On the last occasion on which the subject of Spanish music was discussed at a meeting of this Association, we were able to listen to the finished product—a product “finished” in every sense of the word, for, as members will recollect, the illustrations, consisting of a number of Spanish madrigals, were beautifully performed by the English Singers. This time, I should like to begin at the other end, as it were—with the remains of early Spanish music as they confront the researcher, and the traveller. For the researcher is not confined to musical MSS. or to the statements of the theorists. Sculpture, ivories, miniatures and contemporary descriptions in prose or verse, often throw more light on the conditions of performance and the character of the music itself, than the actual MS. with the musical notation (supposing it to exist and to be intelligible), and they are certainly more illuminating than the treatises on musical theory.

The Tudor Era was remarkable for the interest shown in music by all classes of society. Educationists as Sir Thomas Hoby through his translation of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, Sir Thomas Elyot in The Boke of the Governour, Roger Ascham in Toxophilus, and Richard Mulcaster in The Elementarie write at length on the value of musical education.

In order to say anything new about Puccini's orchestration, it is necessary to subject his manuscripts to a detailed scrutiny and it soon becomes apparent that many pages of his writing have not yet been microscopically examined. In fact the early copyists, probably working under the difficult pressure of a late arrival of the manuscript from the composer and an imminent theatrical rehearsal, appear to have approached his compositions with a certain creative flair of their own. Of the two operas which I have been able to copy out almost completely from the manuscripts, La Bohème and Tosca, only three or four pages towards the end of Act I of Tosca could be said to have been accurately copied, as though the work of copying might have fallen into different hands for those pages. Elsewhere throughout both scores, apart from the obvious changes which Puccini brought to his composition subsequently, there is a general wash of ‘editing’ which has introduced an average of from 40 to 50 small changes on each and every page of the score.

Like every other constituent of opera in the middle of the eighteenth century, the overture was subjected to theoretical scrutiny. Rousseau's article in the Encyclopédie was the starting point for critical discussion. An attack on the traditional French overture was part of his general campaign against French tragédie lyrique, and with characteristic polemical skill he gives an illusion of objectivity by attributing his views to unspecified third parties. He begins with an impeccable definition: ‘The overture is a symphonic piece which the composer aims to render brilliant, imposing, harmonious, and which introduces operas and other lyric dramas of substantial proportions’. He goes on to point out that 40 years earlier the French type of overture was exported to Italy. But music has progressed since then, so the Italians now use the quick-slow-quick sequence. By so doing they silence the audience and command attention with the lively opening; induce receptivity to emotions with the softer slow section; and arouse a sense of expectancy with the conclusion. They (the Italian musicians) assert that the French overture does not fulfil the essential function of engaging the attention of the audience, because the slow introduction is indistinguishable from the preliminary tuning-up, and because what follows is conducive of boredom, not concentration. Rousseau goes on to deal with the relationship of the overture to the following opera. A connection between the two is desirable. But it is wrong to include in the overture all the features of the drama. This has the consequence that the action and the development of the opera is presented twice. The best kind of overture, says Rousseau, is one which predisposes the audience to be receptive to the mood of the opening scene of the opera.

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.

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.

But surely the founding of the Royal Society was an act of some wisdom? It set the example for the French Academy, and Paris set the fashion for the courts of Europe. Philosophy was recognised in high places, and the cult of orderly thought encouraged. How important this fashion of an age of reason proved to be we know from every aspect of the eighteenth century history : in the musical works of the classicists just as much as in British business enterprise. There was a belief in the virtues of rationalisation amounting almost to a religion.

In taking the subject of “Cadences and Closes” as the theme of my paper to-day, I am of course aware that an excellent paper, under the heading “Closes,” was read before the Musical Association by Mr. F. Corder on January 7, 1889. This paper, however, was in the main an exposition of the wondrous variety and exceptional treatment of the Cadence in the works of modern writers, and I believe that the subject of the Cadence from an historical point of view has not been put before you.

