In 1724 a cemetery was established at Neustadt Ostra (today Friedrichstadt, Alt Dresden) for the burial of Catholic members who served at the Dresden court of Saxon Elector Friedrich August I (‘der Starke’: as King of Poland known as August II). Between 1723 and 1732 annual lists were compiled of these Catholic employees, their family members and servants, by the Royal Polish and Saxon Electoral office of the Court Marshal. These chronicles, which function as a type of census, give details of Catholic artists affiliated with the Dresden court. Listed are those who were eligible to be buried in the Catholic cemetery. Included are complete lists of the families and households of Catholic members of the Italian and French ensembles of actors, dancers and musicians (the Italienische Comoedianten and Französische Comoedianten und Tänzer), of the Catholic musicians of Dresden's outstanding Capelle (also known as the Hofkapelle), and of the young choristers (mostly from Bohemia) who performed the usual music in the Catholic court church of Dresden. Additional information becomes available about the throng of outstanding performing artists from throughout Europe who came to serve at the court of a charismatic ruler, one whose taste made Dresden one of the most brilliant artistic centres of the age.

It was way back in the mid-1960s that I first became interested in the Academy of Ancient Music, and I have been collecting stray scraps of information relating to them ever since. Fifty years on, methinks it’s high time I shared my findings with the world of eighteenth-century musical scholarship at large. Others meanwhile have dealt with various bits of the story, but no one so far as I know has yet attempted to bring it all together in one place. What follows here is in three self-contained parts and two appendices. The first part surveys the history of the society from cradle to grave so to speak, and deals with all the main personalities and events involved. The second, and by far the longest, part provides details of all the Academy programmes known to have survived together with various references to be found in diaries, letters and other manuscript material of the period; there is also, for the 1780s and 90s in particular, a good deal of supporting comment in the London newspapers. Also duly noted in this section are the present-day whereabouts of all those individual works that can be identified as having once formed part of its celebrated library. Part III is an editorial conflation of the 1761 and 1768 editions of The Words of such pieces as are most usually performed by the Academy of Ancient Music (plus a short and hitherto unnoticed addition to the latter to be found only in some copies), and keyed to it are the dates of all known performances tabled in Part II. Appendix A provides an annotated list of all those who were named as subscribers on 9 April 1730. This is the last such list to have survived, and here, for the first time, an attempt has been made to identify those various City merchants, clerics and others who are not among those well-known musicians usually named as being members. Appendix B refers to an interesting document now in the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale. It contains not only the names of the subscribers to the 1785–86 season but also a list of all those singers and instrumentalists who were employed by the Academy in 1786–87 (and how much they were paid). Only the latter, however, is reproduced here, and its content has been reordered in the interests of greater clarity. Standard RISM sigla are used for all but a very few library references.

It was during the eighteenth century that musical festivals - or music meetings, as they were also known - began in England, a movement which still remains a feature of English musical life. A few towns and cities held annual meetings, while others presented occasional gatherings of this type.

This article considers the reception of Ralph Vaughan Williams's nine symphonies (and a few non-symphonic works) in New York City (and, occasionally, its suburban environs), from the American premiere of A London Symphony on 30 December 1920 to a performance of Symphony No. 6 on 10 December 2014. The author argues that the reception rolls out across five distinct periods: (1) 1920/1–1922/3: the New York premieres of A London Symphony, A Sea Symphony and A Pastoral Symphony (in that order), all to greetings that were lukewarm at best; (2) 1923/4–1934/5: Vaughan Williams's reputation grew meteorically, and A London Symphony became something of a staple; during this period Olin Downes of the New York Times became Vaughan Williams's most ardent champion among New York's music critics; (3) 1935/6–1944/5: Symphonies 4 and 5 made their New York debuts, and a rift opened between the pro-Vaughan Williams New York Times and the negative criticism of the New York Herald Tribune, one that would follow Vaughan Williams to the grave and beyond; (4) 1945/6–1958/9: premieres of Symphonies 6, 8 and 9, as Vaughan Williams's reputation in New York reached its honours- and awards-filled zenith; and (5) the long period from 1959/60 to the present day, which can be described as 20 years of decline (1960s–1970s), another 20 in which his reputation reached rock bottom (1980s–1990s) and, since the beginning of the new millennium, something of a reassessment, one that is seemingly unencumbered by the ideologically driven criticism of the past. Finally, Appendix I provides a chronological inventory of all New York Philharmonic programmes (along with those of the New York Symphony prior to the two orchestras' merger in 1928) that include any music (not just the symphonies) by Vaughan Williams. Appendix II then reorganizes the information of the chronological list according to work, conductor, venue and premieres.

