Under the provisions of the 1709 Copyright Act, Scottish universities were entitled to a copy of each printed work entered at Stationers' Hall, London. This entitlement ceased in 1836 when the five Scottish universities agreed to receive an annual payment in lieu of the privilege of deposit. Amongst the many difficulties thrown up by the well-intentioned legislation of 1709, a peculiarly Aberdonian aspect was that the Act specified only ‘the Four Univerisities in Scotland’ provoking arguments as to which of Aberdeen's two universities, King's College or Marischal College, should be the recipient. Although this was- resolved in favour of King's College, it is clear that friction persisted. As late as 1826 the Aberdeen Censor was urging, ‘I wish the members of Marischal College would look to what has become o’ the Stationers' Hall music'. This seems to be the only reference in contemporary literature to the collection.

Writing from Dublin in February 1724, Jonathan Swift responded to some London gossip and joked about the ‘gallantry’ of the aged military hero the Earl of Peterborough, who had publicly commanded an apology from the castrato Senesino for his impugning the honour of the soprano Anastasia Robinson. This scandal set off a series of obscene, misogynistic, satiric epistles written to or about Mrs Robinson, Senesino, Faustina, Mrs Barbier, and Farinelli that accuse the female singers, British prudes, and others of a variety of deviant, sexually subversive practices. This article introduces and presents annotated texts of this group of epistles written between 1724 and 1736. Several have been discussed by historians of opera and literary scholars, but the whole corpus has not been identified or made readily available to opera scholars.

… as they say in Germany, ‘in music, Cherubini is a hundred years ahead of us’. trans. from Correspondance des Arrwteurs musiciens, 8 October 1803

Attitudes to Cherubini have been affected by the knowledge that his most important operas had scant success in Paris after 1800. This lack of a continuous French performing tradition has encouraged the feeling that they were perhaps unviable or unattractive. It is not one shared by the author of a substantial dissertation on Cherubini, Stephen C. Willis; but Willis's work was focussed on the composer rather than his operas’ reception. In fact, neither the performance history nor reception of these five main works has apparently, until now, been investigated. They are: Démophoon (text by J. F. Marmontel, Paris Opéra, 2 December 1788); Lodoïska (C. F. Fillette, or ‘Fillette Loraux’, 18 July 1791); Eliza, ou Le voyage aux glaciers du Mont St Bernard, J. A. Révéroni St-Cyr, 13 December 1794); Médée (F. B. Hoffman, 13 March 1797); and Les Deux journées (J. N. Bouilly, 16 January 1800). The last four were all produced at the Théâtre Feydeau. A properly detailed account of Cherubini's involvement at this theatre must be reserved for another occasion: part of the ignorance surrounding the genesis of these extraordinary operas lies simply in the fact than no history of the Feydeau has been written. Cherubini produced two comedies at the Feydeau which were unsuccessful and are not considered here: L'Hôtellerie portugaise (25 July 1798) and La Punition (23 February 1799).

There is an established literature on office-holding in the English royal household, which has focused on those members of the court involved in the royal body service and ceremonial; those associated with the domestic needs of the monarch, the royal family and wider domus and those involved in its administration. Yet this mainly deals with the late seventeenth century and beyond; comparable detailed and comprehensive information on this particular aspect of court history for earlier periods has yet to appear in print. The courts of the Tudors have, for example, suffered in this respect. This is surprising, for recent historical scholarship has shown that far from ossifying into a purely domestic establishment as an older generation of scholars thought, the Tudor Court was rather of central importance in the political, administrative, religious and cultural history of sixteenth-century England. By that time the royal domus was the centre of politics, patronage and power and access to the sovereign—the sole font of that power—and the ability to catch ‘either… [his/her] ear or… eye’ headed, to a large extent, the agenda of any ambitious courtier. A published investigation of the patterns and procedures of office-holding within this important institution is, therefore, long overdue.