Of all the Indian arts one of the most popular is that of music, and perhaps of them all the least known to Europeans. Almost every one who has been in India knows that native music exists, but there are comparatively few who recognise the deep hold that it possesses over Indian minds. Europeans, as a rule, leave India with the idea that the national music of the country consists only of noise and incessant drumming, varied, perhaps, by nasal drawling—equally repulsive as unmusical. That there is a real musical art—with an employment of various scales, abounding in rhythmical beauty and full of passionate expression, seems to many almost incredible. And yet this is so.

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.

The well-known Treatise on Harmony, by Alfred Day, M.D., has already been prominently brought under the notice of this Association at least three times :—first, by Mr. Charles E. Stephens, in his paper entitled, “The Fallacies of Dr. Day's Theory of Harmony, with a brief outline of the Elements of a New System,” read during our First Session, 1875; secondly, by Mr. Gerard F. Cobb, M.A., whose paper on “Certain Principles of Musical Exposition, considered educationally, and with special reference to current systems of Musical Theory,” occupied our attention for two consecutive meetings of the Tenth Session, 1883–4; and lastly by Mr. Ebenezer Prout, B.A., whose paper on “Some suggested Modifications of Day's Theory of Harmony,” read as recently as the fifth meeting of the present (Fourteenth) Session, must be still fresh in our minds.

It is easy to waste words on problems of definition while avoiding the wider significance of what one is supposed to be defining. In the case of a composer's sketches, an adequate terminology can best serve as a means of identification: to place any further claims upon it, especially in view of our underdeveloped concepts in this field, is to invite confusion where little enough order already exists. Nevertheless, it is worth spending a moment on the question as far as Wagner is concerned, if only because the problem of nomenclature has reached a point where it threatens to confuse a discussion of the sketches themselves—a discussion which in any case is only just beginning. This paper has no claim to finality, but rather attempts to clarify an unfortunate and premature entanglement.

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.

The music of The Whole Book of Psalms (first printed in 1562) was not a product of English tradition, but a new congregational system brought home from Geneva. Psalm tunes in Edward VI’s time had been secular, iambic and based on dance rhythms; in so far as Thomas Sternhold’s metrical psalms were sung in church, they were chanted by choirs to Sarum tones. The tunes created for congregational use by the Marian exiles had to satisfy Calvin’s principle that they must be distinct from secular songs. They avoided strong rhythms and imitated the Huguenot psalter, which catered for a very different French prosody. Elizabethan congregations were enthusiastic about singing, but did not take to many of these tunes. Evidence shows a growing tendency for the printed tunes to be ignored in practice, and to be replaced by orally transmitted ‘common tunes’ restoring the secular Edwardian idiom. These, rather than the Elizabethan tunes, became the lasting model for the English hymn tune.

This article addresses the early Italian reception of Verdi's Messa da Requiem (1874), premièred in Milan on the first anniversary of the death of the novelist Alessandro Manzoni. Previous literature has focused on issues of musical genre and the work's political implications (particularly its connections with Manzoni and with late nineteenth-century Italian revivals of ‘old’ sacred music). The article examines, instead, the curiously pluralistic concerns of contemporary critics, as well as certain aspects of Verdi's vocal writing, with the aim of destabilizing traditional dichotomies such as old/new, sacred/operatic, vocal/instrumental and progress/crisis. It argues for more broad-ranging political resonances of Verdi's work, suggesting that the negotiation of a variety of boundaries both in Verdi's music and in its contemporary discussion made the Requiem dovetail with wider cultural attempts to define Italian identity.

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.

Using a combination of ethnography, empirical measures of microtiming between rhythm-section musicians and ethno/musicological analyses, this article examines and measures groove in three real-world performances of the popular dance tradition of Cuban son and salsa. The findings paint a complex picture of groove that is shaped by rhythmic-harmonic structure, shared concepts of timing, individual preferences, group dynamics and rhythmic interactions between musicians as they work together to negotiate a groove with the ‘correct’ feel. Microtiming analyses produce a snapshot of how rhythmic timing relationships are ‘played out’ between musicians in live performances and provide quantitative measures of the level of synchrony and separation within the rhythm section. They also suggest that microtiming is influenced by certain metric locations within the rhythmic-harmonic structure, particularly those locations that anticipate harmonic changes and mark the beginning of repeated rhythmic-harmonic sequences.