It is well known that the sounds of the natural trumpet before the Classical period present themselves to us on two distinct planes of pitch, each associated with a particular musical character and technical requirement, or in a word, style. One style involves the diatonic range supplied by high harmonics of the instrument from the 8th upwards, and was described by German trumpeters as Clarin. This is also the register of the English ‘Trumpet Tune’, and we now tend largely to identify the old natural trumpet with this style, which was produced on the whole fairly softly and with, as Johann Ernst Altenburg wrote, as close an approach as possible to the expressions of other musical instruments. Below this in range, where the trumpet was confined to the sounds of a common chord, falls the register of the Principal and also of the cavalry calls. It was produced in an esoteric trumpet style, robust and with strong emphasis on rapid articulation of single notes with the tongue.

Far more attention has been given over the last century to the polyphonic compositions of Adam de la Halle and his plays than to his courtly chansons. Yet, if the number of surviving manuscripts is a guide, it was as a trouvère in the high courtly style, a courtly ‘maker’ in the tradition of la grande chanson courtoise, that his contemporaries chiefly valued him. His courtly chansons survive in eight main manuscripts and several lesser ones. In the manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fir 25566) containing his Collected Works, as it were, the chansons have pride of place and are notated in a different style from the polyphonic rondeaux and motets and from the monophonic refrains of the same manuscript. Their notation is the square, non-mensural notation analogous to that of contemporary Gregorian chant and traditional for vernacular monophonic song.

During the final editing and printing of his Treatise of the Natural Grounds and Principles of Harmony (1694) William Holder was engaged in a protracted correspondence. The letters to Holder were kept together and formed part of the founding collections of the British Museum, but they seem to have been little used. This neglect may represent the true verdict of history upon their merit, or it may be that they have never attracted the attention of a professional student of harmony qualified to assess their value. I am not such a one, and though, as it were by chance, I may turn over a little new grist for specialists, my set purpose is to describe the chances and changes through which one manuscript passed at the hands of its editor, publisher and printer during its transformation into a book at the end of the seventeenth century.

Much of the early history of the musical oratorio is still unknown. It seems that by the 1620s it was customary for religious confraternities to have music at their services before and after the sermon. In Rome the Congregation of the Oratorio, Philipp Neri's group which eventually met at the Chiesa Nuova, preferred music with Italian texts, whereas the Arciconfraternitàdel Santissimo Crocifisso, named after a cruxifix unharmed in a terrible fire at S. Marcello, preferred Latin texts. Apparently it is these two organizations, with their great emphasis on music and their financial support of trained musicians, which provide the background for the creation of the new musical genre and the impetus for its spread to other centres.

One of Shakespeare's most eloquent eighteenth-century apologists was an Italian: Dr. Johnson's good friend Giuseppe Baretti, who had acquired the taste during his residence in London in the 1750s. When Johnson's Shakespeare edition appeared, Baretti, now back in Italy again, wrote to request a copy: he wished, he explained, ‘to expound the great tragedian to the ladies of Italy’. Baretti was as good as his word, writing in the literary magazine Frusta in January 1764 of this poet who ‘in both the tragic and the comic style stands quite alone, ahead of all the Corneilles, all the Racines, and all the Molières of Gaul’. And it was Baretti who took up arms against Voltaire, whose prestige as a Shakespeare critic had been hitherto unquestioned in France and Italy, publishing in 1777 his Discours sur Shakespeare el sur Monsieur de Voltaire.

It is easy to waste words on problems of definition while avoiding the wider significance of what one is supposed to be defining. In the case of a composer's sketches, an adequate terminology can best serve as a means of identification: to place any further claims upon it, especially in view of our underdeveloped concepts in this field, is to invite confusion where little enough order already exists. Nevertheless, it is worth spending a moment on the question as far as Wagner is concerned, if only because the problem of nomenclature has reached a point where it threatens to confuse a discussion of the sketches themselves—a discussion which in any case is only just beginning. This paper has no claim to finality, but rather attempts to clarify an unfortunate and premature entanglement.

The name of Johann Adolph Scheibe is at once famous and obscure in music history: famous perhaps for the wrong reasons, and largely as the result of his criticism of Johann Sebastian Bach, which can be found retold and frequently misinterpreted in almost all Bach biographies; obscure because little attention has been focused on his many significant contributions to the historical study of musical thought in the early eighteenth century. In the more than two hundred years since the 29-year-old musician and writer published his rather mild words of aesthetic disagreement with Bach's musical style, Scheibe's opinions regarding Bach have never received an adequate defence. Bach had been insulted, and his Leipzig friends as well as Scheibe's enemies declared him guilty of a heinous crime: he had dared to suggest that the master's music was not without faults. Scheibe has been assumed guilty ever since. He tried to counteract each critical attack aimed at him by Bach's circle of defenders with vigorous logic and at times unfortunate youthful sarcasm, but the war of words which developed never resolved itself positively one way or the other in his lifetime. Rather it faded away after a few years, only to be resurrected by Bach scholarship in the nineteenth century.

The bulk of Stanley's organ music was published in three sets of ten voluntaries, Opp. 5–7 (1748–54, reprinted c.1765, again c. 1784 and a third time c. 1809). Their popularity was unrivalled in their day, and Stanley is still regarded as the greatest English organ composer of the eighteenth century. All but five of the 30 voluntaries have two movements (the rest have three or four), and these invariably consist of a short slow movement followed by a longer fast one. The slow movements are strongly influenced by Corelli but the quick ones owe more to Handel and especially Vivaldi in their great rhythmic energy and frequent use of a rudimentary ritornello form. These quick movements are either fugues for full organ or else they make use of a particular solo stop, usually the cornet or trumpet.

Giovanni Bononcini was born at Modena on 18 July 1670. Not long after the death of his father in 1678 he moved to Bologna, where he completed his musical education, held his first posts as a church musician and published his first eight collections, largely of instrumental music. He left Bologna for Rome in 1691 and composed there his first operas, beginning with Xerse in January 1694. To this period also belongs the opera Il trionfo di Camilla, Regina de' Volsci which was first performed at Naples on 27 December 1696, and achieved international renown. By 1699 he had moved to Vienna where he wrote music for 21 dramatic works of various sorts between that year and 1710, including ten full-length operas. Two serenatas for Berlin and one opera and part of a pasticcio for Italy also date from this period.