Since the Royal Musical Association was founded in 1874, it has heard five papers on Mozart. Perhaps the most notable was read in 1932 by C. B. Oldman, under the title ‘Mozart and Modern Research’. As this gave me the idea for the present paper, and as Oldman's name will recur in it, I might briefly recall what he did for the Association and for Mozart. He was a member of Council for 37 years, and a vice-president for 21. Shortly before he died, in 1969, he gave up the chairmanship of the Proceedings Committee which he had held since 1953. From the mid-1920s, for nearly three decades, it was he in the British Museum, even during the arduous years of his Principal Keepership of Printed Books, to whom visiting musical scholars came for advice, particularly on Mozart, but on much else as well.

It is natural that language should change. Otherwise it would become moribund and inadequate for daily life. Some changes are inevitable, even necessary. Others result from changes in our habits and way of life. Some are the result of adaptation to what is pompously called ‘technology’. Some are capricious and inexplicable. Some pervert the meaning of perfectly respectable words. And there are new words, some of which are necessary to define new things or to express new concepts, while others are entirely unnecessary and become accepted only as the result of a sheepish habit of following where others lead.

In this paper I concentrate on two points which are, I hope, of interest not only to musicologists but also to historians of ideas in other fields. I deal mainly with the works of the two Galileis, but of course mention the views of other musical theorists, in particular of Zarlino, since a large part of Vincenzo Galilei's writings is directed against him. This brings me to the first of my two general points: that polemical writings often present to the historian peculiar difficulties of interpretation, especially when the two adversaries, on the one hand, genuinely hate each other, and, on the other, may in fact agree on the main subject under discussion. This was, I believe, the case in the controversy between Vincenzo Galilei and Zarlino, and the resultant dishonesty and evasion of crucial problems makes very tricky the task of disentangling their true thought.

We are relatively well informed about both the theory and the practice of embellishing late sixteenth-century music. Treatises by Bassano, Bovicelli, Conforto, Dalla Casa, Rogniono and others supply numerous and elaborate decorative formulas which were intended to be superimposed upon the unadorned melodic lines of madrigals, chansons, and even motets by Cipriano da Rore, Alessandro Striggio, Philippe de Monte, Andrea Gabrieli, the ‘inviolable’ Palestrina, and their contemporaries. Most of the treatises offer as well examples of actual music embellished in this way so that we can know for certain how virtuoso soloists, both vocal and instrumental, transformed apparently sober polyphonic music into accompanied monodies filled with fioriture and the most extravagant virtuoso display.

In his life-time Schoenberg published, apart from important essays which must be the subject of separate evaluation, one major theoretical work, the Harmonielehre of 1911, and another, Structural Functions of Harmony, completed in 1946, appeared shortly after his death, in 1954. In addition there is a short work, Models for Beginners in Composition (1942). Posthumous publications edited by Leonard Stein and Gerald Strang are Preliminary Exercises in Counterpoint (published in 1963 but dating from around 1936) and Fundamentals of Musical Composition (1967, but worked on between 1937 and 1948).

The tune called ‘L'Homme armé’ has long been famous as the structural basis for more than 30 Mass settings ranging from Dufay to Palestrina and even beyond, ending anachronistically with Carissimi. Yet many questions that were raised by pioneering scholars 40 and 50 years ago about the melody and its elaborations are as open now as when they were first proposed, and it seems likely that a review of several major problems—in so far as this is possible within a single paper—may serve to redefine the boundaries of the present state of knowledge and perhaps to stimulate new initiatives.

Until recently Donizetti was not respectable enough for musicology. He was remembered for two or three comedies; yet he and Rossini both devoted their mature years almost entirely to serious opera. Of Donizetti's 70 stage works, a few of which are lost, exactly half belong to the opera seria class (that includes two French grand operas); three are early works on Classical subjects, nine are opere semiserie, and 23 are comedies or farces. But those figures do not give a true picture. In the first place, twelve of the comic operas but only one of the serious are in a single act. Second, if we take the end of 1828 as a dividing line—which is roughly when Donizetti reached maturity—we find that before that date he composed 29 operas, of which only six are serious, whereas after it he produced eight comedies (five in one act), four semiseria (one in one act), and 29 full-length serious operas. Clearly he regarded Romantic tragedy as his main line.

As recently as two decades ago it was generally assumed that the liturgical music of fourteenth-century Italy consisted of only a few Mass movements in madrigal style, and that the motet appeared—with a few exceptions—only in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, that is, at the time of Ciconia. Such a view can no longer be maintained, now that scholars like F. Alberto Gallo, Ursula Günther, William Layton, Nino Pirrotta, Dragan Plamenac, Giuseppe Vecchi and others have presented the results of their research. The music in square notation and early mensural notation was published in facsimile in 1968, and an edition of the liturgical pieces in partly mensural and mensural notation will appear in 1976.

The most trustworthy contemporary biographer of Joseph Haydn, Georg August Griesinger, interviewing the aged composer, asked him whether it was true that he had composed the Andante of the ‘Surprise’ Symphony in order to waken the English who fell asleep at his concert. Haydn replied:

The Attwood papers recently entered the public domain, having been acquired by the British Library. This is fitting, for they constitute a kind of national monument—a vital force that has made itself felt upon English musical thought and training for nearly two centuries. Ever since Attwood brought them back from his period of study with Mozart in Vienna in 1785–7 they have been used repeatedly for teaching purposes, and handed on with reverence from master to disciple (thus escaping total destruction, the usual fate of such documents). Upon Attwood's death in 1838 the papers passed to his pupil John Goss, who had already published the Minuet in C major, perhaps the best known of Attwood's pieces rewritten by Mozart, in his Introduction to Harmony and Thorough Bass (1833).

It is well known that during the Baroque period an important role in Vienna's cultural life was played, not only by the commedia dell'arte, but by all kinds of comedies, both Italian and German, in which music was an essential ingredient. Theatre history in Vienna during the eighteenth century cannot be separated from musical history, since music, like dance and pantomime, had been an integral part of the popular theatre for centuries. It was not at all exceptional for the operetta Der neue krumme Teufel of 1758, for which Haydn composed the music, to include a pantomime (also with music by Haydn) and an Italian intermezzo (the composer of which has not yet been identified). Also typical of most Viennese popular dramas during the eighteenth century was the traditional combination of comic and serious elements.

When my father died in 1934 I inherited what was in his music cupboard. There were several manuscript scores of published works, and I was able to give The Planets to the Bodleian Library and the Choral Symphony to the Royal College of Music. The remaining manuscripts were of his unpublished works, and I have given most of them to the British Library, where they can be studied by readers but not reproduced for publication or performance. During his life my father gave away some of his manuscripts to his friends. I have not been able to trace them all, but his two chief amanuenses, Vally Lasker and Nora Day, have presented theirs to the Parry Room Library, Royal College of Music, and those he gave to his friend Edwin Evans are now in the Westminster Central Library.

The dispute between Arnold Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker—witnessed in Schoenberg's ironical remarks in the Harmonielehre and Schenker's vigorous polemics in the second volume of Das Meisterwerk in der Musik—was in the first instance a controversy concerning the significance of nonchordal notes (in the German, literally, notes foreign to the harmony), a subject that appears harmless enough. The dispute as such would be hardly worth examining if it revealed nothing beyond each antagonist's lack of understanding of the other and the failure of both to do justice to the subject about which they claimed to be speaking. But beneath the surface of a discussion about technical details is concealed a conflict of fundamental principles concerning modes of musical thought—modes of thought that cannot simply be reduced to the clichés of ‘progressive composer’ and ‘conservative theorist’.