It is forty years since Willi Apel published his important article which linked Frescobaldi's keyboard music with that of the contemporary Neapolitan composers, Mayone and Trabaci. By drawing attention to generic, formal and stylistic features common to the music of Frescobaldi and the Neapolitans he established a more balanced outlook on Italian keyboard music of the seventeenth century, and also pointed to Cabezon as an influence on Mayone and Trabaci. There is, however, a case for reconsidering this current view in the light of the artistic contacts between Naples and Ferrara in the last decade of the sixteenth century, and for examining the possible origins of some of the compositional processes that have appeared to link Frescobaldi to his southern counterparts. Professor Apel singled out features common to Frescobaldi, Mayone and Trabaci; and more recent work by Roland Jackson has established further musical evidence to support the specific influence of Trabaci on Frescobaldi's chromatic compositions and toccatas, and to suggest a more general pattern of musical practice in Naples, exemplified in the chromatic and other compositional procedures found both in Trabaci's music and in the works – vocal as well as instrumental – of Gesualdo and de Macque. Amongst these procedures is the device of inganno which Jackson has identified in some of Frescobaldi's mature chromatic music.

It was through Schubert and Beethoven that Jean Barraqué came to his vocation as a composer. He himself indicated 1940 as the date when his ‘conversion’ began; he was twelve years old, and his practical experience of playing the piano and the violin as well as daily singing classes at school had done nothing to deflect him from his childhood ambition to enter the priesthood. Then one of his teachers played him records of the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, and he was immediately fired with an obsessive enthusiasm for music. He refers to three other works which he went on to discover for himself: the Arpeggione Sonata, the Pastoral Symphony and the Missa Solemnis. He had at that time a burning desire to emulate the great masters, and he would copy out major orchestral scores and compose his own imitations of them. At fifteen, he says, his idea of a composer was of someone who wrote the Missa Solemnis. The work was to remain his constant touchstone, just as Schubert was always, for him, ‘that purest of musicians’. No doubt, too, there was something about the nature of the particular works to which he was first drawn that determined the scale on which he later customarily worked. He could not conceivably have composed Bagatelles or Moments Musicaux; these would have seemed to him too self-contained, too ‘finished’. In fact, he was deeply committed to what he called ‘l'inachèvement sans cesse’; if creative thought was a continuum, then no creative act could properly be regarded as ‘finished’.

Theorists, analysts and popular writers continue to look more closely at Beethoven's music – and at more of it – than at that of any other composer; and it is his music, more often than not, that lies at the basis of theoretical formulations that are the most significant for our time. So, for instance, we agree with Joseph Kerman when he asserts that Tovey's contribution to tonal analysis and theory is inseparable from Beethoven's contribution to the musical repertory; but the association is equally valid for the contributions of many theorists of the past hundred years, including Heinrich Schenker, whose work on the Piano Sonata op. 111 shall be reviewing shortly, and Rudolph Reti, who invented the phrase ‘thematic process’ to describe a method of analysis by which an entire composition can be reduced to one or a few ‘prime cells’. In the first of Reti's two books on the subject, the Ninth Symphony is made the lead batsman in an impressive line-up of musical masterpieces from the sixteenth century to the twentieth; the second of his books is devoted entirely to the piano sonatas of Beethoven.

French Baroque composers, like their counterparts all over Europe, regarded the bass viol, the cello, the bassoon and, in some circumstances, the double bass as suitable sustaining continuo instruments. The choice of one or another, or a combination, depended no less upon circumstances than it did on the desire for a specific stylistic nuance or timbre. In this paper I propose to examine the evidence – in memoirs and other accounts, and in manuscript and printed scores – that documents the rise and decline of the bass viol and the emergence of the cello as a chamber music instrument. The nature of the musical evidence is often contradictory in itself, but ultimately it is indicative of a larger process, of which the use of the viol and the cello were a significant part: the assimilation of Italian genres into the French musical idiom.

Jacopo Peri, the so-called ‘inventor’ of opera, is well known to music historians. To concentrate solely on his Dafne and Euridice, however, is to present a distorted picture of this court musician. The time has come to seek out a more balanced view of a composer who was not quite the revolutionary that the history books would have us believe.

