With no startling incidents or striking events to mark its course, the life of Sterndale Bennett will yet be always interesting to every one who likes to trace the progress and development of a truly artistic genius. It will be my endeavour to put before you plainly and simply the salient features of a career highly important in the history of musical art in England. The Bennett family were of Derbyshire orgin. Sterndale Bennett's grandfather, John Bennett, was born in the picturesque village of Ashford-in-the-Peak in 1750. Whilst still a youth he left for Cambridge, where he was appointed lay clerk at King's. He married, and had a numerous family. Robert, one of the elder sons, father of Sterndale Bennett, studied the organ and composition with Dr. Clarke. He became a musician of ability, and settled in Sheffield, where he took an excellent position and held the office of organist at the parish church. Amongst his many friends were Mr. William Howard and Mr William Sterndale, the latter a man of literary tastes, some of whose verses were set to music by Robert Bennett and published by subscription. In 1812 he married Elizabeth, daughter of James Donn, curator of the Botanical Gardens, Cambridge, and author of a classified catalogue of plants. He had two daughters and a son— William Sterndale Bennett—who was born on April 13, 1816, in Norfolk Row, Sheffield. Little Sterndale was not fated to know for long a father's care or a mother's love. He lost his mother when two years old, and his father died a year afterwards. Thus he was doubly orphaned in tender age. Happily his grandfather adopted him, and Mr. Howard took charge of the child until he could be sent to Cambridge. Here he was placed, when eight years old, as chorister at King's College, and had the educational advantages afforded to the boys of the various choirs.

There is probably no department of human industry wherein the predominating influence of a master hand has been more forcibly and continuously displayed than in the case of Antonio Stradivari; and although my remarks are chiefly intended to be directed to the period subsequent to his death, it may nevertheless be well to preface them with one or two observations concerning this extraordinary man and his work.

It is doubtful if a subject more essentially English could have been chosen from the pages of musical history than that of the Viols. Although of foreign origin, they became so thoroughly naturalised in this country, and exercised so great an influence upon the history of English instrumental music, that I think no apology will be needed for my having selected them to be the theme of the present paper. I have written it in order to bring together all the information I could collect, and out of the whole to construct an account that may possibly be useful for purposes of reference. But before going further into the matter it will be well if I state my programme in more detail. By “Viols,” I mean the members of that family of bowed instruments with flat backs, sloping shoulders, and C-shaped sound-holes. They were instruments of the greatest possible importance, looked at from any point of view, and, in consideration of their worth in the artistic, historical and sociological aspects, they certainly merit detailed treatment. The period to which I propose to devote myself is that which lies between the date of our first authentic piece of documentary evidence and that at which the Viola da Gamba vanished before the conquering Violoncello. With Rebecks, Vielles, Fiedels and Gigues I shall have nothing to do; we have seen all too often into what misty tangles such research can lead the antiquarian. I wish to indulge in speculation as little as possible, and shall do my utmost to avoid propounding theories as to the ultimate source of the Viols. It will be best, I think, if we accept these instruments as accomplished facts and see what can be discovered of their English history. I am of opinion that a consideration of the Mediæval bowed instruments—interesting though it might be from the antiquarian and social points of view—would scarcely be worth the time spent upon it by the modem musician. It has not yet been conclusively proved—to my mind at any rate—that these instruments of the Middle Ages were the direct lineal ancestors of the Viols. A discussion of this question is not my purpose to-day; but I must say, in passing, that I do not believe the former had any more or less to do with the latter than had one style of architecture with another. I propose taking up my subject at the transition period when the music for these instruments ceased to be a mere duplication of a voice-part and became instrumental music pure and simple. That motley throng of fiddlers, jongleurs and troubadours, must go on fiddling their improvised accompaniments in the romantic borderland between legend and established facts; while we confine ourselves to the time when our beautiful soft-voiced Viols were making scientifically correct music of distinct artistic worth.

Possibly at no previous period in the history of our Art has so much been said and written about that very complex human faculty—the action of listening to music. We have only to take down the last of those comely little volumes of the Proceedings of this Association (which now begin to make quite a goodly show upon our bookshelves) to find that no fewer than three papers bearing more or less directly upon this subject were read last session. I refer, of course, to those by Messrs. Jacques, Banister, and Lake. The importance and interest, as well as the comprehensiveness of this absorbing topic must be pleaded as my excuse for venturing to bring it before you again this evening.

