Iver Brink (1665–1728) is familiar to students of Danish religious literature, but a published auction catalogue of his books (1729) shows him also to have been a discerning collector of music. Born in Norway, Brink settled in Copenhagen in 1686. After ordination, he became, in 1691, the first official pastor to the Danish community in London. Returning in 1701, he worked as pastor at two Copenhagen churches. In 1708–9 he accompanied King Frederik IV to Italy as chaplain. Brink's musical collection reflects his religious vocation, his travels to England, Italy and Germany, and especially his fondness for solo song of any description. He penned the texts of several devotional songs, and the ensemble music in his possession hints at his participation in social music-making. The breadth and connoisseurship displayed by his collection reinforces a growing perception that Danish musical culture in the early eighteenth century was less provincial than previously believed.

What would contemporary music scholarship look like if it was no longer imprinted with the disciplinary assumptions, boundaries and divisions inherited from the last century? This article proposes that a generative model for future music studies would take the form of a relational musicology. The model is drawn from the author's work; but signs of an incipient relational musicology are found scattered across recent research in musicology, ethnomusicology, and jazz and popular music studies. In support of such a development, the article calls for a reconfiguration of the boundaries between the subdisciplines of music study – notably musicology, ethnomusicology, music sociology and popular music studies – so as to render problematic the music/social opposition and achieve a new interdisciplinary settlement, one that launches the study of music onto new epistemological and ontological terrain. In proposing this direction, the article points to the limits of the vision of interdisciplinarity in music research that is more often articulated, one that – in the guise of a turn to practice or performance – sutures together the historically inclined, humanities model of musicology with the micro-social, musicologically inclined aspects of ethnomusicology. The article suggests, moreover, that this vision obscures other sources of renewal in music scholarship: those deriving from anthropology, social theory and history, and how they infuse the recent work gathered under the rubric of a relational musicology. As an alternative to the practice turn, a future direction is proposed that entails an expanded analytics of the social, cultural, material and temporal in music. The last part of the article takes the comparativist dimension of a relational musicology to four topics: questions of the social, technology, temporality and ontology.

This article provides a revisionist account of thirteenth-century refrain use, challenging the presumed connection between the refrain and oral song traditions. The distribution patterns in the surviving sources reveal no strong connection between refrain use and the rondet, the song genre often posited as the refrain's point of origin. Further, a significant corpus of refrains circulated only within the motet repertory, independently of monophonic song. Close comparison of refrain concordances in surviving sources reveals careful attention on the part of composers and scribes to the preservation of their melodic identity. Together, these findings suggest new contexts for understanding the refrain. The author relocates refrain use within clerical practices of quotation, particularly auctoritas, exploring case studies in which refrains are interpreted exegetically. In motets, chansons avec des refrains and a vernacular translation of Ovid's Ars amatoria, refrains are treated as sources of vernacular knowledge and objects of commentary.

The story that Mozart was commissioned to write three piano quartets for publication in Franz Anton Hoffmeister's subscription series has proved to be remarkably resilient in the Mozart literature. According to the account that first appeared in Georg Nikolaus von Nissen's biography (1828), Hoffmeister gave Mozart an advance payment for the works, but decided to withdraw after the first quartet, K.478, was poorly received. The article exposes a series of flaws in this narrative by locating Hoffmeister's edition of K.478 in a wider contextual and bibliographical framework than has been hitherto attempted. A revised chain of events, based on a new understanding of Hoffmeister's business, suggests a more complex narrative for Mozart's dealings with the publisher. It also prompts us to reconsider the circumstances surrounding Mozart's composition of his two completed piano quartets and the reception of his chamber music in Vienna before 1791.

This study presents the sketch of a theory of musical listening based on historical considerations of the role of music in Western culture. A universal element of musical listening might lie in the notion that all music is the product of a fundamental human capacity to hear, harnessed in countless ways by diverse cultures. Secondly, there is the type of music, covering very broad historical and cultural boundaries, that presupposes attentive listening or even a participating audience; this is perhaps the simplest and most familiar category, at least in the West. Finally, there is the range of music that might contain an ‘implied listener’, something which I suggest is much more elusive, with specific historical and cultural boundaries within Western modernity. While this sense of the implied listener – someone developing the sense of a consistent and unitary self over time – is understandable today and might well still be employed in a broad range of new music, I would suggest that it now reflects only one way of being human among an alarmingly broad array of choices.

The large-scale structure of Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is defined by three major articulations: at E.5, I.1 and T.5. The proportions these define are remarkably constant across 12 recordings and Vaughan Williams's own metronome indications. Those at E.5 and T.5 help create a state of structural stability defined by quarter–half–quarter symmetry, while the articulation at I.1 coincides almost precisely with the ‘short’ Golden Section. These proportions find fascinating analogues in the structure of Gloucester Cathedral, for which venue the piece was composed, although this connection (especially with regard to the Golden Section) was probably not conscious. The proportions defined by E.5 and T.5 in the original version (1910) differed from those in the version we hear today (second revision, 1919), and Vaughan Williams's motive in making two waves of cuts (1913 and 1919) may have arisen from an instinctual desire to establish the sense of quarter–half–quarter symmetry.

