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.

In July 1817 Benjamin Flight and Joseph Robson, two of London's most celebrated organ-builders, unveiled their latest concept in organ design — the Apollonicon. This mammoth finger-and-barrel chamber organ, predecessor to the giant orchestrions of the Victorian era, had been five years in the making. And when it opened for performances at the firm's fashionable West End premises, 101 St Martin's Lane, it heralded a new era of evolution for the organ in British concert life.

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.

The ambiguity of the title of my paper is intentional—I wish to speak on “The Teaching of Musical History” in more than one sense. A further preliminary explanation I have to make is this. If I present to this Society a plea for a proper and more general study of musical history, it is not because I think the members to be in need of advice and guidance, but because I look upon them as influential agents able to bring about a change in a now obtaining unsatisfactory state of matters. In short, my object in drawing your attention to the importance of certain facts is to inspire you with missionary zeal, to induce you to go forth and spread the light that is in you among the ignorant, the idle, and the indifferent. This, however, is not my only object. I wish also to lay before you some views of perennial interest, and invite you to discuss them —to discuss them for our own profit and, if possible, for the profit of the world at large.

Reacting to recent materialist developments in music studies and beyond, I argue for the value of dialectics in accounting for compositional orientations vis-à-vis their objects – be these objects sound-producing, non-human entities, such as musical instruments, or the object that is ‘sound itself ’. Engaging the compositional thought and practice of Busoni, Russolo, Varèse, Cage and Tudor by way of example, I highlight two intersecting tendencies: the first constitutes a presumed mastery over the object in question; the second is suggestive of an exploration of the object on its own terms. Interweaving aspects of post-Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, I argue that, ultimately, our orientation towards the object manifests a negotiation of the self in a changing material world.

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.

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.

My purpose this afternoon is to trace the development of the three-movement symphony-overture in England during the eighteenth century, as composed by English composers and not by visiting foreigners, whose works will only be mentioned in so far as they contribute to our knowledge of the native style. I use the hyphenated expression ‘symphony-overture’ advisedly, as its two component terms were completely interchangeable throughout the whole period under review; both signified a piece of music, usually for a full band of players, which could be performed either before or during a theatrical representation, or as a separate item in a concert. Both words had long been familiar in this country; ‘symphony,’ a word of Greek derivation, seems to have been the older in English usage, although more familiar as a term referring to various instruments of the hurdy-gurdy class than to any specific kind of music.

The question of how the term ‘Expressionist’ relates to certain music can best be answered by reference to the principle features of Expressionism in painting. The word was coined by a German art critic in 1911 to serve as an appropriate antonym to Impressionism. The new art to which it was applied was based not on purely visual impressions of the outer world but on the expression of the artist's inner experience. The Expressionist does not paint an object but his own subjective reaction to it. He recreates it in the light of his emotions, often distorting form to penetrate essence and reveal the truth that lies behind the outward appearance. The results are highly emotive, dramatic, visionary and often violently ugly. They express the fears, real and subconscious, of men who saw materialism eating into society and enslaving the individual. The technical implications of this art meant that traditional principles of ‘beauty’, ‘symmetry’ and so forth gave way to exaggeration, distortion, grotesqueness, startling colour clashes and vehement emotional release; and precisely the same process, and results, can be seen in the work of Schönberg as he turned from the musical orthodoxes of form and key to the instinctive, tortured sounds of atonality. His work in this direction was more or less contemporary with that of the original Expressionist art group, ‘Die Brücke’ (‘The Bridge’), which existed as a community from 1905–13. Its members were Kirchner, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff, and later Nolde, Pechstein and Müller. Schönberg's own paintings bear a strong likeness to the productions of this group. There are the same brutalized portraits and nightmare visions, the same distortion of natural forms parallelled by the angular, disintegrating lines of his atonal music.

In the present state of scientific knowledge in general, it may appear incomprehensible, to those who hare not pursued it in the direction of music, that we should have arrived beyond the middle of the nineteenth century of the Christian era without any work having yet appeared which has set forth even the elements of that science in a light which has carried conviction and met with general acceptance. I am not speaking here of the excellent treatises of Sir John Goss, John Hullah, Henry Lunn, Henry Banister, Alexander Hamilton, &c. These, and numerous others, do not profess to treat of the recondite view of the subject, but solely to supply the young student with practical applications of accepted facts. What is still wanting, despite numerous endeavours, is a work which shall convincingly trace the materials and combinations of the Harmonist to their true source, and show him (as I believe to be the case) that those materials and combinations are not arbitrary and conventional, but are supplied by Nature herself—thus enlarging his views, and, in fact, laying before him all of which, as a Harmonist, he can avail himself.

The reason why music appeals to every side of our nature is that music itself is the result of the activity of the whole nature of a man. Being called forth by the travail of thought, feeling, and will, its effect is the stirring of the thoughts, emotions, and volitions of the listener. It reminds me of one of the natural phenomena in my Oriental country—those mysterious springs that well forth from unknown depths and penetrate into mysterious depths again; the strength which enabled them to break their way from the dark, also enables them to find their path into new depths—the greater the warmth that gave existence to the well, the brighter it sparkles, the higher it rises, and the deeper it sinks again.

Never, perhaps, did a new country begin in circumstances so unpromising for its musical development as did Australia. To the normal difficulties attendant upon cultural activities in a young country must be added the state of creative music, and especially the attitude of society towards it, in the Motherland during the later eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth. Musical composition was drifting rapidly to a condition of unredeemed bathos; not until the end of the nineteenth century was music being written in England which could provide a point of departure, a basis of any kind for the building-up of a worthy indigenous tradition of composition.

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).

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.

During the past forty years much of the finest pre-Restoration service music has come back into the cathedral repertoire. So many are the distinguished scholars who have contributed to this welcome revival that one hesitates to single out any by name. Nevertheless some small tribute must be paid to Dr. Fellowes who has been responsible for publishing so much music of the period and who has written several valuable historical studies, including one on the subject of English Cathedral Music. As Dr. Fellowes pointed out in this very book, however, there is still much to do before a definitive survey of pre-Restoration church music can be attempted. Many sources have yet to be collated and much music scored. With this in mind I began some time ago to catalogue the contents of all the known sources of early seventeenth century anthems. I would like this evening to discuss one or two points which have resulted from my work, all of which are connected, directly or indirectly, with the anthem.

There are musicians who hold that what are termed National characteristics in music are due solely to the peculiarities of the languages, instruments, and scales used in different parts of the world, and that therefore the style and characteristic phrases of a national music are not the outcome of the character and peculiarities of a nation. They tell us that the deeper feelings of mankind are alike all the world over, and that consequently the peculiarities of national music are only national in the narrow and superficial sense of the word, and are therefore unworthy of adoption by composers of distinction. It will be my endeavour to show, however, that the many distinct peculiarities found in the music of various nations have a deeper significance than is commonly supposed. Whilst of course the same emotions are common to all mankind, some nations, owing to their surroundings and vicissitudes, experience certain emotions more frequently than others, and such emotions finally leave their permanent imprints on the whole nation and form what is called a national character. I need hardly say that, viewed from this standpoint, the subject is a very comprehensive one. It embraces the physical and mental peculiarities which distinguish the different races of mankind; the history of the sub-division of races; the resultant character and temperaments produced by the mixture of races; their gradual formation into nations; the alterations in language consequent on its corruption and development; and the effect of climate on religion, mode of thought, customs, and institutions. Obviously I can but touch on these points, but I trust with sufficient clearness to show their relative importance. As my subject is somewhat complex, I should like first to explain what I mean by the terms “race,” “nation,” and “character.”

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.

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.