The recent publication of Heinrich Schenker's Das Meisterwerk in der Musik (1925-30) in a translation by Ian Bent, William Drabkin and others reminds us that in the highest modern traditions textual criticism and exegesis — editing and analysis — are inseparable. Much of Schenker's commentary on Mozart's Symphony in G minor, K.550, is devoted to isolating discrepancies between manuscript and edition, and some of his most fascinating analytical suggestions grow out of just this. Conversely, analytical strategies may have editorial consequences, and decisions taken by editors of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe have been challenged justly on stylistic grounds. If a passage occurs twice in a composition, for instance, does it have to be articulated in the same way on both occasions? And if there are differences in the articulations, what exactly do they tell us? Given the intricacy of the modern analytical debate over Mozart, such questions may not be answered by editors alone. Nor can editions be undertaken without reference to changing social circumstances: for composers in general have shown themselves more than ready to provide their own variants for different performing situations (again, Mozart's re-orchestration of the Symphony in G minor is a case in point). Indeed, in another field, scholars have asked that cultural issues should also influence editorial practice; these issues similarly require learning and sensitivity, and again deserve attention.

In examining the relationship between Tchaikovsky and Balakirev, I shall investigate in some detail the influence upon the Moscow composer of the leader of the St Petersburg group or ‘mighty handful’ (which included, besides Balakirev himself, Cui, Borodin, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov). Balakirev's group had been established before the St Petersburg Conservatoire of Music was founded by Anton Rubinstein in 1862; this, coupled with the fact that there were no textbooks on the theory of music in the Russian language, meant that Balakirev and his protégés had had no formal musical education, but had learned the technique of composition solely by studying the actual works of other composers, past and present. Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, had been a student at the Conservatoire from the time of its foundation till 1865, his graduation exercise taking the form of a setting of Schiller's ‘Ode to Joy’ which was performed at the end of that year and was torn to pieces by Cui in a typically vituperative article. By the time this article had appeared early in 1866 Tchaikovsky had already moved to Moscow to take up a teaching post at the new Conservatoire there. According to Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev's group knew Tchaikovsky only as having composed a Symphony in G minor (his First) of which the two middle movements had been performed at a concert of the Russian Musical Society in St Petersburg in February 1867. As a product of the despised Conservatoire, they viewed Tchaikovsky askance.

That the English style of the early fifteenth century was crucial to the development of later music seems undeniable. The oft-cited, passages from the writings of Martin le Franc and Tinctoris, whatever their obscurities of detail, are unequivocal in their placing of the English in general and Dunstable in particular at the head of a completely new style, and to set against this, we have a large and varied corpus of music, especially music for the mass Ordinary, which amply testifies to the richness of the insular tradition. Not only was this music considered distinctive in its own day, but it has also proved readily recognizable to modern scholars despite the relative dearth of ascriptions. Even so, one feels that any suggestion that it is the English style as such which is so obvious remains surprisingly premature. The main reason for this is not hard to find; in fact, nearly all the most convincing evidence for assigning English authorship to anonymous works has turned out to be either essentially non-musical (e.g. the presence of a piece in an insular source, the use of a distinctively English variant of a given plainsong, the presence of telescoping in settings of the Credo, the use of characteristic notational procedures) or concerned with relatively superficial aspects of style (e.g. the use of a standard mensural scheme, the appearance of one or more of a handful of melodic clichés). Since there are clearly much easier ways of recognizing English music than from the niceties of musical style, efforts at more specifically stylistic analysis have lagged behind somewhat, despite the important work of such scholars as Brian Trowell and Margaret Bent. Certainly, it has not proved possible to tease out that arcane quality, the contenance angloise, which has sometimes been assumed to infuse the entire repertory from the Old Hall Manuscript onwards.

An opera so widely known and loved as La traviata may seem. a strange subject for musicological research. It was first performed in March 1853. From the following year onwards it enjoyed an uninterrupted reign as an international favourite. Throughout the nineteenth century it came second in popularity only to Il trovatore; while Verdi himself, when asked at one point which of his own operas he preferred, is said to have replied, ‘Speaking as a professional, Rigoletto, speaking as an amateur, La traviata’. In the period following his death many of Verdi's works now considered masterpieces sank for a while below the horizon—but not La traviata. Today it is not only Verdi's best-loved opera, but the most popular piece in the entire operatic repertory. What more could there be to find out about it?