René of Anjou (1409–80) was a major figure in the French royal family in the fifteenth century. He inherited some of his titles and lands from his brother Louis III, held previously by his father Louis II and grandfather Louis I (the second son of John II, King of France). But marriage and politics had also increased the wealth and power of the Angevins, adding to the Dukedom of Anjou the Dukedoms of Lorraine and of Bar, the County of Provence, the Kingdoms of Sicily and of Naples, and the title of King of Jerusalem. In the later phases of the Anglo-French conflicts of the fifteenth century René initially supported the Anglo-Burgundian alliance, but later (by 16 July 1429) he transferred his allegiance to the French crown. Captured by the Burgundians at the Battle of Bulgneville on 2 July 1431, he was held prisoner at Dijon until 1437. He was granted provisional liberty between 1432 and 1434, and again in 1435, and was finally released in 1437 after payment of a large ransom.

Martino Bitti (1655/6–1743) was the leading violinist-composer working in Florence during a long period stretching from Corelli's first published works to the mature years of Vivaldi. Ironically, his nine sonatas for wind instruments are better known today than the 27 solo sonatas for his own instrument, the violin, which constitute a corpus of great technical accomplishment and musical expressiveness. Since the publication of a critical edition of Bitti's violin sonatas is currently in progress, the moment is right to present a thematic catalogue of his instrumental music, which forms the second part of the article. The first part comprises an updated biography of the composer (which for the first time proposes that Bitti briefly visited England) and a general evaluation of his highly distinctive musical style.

Naval records seem an unlikely source of information about musicians, but many unlikely things happened in Venice. It has recently come to light that Venetian craft guilds served as conscription agencies for the Armada and revenue agencies for the Republic. Hence, one of the things that is to be found among naval records in the Venetian State Archives is a series of reports from the instrumentalists’ guild (‘arte di sonadori’) concerning its membership. The surviving documents relate principally to the period from 1672 to 1727, although the alliance of guild and government was operative for several centuries. The reports of membership are notably lengthy (guild membership seems to have been on average about 170) and frequently include members’ ages, knowledge of which was vital to estimates of potential naval strength. In the following pages the reader will find an annotated listing of names and ages representing the contents of the seven membership lists in the fascicle labelled ‘Sonadori’ in Bus ta 553 of the archival source ‘Milizia da Mar’. No corresponding records of a guild of ‘cantori’ have come to light.

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 source material remains one of the areas most neglected by academics. These lists shed considerable light on the connections that an author or composer had with other like-minded individuals and the support that they received from members of the middle and upper classes. In cases where a single composer published a series of works by subscription, there is an opportunity to gain an insight into the growth of the public's appreciation of the composer and the contacts he or she forged over the course of a lifetime. Charles Avison is one of the best known British composers from the eighteenth century. He issued six works by subscription between 1740 and 1767 and they together provide a unique insight into his growth into one of this country's leading native musicians. Although a respectable number of the associations discussed are already known through other sources, this study not only reinforces the importance of these associations, but additionally gives an insight into those links for which there is no other known evidence. This research ultimately reveals that Avison's location in the North-East of England did not significantly impact on his ability to forge connections across Britain and beyond.

Composer complete critical editions originated in the mid nineteenth-century and remain an important contribution to twenty-first-century scholarship and performance practice. This discussion article, commissioned by the Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, uses the Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition, inaugurated in 2016, as the basis of reconsideration of the musicological, performance-related, publishing and business aspects of today's complete editions of composers’ works. Gillies looks at the characteristics of the first two Bartók edition volumes, For Children and Concerto for Orchestra, particularly their approach to the composer's use of notation, the representation of their geneses, and some interesting issues about variants, versions, alternatives, replacements, arrangements and deletions. He also considers what a dozen Henle Urtexts, issued on the basis of this complete critical edition's research, seek to present for performers, particularly in their use of Bartók's own recordings as exemplars as well as the presentation in his folk-music treatises of melodies on which these pieces are based. Gillies's consideration also reveals some of the bases of the Bartók complete edition in the post-war ‘Neue Ausgabe’ critical series, with some later influence from Schoenberg and Debussy editions. After looking at changes in format and related products, including thematic catalogues, and the business models that underpin many complete critical editions, Gillies evaluates the risks that may face the Bartók edition in the future, and suggests how they might best be mitigated.

To grangerize is a verb not much used by musicologists. As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, it refers to that process by which an existing book is made larger—and sometimes vastly so—by the binding into it of various prints, photographs, letters, maps and other documents chosen to provide extra illustrations for the parent volume. Given that this nearly always involves the cannibalization of certain other books en route, the art of grangerizing is not something of which all true lovers of books readily approve, yet there have been a number of works so produced whose final state is far and away more interesting and important than that of the original. One such is the subject of the present article.

Although little information survives on Antonio Sartorio's formative years, his date of birth can be placed at c. 1630 on the basis of the act of his death, which states that he died on 30 December 1680 at the age of ‘about 50‘. In all probability Sartorio came from a family of artists-craftsmen as the composer Gasparo Sartorio (1625/6–80), and the theatre architect and opera set-designer Girolamo (Hieronymo, Geronimo) Sartorio (d. 1716) were his brothers.

