Everybody can imagine the following kind of operatic scene: many characters are on the stage, all singing, pronouncing different words, and expressing contrasted emotions simultaneously – but nothing happens. Action is suspended, the music goes on. The music does not need to be carried forward by action or even text; it has its own formal logic and extension. The last section of Mozart's second finale of Le nozze di Figaro, for instance, takes no less than fourteen pages in the vocal score. Its text consists of only two quatrains of four lines each, which are pronounced and repeated by one group of actors each. The piece comes at the end of a long finale that is full of action; but after the ‘colpo di scena’ provided by the entry of Marcellina, Dottor Bartolo, Don Basilio, with their marriage contract, nobody is able to act or even to speak coherently any longer, nobody causes the other to react to his words, nobody seems to hear the other – and they are all singing loudly and clearly. Not only does the surprise justify the standstill of actions and reactions on the stage: it is typical that in such operatic ensembles the characters behave as if they were not listening to each other.

On 27 July 1913 Colin Taylor, a music master at Eton and confidant of the young Philip Heseltine, wrote to his protégé:

Charles Jennens (1700–73) is best remembered as the friend and protector of Handel who was also the composer's literary collaborator in Messiah, Saul, Belshazzar and L'Allegro. A connoisseur and collector of music, Jennens subscribed to all Handel's published scores from 1725 to 1740 and had a large number of works by his friend especially copied for him. An understandable predilection for Handel's music did not, however, lessen his curiosity about the works of Italian composers, some of whom were Handel's colleagues or rivals in England. This interest is fascinatingly charted in the surviving correspondence, spanning the years 1729–46, between Jennens and the Latin poet and classical scholar Edward Holdsworth (1684–1746), which was acquired by the Gerald Coke Collection in 1973. Jennens's letters – at least, those written from 13 November 1735 onwards – were returned to him after Holdsworth's death, so that the two sides of the correspondence are today united.

In The Times of 24 April 1963 there appeared a headline which read: ‘The Computer as Composer?’. A mathematics lecturer in Bristol had been reading into a computer the elementary rules of melodic construction, in order that the computer should be able to compose, in return, well-constructed melodies. The lecturer had spoken of programming the characteristics of the great composers, as to melody and harmony, and of getting back ‘original compositions in their style’. We in this, the first paper to be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association on computers and their applications to music, are not going to make such extravagant propositions. We aim to give an introduction to the ways in which a computer may be used for musical analysis, and at the same time to convey the ‘feel’ of working with a computer. We shall present two analytical projects which have been designed specially for demonstration in this paper. But before presenting our analytical projects, a few preliminary words must be said about the computer and how we use it. We shall speak very briefly about the nature of a computer, about the way in which we submit work to it, about the way in which we present music for it to ‘read’, and about the way in which we tell the computer what it is to do with that music.

The twenty French and four Italian cantatas of Michel Pignolet de Montéclair are distributed over three printed editions dated 1709, 1713 and 1728 respectively. Bachelier in his Recueil de cantates published in The Hague in 1728, described Montéclair's first two cantata books as follows:

The documentation of many aspects of early musical history is substantially fuller, and extends further backwards in time, in Asia than in Europe. This is so for the history of secular music in general, for the history of musical forms and melody types, as well as for the history of instruments, of playing techniques, and of ornamentation. Assyriologists, and musicologists with some knowledge of and competence in Assyriology, have recently demonstrated that the Babylonians were already familiar with the seven diatonic modes of the European tradition in the second millennium b.c., and there exists a Hurrian cuneiform tablet of 1400 b.c. bearing words and music of a hymn to the goddess Nikkal, wife of the Moon-God. The concern of this paper, however, is with South and East Asia, rather than with Western Asia and the Ancient Fertile Crescent, and in both East and South Asia numerous documentary sources carry us back to a point in time in musical history some five or six centuries earlier than equivalent European sources. From the standpoint of the historian of Western music, what is perhaps most astonishing is the existence of a substantial body of secular instrumental music of the eighth and early ninth centuries, surviving in score, in mensural tablatures, in documents in part themselves written in the ninth and tenth centuries, or now available in copies made not later than the twelfth or thirteenth centuries.

Carlo Goldoni left his native Venice to practise law in Tuscany for five years starting in 1743. Up to this point he had written some twenty comic librettos, most of them Intermezzi in two acts for two or three characters, but some of them full-length dramas in three acts for several characters. La Contessina, which ranks as the latest and finest of his dramas in the latter category up to this time, received its première in the San Samuele theatre at Venice during the Carnival of 1743. In his edition of the playwright's complete works, Ortolani suggests that Goldoni's model for La Contessina was a specific Neapolitan comedy, Madama Ciana, with text by Barlocci and music by Gaetano Latilla. The satire in both turns upon a poor family with pretensions to noble rank, manifested most appallingly in the person of the daughter and the question of her dowry. The music of the original production of La Contessina is lost; all we know is that the piece was a pasticcio, involving among others the young Jommelli. There were no revivals, which tells us something even so: Venice at this time was in no position to compete with Naples in the production of original comic operas.

In 1804 the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung published a long account of an opera performance in the fictitious town of Krähwinkel. It was, it seems, a fairly typical evening. The hero was so vigorously applauded for his big aria that he lost his place; the heroine had to repeat a scene, thereby making nonsense of the plot. Tremendous enthusiasm greeted the soprano, ‘a large, well-rounded figure of which there was so much to see that no question arose of listening’ – a sculptor could have made two sopranos out of the material allotted by nature to one, though the Krähwinklers regarded her as a paragon of nymph-like beauty. The tragic hero had about enough talent to perform Pickelhäring, and the Priest boomed his aria in tones more suitable to sailors' songs. The décor included a sunset contrived by means of sulphur matches attached to a windmill. Between the acts, the Kapellmeister held court in the aisles, modestly accepting for his opera the rapturous praises of the Krähwinklers. Only one member of the audience remains silent, a stranger whose glum attitude the Krähwinklers find offensive. Goaded by two neighbours into giving the reasons for his silence, he objects that the music has totally failed to convey the feeling and spirit of the poem, and he gives his chapter and verse. When they comment sarcastically on his familiarity with the text, he reveals himself as its author.

Despite important contributions in the realms of sacred vocal music, it has long been acknowledged that the most significant factor in the rise of the Bologna School was its concentration to an unprecedented and ever increasing extent on the production and publication of instrumental music. Before the 1660s the Venetian presses held a virtual monopoly in this field, but almost overnight they were eclipsed by the Bolognese publishing houses of Pisarri, Dozza, Silvani and Giacomo Monti. The relative importance of instrumental to vocal music may be gauged by comparing the catalogues for 1621, 1649 and 1661 of the Venetian, Alessandro Vincenti, who includes between six and ten per cent of instrumental music, and those of Monti (1680?) and Silvani (1698–9) containing respectively 30 and 60 per cent. It is perhaps not so generally recognized that the majority of collections which issued with such profusion from the Bolognese presses were not designed for church use but were mainly sets of dance or chamber music. This neglect of the secular aspects of the Bolognese development has led to some fundamental misconceptions about the precise contribution of the Bologna School to late seventeenth-century instrumental forms.