Before beginning my paper this afternoon, permit me to express my humble appreciation of the honour you confer upon me by the invitation to thus address you. In the long history of your Association, the second oldest of all of the musicological societies in existence today, but three other Americans have thus confronted you. In 1895, Waldo Selden Pratt spoke on The Isolation of Music. Again, in 1912, Professor Albert Stanley of the University of Michigan read a paper on Graduate Work in Music in America. More recently, Professor Glen Haydon of the University of North Carolina addressed you, in 1945, on Music and Philosophy.

The historian's art is one of wisdom after the event. In this art, distance in time acts like altitude in aerial photography, revealing outlines and proportions which often cannot be seen from the ground-level of contemporary life. Yet the contemporary's immediate contact with the daily scene lends vividness to his story, and even his prejudices and miscalculations are part of the climate of the age. When, in the summer of 1829, Vincent Novello, accompanied by his wife, set out on his journey across Europe and back, he equipped himself with a notebook in which to record his impressions, and his copious jottings provide a valuable reflection of that segment of the musical scene that he saw.

The legendary life of Stradella has been the subject of eight nineteenth-century operas and of at least one novel. The earliest full biographical notice of him is to be found in Bourdelot's Histoire de la musique et de ses effets (Paris 1715) and as this account, which contains the story of how Stradella's music softened the hearts of assassins, has been followed closely by Burney, Hawkins and many others, there is no need to repeat it here.

In 1951 my attention was drawn by the Hon. Mary Parnell, of the Galpin Society, to a MS in the Somerset Record Office, entitled Directyones to Wynde the Home. It consists of a single leaf on which are inscribed sixteen calls for use in the Chase, together with the name of each. The document bears the signature of one Henry Sayer, Honorary Master, and the handwriting appears to date from about the beginning of the seventeenth century. Apart from a transcript printed some seventy years ago by the Commission on Historical Manuscripts, the piece is practically unknown. Its interest lies in the fact that the required sounds are recorded, not in musical notation but in a code whose meaning is no longer clear. As the Commission's Report says, it ‘very much needs a key’. Miss Parnell and I were, however, anxious to try to discover that key, and this paper is mainly a brief account of the attempt.

The date of Martin Peerson's birth has never been established. As I shall show, this happy event—for it gave England one of her greatest composers—must have occurred between the spring of 1570 and the end of 1574, during which interval Martin's parents were married, his father died and his mother remarried. Former estimates, which appear to have been reached by guesswork, place his birth between seven and nineteen years later than this, so I will state my case briefly.

The polyphonic fiddling of the Black Sea coast of Asia Minor is remarkable enough as a type of folk music; but it is the more remarkable to find such polyphony within the territory of the Islamic musical world, the territory of the purely homophonic (or at most mildly heterophonic) classical Perso-Arabo-Turkic tradition. From passages in the surviving treatises of Al-Kindī (ninth century) and Ibn Sīnā (eleventh century) it is known that these authors were familiar with fourths, fifths and octaves and their use; and in the Mūriṣtus MSS quoted by Farmer, triads are mentioned and their affective properties described. But these are the only traces of such knowledge in the history of a tradition which as it reaches us today is homophonic. The nature of this tradition has often been misunderstood, as is shown by such a statement as: the Arabs never got beyond the stage of homophony. This implies that homophony as practised in the Islamic world is primitive, or if not primitive is yet a stage in the evolution of harmony. Either view is false; false to that which can be observed all over the world at the present time, and historically false as well. The music of Islam is a music of high sophistication, and its sophistication was well established by the ninth century.

The date of the foundation of the first German Bach Society, 11 December, 1850, marks, by common consent, the birth of modern musical research. It preceded by less than a year the issue of the first volume of the first complete edition of Bach's works. This event had been foreshadowed by the editorial efforts of two generations of Bach scholars, and it had originated in England. It was there, not in Bach's native country, that A. F. C. Kollmann, K. F. Horn and Samuel Wesley planned and issued critical editions of certain keyboard works of Bach at the turn of the eighteenth century. Only thirty years later the Bach revival became an international cause with Felix Mendelssohn's memorable performance of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin on 11 March, 1829.