Throughout the sixteenth century France looked towards Italy with an intensity rarely matched before or since. Generations of French kings pursued dreams of conquest on the peninsula; during their Italian campaigns French noblemen and their retinues spent extensive periods south of the Alps, gaining firsthand experience of Italian language and culture. Dynastic marriages linked leading French families with different Italian states: the Retz with the Florentine Gondi, the Nevers with the Mantuan Gonzaga and the Guise with the Este of Ferrara, among many others.

Two conspicuous scholars have honoured the publication of my book The Rise of European Music, 1380–1500 (Cambridge, 1993) with reactions that may interest a much wider readership. Lewis Lockwood's review of the book, in Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 120 (1995), 151–62, and Christopher Page's essay ‘Towards: Music in the Rise of Europe’, in The Musical Times, 136 (1995), 127–34, are both highly engaging, masterly studies of the basic dividing lines in history and the historian's dilemma of distributing his attention among all the issues that have a claim on it. That both find the time to confer generous praise on the book is a demonstration of scholarly solidarity of which I do not feel worthy. If all the objections they also raise against the book are justified, then their kind evaluations of it are doubly undeserved.

Two traits distinguishing the music of the Renaissance may be singled out as relevant to this study: a spirit of emulation leading to appropriation by composers of various aspects of the music of their peers and the development, to a degree not previously seen, of a historical sense. Both in my opinion play a role in the choices made by Palestrina in approaching the L'homme armé theme.

Music psychologists interested in the perception of tonal closure might do worse than investigate the Classical retransition as a sign of impending resolution. Haydn tends to attract more than his fair share of ‘listener-orientated’ approaches, perhaps on account of his attested sensitivity to his audience's cognitive ‘processing limits’. His well-known remark to Griesinger that, isolated at Eszterháza, he ‘could make experiments, observe what elicited or weakened an impression, and thus correct, add, delete, take risks’ conveys the impression of an artist clearly in touch with his public. And yet this most playful of composers exploited this rapport to mislead his listeners, making aesthetic capital out of systematic disinformation.

The first of an uninterrupted series of piano works to follow the orchestral Prometheus, op. 60 (1908–10), Scriabin's Sixth Sonata, op. 62 (1911), is a striking example of what may be termed an ‘octatonic sonata’. Indeed, the Sixth Sonata shows Scriabin experimenting with the octatonic at its most rigid and is unique in containing long spans of pure octatonic writing where not a single extraneous note is invoked. In contrast to the Fifth Sonata, op. 53 (1907), which is closely associated with the Poem of Ecstasy, op. 54 (1905–8), the Sixth Sonata has only loose ties with Prometheus.

Slåtter, op. 72, was composed in 1902-3, and is thus among Grieg's very last works. It is also one of his least familiar. ‘Here [in Norway] my early position is still being promoted, praised at every available opportunity at the expense of my current one’, he wrote in his diary on 21 March 1906. Earlier that day he had played six of the 17 slåtter at a concert in Kristiania (now Oslo), and he was disappointed by the lukewarm response. Grieg did, however, live long enough to witness the successful reception of the work, not least in France where avant-garde circles talked about ‘le nouveau Grieg’. Nevertheless, the widespread perception of Grieg - even today - is based on his lyrical pieces, the ‘wheat buns’, as he himself called them. Yet Slåtter is without doubt one of Grieg's most fascinating works. We do indeed meet a ‘new Grieg’ here, and there is good reason to believe that the work played some part in Béla Bartók's development. There was a copy in Bartók's library, and in an article in the Hungarian journal Zeneközlöny from 1911 (a year before he visited Norway) he mentions Norwegian slåtter and Romanian joe as distinctive types of instrumental folk music. According to the Norwegian Grieg scholar Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe, he probably became aware of Grieg's Slåtter in Paris in 1910.

In 1913 Milhaud set passages of André Gide's La porte étroite as a song-cycle, Alissa. However, he subsequently left the youthful work unpublished, although it was performed by Jane Bathori and Milhaud at the Sorbonne on 11 February 1920. 18 years after its composition he returned to it, and the revised score was published in 1931 as op. 9. It was rare for him to revise earlier works (and, indeed, he seldom made sketches for any compositions). However, he did return to some other works from the same period, the First String Quartet, op. 5 (1912), and the Suite for Piano, op. 8 (1913), simply indicating sections to be cut from the published score of the quartet, and removing a movement from the suite. That Milhaud chose to intervene more extensively in Alissa indicates his attachment to the work and reveals, within the context of one work, the process of compositional growth more generally discernible in his output between these dates.

The ‘cultivation of the self’, which Carl E. Schorske has identified as a characteristic of the Viennese bourgeoisie, establishes a ‘link between a devotion to art and a concern with the psyche’. Such a life ‘appropriated the aesthetic, sensuous sensibility’ leading to ‘narcissism and a hypertrophy of the life of feeling’. Szymanowski, who was for many years fascinated by Viennese culture, reflects many of these characteristics. He was, furthermore, greatly influenced by the work of Pater and Wilde, central figures in the English ‘decadent’ scene which, in Arthur Symons's words, was marked by ‘an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity’. It is unsurprising, therefore, to find narcissism appearing as a prominent theme in many of Szymanowski's works.