A recurrent trope in the reception of Joseph Joachim's performances is the notion that that he magically transformed himself into the composer of the work. In particular, his performances of violin concertos frequently evoked this perception, as documented by Andreas Moser, Otto Gumbrecht, Hans von Bülow, and Johannes Brahms. Building on work by Katharina Uhde and Karen Leistra-Jones, this article will propose that Joachim's cadenzas played a central role in fostering the perceived slippage between the composer and performer. Joachim composed – and performed – cadenzas for many of the concertos in his core repertoire, including works by Giuseppe Tartini, W. A. Mozart, Giovanni Battista Viotti, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Brahms. I will argue that Joachim's cadenzas enact a compositional approach to the thematic material. The depth of this engagement is profound, encompassing not only the soloistic passages but also the ritornello sections as material for developmental reworking and modulatory processes. In fact, he often explores harmonic avenues that are only hinted at in the ‘parent’ concerto, highlighting and fulfilling moments of unrealized potential. Joachim's cadenzas thus create the impression that the composer of the concerto is revising and expanding his own work. I propose that he inhabits the genre of the cadenza as a site of compositional and performative virtuosity, fusing the two personas at a time when they were becoming increasingly polarized in European musical culture.

As the largest and most comprehensive Chinese database in the world, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI: Zhong guo zhi shi ji chu she shi gong cheng 中国知识基础设施工程, also commonly known as Zhi wang 知网)1 is supervised by Tsinghua University and Tonfang Knowledge Network (TKN), a high-tech enterprise funded by Tsinghua University in 1997. It is supported by the Chinese Ministry of Education, the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the State Administration of the Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of the People's Republic of China and the State Planning Commission of the PRC. In December 1996, CNKI began providing CD-ROM and CAJ-CD for Chinese academic journals, and it was officially launched in 1999. This repository initially focused on Chinese academic journals and later expanded its coverage to PhD dissertations, masters’ theses, conference proceedings, yearbooks, books and patent documents. It is divided into three categories: ‘databases’, ‘specialized sources’, and ‘international sources’, including ProQuest and Taylor and Francis journal databases. Ten service centres are established across the world, including Beijing, North America, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong; users include universities, research institutions, government think tanks, industries, hospitals and public libraries.2 CNKI (or CIKRD) updates its information on a daily basis, and its current growth rate is approximately 350,000 new journal articles per month.

In an era when historical statues can be toppled and reputations smashed, critical editions remain one of the more durable monuments to the significance of a composer. Initiated by the nineteenth-century Bach-Gesellschaft and Händel-Gesellschaft editions, the practice of trying to produce a ‘correct’ text of the complete musical works of a single composer reached its apogee in the decades after World War II, leading to marquee projects like the Neue Bach-Ausgabe (1954–2007) and the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (1955–91). So pervasive was edition-making in this era that it led Joseph Kerman to complain ‘there is something wrong with a discipline that spends (or spent) so much more of its time establishing texts than thinking about the texts thus established’. But despite such criticisms and amid the proliferation of alternative forms of musicological research in the last 40 years or so, the making of critical editions has continued, with new projects taking in figures such as Janáček (1978–), Verdi (1983–), Donizetti (1989–) and Bartók (2016–), among many others. Even if it may be nowhere near as dominant a part of musicological endeavour as it once was, edition-making has survived, a tacit refutation of the challenges that the canon has met with.

This article focuses on four digital resources for researching nineteenth-century women in music. Two are over two decades old and hail from the German-speaking world: Musik(vermittlung) und Gender(forschung) im Internet (MuGI) and the Sophie Drinker Institut online lexicon. The remaining pair are emerging digital resources based in the United States: Art Song Augmented and the Boulanger Initiative Database (BID).

Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending is a perennial favourite in the British classical music radio station Classic FM's ‘Hall of Fame’ poll. In spite of its apparent popularity, however, the work sits uncomfortably with the way revisionist critics and scholars have wanted to portray the composer. As an escapist piece of English musical pastoralism, The Lark undermines their preferred view of Vaughan Williams as a progressive or even ‘modernist’ participant in his artistic milieu. To combat this image, some critics and musicologists have argued for complex, harder-edged interpretations of the work that have little to no basis in the music's primary source materials or the composer's stated priorities in his own writings. Such emphases reflect a problem in recent revisionist literature, wherein traditionalist, nationalist, or Romantic aspects of Vaughan Williams's music are excessively downplayed (or re-situated) in favour of arguments that better support elite sensibilities. As a work consisting of accessible, melody-centric music, and following from a poem excerpt suggesting an idyllic scene, The Lark serves as a bulwark against revisionist overreach and a check against over-emphasis on trendy priorities.

Despite her current marginal position, the nineteenth-century pianist and composer Delphine von Schauroth (1813–1887) once ranked among the most prominent virtuosos of the nineteenth century and had connections with Fanny Hensel, Ferdinand Hiller, Josephine Lang, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and others. Drawing on large body of music criticism, as well as compositions, letters, images and literary works, this article presents a portrait of Schauroth as an artist, with an emphasis on the role of improvisation and the improvisatory in her pianism. In particular, the article fleshes out Robert Schumann's characterization of Schauroth as a ‘Corinna-sister’, a reference to the improvising poetess of Madame de Stäel's novel Corinne, or Italy. The article suggests that Schumann's comparison highlights key facets of Schauroth's status and character as a pianist and composer. Firstly, like Corinne, Schauroth was widely renowned as an eminent performer and was celebrated as a genius by critics, which was particularly notable for a woman musician in the early nineteenth century. Secondly, Schauroth was received as a creator, not only for her compositions, but also for her performances: in the late 1820s and early 1830s, in particular, critics responded to these performances with images of magical creation and an emphasis on the newness of her performance over the composer's work. Thirdly, Schauroth displayed a varied practice of improvisation, and her compositions were understood as having an improvisatory character.

Print created the urge to innovate new modalities of musical knowledge production and dissemination in nineteenth-century Bengal. Publication of music books made the bifurcation between music theory and practice clearer, but only as a textual category. As the literature suggests, these were two categories for organizing musical knowledge, intimately entwined, where one produces the other and also doesn't exist without each other. The technology of ‘swaralipi’ (musical notation) used in the modern printed books materialized the project of disseminating music to the reader who could now ‘read’ the music from the book. For some book writers, music books were meant to be a replacement for the oral tutelage, published as ‘self-instructors’. But, on the contrary, the most prolific book-writers of the time used their books as the basis of oral tutelage in the music school. In the modern setting of the music school, the person of the ‘guru’ or ‘ustad’ was replaced by the formalized, systematic teaching of the ‘professors’ of music. Music books, as the medium of modern music pedagogy, thus changed not only the way students learned – making it possible to learn from the book with no instructor – but also the role of teachers, whose teaching was validated by the book. The music books came to function as the ‘modern shastras’ – to exercise regulatory authority over music practice, and how music is learned and taught. The ‘orality’ of music emerges as a liminal space in the gap between the writings on music and the writing of music. What emerges is an unlikely milieu where a new form of musical education is devised, the possibility of an education without a guru is conceived, and the schema of musical notation brings the entire process to life.