Employing the term ‘point of audition’ to describe the spatial position musical works imply for their listeners, this article examines the use of technologies for extending the senses to define new points of audition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Popular literature on natural philosophy promoted magnifying instruments as windows onto distant or hidden realms and as tools for acquiring knowledge. On the operatic stage and in writers' metaphorical musings, kindred sensory extensions were imagined for hearing. These contexts connected (magic) mirrors and magnifying instruments to their musical analogues: muted tone and keyboard fantasizing. The development of these associations in opera and literature made it possible for instrumental music to position listeners as eavesdroppers upon unknown realms. Such a point of audition is shown to be implied by the Adagio un poco mosso of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto. By examining material practices and discourses surrounding sensory extension, this article demonstrates the relevance of technologically mediated observation to musical culture at the turn of the nineteenth century, and its contribution to the otherworldly orientation characteristic of romantic listening.

Vienna, 21 August 1773: Mozart signs off a letter to his sister Nannerl in his usual jocular manner: ‘oidda – gnagflow Trazom neiw ned 12 tsugua 3771’. This ‘arseways’ spelling of his signature is an early example of Mozart's well-known fondness for jesting and playing with patterns – spatial, arithmetical, linguistic and musical. Mozart appears to have been especially committed to such games in the 1770s. This was a period when he was also involved with the more serious matter of advancing his career, in which the composition of the first six so-called ‘difficult’ yet also ‘popular’ keyboard sonatas, k279–284, played an integral part. This article reads certain inexplicable gestures in the first sonata, k279, as reflecting Mozart's preoccupation with witty expressions at this time, seemingly as part of his attempt to gain the favour of prospective patrons, publishers and employers. The idiosyncrasies of the sonata result from an intersection of the syntax of phrase-level patterning and large-scale form with the semiosis of musical topics, eliciting laughter or simply a smile. Mozart's communicative strategy is situated in a broader context of the compositional play, wit and humour discussed in late eighteenth-century theory and aesthetics. It also allows us to revisit several implications arising from Danuta Mirka and Kofi Agawu's Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music of 2008, including the importance of ‘context’ for successful communication, the susceptibility of eighteenth-century artefacts to present-day misreading and the problem of Kenner, Liebhaber and audiences in general.

Bach's vocal oeuvre contains a significant number of movements (about thirty-five), including but not limited to those in modified da capo form, with a concluding reprise of opening thematic material in the subdominant key. Some of these ‘subdominant returns’ involve strict parallelism, whereby the entire A section returns at the new pitch, thus transforming the original ‘departing’ modulation from I to V into a ‘returning’ modulation from IV to I. Many subdominant returns, however, occur in a range of contexts, which resist straightforward formal categorization. One example is the opening chorus from the St Matthew Passion. While the unusual da capo in this movement has elicited provocative commentary by Karol Berger and others in recent years, the significance of the subdominant return (here and elsewhere) has not been examined in depth. This study begins with a comprehensive survey of subdominant returns in Bach's vocal oeuvre, and then examines cyclic and linear aspects of form through detailed analysis of six movements that exhibit this procedure.

1770s Berlin saw the birth of a new theory of rhythm, first stated in Johann Georg Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–1774), and later labelled the Akzenttheorie (theory of accents). Whereas previous eighteenth-century theories had seen rhythm as built up from the combination of distinct units, the Akzenttheorie saw it as formed from the breaking down of a continual flow, achieved through the placing of accents on particular notes. In his Philosophie der Kunst (1802–1803) the philosopher Friedrich Schelling used Sulzer's definition of rhythm to suggest, astonishingly, that music can facilitate knowledge of the absolute, a philosophical concept denoting the ultimate ground of all reality. In this article I show how Schelling could come to interpret the Akzenttheorie in such extravagant terms by examining three theories of time and their relationships to rhythm: that of Sulzer and his predecessor Isaac Newton, that of Immanuel Kant and that of Schelling. I conclude by arguing that in Schelling's case – an important one, since his is the earliest systematic presentation of a view of music that came to predominate in the decades after 1800 – his view of music was driven neither by developments in contemporary music nor by changes in the philosophy of art as a discrete intellectual enterprise, but by revolutions in philosophy by and large unconcerned even with art in general.