The subject of this paper deserves an entry in music dictionaries, yet it has received none, no doubt because the Hunt's Up has been studied not as an entity but as different things: a ground, a type of song, a few pieces of instrumental music, a musical genre, a custom. To my knowledge, no writer has discovered what if anything beyond a name relates the various aspects, though it is in the ways they are related that the importance of the Hunt's Up for the history of English music is to be found. The purpose of this paper is to establish what those relationships are. My indebtedness to the work of other scholars – William Chappell, Anne Gilchrist, and Claude Simpson, to name but three – will be evident to anyone who has worked with this subject.

In 1946, the critic Scott Goddard ended an enthusiastic and judicious discussion of Britten's achievement with this comment: ‘Whoever tries to discover the intrinsic quality of the music of Britten and his generation must take courage from what they possess in only a small degree, sufficient knowledge to form a judgment.’ Things ought to be very different today. We are able to consider Britten's life and work as a complete whole. We are able, and possibly even willing, to read the millions of words which have been written about him. If anything, the problem is not that we have too little knowledge to form a judgment, but too much; with so much material, so much information, so many opinions, to make any kind of decision about it all can seem, to the late twentieth-century mind, faintly improper. Worse still, I can state with some confidence that our knowledge of Britten and his music is still far from complete: the archive in the Britten-Pears Library at Aldeburgh contains a wealth of unpublished material of all kinds, from the diaries and letters which will no doubt be extensively quoted in Donald Mitchell's official biography, to sketches and drafts which will eventually enable authoritative discussion about Britten's working methods to take place.

Upon the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 Matthew Locke received three places in the king's Musick: private composer to the King in the place of John Coprario, composer in the wind music in place of Alfonso Ferrabosco (ii), and a new place as composer for the band of violins. He was also made organist to the Queen at her chapel (probably because of his Catholic religion), and he composed the music for the elaborate celebrations marking the return of the King to London. Locke was then thirty-eight years old, and in his spare time he moonlighted as composer for the Duke of York's Theatre Company organized by Sir William Davenant.

The genre of motet for a single voice of the baroque and pre-classical eras has been little investigated. Bukofzer mentions only its origins in a brief paragraph; Abraham admittedly has half a page in his Concise Oxford History of Music, putting it quickly into context; but Fellerer's ample Geschichte der katholischen Kirchenmusik (Kassel, 1976) treats it only sketchily and even Finscher's article on the motet in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart mentions it only in passing, the more important discussion being devoted to the motet in the stile antico, perhaps not surprisingly, since that was what the term really implied in Germany during Bach's lifetime. But everyone knows at least one solo motet, Mozart's Exsultate jubilate (K. 158a); most people will know a piece in a similar tradition, Bach's Jauchzet Gott (BVW 51), significantly included among the cantatas; to which may be added a work which some of us feel is finer than either, Handel's Silete venti. In monographs on the various composers, these pieces usually get short shrift, being considered either a-typical or at least of minor importance. This paper will attempt to provide a background to these works.

In 1920, after the first concert of his music in a newly independent Poland, Szymanowski wrote the following: ‘I do feel, where Polish culture is concerned, that I am in a vacuum. But I cannot afford a complete abnegation, for my inner life is developed too strongly’. The concert took place at an important turning-point in his development, and the adverse critical reception which greeted it brought into sharp focus a creative crisis which had been with the composer since 1918. It is an interpretation of that crisis which I intend to offer in this paper.

We are remarkably well-informed about the liturgy of the Second Temple at Jerusalem in the years which preceded its destruction by the Romans in AD 70; the same is not the case, as will be seen below, with the contemporary Synagogue. The central source of our knowledge about Temple liturgy is the Talmud, that massive compendium of rabbinic learning and lore which had its first redaction in the Mishnah of about AD 200. There are numerous remarks on Temple liturgy scattered throughout the sixty-three tractates of the Mishnah, but two in particular give us as detailed a description of its daily services as do the ordines romani of the seventh-century Roman pontifical Mass. These are the tractates Middoth, literally measurements, which gives a description of the Temple with its dimensions, and Tamid, literally perfect or perpetual, which goes step by step through the daily sacrificial rites.

What distinguishes Italian oratorio from Italian sacred opera in the period from around 1700 to around 1825? The question arises from the significant difference between the use of the term ‘oratorio’ by Italian writers and composers at the beginning and end of this period. About 1700 nearly all Italian writers and composers applied the term to works performed without stage action. A century later, on the other hand, Italian writers and composers frequently applied the term to works that were presented as sacred operas. By the early nineteenth century the application of the term to a sacred work with stage action had become so common that it found its way into an Italian musical dictionary. In Lichtenthal's Dizionario ‘oratorio’ is defined as 'A species of drama, the subject of which is a theme selected from sacred history, performed by singers with the accompaniment of an orchestra, either in a church, or in a hall, or indeed on a theatrical stage - in this last case one means Opera sacra, and it bears the mark of the usual Opere in musica, having the same form and conduct.

The outlines of the history of Madama Butterfly are well known. The first performance took place at La Scala on 17 February 1904, and was one of the most spectacular flops ever seen at that famous opera house, or indeed at any other. Puccini immediately withdrew the opera and made a number of revisions. A few months later, on 28 May, the work was performed at Brescia, and was received enthusiastically by public and critics alike. Further alterations were made to the score during the next two and a half years or so, and by early 1907, following a series of performances in Paris, the version we know today had been arrived at.

The mention of the term ‘colossal baroque’ brings to mind the Missa Salisburgensis in fifty-three parts, which was long thought to have been written by the Roman composer Oratio Benevoli and performed at the Consecration of Salzburg Cathedral in 1628. While it has often been cited in standard text books as the prime example of music of the Roman ‘colossal baroque’, it has been shown by Ernst Hintermaier that the work is not by Benevoli and, far from being performed in 1628, it dates from the second half of the century. In the wake of the historical vacuum created by this discovery it will be the purpose of this paper to examine archival and musical evidence of multiple-choir music in the period in which the mass was originally thought to have been written and so to outline the development of large-scale music in Rome.