The precious collection of manuscript scores and printed libretti dating from the late seventeenth century and housed today in the Biblioteca Estense at Modena is ample proof that Duke Francesco II d'Este (1660–94) was one of Italy's most generous patrons of music. Indeed his library, which good fortune has preserved almost intact, is an indispensable resource for the study of oratorio, opera and instrumental music in northern Italy in the last quarter of the century. Its contents show him to have been a man of catholic and modern taste, acquiring and promoting works by living composers active in Rome, Florence, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice and, of course, Modena. On the evidence of the Este music collection, historians have been consistent in applauding the cultural achievements of Francesco II's reign and yet, surprisingly, there have been no detailed studies of the way in which the duke exercised his patronage.

It appears to me that in this world all things move onwards together, and that just as in things external, and what we are accustomed to call material, so in things which concern the mind, there is no department of philosophy, or science, or art which goes on quite by itself, without influencing and being influenced by the progress which goes on in other lines. The tone and predisposition of men's minds, and the character of the prevalent courses of speculation, seems to be determined by causes which affect all branches of mental activity in a similar way, and the tendencies which show themselves strongly and effectively in one branch are sure to appear sooner or later in another.

In 1773 Johann Christian Bach filed a bill of complaint in Chancery for breach of musical copyright, initiating what was to become a landmark case in British copyright law. Bach claimed that the publishing firm of Longman, Lukey & Co. had brought out unauthorized editions of two of his compositions: a ‘new lesson for the Harpsichord or Piano Forte’ and a ‘new Sonata’ for keyboard and viola da gamba.

Sheffield pop band Pulp's album This is Hardcore (1998) problematizes media constructions of fame, masculinity, youth and sexuality as self-aggrandizing fantasies. Pornography and glamour function in the album as cyphers for the disparity between fantasy and reality - a disparity fuelled by the media and their highly alienated cultural forms. The album's critique of these fantasies is made both in its subject matter and through the alienated subject position it solicits - a subject position at odds with constructions of macho masculinity as the protagonist in sexual encounters, and with constructions of fame and stardom. Drawing on media theory, I situate the album as part of a more general critique of spectatorship and voyeurism, and of the forms of cultural consumption (including music) which encourage passivity and disengagement.

The object of this paper is to draw attention to a bye-path of musical history. The Sol-fa syllables now play an important part in elementary musical education. It may, therefore, be worth while to give a brief account of their birth and adventures.

It is forty years since Willi Apel published his important article which linked Frescobaldi's keyboard music with that of the contemporary Neapolitan composers, Mayone and Trabaci. By drawing attention to generic, formal and stylistic features common to the music of Frescobaldi and the Neapolitans he established a more balanced outlook on Italian keyboard music of the seventeenth century, and also pointed to Cabezon as an influence on Mayone and Trabaci. There is, however, a case for reconsidering this current view in the light of the artistic contacts between Naples and Ferrara in the last decade of the sixteenth century, and for examining the possible origins of some of the compositional processes that have appeared to link Frescobaldi to his southern counterparts. Professor Apel singled out features common to Frescobaldi, Mayone and Trabaci; and more recent work by Roland Jackson has established further musical evidence to support the specific influence of Trabaci on Frescobaldi's chromatic compositions and toccatas, and to suggest a more general pattern of musical practice in Naples, exemplified in the chromatic and other compositional procedures found both in Trabaci's music and in the works – vocal as well as instrumental – of Gesualdo and de Macque. Amongst these procedures is the device of inganno which Jackson has identified in some of Frescobaldi's mature chromatic music.

To try to understand the vocal styles demanded by the famously exacting Giuseppe Verdi, I consider a wide range of evidence, including the composer's scores and letters, contemporary treatises, reports on performances, and selected early recordings. On the basis of this material, I contend that the vocal styles known and advocated by Verdi differed radically from what is proposed by most modern pedagogues and nearly always heard in opera houses today. An examination of the evidence, as it bears on specific technical and expressive procedures, sheds light on nineteenth-century vocal style, offering novel interpretative possibilities to the modern performer.