Between 1800 and 1845 some 30 periodicals devoted to music were launched in Britain, nearly all of them attributing their appearance to a current ‘general’, ‘wide’, ‘perfect’ or ‘increasing’ cultivation of the subject. But the real flurry of activity seems to have been in publishing rather than music. The average lifespan of a single musical journal in this period was only about two years and four months; most lasted a year or less and died from financial distress. From this record, one might question not only the state of genuine musical cultivation in early nineteenth-century England but also the rationale of editors, printers, publishers and proprietors who continued to produce for a marginal, certainly elusive, musical audience.

Among the Stafford family papers in Staffordshire Record Office is a small bundle of miscellaneous musical items which is as yet uncatalogued. There are incomplete sets of Richard Dering's Cantiones Sacrae (1617) and Cantica Sacra (1618) for five and six voices respectively, Giovanni Croce's Musica Sacra: To Sixe Voices (1611 edition), Agostino Agazzari's Madrigali a Cinque Voci (1602), George Kirbye's First Set of English Madrigalls (1597), and Thomas Watson's Italian Madrigalls Englished (1590), as well as the Abbé Duval's Principes de la musique pratique par demandes et par réponses (1764). The only manuscript item in the collection is a commonplace book that appears to have been compiled over a number of years by a certain Hugh Davis. Its varied contents range from songs, catches, poems, and Latin orations written in the early 1650s, to folk remedies for various ailments, extracts from Charles Butler's The Principles of Musik in Singing and Setting (1636), and a verbatim copy of James II's first Declaration of Indulgence of 4 April 1687. Although the first ten pieces have been torn out and those that remain are roughly and at times inaccurately notated, the manuscript is of interest in that it provides a rare insight into the musical and literary tastes of an undergraduate in mid-seventeenth-century Oxford, and preserves not only a number of hitherto unrecorded songs but also new sources of acknowledged works by such figures as Nicholas Lanier, John Wilson, Thomas Holmes and the Lawes brothers.

Victorian England held firm convictions about which instruments were appropriate for middle- and upper-class women, whether professionals or well-bred amateurs. Conventional wisdom holds that, until the informal ban on women playing the violin began to loosen in the 1870s, only three instruments were deemed suitable: piano, harp, and guitar. There was, however, a fourth instrument to which women had recourse: the English concertina, developed by the physicist Charles Wheatstone circa 1830.

This study looks at the 978 women for whom there are 1,769 transactions-about 12% of the total-recorded in nine extant Wheatstone & Co. sales ledgers that list the firm's day-to-day sales from April 1835 to May 1870. It is in two parts: (1) an Introduction, which analyses the data presented in the Inventory from a demographic-sociological point of view and places Wheatstone's commerce with women into the context of its business activity as a whole; and (2) the Inventory (with three appendices), which lists every transaction for each of the 978 women, identifies as many of them as possible, and offers a miscellany of comments about both the women and the transactions. Briefly, the roster of Wheatstone's female customers reads like a list of Victorian England's rich-and-famous: the Duchess of Wellington and 146 other members of the titled aristocracy (more than twice as many as their male counterparts), the fabulously wealthy philanthropist Angela Burdett Coutts, members of the landed gentry, and such mainstays of London's musical life as the guitarist Madame R. Sidney Pratten, the organist Elizabeth Mounsey, and the contralto Helen Charlotte Dolby, as well as a large number of Professors of Concertina.

It is a slightly embarrassing story. In 1984 Mr Adrian Bassett sent me xeroxes of four pages of monophonic English dance melodies that he had received from the Derbyshire Record Office. Quite why they made so little impact on me at the time is long forgotten. But the information that came with them suggested that they were Elizabethan; I passed on some details to a few scholars concerned with such matters and effectively forgot them. In any case, Derbyshire may stretch to within ten miles of my home in Manchester, but the accident of both roads and public transport means that the County Record Office in Matlock is easier to reach from London. So it was a full eleven years later that I mentioned them in passing to another colleague, who showed an active interest. I pulled out the old xeroxes and realised with a shock that they must be from nearer 1500 and therefore far closer to my own urgent concerns.