The circumstances surrounding the compilation of many seventeenth-century English keyboard manuscripts remain unknown. The most concrete information exists for the early-seventeenth-century repertory, and scholars have also identified several copyists from sources dating from the end of the century. Without considering the question of repertory, the focus on the earlier manuscripts can be explained in part for the following reasons. A few volumes are associated in some way or another with famous composers (for example, Thomas Tomkins and his autograph Conservatoire National de Musique (in Bibliothèque Nationale), Paris, (F-Pc) MS Rés. 1122), and others are noteworthy for their expansive contents (Fitzwilham Museum, Cambridge MS Mu 128, the famous ‘Fitzwilliam Virginal Book‘). Others are well known because their copyists are familiar personalities, such as British Library, London (Lbl) RM MS 23.1.4 and F-Pc MS Rés. 1185—both connected with Benjamin Cosyn, organist of Dulwich College and conspicuous for his knowledge of John Bull's music. However, the copyists of most mid-century keyboard manuscripts remain unidentified. Concrete information concerning the copyists of a few sources exists, but most identified copyists are unknown men or women—keyboard music in the hand of a prominent musician is quite rare.

Recently I found myself again singing Weelkes' “Thule, the period of cosmography” from the Madrigals of Six Parts published in 1600 and, not for the first time, wondered where Fogo is:-

The first part of the madrigal refers to Hekla and Etna, both well-known volcanoes of the present day, but the location of Fogo is much less certain. E.H. Fellowes stated that it was a volcano in Tierra del Fuego but gave no evidence to support such an identification. It seems that everyone nowadays merely repeats Fellowes’ opinion, and it is quoted unchanged in the latest edition of English Madrigal Verse.

In this review article the author reads Nagmusiek – Stephanus Muller's monumental metafictional biography of South African composer Arnold van Wyk – as an extended allegory on the geopolitics of academic writing. She argues that the book articulates, through its unusual physical apparatus, narratological techniques and metafictional hermeneutic deconcealment, a valuable theory-in-praxis of the aporetics of peripheral writing. In so doing, Muller materializes Walter Mignolo's notion of ‘epistemic delinking’ in radically original and risky ways.

In a recent article, I surveyed the British music holdings of the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Hamburg, prior to the Second World War; details of which derive from the nineteenth-century manuscript catalogue compiled by Arrey von Dommer (1828–1905)—see ‘The Music Collection of the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Hamburg: A Survey of its British Holdings Prior to the Second World War’, RMA Research Chronicle, 30 (1997), 1–138. In addition, I also discussed the history of the collection and commented on its losses and recoveries. I have recently uncovered further British references, and it is with these that I am concerned here.

Since the appearance of Luther Dittmer's The Worcester Fragments: a catalogue raisonné (1957), and Worcester Additional 68, Westminster Abbey 33327, Madrid Bibl. nac. 192: a facsimile edition (1959), queries have arisen concerning a number of the descriptions, datings and other aspects of his inventory and transcriptions of Worcester Cathedral Library, Add. 68 (hereafter WOc 68). This is hardly the place to go into the many debated and debatable points which emerged (see Bent 1973, 65–6; Hughes 1974, 230). More to the point is the discovery of an unknown fragmentary and textless Sanctus, one barely visible to the naked eye, on the recto of f.bl of fragment xix of WOc 68 (see the revised inventory for this fragment, Table 1). The cathedral librarians, Canons Fenwick and Browning, kindly permitted the transfer of this fragment on a number of occasions to the Hereford and Worcester County Record Office, which is equipped with an ultraviolet lamp. The portion of the Sanctus which survives is a Benedictus for three voices, notated in score format in English discant (ex. 1). The lowest voice corresponds almost exactly with the third Sarum Sanctus, here without the trope Marie filius (Frere 1894, plate 15∗), the chant sounding at pitch and without ornamentation. Thus this composition brings the total number of English discant settings with the chant exclusively as the lowest voice to nine. The notation (the abundance of minims) and musical style (the obvious treble domination and use of sequential patterns in the highest voice) suggest that this work should be dated in the latter half, and probably the final third, of the fourteenth century.

The masque—a long-established if only loosely defined form which had its origins in the Elizabethan revels—underwent striking changes in the course of the seventeenth century. Having reached a sophisticated and inevitably short-lived unity of all its possible dramatic elements during the first quarter of the century, this unity was first undermined by the departure of Ben Jonson in 1631 from the team at Court, and then all but extinguished by the Commonwealth. Although its performance during the Interregnum and its subsequent regeneration both at Court and in private are more vigorous than is usually believed, there was never the money to revive its earlier splendour, nor the political climate in which to do so. There was, of course, a revival of the pre-Commonwealth habit of inserting masques into spoken plays, and towards the end of the century, masques were also interpolated between the acts of spoken plays. Masques were also included in the ‘dramatick’ operas of the 1670s and 1690s, but although the masques here were more extravagant than those in plays, this use did not give the genre theatrical independence.