The subject of my paper is the use of new technologies in serious musical creation. Although I cannot develop the comparison with popular music and its mass market, one will understand implicitly the importance of the fact that ‘all of my story’ is set within the institutions and environment located on the edge of the market. My aim is not to show why diverse technologies that have appeared in the last 40 years have been exploited by composers, but rather how innovations such as electroacoustic and computer music were able to ‘succeed’. I employ the word ‘success’ in the organizational sense: it is the lasting formation of new segments of musical creation and the mobilization of composers, of partners from the scientific world, and of the technical and financial resources for establishing these new segments.

The discourse of history can appear as a medium of proud self-portraiture, as the ritual of a culture in narcissistic self-contemplation, glorying in its uniqueness and superiority and in its descent from revered ancestors. This thought catches history as a kind of myth and opens history to anthropological, as well as to historiographical, description.

London in 1500 was not the vast metropolis that we know to-day; it was a small walled city only about one square mile in area. Within that square mile was concentrated much of the wealth of the whole kingdom. The city's prosperity reached a peak in Tudor times when foreign wars closed up avenues of foreign trade upon which Norwich and Bristol relied; as a result of this, London alone, which had built up strong commercial ties with the Netherlands, was able to maintain any substantial continental trade; and here it naturally expanded rapidly. It is important to emphasise this accumulation of wealth in the City, for at a time when the uses of money were much more restricted than they are to-day, the effect was an ever-increasing splendour of religious observances and secular entertainment.

The Renaissance attitude to art as craft is reflected in a veritable cult of competitive setting testing the composer's ingenuity and invention. Already in the fifteenth century one finds abundant evidence of this trend in rival versions, sacred and secular, by famous professional musicians of chansons like ‘De tous biens plaine’, ‘J'ay pris amours’ and ‘Fors seulement l'attente’. A similar situation is found in the poetry of the time: thus in the fifteenth century one finds numerous rondeaux with the same incipit but with different continuations, while the sixteenth century provides a parallel case with the résponse (or rebours) which borrows its form, ideas, images and even whole lines from the model. The entire neo-Petrarchist repertoire is emulative, and the vogue of the blason, instituted by Clément Marot in exile at Ferrara in 1535, was overtly competitive.

The front cover of Cod. 17561a in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, bears the following inscription: ‘Dieses vollständige Requiem, bestehend aus Bl. 1–64, wurde im Jahre 1838 angekauft’ (‘This complete Requiem, consisting of ff. 1–64, was acquired in 1838’). Similarly, on Cod. 17561b we read: ‘Dieses unvollständige Requiem ist aus zwei Bruchstücken zusammengesetzt: (1) Bl. 65–86 (alt 11–32) wurden vom Abbé Stadler gekauft. (2) Bl. 87–99 (alt 33–45) wurden vom Hof-Kapellmeister Eybler geschenkt’ (‘This incomplete Requiem is assembled from two fragments: (1) ff. 65–86 (olim 11–32) were bought from Abbé Stadler. (2) ff. 87–99 (olim 33–45) were presented by Hof-Kapellmeister Eybler‘).

This study presents the sketch of a theory of musical listening based on historical considerations of the role of music in Western culture. A universal element of musical listening might lie in the notion that all music is the product of a fundamental human capacity to hear, harnessed in countless ways by diverse cultures. Secondly, there is the type of music, covering very broad historical and cultural boundaries, that presupposes attentive listening or even a participating audience; this is perhaps the simplest and most familiar category, at least in the West. Finally, there is the range of music that might contain an ‘implied listener’, something which I suggest is much more elusive, with specific historical and cultural boundaries within Western modernity. While this sense of the implied listener – someone developing the sense of a consistent and unitary self over time – is understandable today and might well still be employed in a broad range of new music, I would suggest that it now reflects only one way of being human among an alarmingly broad array of choices.

