The discovery of a new anthology of secular songs from Madrid fills an important lacuna in our understanding of secular music in seventeenth-century Spain. The Biblioteca Xeral of the University of Santiago de Compostela — near the romanesque cathedral for which the famous Codex Calixtinus was written — preserves a manuscript of 111 folios (E-SCu MS 265) which has hitherto escaped the attention of both musicological and literary scholars. It contains 100 anonymous songs, all but two for solo voice and continuo, and was copied by a certain José Miguel Guerra, scribe of the Spanish Royal Chapel. The manuscript is undated but, as we will argue later, it appears to have been compiled around 1680. If this estimate is correct, it would make this anthology the earliest collection of its kind, a significant missing link between the latest polyphonic cancioneros of the mid-seventeenth century and the numerous anthologies of solo songs and cantatas from the 1690s onwards. This article represents a preliminary investigation of the manuscript, its contents and the circumstances of its compilation, though many of the questions surrounding the collection will have to await further study.

Evidence of reworkings by Restoration composers of their own pieces is not difficult to find, but inevitably such material has survived in a haphazard fashion. Only rarely does one come across examples like Matthew Locke's scorebook of consort music, London, British Library (GB-Lbl), Add. MS 17801, where alterations have been made systematically. Even where such examples do exist, the common contemporary practices of cutting out rejected leaves or of scraping away the original notes on a page often make it impossible to analyse the revisions made: of course the composers themselves could never have imagined that anyone would be interested in their cast-offs and made no attempt to preserve them. It is something of a stroke of luck, then, that three distinct and almost complete versions of an anthem by William Turner should be extant: they allow an unusually detailed study of the revision processes of a successful Restoration composer. What emerges as most important from such a study is the fact that Turner's reworkings of each section of the piece appear to show a consistency of purpose that one simply cannot search for in the odd revised phrases and bars which survive for most other composers of the period.

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.

Eduard Hanslick's The Beautiful in Music (1854) is a classic of musical aesthetics. Its influence has been profound, not least as a polemic against Wagner's Opera and Drama (1851). The polemic was defended by the author in his preface to the seventh edition of 1885, which contains the oft-quoted evaluation of music drama as ‘formlessness exalted into a principle’. The Hanslick/Wagner debate defines an aesthetic and theoretical ground zero around which significant forces have been arrayed. The results have been complex and mixed. While Wagner's music prevailed and his theories were generally dismissed, Hanslick's rejection of music as a medium for expressing feelings articulated an approach brought to fruition by Heinrich Schenker (who unsurprisingly shared Hanslick's negative view of Wagner as well as his polemical tendencies).

Reflecting on the composition of his First Chamber Symphony, op. 9, in the essay ‘How One Becomes Lonely’ (1937), Schoenberg wrote:

Mercure, a ballet in three tableaux with scenery and costumes by Pablo Picasso and choreography by Léonide Massine, created a scandal on a par with that of Parade (1917) when it was first performed at La Cigale Theatre in Montmartre on 15 June 1924 as part of the ‘Soirée de Paris’ season mounted by the wealthy Comte Etienne de Beaumont. Although Mount Etna, as it transpired, featured in the scenario but not in Picasso's stage sets, the première was certainly the scene of a volcanic eruption, a deliberate demonstration orchestrated by the Surrealists (led by the poet André Breton), who tried to drown Satie's music-hall score with their cries of ‘Long live Picasso! Down with Satie!’ The reasons behind this were complex and inseparable from Satie's enthusiastic support for the Dada movement and its founder, Tristan Tzara, from 1919 onwards. After the failure of the Congrès de Paris (convened by Breton to establish a Dada constitution and himself as leader), Satie took great delight in assuming the presidency of Breton's public trial at the Closerie des Lilas restaurant on 17 February 1922. Their enmity was further intensified by Satie's participation in the ‘happening’, known as La soirée du Coeur à barbe, which Tzara mounted at the Théâtre Michel on 6 July 1923. In what might be regarded as a dress rehearsal for Mercure, the newly founded Surrealists under Breton mounted a campaign in support of Picasso, which led to Breton being expelled by the police.