At the outset, I should perhaps explain why I'm going to play the illustrations to this talk on the piano rather than on a harpsichord. In the first place, I only play the harpsichord as an amateur, and would feel abashed to display my shortcomings before an audience containing many eminent professionals. And secondly, since harpsichords are still comparatively few and far between, I'm anxious to suggest that students and performers can give great pleasure to themselves, and to others, by playing these works understandingly on whatever keyboard instrument happens to be available.

Wilfrid mellers has said that ‘if jazz is music it ought to be intelligible to musicians’. The truth of this is obvious; jazz is intelligible to anyone who takes the trouble to listen to it. But this should not obscure the fact that though jazz is certainly music in the sense that Mellers suggests, it is still music of a special kind. It has its own traditions, its own techniques, its own characteristics.

We are all accustomed to regard the music for the Latin rites of the Catholic Church as a glorious part (for at least seven centuries the main part) of the heritage of Western music. So of course, it is. But if its development be examined from the pastoral aspect, if we ask how far this music has assisted the majority of worshippers in understanding and participating in the liturgy as ‘the outstanding means whereby the faithful may express in their lives and manifest to others the mystery and the real nature of the true Church’, a very different picture results. To understand the need for changes in liturgical music today and the reasons why it has taken so long for this need to be openly admitted and changes officially sanctioned, requires a brief historical introduction.

Our fixture card tells us the main purpose of the lecture which M. Fédorov intended to give us this evening—‘A major point to be considered will be reasons for the decline and revival of Rameau's popularity’. Those words led us to expect evidence from periodicals published since 1764, and perhaps from concert programmes and theatre records. Few musicians could be better equipped for this task than the Librarian of the Paris Conservatoire, yet M. Féderov would not have promised ‘reasons’ for a decline and revival if he had intended to reveal only his literary discoveries without comment upon Rameau's measure of our common humanity, and upon changing taste in the arts. So while we lack M. Fédorov's researches, we may still undertake what he proposed as his ‘major point’. And that is why, though I have never embarked upon any study of Rameau worth calling research, I hope that nobody here will say ‘Sir, you presume!’ if I accept your Secretary's invitation.

In recent years the study of musical instruments and their history has become an accepted feature of modern research, and the performance of earlier music upon the instruments appropriate to its period is now a familiar part of our musical life. Especially during the last decade, the revival of instrumental works from the Renaissance and Baroque periods has stimulated great interest in historically accurate performances; and more recently this concern for using authentic instruments or good modern copies suitable to the music in question has spread to the Classical period as well. Thus in an age when so much attention has been paid to the instruments of the Baroque and Classical orchestra, it is surprising to find that the horn is still very much of an enigma. Even in otherwise authentic performances with eighteenth-century instruments, original or copied, it is still common to hear the modern valve horn in all its chromatic self-assurance.

The association's calendar of events for this session announces that this paper is to be a ‘general survey’ of Thomas Weelkes's church music. I trust I shall not incur too much of your displeasure when I say that I am not going to follow this statement of intentions. I have not lightly modified my plans; let me explain the reasons that have induced me to do so. First, the volume of the complete anthems of Weelkes which is promised in Musica Britannica is still, alas, only a promise. It will appear very shortly, but it has proved impossible to have it to hand for this present meeting. This makes a detailed study of the anthems less useful here, for I would be talking about works which, in some cases, my audience would have had no chance of knowing. My decision has also been influenced by the fact that a full study of Weelkes's church music will appear in print in due course. If I may be permitted a ‘commercial’, may I give notice that the American scholar, Walter Collins, and I will in due course be publishing a study of Weelkes in which Dr. Collins will be dealing comprehensively with the church music. I should at this point acknowledge my indebtedness to both Dr. Collins and Dr. Peter le Huray, my fellow editors of the forthcoming Musica Britannica volume; our corporate edition has provided most of the material upon which this paper is based. I must also acknowledge Dr. Collins’ additional work in transcribing all Weelkes's anthems which have survived in a form too fragmentary to make practical publication worth while; I have also been able to make use of these transcriptions. On the other hand, all the ensuing assertions and opinions are ones for which I take the sole responsibility.

When in 1947 Gerald Abraham's symposium on. Sibelius first appeared a good deal of Sibelius's early music was still inaccessible: even two of the four Legends were still unpublished and none of the early chamber music was available for inspection. Apart from an excellent study by Robert L. Jacobs which sets out to show how the evolutionary thematicism of Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari serves programmatic ends, there has been no summary generally available in English of the material that has emerged over the last decade or so. Simon Parmet's book was confined to the symphonies while Harold Johnson has cast himself so firmly in the rôle of the poor man's Richard Aldington that none of his comments on the music can escape suspicion. Rather a René Leibowitz whose Jean Sibelius, le plus mauvais compositeur du monde has the merit of an engaging title if nothing else, than Harold Johnson whose pretensions to objectivity are belied by his highly selective approach to his material.

‘Bennett is a pianist above all things’ wrote Schumann. Of his compositions with opus numbers nineteen are for piano solo, and a twentieth is for piano duet. There are a further seven piano solos without opus number. He also published five concertante works for piano and orchestra, discarded a sixth and postponed publishing a seventh. The three chamber works all employ a piano, and the first of these, the Sestet op. 8, is virtually an eighth piano concerto with string accompaniment.