This response highlights the cultural specificity of the ‘work-concept’ and questions the tripartite scheme of listening proposed by John Butt. It offers an alternative set of listening categories, and makes reference to the issues of early-modern class structures and the role of music in religious devotions. The argument is supported by critiques of historical vignettes that include the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's transcription of Gregorio Allegri's Miserere and Jean Joseph Marie Amiot's demonstration of French music to a Chinese audience in the mid-eighteenth century.

During the seventeenth century, the Medici family sought to legitimize its power by using art to communicate a political message, referring constantly to a precise code of sacred imagination and religious devotion. This article focuses on Antonio Veracini – a violinist in the service of Vittoria della Rovere – and on his op. 1, which shows a perfect agreement with the aesthetic ambitions of the grand duchess and with her double role of regent and defensor fidei. In the light of recent studies that reconsider the traditional historiographical approach to what has been called the ‘bigotry’ of Cosimo III, Antonio Veracini's sonatas – in comparison with two other coeval collections of trio sonatas dedicated to Grand Prince Ferdinando (by Pietro Sanmartini and Giovan Battista Gigli) – show a full awareness of the expressive potential of the sonata, transforming it into a musical genre capable of conferring not only ‘pleasure’ and ‘delight’ but also symbolic significance within specific cultural contexts.

This article develops a theoretic base for the hermeneutics of spatialization in recorded popular song, drawing from work in ecological perception, cognitive linguistics, proxemics and some music semiotics. It uses this base in order specifically to observe a range of uses of the deictic expression ‘here’ in the lyrics of popular songs, and from this observation to construct a typology. It draws from a very wide range of Anglophone genres, stretching across most of the previous century and beyond, exploring the varying extents to which the music that encompasses such lyrics helps to fix a type of location indexed by ‘here’. Such an exercise forms part of a larger programme to establish a grounding that permits a reasoned response to Ricoeur's call to interpret the text by means of disclosing a ‘possible way of looking at things'.

The purpose of this paper is to describe some aspects of the agenda of listening in the Western tradition. Ancient and modern versions of some of the myths of listening (Orpheus, the Sirens) are compared to illustrate what might be at stake in the activity of listening. A basic contrast is drawn between ancient rhetorical ideas of the power of music to affect the listener and the demand of instrumental music, from the late eighteenth century on, that we understand what the music wants of us. The paper continues with a discussion of some ancient ideas about philosophical listening, which precludes talking and is directed both inwards and outwards, and it ends with some suggestions about themes that a history of listening might pursue.

Using the famous death-themed Cantata 82 as a case study, this article offers a model for situating J. S. Bach's cantata output in the wider cultural sphere of early eighteenth-century Leipzig life. Looking beyond the immediate and well-studied liturgical and theological contexts, the article reconstructs a broader range of associations that Bach's music may have evoked for his contemporary listeners, drawing out allusions to operatic topics, popular fears of deadly diseases, fictions of heavenly music and macabre dances of death. By locating the question of musical meaning in the interpretative space between the piece and its historical listeners, the article offers an alternative to conventional hermeneutic approaches that view Bach's cantatas as conveying a singular and clearly audible message of Lutheran doctrine.

This article offers a contextual reading of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's and Richard Strauss's 1927 opera Die ägyptische Helena. For Hofmannsthal and Strauss, the marital rift between Menelas and Helena caused by her infidelity operated as the symbolic manifestation of a similar schism in pan-Germanic politics, society and the arts – thus highlighting the concomitant necessity for unity through recognition and celebration of a common culture. By recasting the story of Menelas's and Helena's homeward journey from Troy in order to create an aesthetic answer to the problems of the present, Hofmannsthal and Strauss pointed to the distinct similarities between the Trojan War and the recent conflict that had completely changed the political, geographical and social landscape in Europe. As this article demonstrates, Die ägyptische Helena stands as an artwork both expressly aware and uniquely representative of its historical moment through a multi-faceted literary and musical referentiality inherently characteristic of its creators.

This response considers whether it is possible to think of listening as a non-coercive alternative to ‘the gaze’. An attention to the work of ancient and modern thinkers provides a starting point for conceptualizing musical ‘possession’ in a way that is not bound to asymmetrical, subject–object relations.

Early recordings raise fundamental questions about our response to music. Why do these performances seem so strange to us? How could they ever have made musical sense to listeners? How might we make sense of them now, in our very different music-cultural environment? This paper looks at some of the ways in which musical sounds model other processes involving change over time. A mechanism is proposed that may underlie the cross-domain mappings generating musical meaning. Music is seen to be exceptionally adaptable to the modelling of other experiences, able to offer many potential likenesses, among which those with most relevance to what an individual brain already knows and believes are favoured by conscious perception. Performance and perception styles change over time as certain kinds of potential meaning are selected for their relevance to other aspects of contemporary experience. The model helps to explain how subjectivity is constructed and how it changes.