In 1913, at the Théâtre des Arts in Paris, a controversial but highly successful ballet choreographed a circus-style pantomime to the music of Fauré's Dolly Suite. With its apparently incongruent relation of dance to music, the ballet displayed, as one reviewer put it, ‘criticisms in action’. This article investigates how we might conceive the production as an act of musical and cultural criticism, by examining its close relation with contexts such as early comic film, music-hall entertainment, the children's literature market, medical and anthropological theories, and surrealist thought. The ballet implicitly challenged conventional interpretations of Fauré's music as reflecting a particular perception of childhood – one which was rather too close to the sentimental attitudes vehemently dismissed in contemporaneous literature. The production was an important manifestation of an emergent understanding of the ‘childlike’ in early twentieth-century French culture – as a condition enlightened by irrationality, with important physiological traits.

In October 1945, five months after the end of the Second World War in Europe, German critic Edmund Nick wrote the following in the American-sponsored Munich newspaper Neue Zeitung:

The venerable founder of Soviet musicology Boris Asafiev aroused widespread dismay by his actions in 1948 after the promulgation of a Central Committee resolution condemning the USSR's leading composers: he not only acquiesced in his appointment as chairman of the Composers’ Union, but agreed to give a keynote address endorsing the resolution at its first national congress. His admirers have claimed that he must have been coerced into collaboration and that his address did not reflect his real views. The present essay re-examines the circumstances, arguing that the evidence of Asafiev's willing complicity is overwhelming. A close analysis of his keynote address reveals its contents to be wholly consistent with views that he had regularly expressed throughout his career, as one of the principal progenitors of an anti-modernist, ethnic nationalist and xenophobic strain in Soviet writing on music that was given forceful expression in the 1948 resolution.

In this article I argue that Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony assumes a pivotal role in advancing the romantically tinged narrative in Luchino Visconti’s film Senso (1954) through a politically recoded message. Visconti offers in this film a reflection upon the political climate in Venetia during the Risorgimento through the pre-eminent role of music. In particular, Bruckner’s music emphasizes the condition of the Venetians under Austrian rulers by dominating as an oppressive and overpowering force, not unlike the Austrian supremacy over the north Italians. Bruckner’s music, which relies on a decisively Wagnerian idiom, conveys throughout the film ideas of betrayal, on both the microlevel and the macrolevel. Such betrayals refer to the Christian Democracy, which excluded the Marxist partisans from governing post-war Italy. These events mirror, for Visconti, the failed revolution of the bourgeois-driven Risorgimento in the 19th century due to the idleness of the aristocracy. Interpreted through Visconti’s Marxist ideology, Bruckner is thus an indicator that the hegemony of the elite remained in place, unchanged and unaltered. As the sonic representative of the Austrian monarchy, it opposes the Risorgimento ideal of the bourgeois class and reassures the supremacy of the ruling class.

Attempts to promote the aesthetic prestige of serial and post-serial music were grounded in theories of material and philosophies of history. As composers explored new aspects of sound and subjected these to rational organization, they saw themselves pushing history forward, with new musical materials providing physical evidence for each new stage of progress. The continual search for new material fashioned a thread that bound together vastly different personalities, and similar ideas about material and history linked a diversity of approaches to, and reactions against, serialism. Believing themselves to be renouncing a subjectivity made untrustworthy by the recent past, many post-war composers turned to something larger to guide their compositional decisions: to the objective dictate of historical progress. Such deference to a fictitious construction of history veiled subjective aesthetic preferences and provided a way to legitimate new techniques with the authority of ‘higher laws’. This article reconsiders post-war serialism in central Europe from the perspective of theories of material and examines how these theories coupled aesthetic and social concerns with philosophy of history to justify compositional techniques.

Since God so tender a regard is one of a small number of ‘domestic sacred’ pieces Purcell entered into his manuscript scorebook, London, British Library, Add. MS 30930. Its particular interest lies in its construction over a ground bass, and the range of artificial devices Purcell employs in its setting. Its background in seventeenth-century psalm settings, and its likely performance circumstances, allowed Purcell to turn these features to rhetorical advantage, with highly imaginative and individual results.

A few puzzling features in the text of Figaro have been discussed for a very long time within the vast literature on this opera. Nevertheless there is little in the libretto that Lorenzo Da Ponte based on Beaumarchais's revolutionary play La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro, and in the music that Mozart then provided for it, which is really problematical. After all, almost the entirety of Mozart's long autograph score has come down to us, even though today Acts 1 and 2 are divided geographically from Acts 3 and 4 - the first two acts being in the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Berlin (DDR), and the last two (which left the Berlin library in World War II) being at present in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska at Kraków in Poland. (The whole autograph is fortunately accessible today.) It would seem that the only portions that have not come down to us in Mozart's handwriting are a couple of passages for recitative, and some of the supplementary wind parts for the last act's finale; we have these merely in the handwriting of copyists, included inter alia in scores made for early performances, or for sale in Vienna and other cities. Several of these copyists' scores will shortly be discussed here.

In the autumn of 1564, the abbot of the Benedictine monastery of S. Giorgio Maggiore in Venice recounted his experience on a recent journey from Rome to Venice of hearing the Lamentations sung during Holy Week in Perugia and Arezzo. It was a source of considerable annoyance to the abbot that, instead of the anticipated refined, devout and pious rendition appropriate to the liturgical occasion, the performance had been a confused uproar owing to the large number of participating singers and the extensive use of ornamentation, with the result that the mournful character of the Lamentations text had not been comprehensible. The direct consequence of the abbot's criticisms was the published compilation, by the anonymous monk to whom the observations had been made, of a comprehensive collection of polyphonic settings by the Benedictine monk Paolo Ferrarese of the constituents of the Holy Week liturgy. The editor stresses that the settings demonstrate the required qualities of piety, devotion, gentleness and smoothness, as well as clarity of text setting in which each verbal emphasis and nuance is realized.

