Marie-Dominique-Joseph Engramelle's treatise La tonotechnie, ou l'art de noter les cylindres (1775) claimed that automated instruments driven by pinned cylinders would grant listeners direct access to music as the composer conceived it. Standard notation was insufficient, as it did not capture the music's mouvement – its temporal flexibility from moment to moment. Denis Diderot provided an aesthetic justification for automated instruments in terms that linked them to materialist philosophy. Like android automata, which simulated life through automated motion, automated musical instruments encoded live music to simulate the ideal performance of a composer. Yet Engramelle's collaboration with the composer Claude Balbastre, which resulted in a pinned-cylinder notage of one of Balbastre's keyboard pieces, raises crucial questions about the effectiveness of the technology and its notation, and about Engramelle's claims and his own musical skill. Engramelle's project is best understood as a performance unto itself – a manifestation of the cultures of public science that were widespread in the European Enlightenment.

This article examines the early writings of one of Handel's English librettists, Newburgh Hamilton. It describes what seems to be Hamilton's first publication, the little-studied Tory satire The Changes (1711), sets it alongside other early publications and biographical details, and reads this material alongside two of Hamilton's librettos for Handel, Alexander's Feast (1736) and Samson (1743). Hamilton's early writings are approached less as contexts for the oratorios than as texts with their own interest, and as intertexts to be set in dialogue with later productions. The article seeks to contribute to debate over the politics of Handel's vocal music, debate provoked not least by the difficulties of defining the sphere and meanings of politics in eighteenth-century culture, and of conceptualizing the collaborative endeavours and multiple sites of composition, patronage, business, performance and reception that make up Handel's oratorios.

The question of what happens when a composer alters a poet's poetic cycle haunts examinations of many song cycles and has proven especially problematic for Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe. The long-held view that Schumann crafted a clear plot from Heine's non-narrative Lyrisches Intermezzo has recently been questioned in favour of a view of the cycle as an incoherent fragment. Using the tools of narratology, this article argues that Dichterliebe is both a fragment and a coherent whole, a string of memories held together by a distinct narrative logic. Identifying two poetic voices illuminates the cycle's narrative strategy and also sheds light on problematic aspects of the music, including Schumann's deletion of four songs, the voice–piano relationship and the enigmatic final postlude. This article proposes answers to age-old questions about Dichterliebe while also offering a fresh approach to the study of song cycles.

This article explores the role of music in nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts of medieval Italian literature and its relation to the construction of Italian national identity both during and long after the Risorgimento. Tracing music's role in the writings of Giosuè Carducci, Vincenzo De Bartholomaeis and Aurelio Roncaglia, it argues that music somewhat paradoxically became entangled with Italy's literary identity even as scholars worked to extricate the peninsula's most renowned poetry from its grasp. In the realm of ‘popular’ poetry, Italianness depends on the presence of music, which serves as a marker of that poetry's popular origins. In contrast, music's absence from the realm of ‘high-art’ poetry was essential to the construction of an Italian tradition independent of and superior to its French and Provençal predecessors.

Current studies of burlesque position it as a subversive genre that questioned cultural and social hierarchies and spoke to diverse audiences. Central to this interpretation are burlesque's juxtapositions of high and low culture, particularly popular and operatic music. This article problematizes this view, proposing that mid-Victorian burlesques lost their satirical bite. Demonstrating little concern for the tastes or interests of the poorer or the most elite members of the audience, they specifically targeted the bourgeoisie. The article places three mid-Victorian burlesques in the wider context of the commercial development of the West End following the 1851 Great Exhibition. It proposes that this broader context, and not the genre's perceived social role, provides the key to understanding the impulses driving the musical choices. It argues that juxtapositions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ music were far from subversive; rather they were included for commercial reasons, offering variety – but variety within strict bourgeois limits.

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.

