Rhetorical studies of Mozart have assumed a rationalist conception of language, ignoring the empiricist model that actually dominated the Enlightenment. The two models, comparable structurally to the stile antico and style galant, collide in Mozart's learned finales. A study of three finales, from the Mass in C minor, the Concerto in E♭, K.449, and Die Entführung aus dem Serail, shows how Mozart negotiated irreducible contradictions within Enlightenment thought by switching between the two models.

One of the main challenges facing early printers and publishers of music was how to distribute their products to a dispersed, niche market. At the start of the seventeenth century there were two principal routes of dissemination in German-speaking lands: the general book trade (including the fairs at Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig) and the composer's own initiatives (whether via presentation copies, or via self-publication as pursued by Michael Praetorius, Johann Hermann Schein and Heinrich Schütz). This article traces the transactions by which music was disseminated, examines the range of music available through the book trade, and asks how booksellers and musicians negotiated the market for printed music.

In 1816, Richard Fitzwilliam died, bequeathing his important music collection to the University of Cambridge. In 1824 the University decided to allow selections from it to be published. The most important outcome was Vincent Novello's five-volume The Fitzwilliam Music (1825–7), containing Latin church music by Italian composers of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, but there was also an edition by Samuel Wesley of three hymn tunes by Handel to words by his father, and Wesley also projected an edition of motets from Byrd's Gradualia which for financial reasons was never published. This article discusses Fitzwilliam's bequest, the involvement of Novello and Wesley, the two publications that resulted in the 1820s, and Wesley's unsuccessful Byrd project.

Analysis of the contents of Jānis Cimze's harmonized folksong collection A Garland of Songs (1872) and the cultural context in which it was published reveals its musical portrait of an emergent Latvian nation to be a synthetic construct. Drawing upon aspects of the German nationalist choral movement, the quasi-Herderian work of Baltic German folklorists and new opportunities for cultural expression afforded by mid-century Russian imperial reforms, Cimze's work inspired heated and increasingly xenophobic debate among his contemporary Latvians about the destiny of their community in pre-Revolutionary Russia.

In 1876, the National Training School for Music was established by the Society of Arts as a model of advanced music education after the pattern of leading European conservatoires. But, despite having Arthur Sullivan as Principal, the School failed amidst the rumblings of an academic scandal that dogged George Grove's attempt to establish the new Royal College of Music. The article sets this failure against the successful start of the Royal College and explains how conservatoires, after being in all practical senses virtually an irrelevance to professional concert life, managed to reinvent themselves as vital incubators of British musical talent.

A model is presented which aims to show how, for listeners familiar with a given style, aesthetic response to music may be related to its ‘structure’ (as defined in relation to ‘zygonic’ theory) and ‘content’ (the particular perceived qualities of sound that pertain to a given musical event). The model combines recent empirical findings from music psychology with other approaches adapted from music theory and philosophy. Intramusical considerations, which form the core of the model, are positioned within a broader socio-cultural, cognitive and physical context. The new framework is used to inform an analysis of Beethoven's Piano Sonata op.110, which examines in particular the notions of teleology in music and narrative metaphor.

Béla Bartók was an intensely private man who avoided politics throughout most of his life. At the same time he was so passionately devoted to his Hungarian nation that, even during the difficult years of his American exile, he felt compelled to become involved in pro-Hungarian activities. At one point he accepted the leadership of an organization that had started out as a political lobby and a base for a possible Hungarian government-in-exile.