This response to Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's paper questions whether the (explanatory) movement between culture, nature, biology and music is as seamless as his argument suggests.

When I chose the title of this paper, not without difficulty, some months ago, I had in mind only the unique nature of Domenico Scarlatti's keyboard compositions themselves, for my approach to this composer had always been musical rather than bibliographical or historical. I am, indeed, no bibliographer or historian, but merely a practical musician whose only qualification to speak on Scarlatti's works is that of having long known them fairly intimately with my fingers. I have played each one of the 550 Scarlatti pieces I possess several times, and a great many of them countless times, though never upon the type of instrument for which they were designed. To my infinite regret I am not a harpsichordist, but in playing my Scarlatti illustrations on the piano I am fortified by a remark made by our President at the first meeting of the Session, to the effect that in performing early music upon modern instruments, musicians were interpreting it as a living art.

The real rise of Lucca dates from the end of the twelfth century when many of the nobility moved within the city walls, declared themselves ready to defend them, and chose a Podestà as their head. But the ensuing centuries found Lucca often in conflict with other comuni such as Florence and Modena, with the Church especially over control of the Garfagnana mountains, and with the nearby sea republic of Pisa which sacked Lucca in 1314 in order to form with it a strong ghibelline force against Florence. Due to a series of unfortunate political manoeuvres, Lucca next found itself tossed from one owner to another. First it was sold to Francesco Castracani, then to Gherardo Spinola, to John of Bohemia, to the Rossi of Parma, the Scaligeri of Verona, and to Florence from where it passed back to Pisa in 1342. In 1369 Emperor Charles IV freed Lucca of Pisa, and although he kept it somewhat under himself, he allowed it to write a statute as a republic in 1372. Unfortunately independence soon gave way to domination by Paolo Guinigi who managed to keep control from 1400 to 1430. Only then was Lucca once again able to assert itself as a republic, a situation it guarded proudly and jealously for three centuries, until 1799 when France and Austria began. alternately to occupy it. In 1805 Napoleon installed his sister Elisa Bonaparte and her husband Felice Baciocchi as rulers of what then became the Principality of Lucca.

A problem that continually makes its presence felt in the medieval field is that of the use of instruments in church. The sources of sacred music offer little internal evidence, and for a variety of reasons the evidence of the literary and visual arts must be treated with reserve. Many of us would now probably subscribe to F. Ll. Harrison's view that ‘… there is no evidence that any instruments but the organ were normally played in church. …’ It is with the exceptions implied by the word ‘normally’ that this paper is concerned. Documentary evidence shows that other instruments were indeed played in church—that has never been disputed. Granted that these occasions were in some way exceptional, we must set out to answer certain questions: in what circumstances were other instruments used ?—what instruments were involved?—and what traditions, if any, are represented by these apparently isolated occasions? It is the attempts to answer the last of these, especially, that have caused disagreement in the past.

Papers communicated to learned societies generally deal with the results of investigation into some little understood subject of historical interest. It is not often possible to carry that subject up to modern times and to discuss its present-day implications. That, however, is what I am able to do this evening. I have chosen to take the last years of the early keyboard instruments as my starting point, to draw attention to activities relating to them during the nineteenth century, and to outline the circumstances in which the manufacture of the harpsichord and clavichord began once more towards the end of that century. That will bring us to a date some sixty years ago, and I think that is far enough back to enable one to place those happenings in an historical perspective.

During the final editing and printing of his Treatise of the Natural Grounds and Principles of Harmony (1694) William Holder was engaged in a protracted correspondence. The letters to Holder were kept together and formed part of the founding collections of the British Museum, but they seem to have been little used. This neglect may represent the true verdict of history upon their merit, or it may be that they have never attracted the attention of a professional student of harmony qualified to assess their value. I am not such a one, and though, as it were by chance, I may turn over a little new grist for specialists, my set purpose is to describe the chances and changes through which one manuscript passed at the hands of its editor, publisher and printer during its transformation into a book at the end of the seventeenth century.

Until recently Donizetti was not respectable enough for musicology. He was remembered for two or three comedies; yet he and Rossini both devoted their mature years almost entirely to serious opera. Of Donizetti's 70 stage works, a few of which are lost, exactly half belong to the opera seria class (that includes two French grand operas); three are early works on Classical subjects, nine are opere semiserie, and 23 are comedies or farces. But those figures do not give a true picture. In the first place, twelve of the comic operas but only one of the serious are in a single act. Second, if we take the end of 1828 as a dividing line—which is roughly when Donizetti reached maturity—we find that before that date he composed 29 operas, of which only six are serious, whereas after it he produced eight comedies (five in one act), four semiseria (one in one act), and 29 full-length serious operas. Clearly he regarded Romantic tragedy as his main line.

Ladies and Gentlemen,—The study of the phenomena of nature in all her multitudinous aspects is and has ever been a source of delight and lasting interest to the human mind; and the pleasure derived from this study is one which is not restricted to the professional and trained naturalist, but is one in which all can share. Instances are numerous of men of humble origin and but limited education who, possessing an innate love of nature and keen powers of observation, paid attention to what they saw around them, and so developed into students of nature, and did good and original work in the field of natural science; and one of the charms of this study is, that as soon as we look beneath the surface of things, that which at first and to a superficial observer seems commonplace, becomes at once an object and source of fascinating interest and admiring wonder.