All musicians are familiar with the repeat conventions of classical music and most are accustomed to standard responses to them which have been built into the performing practice of our own time. It is, for example, relatively common to hear the first repeats of sonata-form movements observed, much less common – in fact remarkably rare – to hear second-half repeats. The decision whether or not to observe a repeat is shared between current convention and the caprice of the performers. In modern practice, for example, unimportant factors make repeats more likely to be observed. The existence of first- and second-time bars is persuasive, for fear that valuable music under the first-time bar may otherwise be lost, even though the essence of the music is not affected: a first-time bar is, after all, usually the result of small awkwardnesses in the cadence rather than the expression of structural necessity. Similarly, in variations, just one variation having its repeat written out in varied or ornamented form is enough to constrain the players to observe every other repeat in the set when a first instinct might have been to observe none, or first-half repeats only. Then there is the universal habit of scrupulously observing minuet or scherzo repeats on the play-through and scrupulously overlooking them on the da capo, even when, as often happens in Beethoven's scherzos, the first section of the movement is a single eight-bar phrase which makes little sense unless it is repeated. It is odd that the minuet, often the least sophisticated section of a classical work, is heard generally three times while development and recapitulation, of intrinsically higher interest, are usually heard but once.

Far from being always unjustly neglected until the late twentieth century, as a recent view would have it, Berlioz's music enjoyed dedicated attention and considerable admiration a century earlier. His orchestral works, in particular, were taken up by a range of skilful players and conductors in Britain from the 1870s, yielding performances in the English regions, the London suburbs and in Scotland that impressed ordinary listeners much more than many experienced ones. I argue that structural change and professional competition within the British concert industry to 1920 assisted this remarkable reception – largely ignored in the historiography of Berlioz's reputation as well as in that of British musical culture – while imaginative musicians, astute promoters, writers and thousands of listeners continued to benefit from contact with his work. Berlioz's challenging music indeed became an agent of aesthetic change in Britain – a benchmark, and a calling-card, of modern orchestral presentation that was both standard and commonly accessible before the First World War.

The importance of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni of Rome in the history of early eighteenth-century Italian music is widely appreciated. We remember him as the illustrious patron of music and the other arts, and the benefactor of Corelli, Alessandro Scarlatti, Handel and a host of other musicians. It is a matter for regret, however, that so little is known of what became of his music library, which, by the time of his death in 1740, would have grown to enormous proportions. In the fifty years since he was created a cardinal he must have amassed a rich collection of vocal and instrumental pieces, for there was not a single genre which he failed to promote. He surely possessed settings of his own librettos and those of other dramas whose production he had supported, manuscript scores of cantatas and sacred works, presentation volumes given to him by grateful recipients of his munificence, numerous prints dedicated to him and all manner of material relating to the regular accademie and other performances at his establishment. Ultimately such treasures became dispersed; they were probably disposed of in the sale of Ottoboni's works of art to which Horace Walpole refers in a letter from Rome in 1740. We know, at any rate, that the collection did not remain intact.

The dispute between Arnold Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker—witnessed in Schoenberg's ironical remarks in the Harmonielehre and Schenker's vigorous polemics in the second volume of Das Meisterwerk in der Musik—was in the first instance a controversy concerning the significance of nonchordal notes (in the German, literally, notes foreign to the harmony), a subject that appears harmless enough. The dispute as such would be hardly worth examining if it revealed nothing beyond each antagonist's lack of understanding of the other and the failure of both to do justice to the subject about which they claimed to be speaking. But beneath the surface of a discussion about technical details is concealed a conflict of fundamental principles concerning modes of musical thought—modes of thought that cannot simply be reduced to the clichés of ‘progressive composer’ and ‘conservative theorist’.

A comparison of the 1854 and 1891 versions of the Piano Trio in B, op. 8, explores how musical allusion can be interpreted to convey Johannes Brahms's attitudes to critics, friends, other composers and his own past. The young Brahms's attachment to E. T. A. Hoffmann's literary alter ego Johannes Kreisler helps explain the extent to which the music of others makes itself heard in the first version of the trio. Changing standards of criticism affected the nature and scope of Brahms's revision, which expunged perceived allusions; the older Brahms's more detached compositional approach shared elements with Heinrich Schenker's analytical perspective. There are also parallels between Brahms's excisions and the surgical innovations of his friend and musical ally Theodor Billroth. Both Brahms and Billroth were engaged with the removal of foreign bodies in order to preserve organic integrity, but traces of others – and of the past – persist throughout the revised trio.