This article explores the first attempt to reform Handelian oratorio, by the Revd John Brown, in 1763. Concerned about the waning popularity and literary flaws of Handel's works, Brown launched a reform campaign through his own oratorio The Cure of Saul, performed at Covent Garden Theatre, and the publication of A Dissertation on […] Poetry and Music. He also produced the first monograph of oratorio criticism, An Examination of the Oratorios which have been performed this Season, at Covent-Garden Theatre (1763). Published within weeks of one another, the three works shaped an intellectual offensive with aesthetic and moral goals mounted on an educational platform. Although a failure, Brown's attempt reflected Britain's national anxiety in the wake of the Seven Years War.

This article examines the employment of brass instrumentalists in German cities around 1500, as a reflection of the political circumstances of the epoch, where rivalry between the distinct components of the social hierarchy encouraged the assertion of power and status through musical patronage. Archival records and contemporary chronicles provide invaluable insights into the performances of civic brass instrumentalists, whether in the provision of signals (by the city watchmen or those who played alongside the cities’ troops) or for the entertainment of the citizens and their guests (within the civic instrumental ensembles – the Stadtpfeifer (‘town pipers’)). Although the use of ambiguous nomenclature in contemporary records can hinder a definitive understanding of the instruments used by these musicians, the musicians different duties within the city walls can often be inferred. Important insights can thereby be gained into the extent of the patronage of these civic brass instrumentalists, their roles within everyday city life, and their resultant contribution to the communication of civic strength to the populace and their guests.

This article explores aspects of transatlantic culture through the career and works of the baritone, librettist and impresario Henri Drayton (1822–72). Using the published operas as well as reviews from period newspapers, the author retraces the events of the Philadelphia-born Drayton's professional life. Concentrating on the creative works, the author shows how Drayton went from playing stock roles at London's Drury Lane Theatre to collaborating with composers such as Joseph Duggan and Edward James Loder. With his wife, the soprano Susanna Lowe, Drayton performed in what he termed ‘drawing-room’ operas. Their popularity attracted the attention of visiting US impresario P. T. Barnum, who brought Drayton to New York in 1859. When his success in the USA was cut short by the outbreak of the Civil War, Drayton returned to London and created a one-man ‘entertainment’, Federals and Confederates. Spending what would be his final years as a member of the Richings English Opera Company, Drayton returned to New York in 1869.

It has been claimed that Burlington House and Cannons, the homes of the Earl of Burlington and the Duke of Chandos, were homosexual or homoerotic settings and that Handel's presence in these environments suggests that he was ‘gay’ or influenced the secular works he composed there. Examining in detail biographical information about John Gay, Alexander Pope and William Kent, eighteenth-century biographical accounts of Handel and insights from the history of sexuality, this article argues that there is no basis for these claims about the homosexual milieux at Burlington House and Cannons or for Handel's sexuality.

Whether we can ascribe specific meanings to the works of Arnold Bax is a vexed question, given that the composer was rarely explicit about such matters. In that context, this article explores the significance of musical quotation and allusion in Bax's First String Quartet in G major (1918), dedicated to Edward Elgar. Several references to Elgar's Violin Concerto are highlighted in the first and second movements of the quartet, and broader stylistic referencesto Dvořák and Debussy are also identified. Explanations are suggested for these references, based on parallels drawn between Bax's musical practice in this work, the composer's early reception, and his prose writings in the Musical Standard and Musical Herald, which discussed ‘artistic good faith’, musical influence and the difficulties of creating a national style in British music.

ABSTRACT

A musical response to Lacan's concept of the objet petit a – the imaginary ‘object-cause’ of desire – accounts for certain songs by Charles Ives in which ‘tonic’ chords are signified by complex networks of dominant-seventh harmonies. These objects of tonal desire adopt the structure of both lack (as absent centre) and surplus (as multiple tonal centres). In each song, Ives employs individual harmonic techniques to question the ability of tonic chords to coordinate a fractured tonality. Investigating Afterglow, Serenity, At Sea and Mists from the 1922 collection of 114 Songs, I explore the Lacanian dimensions of each text and setting, bringing out the message that each song offers about the function of the tonic. An analysis of Premonitions exemplifies a distinction Slavoj Žižek proposed between a functional system in which the object a coordinates desire as absent centre, and a system in which the object is stripped of its organizational power.

This article explores the treatment of space in Gustav Mahler's First Symphony from the perspective of the composer's experience as a conductor of opera. It considers the ‘theatrically’ located offstage utterances in the work's introduction in light of passages from Beethoven's Fidelio (Act 2, scene ii) and Tristan und Isolde (Act 2, scene ii), and against the backdrop of Mahler's controversial attempt to assign the Alla marcia section from the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to a small offstage orchestra. By considering in turn the implications of Mahler's treatment of offstage space on the work's overall structure, specifically with respect to the moment of ‘breakthrough’ in the first and last movements, I suggest that Mahler ultimately re-establishes the vitality of the symphony as genre at the intersection between the waning symphonic tradition and the immediacy of operatic convention.

The French composer Raoul Laparra held an advanced knowledge of Spanish culture and music that was rare among French musicians. In his first opera, La habanera (Opéra-Comique, 1908), he tried to represent a Spain that was ‘different from Carmen’, focused on the ‘colder’ central region of Castile rather than southern, gypsy stereotypes. However, owing to several inconsistencies in his ideological agenda, and the weight of conventional representations of Spanish music and culture, Laparra rendered a contradictory image of Spain, which drew partly on the very southern and gypsy stereotypes he had intended to oust. Furthermore, the French critics’ lack of familiarity with Spanish traditions caused his project to be misunderstood. Those critics read La habanera in the context of French cultural struggles, mostly related to the definition of a national identity and the influence of Italian and German music.

The electromagnetic basis of video technology allowed sound and image to be recorded simultaneously: as a result, composers could visualize their music and artists could sound their images. Many believed that such intermedial audio-visuality signalled a brand-new art form that was free from lineage. Using Nam June Paik as an example, this article suggests that this is inaccurate. During the twentieth century, composers were experimenting with spatializing their sounds, while artists were attempting to include time as a creative element in their visual work. The intermedial capabilities of video technology allowed these two disciplines to come together, acting as a conduit that facilitated the fusion and manipulation of pre-existing elements. Understood in this way, music and art in the twentieth century cannot coherently be discussed as individual disciplines, but rather encourage a more lateral history – or spatial sensibility – that moves fluidly through the space between them.

Björk's 2004 album Medúlla offers listeners radical and new combinations of vocal sounds in pop music. The album features emergent processes ranging from textural emergence, as in standard pop-rock formulas for song introductions, to less common emergent and transformative processes involving metrical, tonal, motivic and phrasal structure. When such processes involving different parameters are combined, other (non-emergent) processes recede to the background, and the effect of emergence assumes a fundamental role over the course of the composition as a whole. Recognizing emergent processes opens up connections with song lyrics and possibly also extra-musical narratives which can enrich our analytical understanding and ultimately our listening experiences of these songs. Furthermore, Medúlla models ways in which other contemporary songwriters could develop sophisticated emergent processes that disturb conventional understandings of popular music as simplistic and formulaic.