Ralph Vaughan Williams's father died when Ralph was two years old; his mother took her three small children to her own parents' house, Leith Hill Place, near Dorking, and brought them up much as she had been brought up herself. Besides the children, the household consisted of grandparents and a maiden aunt, and a staff of servants, mostly local people. Judging from a photograph of a group of them, none was young, and all were slightly eccentric.

An index reference in Donald Mitchell's study of Mahler's ‘Wunderhorn’ years seems to promise an appraisal of Mahler's debt to Liszt; on the page, however, an assumption precedes an exhortation to ‘serious research and documentation’. The debt is located in Mahler's ‘consistent and brilliant’ use of transformation of themes with particular reference being made to the ‘Faust’ Symphony. Elsewhere, Mitchell cites a trumpet tune from the finale of the ‘Resurrection’ Symphony and its subsequent transformation into a chorale as an example of ‘how closely Mahler had studied Liszt’. The species of transformation demonstrated is common in Liszt, mood and association being altered by radically changing the context while leaving melodic, harmonic and rhythmic contour relatively untouched. All of this, however, Mahler might have learned from Wagner, Smetana, Weber or many another composer of dramatic or programmatic music. Real documentation, in the form of letters or recorded comment, has always taken place in discussion of Mahler's debt to Liszt to the pursuit of technical and aesthetic parallels; Constantin Floras' study in progress is typical in that copious motivic and thematic cross-reference, and extensive documentation with regard to Mahler and Liszt individually far outweigh recorded discussion by Mahler of Liszt's personality and music.

The earlier part of the nineteenth century is considered a ‘bad’ period of English music. It has been labelled, like the earlier period discussed by Dr. Sadie at our last meeting, a ‘Dark Age’. It is interesting to see on what basis these judgments are held. How much music written by English composers in the years 1800–1860 is still generally known? I have compiled a rough list of works that are still in current use, apart from occasional revivals. It is based on recent programmes, chapel lists, publishers’ catalogues, and so on.

This article explores the treatment of space in Gustav Mahler's First Symphony from the perspective of the composer's experience as a conductor of opera. It considers the ‘theatrically’ located offstage utterances in the work's introduction in light of passages from Beethoven's Fidelio (Act 2, scene ii) and Tristan und Isolde (Act 2, scene ii), and against the backdrop of Mahler's controversial attempt to assign the Alla marcia section from the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to a small offstage orchestra. By considering in turn the implications of Mahler's treatment of offstage space on the work's overall structure, specifically with respect to the moment of ‘breakthrough’ in the first and last movements, I suggest that Mahler ultimately re-establishes the vitality of the symphony as genre at the intersection between the waning symphonic tradition and the immediacy of operatic convention.

The spectre of music as a transcendent artistic ideal figures prominently in the literary criticism of Victorian aestheticism, though the extent to which aestheticism of the movement actually influenced the thinking of British composers has received only marginal scholarly attention. By the first decades of the twentieth century, aestheticism had become decidedly unfashionable even in literary circles, so it is unsurprising that composers of the time would choose to distance themselves from its rhetoric. The prevalence of a certain type of metaphysical conception of the creative act of the artist and intuitive act of the critic, however, may suggest an important remnant of aesthetic influence. Drawing from new critical trends which themselves mirror those of aestheticism, this article posits a revised conception of aesthetic discourse as an activity of self-cultivation, and examines its role in shaping the lives of selected British composer-critics from the early part of the twentieth century. By casting the aesthetic ethos not as a doctrine but as a set of internal practices that inform the creation and subversion of doctrine, the article demonstrates how a ‘relational musicology’ can act as a tool for historical inquiry.

Few extant collections of late-medieval polyphony have been linked definitively to composers whose works they transmit. A dearth of documents that are literally ‘authoritative’ – in the sense that they come directly from the hand of the author – is not surprising in light of the small survival rate of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts and the likelihood that pieces were not written down for the first time in versions for presentation. Most surviving manuscripts appear to be several generations removed from written originals. Nevertheless, presentation manuscripts and other anthologies were not necessarily compiled by scribes in isolation. When composers were nearby they probably were consulted, either directly or through scribal access to authoritative written exemplars. Therefore, despite a paucity of documented relationships, some extant manuscripts may have been compiled in close association with the composers whose music they contain, perhaps even under their guidance.