Rupert Hughes, in The Boston Musical Record, 1899:

The musical season in Dublin which occurred at the exact mid-point of the eighteenth century was initiated on Monday, 11 September with an open-air performance of Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks at Marlborough Bowling Green. Unlike on the occasion of the first performance five months previously in London, there is no evidence that the gentlemen (who paid one shilling entrance) and their consorts (admitted free) were disappointed by a failure of the ‘Grand Fire-work between the Acts’. Two days later, on Wednesday, 13 September, a second performance was arranged by Dr Mosse in the New Gardens in Great Britain Street as a benefit for the first-ever Lying-in Hospital, which he had opened in 1745. There were two further performances of Mr Handel's popular entertainment before the onset of autumn brought an end to the summer series of open-air concerts; and on Friday, 22 September, the winter season began with a performance of The Beggar's Opera at the Theatre in Smock Alley, where Thomas Sheridan had assembled ‘the best Band of Instrumental Performers ever heard in this Kingdom’. In spite of criticism that Sheridan had ‘struck woeful bargains [with] the Musical Tribe’, the Smock Alley Theatre was entering the second season that featured 22 instrumentalists, 6 principal singers, and two distinguished leaders in the persons of Signor Pasquali and Mr Lampe. Meanwhile, Mr Dubourg, Master of the King's Music in Ireland, and Miss Oldmixon, the popular oratorio soprano were ‘waiting for the first fair wind’ to come to Dublin; and it was rumoured that ‘Mr Handel is coming over to entertain the town this season’. The 1749–50 season, so auspiciously inaugurated, has been chosen for special attention because it was particularly rich and varied, is comparatively well documented, and it represents the culmination of the first phase of development under the more settled conditions after the Williamite war before the changes which led to the Act of Union in 1800 began to have a significant impact on the social life of the community. Before focusing attention on this particular season, a more general description of the musical background in eighteenth-century Dublin will help to place it in perspective.

Few readers will be unfamiliar with E. T. A. Hoffmann's imaginative music criticism, and especially with his essay on Beethoven's instrumental music in which the author compares the music of Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn. Haydn, Hoffmann suggested, leads us through green groves and amongst throngs of happy people. We find there life such as was before the Fall, full of bliss, with no pain or suffering other than a sweet, sad longing for the beloved. Mozart, however, leads us into the very heart of the spirit world. Fear grips us, but not a torturing fear; rather a premonition of the infinite. Tender accents of love and melancholy are to be heard, and we follow with inexpressible longing the figures that wave to us in friendly greeting as they soar through the clouds in the eternal dance of the spheres. Beethoven, on the other hand, transports us to the realms of the monstrous and the unfathomable. Glowing rays flash through the deep night and we are conscious of giant, surging shadows that close in on us, obliterating everything within us other than the pain of infinite yearning. Hoffmann's prose is striking; indeed, nothing quite like it had existed before. His criticisms are veritable symphonies in words of which Ludwig Tieck would surely have been proud. Original as this kind of criticism may have been, though, the ideas behind it owe rather more to the immediate past than is at first sight apparent. We have only to explore one or two of the paths that lead through the forbidding no-man's-land of eighteenth-century musical aesthetics to see that this was so, paths that once were much frequented but which are now sadly overgrown.

How did John Dunstable compose? What principles did he follow when he sat down to plan a piece of music? Manfred Bukofzer's collected edition of his works is now twenty-six years old, and when we consider how little of his music is performed and known as sound, over a quarter of a century after its publication, it is plain that I am not the only person to find him an enigma. We hear a great deal more of Dufay's music: his concise, elegant phrasing, neat, sectional, easily apprehended construction, constant variety of texture and integrated, purposeful bass-lines make Dunstable seem obscure, remote and inhuman by comparison – for all his mastery of the long melodic vault and springing ribs of cross-rhythm. One can follow the harmonic logic and the bar-to-bar detail of rhythm and phrasing, but not the plan of the whole, with the one exception of the isorhythmic works, which accordingly are performed more frequently than his other sacred music. One feels much more at home with their clear, logical structure and steady, purposeful crescendo of rhythmic excitement.

Rhythmic energy is the most striking single feature of Tippett's music – and especially of that written during the first ten years or so of his creative maturity, the period with which this paper is concerned. Tippett's significance lies less, however, in the fact that he has made a major contribution to a vital trend in twentieth-century music than in the particular complexion of his contribution. By associating rhythmic energy so closely with the idea of regeneration, he has given rhythm the decisive role in the formulation of a philosophy; and by articulating this philosophy broadly in terms of a received musical language he has shown that regeneration can grow from within and need not be imposed from without. With one exception, the components of his rhythmic language are drawn from the common currency of the present and previous centuries. The disposition of these components may be unexpected, but their identity remains familiar and is rarely distorted – by melodic angularity or rhythmic displacement, for example. When Tippett uses syncopation it is readily heard as such (as in bar 2 of ex. 2 below or the second half of bar 6 of ex. 3) and thus can easily be distinguished from the exception, anticipatory rhythm, with which it bears a superficial resemblance.