The ‘Venetian’ composer Agostino Steffani and the Modenese diplomat Giuseppe Riva became acquainted at Hanover in 1719. Steffani had first resided there between 1688 and 1703, when he served the Hanoverian Duke Ernst August and his son Georg Ludwig as a musician and special envoy (he went to Vienna, for example, to negotiate the elevation of Hanover to an electorate, a distinction approved by the emperor in 1692). He had been ordained a Catholic priest at Munich in 1680, received a sinecure appointment as an abbot in 1683 and been made an apostolic prothonotary by 1695. His diplomatic and evangelical achievements on behalf of the church were recognized in 1706, when he was named Bishop of Spiga, and 1709, when he was appointed Apostolic Vicar of North Germany. His home in 1703–9 was in Düsseldorf, where he served as chief councillor to Johann Wilhelm, the Catholic Elector Palatine, but in November 1709 he returned to Hanover, a Lutheran city in Lower Saxony nearer the centre of his extensive vicariate.

As a last-minute postscript to his Music & Poetry in the Early Tudor Court, John Stevens gave what he called a ‘preliminary report’ on a group of nine fragmentary song leaves that Thurston Dart had found in the New York Public Library. They were binding pastedowns in the seventeenth-century English partbooks copied by John Merro, Drexel MSS 4180–5. Since then some of these leaves have been used in various editions, and they have had their place in discussions of the Shakespearean ‘Willow song’ and of John Taverner's music. But they have not received any further study either as a group or in the context of other early Tudor sources. This was perhaps to be expected: a major book often leaves the impression that further work on the topic will have little to contribute; and it must be a disappointment to John Stevens as much as to anyone else that so little has been written on early Tudor song since he published his brilliant study in 1961. Even so, if fragments often yield their secrets less easily than complete manuscripts they sometimes tell us rather more; and besides, we occasionally find that a fragment is not as isolated as it now looks.

The present article has two tasks: to define the essential features of a musical form widely known during the eighteenth century by its Italian name of serenata, and to give an account of its cultivation in Venice during the same period. We shall need to devote considerable space to the first task, since by no means all writers on music recognize the serenata as an independent genre, some viewing it as a species of miniature opera and others as merely a particularly elaborate type of cantata; further, not all commentators share our view that the term was once used - and ought still to be used for analytical purposes - in a generic sense, so as to include not only works actually termed serenata but also many others with original descriptions as diverse as azione, componimento, festa or introduzione. So we must start by identifying as precisely as possible the repertory under consideration. Subsequently, when we examine the occasions on which serenatas were performed and the ways in which their music, words and manner of presentation were made to fit those occasions, we shall limit ourselves to a single city, Venice, and its dominions. This restriction has the practical advantage of bringing our investigation within manageable proportions without demanding the sacrifice of too much detail. But it has another, more fundamental purpose. Since the serenata was the most ‘occasional’ of genres, any study of it in a local context will throw into relief the peculiarities of that locality's political and social life. Nowhere could this be truer than in Venice, a city unlike any other in government, institutions, economy, mores, and, not least, topography. By studying the Venetian serenata we can learn more about Venice itself.

No sooner did the Gutenberg revolution reach musical academia than some distinguished theorists became embroiled in a rather nasty disagreement about tuning. Two years after the appearance in 1480 of Franchino Gaffurio's Theoricum opus musicae disciplinae, which was the first European printed book on music, Bartholome Ramos de Pareja published in his Musica practica a new and mathematically simple scheme which he said young singers could use for a monochord to provide a model scale for plainchant. Ramos's book appears to have enjoyed more than one reprinting (Ghisi 1935) but was vigorously attacked by John Hothby and, in 1487, Nicola Burzio. Around 1489 Ramos's leading disciple, Giovanni Spataro, gave a copy to Gaffurio, who returned it with critical comments in the margin (see Gaffurio ed. Miller 1977, 20), some of them about the monochord. Ramos left Italy in 1491, but the exchange between Gaffurio and Spataro went on for some thirty years.

