Studies of the Royal Institution have focused on science, as the term was defined from about the 1840s onwards, and on the institutionalization of science so defined. They exhibit a particular assumption that, until recent years, has dominated the historiography of science and that still is apparent in the latest study of the Royal Institution by Morris Berman (1978). Berman's aim is to demonstrate ‘the process by which technical reason became (as Michel Foucault would say) the prose of our world’ (p. xxv). Thus, according to Berman, what the chemist, Humphry Davy, stood for ‘ultimately made a greater difference for the history of science than what he accomplished with the voltaic pile, for he paved the way for a society in which the “social construction of reality” proceeded along scientific lines’ (p. xxv).

Of the great many minor yet significant composers who lived around the time of Haydn and Mozart and who deserve to be better known, Karl von Ordonez, a Viennese composer born two years after Haydn, has been the subject of much recent scholarly interest. Landon (1959) introduced this composer to the modern musical world, he has since figured in numerous books, monographs and articles (most notably Landon 1962a and 1978, Kirkendale 1966, Apfel 1972, and Larsen 1978), and he has been the subject of several recent studies (Brown 1974a, 1974b, 1978, 1981a, 1981b, and Young 1980b). However, no detailed biographical study has yet been published, and it is the purpose of the present article to meet this need.

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.

Ms 18810 of the austrian national library has long been known to scholars as an important source of the secular works of Ludwig Senfl, Heinrich Isaac, and Paul Hofhaimer. Most of the remaining compositions in the manuscript, however, have been overlooked because they are either anonymous or by lesser-known composers. The purposes of this paper will be to discuss the manuscript and its contents, examine the musical styles found within it, and present an inventory more complete than that made more than eighty years ago by Josef Mantuani (1899, vol. 10, 219–24)’.