An abyss separates the research of Mahler from that of social historians on anti-Semitism in fin-de-siècle Austria and Germany. Mahler specialists tend to study the assaults he endured in terms of the centuries-old intolerance. Social historians, however, have pursued a different tack. They trace the liberal thought of the mid-nineteenth century, the legal emancipation of the Jews and its aftermath to the rise of ‘new’ anti-Semitism in the 1870s, centred in Vienna. The reasons why Mahler resigned as director of the Vienna Court Opera involve many more factors and subtleties, even concerning the expression of anti-Semitism. It is on these elements that this article attempts to shed light.

To make known to the public some mechanical apparatus which will facilitate vocal culture, to demonstrate the difficulties attending the latter, and to point out the means best adapted to overcome them, is the scope of the present lecture. The long experience I have had in teaching will thus, I hope, prove of service to others who are earnestly working and seeking improvement. It is true that theory and principles can be learnt from books, but it is also true that these are as numerous and varied as the sounds on which they treat. Every teacher has his own method of imparting science and his own individuality in enforcing it. I do not wish to condemn these teachings, or to fix a theory upon the formation of the sounds based upon anotomical and physiological principles; but to suggest opportunities for those who desire successful training in this difficult science, now neglected by so many in some of the most essential points; and I propose to find the cause of the deplorable disparity of tone in many fine artistic voices of our days, which, in youth, from natural gifts promised a bright career in art, whereas they were subsequently rapidly lost to fame. My object is to review briefly the difficulties attending the study of vocal culture, and to suggest how they may be overcome, adding the latest results of modern science, and my own personal experience.

In 1058 Pope Stephen IX visited Montecassino, of which he had been made abbot only shortly before his elevation to the papacy the previous year. This German Pope was the former papal chancellor Frederick of Lorraine, the second northern abbot of Montecassino. On the occasion of this visit the Pope strictly forbade the singing at Montecassino of ‘Ambrosian chant’: ‘Tune etiam et Ambrosianum cantum in ecclesia ista cantari penitus interdixit.’

The Franciscan mission repertory in California, c.1770–1830, includes numerous collections of chant and polyphonic music. Scholars have assumed some direct connection with music used in Mexico, but this assumption remains difficult to prove on the basis of the surviving Mexican repertory, which is mostly associated with cathedrals. Chant and polyphonic settings from the Liturgy for the Dead in Californian sources are compared with those from Mexico. Mexican cathedral music, even in the 1790s, reveals connections with pre-Tridentine liturgical traditions; but the California repertory is based on different liturgical and chant traditions. This supports William J. Summers's hypothesis that polyphonic works in the California Missions are based on a peripheral tradition associated with the religious orders.

Michael Gallope’s book Deep Refrains is an in-depth study of the ineffable core of musical experience.4 But it engages ineffability without eliminating the pragmatic material of music’s economic, technological and even ethical mediations; and it posits a synergistic relationship between these realms. Gallope casts equal doubt on the determinism that construes music’s ineffability as wholly absorbed in mediation and on the vitalism that construes it as radically open. Framed by and theoretically grounded in the thinking of four twentieth-century philosophers (Ernst Bloch, Theodor W. Adorno, Vladimir Jankélévitch and Gilles Deleuze), the book deftly steers between the Scylla of music’s irreducible sensuous materiality (and its attendant invitation to decipherment) and the Charybdis of its elusive ineffability (and its attendant vanishing act in the face of decipherment). The book begins by reflecting on the fascinations and prohibitions of the harmoniaia in ancient Greek philosophy. Already here, Gallope revises the standard interpretation of these founding texts, demonstrating the ways in which Socrates, Glaucon, Aristotle and others in fact consider music as at once deeply mysterious and also strictly rule-governed. This conception of music’sperplexing precision is shown to be shared in ‘global’ contexts less available to music history, including (for example) the Ikhwan Al-Safa, an eleventh-century priesthood of Islamic scholars. At the same time, Gallope draws attention to the continuity between simplified taxonomies of the ancients and the instrumentalization of their axioms for contemporary engagements with affect, so rampant in the era of emerging neuromedia. Instead of recoiling from music’s indeterminacy (retreating to silence, say, or insisting on music’s unspeakable mystery), Gallope attempts to unpack the critical potential at the heart of auditory experience. On the other hand, he argues, such potential is not harnessed by marking the movements of music’s conceptual nomenclatures alone. Noting that music ‘never speaks like a language, nor is it entirely nonlinguistic’, Gallope seeks to account for the specificity of its ‘vague impact’.5 In other words, while there is a residue of conceptual mediation at work in all sonic encounter, music’s ‘sensory impact’ cannot be subsumed by that residue.