One of the most important and valuable resources available to researchers of eighteenth-century social history are the lists of subscribers that were attached to a wide variety of publications. Yet, the study of this type of resource remains one of the areas most neglected by academics. These lists shed considerable light on the nature of those who subscribed to music, including their social status, place of employment, residence, and musical interests. They naturally also provide details as to the gender of individual subscribers.

As expected, subscribers to most musical publications were male, but the situation changed considerably as the century progressed, with more females subscribing to the latest works by the early nineteenth century. There was also a marked difference in the proportion of male and female subscribers between works issued in the capital cities of London and Edinburgh and those written for different genres. Female subscribers also appear on lists to works that they would not ordinarily be permitted to play. Ultimately, a broad analysis of a large number of subscription lists not only provides a greater insight into the social and economic changes that took place in Britain over the course of the eighteenth century, but also reveals the types of music that were favoured by the members of each gender.

The musical life of Scotland was transformed beyond recognition during the 18th century. In 1700 Scotland had been a musical backwater, supporting few professional performers and no composers whatsoever: by 1775 Edinburgh and Aberdeen could boast, between them, of several concerts a week during the winter season, and ten or twelve resident composers capable of writing orchestral music.

During the past few years the extensive manuscript journals of the Georgian amateur composer and musician John Marsh (1752–1828) have become increasingly recognised as valuable source material which provide a unique insight into provincial musical making in the southern counties of England. For long known only in the heavily abridged (by Marsh's youngest son Edward Garrard) and incomplete version in the Pendlebury Library, Cambridge, the emergence of the original version in 1990 has brought about a substantial re-evaluation of Marsh's career and personality. Subsequently sold at Christie's in December of that year, the original is now housed in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The complex history and a description of the journals and their contents can be found in an article by the present writer in the Huntington Library Quarterly, an issue which also includes an article on the social importance of the journals by William Weber. My purpose here is to provide an introduction to Marsh's experiences as a concert manager and leader in the cities in which he was resident.

This catalogue lists all the twelfth- and thirteenth-century songs with English words known to exist, and is designed to be of interest to the transcriber, performer and general student of medieval English music. Although there are only nineteen items surviving from the period in question a number have never been published either in facsimile or transcription. A forthcoming appendix to this catalogue will include facsimiles of previously unpublished manuscripts to encourage work on new transcriptions and scrutiny of available ones. It is to be hoped that musicians who have already given much attention to the thirteenth-century repertoires of France and Spain will begin to perform these first English songs more frequently.

English musicians, collectors and patrons are known to have been interested in Italian music from the early years of the sixteenth century. Italian musicians appear in the lists of Henry VIII's musicians, and from then onwards Italian music was frequently imported and copied into English manuscripts. The prestige and circulation of the Italian madrigal and its effect on the English madrigalists in Elizabeth I's reign have been thoroughly examined; but it is perhaps not fully realized that this interest in Italian music continued unabated into the seventeenth century, and that the latest Monteverdian styles were circulating in England while they were still brand-new in Italy. George Jeffreys’ manuscript copies of Italian music offer a unique example of the dissemination of Italian music in England in the first half of the seventeenth century; unique because we know precisely which printed sources Jeffreys used, who they belonged to, and how and when they came to be in the country. The career of George Jeffreys (c. 1610–85) and his relationship with his patron, Sir Christopher Hatton (1605–70), has been fully described in David Pinto's article ‘The Music of the Hattons’ (this journal, above), and I shall therefore avoid any duplication of information.

In 1897, the New Brighton Tower and its Gardens opened for business. This vast leisure precinct attracted millions of visitors each year and provided a host of leisure activities including ballroom dancing, acrobatics, exhibitions of foreign and exotic cultures and orchestral concerts. This article focuses on the first four years of the orchestra's life when it was conducted by Granville Bantock, the only period of the orchestra's history for which many programmes have survived and from which a detailed reconstruction of the orchestra's repertory and programming can be made. The article discusses how class division, press propaganda, moral panics and commercial imperatives affected the programming of so-called ‘serious’ or classical music.