One of the less studied aspects of post-war musical life is private sponsorship of American modernist composers, such as that by the Fromm Music Foundation (FMF) established in 1952. Using unpublished letters and documents from the FMF archives at Harvard and interviews with people who worked with the founder, Paul Fromm, this article discusses how Fromm's involvement in his foundation led to ventures that were influential on the development of American contemporary music and its relationship to academia. Unlike the Ford or Rockefeller foundations, Fromm sought the role of patron, fostering close relationships with composers and accepting their advice. Yet composers in Fromm's network often had aesthetic visions that were different from his. This article discusses Fromm's sponsorship of the Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies and the journal Perspectives of New Music, and how the different, complex and contradictory visions held by Fromm and his advisers were representative of those in the larger American music scene.

Discussions of Dvořák's Sixth Symphony typically focus on its connections with Vienna. Dvořák wrote the symphony for the Vienna Philharmonic and dedicated it to Hans Richter. Its allusions to Brahms and Beethoven led David Brodbeck to describe it as a piece in which Dvořák ‘speaks German with an unusual degree of clarity’. Contemporary Czech critics tell a different story. After its 1881 Prague première, the work was dubbed the ‘Czech Spring Symphony’. One critic stated that it ‘speaks to us in pure Czech’. Indeed, the Sixth is Dvořák's only symphony to include a furiant, and Czech scholars have long sought to prove that the work's themes were derived from Bohemian folk songs. Can these narratives be reconciled? This article suggests that political tensions and Dvořák's growing international renown made Czech critics eager to claim him, giving Czech labels to a piece that could be interpreted as conforming to the Austro-German tradition.

Although philosophical and biographical accounts of Nietzsche and Wagner abound, the musical issues at stake in the late text Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner, 1888) have rarely been addressed within their wider cultural context. This article explores the nineteenth-century concepts of decadence and degeneration as relevant for understanding the ambivalence of Nietzsche's late critique of Wagner. Emphasizing his affinity with contemporary French criticism, it argues that his late texts advance a theory of decadence pertinent to current music history and criticism. It locates The Case of Wagner within the larger discourse of degeneration, probing similarities to and differences from the work of surrounding critics of Wagnerism. Nietzsche's critique combines a condemnation of Wagner's music with a more positive appreciation of the composer's historical relevance. Yet his writings also reveal a fundamental conflict between his personal involvement with Wagner's music and his philosophical quest to analyse this music as expressive of modernity.

This article explores the ways in which audio in the home was figured in (and helped shape) changing consumer and gender roles in post-war Britain. It looks at the ways in which innovations in home-furnishing and audio-equipment design and manufacture created an environment with new tactile as well as sonic qualities; it examines the ways in which changing music styles helped develop new markets for audio equipment and new meanings for audio discourse. But before it does so, the article sets out some arguments on cultural-historical method. Extant academic writing on post-war home audio tends to privilege the study of media representation – and the critique of ideology constructed therein – at the expense of other kinds of enquiry and source-work. In making use of a broader range of sources and interpretative approaches, this piece aims for a thick reading of the ‘social’ along with the ‘cultural’.

Birtwistle's Punch and Judy arrived at a crucial moment for new opera. It premièred in 1968 at the Aldeburgh Festival, the home of a vision of British opera that Punch and Judy seemed actively to confront. However, Punch and Judy also engaged closely with operatic traditions and institutions, and while its Aldeburgh première is remembered as a scandalous provocation, a closer look at this event suggests that the opera was welcomed as a subtle intervention into the British operatic scene rather than a repudiation of it. The opera itself, moreover, performs a similar sense of revolt as inseparable from tradition, of individuality as inseparable from institutions and audiences, and of the supports for artistic production as necessarily also constraints.

Peircean semiotics has retained a place in the study of music for more than 40 years. Few studies, however, have focused upon arguably the most important aspects of Peirce's thought: his contribution to logic and his development of a pragmatic approach to epistemology. This article develops a theory of Peircean semiotics in music that is rigorously derived from the key insights Peirce offered to philosophy. It focuses upon his theory of the proposition and posits an approach to music analysis that is sensitive to the importance of music's internal structure while recognizing the enormously significant role played by cultural contexts and social forces in the development of musical meanings. The article introduces Peircean semiotics and develops a theory of musical valency with particular reference to the Allegro of Mozart's ‘Prague’ Symphony. It concludes by theorizing the role of cultural and ideological forces in articulating and saturating a music's valency.