi and others have presented the results of their research. The music in square notation and early mensural notation was published in facsimile in 1968, and an edition of the liturgical pieces in partly mensural and mensural notation will appear in 1976.

The Plays of Shakespeare have been handled by the naturalist, the botanist, the ornithologist, the entomologist, the psychologist, the typographist, the angler, the lawyer, the physician, and the divine, but never, as far as I can discover, by one who has brought to bear on them a study of the flute. Yet Shakespeare has honoured the flute as he has honoured no other instrument. In “Hamlet” he has brought it on the stage, displayed it to the audience, and discoursed on its music, its structure, and its manipulation. This afternoon I will break new ground: I will bring before you the views of a flute-player on the well-known Scene. I shall suggest a change in the way of mounting it, express an opinion on how it might be played, and comment on the technical phrases it contains.

One of Shakespeare's most eloquent eighteenth-century apologists was an Italian: Dr. Johnson's good friend Giuseppe Baretti, who had acquired the taste during his residence in London in the 1750s. When Johnson's Shakespeare edition appeared, Baretti, now back in Italy again, wrote to request a copy: he wished, he explained, ‘to expound the great tragedian to the ladies of Italy’. Baretti was as good as his word, writing in the literary magazine Frusta in January 1764 of this poet who ‘in both the tragic and the comic style stands quite alone, ahead of all the Corneilles, all the Racines, and all the Molières of Gaul’. And it was Baretti who took up arms against Voltaire, whose prestige as a Shakespeare critic had been hitherto unquestioned in France and Italy, publishing in 1777 his Discours sur Shakespeare el sur Monsieur de Voltaire.

The many researchers who have transcribed Tudor music during the last half-century or so have been acutely conscious of the problems of interpreting accidentals in sources. Few, if any, scribes seem to follow a completely consistent or determinable set of conventions, and the difficulties are compounded when manuscripts of different date give significantly different readings. Some editors of Henrician music have taken the principal sources of that period at, by and large, their face value. Others have preferred the evidence of later (mainly Elizabethan) manuscripts on the assumption that they attempt to spell out earlier unwritten practices of various kinds. In a paper published in the last issue of this journal Roger Bray offered a case for the second of these views. The present article seeks, not to disprove his case, but rather to question some of his premises and methods of deduction, and to enter a plea for caution. It does not claim to do more than touch on some of the issues involved.

In 1816, Richard Fitzwilliam died, bequeathing his important music collection to the University of Cambridge. In 1824 the University decided to allow selections from it to be published. The most important outcome was Vincent Novello's five-volume The Fitzwilliam Music (1825–7), containing Latin church music by Italian composers of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, but there was also an edition by Samuel Wesley of three hymn tunes by Handel to words by his father, and Wesley also projected an edition of motets from Byrd's Gradualia which for financial reasons was never published. This article discusses Fitzwilliam's bequest, the involvement of Novello and Wesley, the two publications that resulted in the 1820s, and Wesley's unsuccessful Byrd project.

In 1965, a short article entitled ‘On the Performing Arts: An Anatomy of their Economic Problems’ appeared in the American Economic Review, the flagship journal of the American Economic Association.1 Written by two Princeton-affiliated economists, William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, the article laid out in eight short pages a powerful explanation for why the operating costs of so many performing arts organizations consistently overran their earnings, and why this tendency had become more pronounced over time. The problem was not that lavish budgets were being spent on productions, nor that musicians’ unions had wrung too many concessions from management. Rather, the problem was more prosaic, having to do with ‘differential rates of growth in the economy’.2 To illustrate the argument, Baumol and Bowen asked readers to perform a thought experiment: ‘Think of an economy divided into two sectors: one in which productivity is rising and another where productivity is stable.’3 For the sake of simplicity, they explicitly assumed a number of useful fictions: that labour can easily and frictionlessly move between the two sectors; that wage increases across the board will keep pace with productivity growth (a standard if problematic assumption in modern economic theory);4 and that the monetary supply is sufficiently controlled to maintain overall price stability. What, given these assumptions, is the outcome of such a stark split in the economy? In the productive sector, the increase in wages that workers receive will be offset by increased productivity. In the stagnant sector, wages will rise but output will not. And if an organization is to avoid bankruptcy, the only way to do so is by raising prices to cover the rise in labour costs. (Remember, one of Baumol and Bowen’s working assumptions is that wage increases will keep pace with productivity growth, in both productive and stagnant sectors.) Yet this solution to the problem creates another one, since over time prices in the unproductive sector will increase at a much faster rate than those in the productive one, making the products of the former unaffordable to an increasing number of workers.

Studies of the Spanish Republican exile, both musicological and otherwise, have often worked under the assumption that the exiles were disconnected from Francoist Spain and were thus unable to contribute in any way to the musical life of their home country. This article re-examines these assumptions by analysing a hitherto unexplored corpus of correspondence between two exiled musicians, Julián Bautista and Adolfo Salazar, and other musicians who had stayed in Francoist Spain. Such correspondence suggests that the exiles could, and indeed did, contribute to Spanish musical life under Francoism in a variety of ways.