Around 1800 a group of critics worried that new music was in danger of losing its social relevance. In their eyes music had become severed from the religious practices which had formerly provided its purpose and now exhibited a mercurial style that threatened its intelligibility, leading to a host of anxieties about its role in the contemporary world. This article argues that these concerns form the basis of an elegiac discourse of musical modernity, one resonating with broader philosophical concerns of the period. Taking Hoffmann's ‘Alte und neue Kirchenmusik’ as the central text, my narrative explores how he and others sought to rehabilitate modern music in the wake of a perceived social upheaval. This rehabilitation chiefly occurred at the hands of critics, who approached the complexities of new musical works by attempting to elucidate them through analysis. Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony belongs in this narrative as a characteristic attempt to secure new music's meaning.

The revival of early music performed on original instruments has resurrected the role of the violinist-conductor ‘maestro dei concerti’, one historical designation among many describing a conductor equipped with an instrument rather than a baton. Prior to this revival, one rarely saw an orchestra led without a baton, particularly if the orchestra was sizeable. Exceptions included a few historically minded ensembles – here I'd like to mention I Musici of Rome for the baroque repertory and, for a case involving a large symphonic orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic's 1996 New Year's Eve Concert, at which Lorin Maazel directed one of the popular Strauss encores from the violin. Yet the idea of having a violinist conduct a romantic symphony, let alone a nineteenth-century opera, seems hardly conceivable today. Such a lost practice, though common in the past, would be bound to baffle modern audiences.

Samuel Howard (?1710–1782) has long been a familiar inhabitant of the diligent footnotes of Handel biographers. A choirboy in the Chapel Royal, he was a member of Handel's chorus and the composer of much theatre music of his own; he later became organist of both St Bride's, Fleet Street and nearby St Clement Danes, Strand, where he was buried in 1782. His most significant and ambitious work is his fine orchestrally accompanied anthem ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made’, published posthumously in 1792 with an impressive title page detailing the performance of the work ‘at St Margaret's Church before the governors of the Westminster Infirmary, in the Two Universities, and upon many other Publick Occasions in different parts of the Kingdom’. This article confirms for the first time that this work originated as Howard's doctoral exercise; contemporary press reports and information in the University archives make clear that the composer's doctorate was linked to the provision of music for the Duke of Grafton's installation as Chancellor of Cambridge University in 1769. Surviving information about this event offers a glimpse of musical life in Cambridge on a comparable scale to the much better reported proceedings upon similar occasions in Oxford. This evidence then serves as a starting-point from which to consider Howard's later prominence as a director of high-profile public performances in London and the provinces.

Marie-Justine-Benoîte Duronceray was an extraordinary, multi-talented artist, described by Bruce Alan Brown as a singer, actor, dancer and dramatist. Her performances on the Paris stage between 1745 and 1771 met with general enthusiasm, and her pioneering of realistic stage costume was influential. Her mastery of the modern Italian aria, linked with Italianate acting style, was crucial to the development of modern opéra comique. Biographers and others have recounted her life, creatively linked with that of her husband, the dramatist Charles-Simon Favart, and images, sometimes capturing a role that she played, have been reproduced; a sculpted likeness can be found in the Louvre. Figure 1 celebrates Marie-Justine in 1753, an eventful year during which she even appeared at Fontainebleau opposite Marie Fel and Pierre Jélyotte, in La Coquette trompée (with music by Antoine Dauvergne and text by C.-S.

In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, composers and music theorists moved away from the system of the eight ecclesiastical modes that had been elaborated by medieval theorists and was later applied to polyphonic music (including the varied system extended to twelve modes in the sixteenth century) towards modern bimodal tonality. Although several modal systems coexisted within this time period, a distinct variant of the eight modes, often known in modern scholarship as the church keys, developed as a practical solution to problems associated with the performance of psalms and other recited formulas (especially the Magnificat) in alternatim practice between the choir in plainchant and the organ. A scarcity of research on this topic within investigations of Spanish music prompts us to outline an introduction to a matter so crucial to music theory of the baroque period in Spain. Thus we present an overview of the treatment of the church keys or tones in Spanish treatises over a long period of two centuries, and focus briefly on particular contributions made by individual authors.

Recently, as I was doing research for a project on eighteenth-century dances, I came across the following entry in Charles Compan's Dictionnaire de danse (1787):

Mozart's canons are rather inadequately represented in the Köchel catalogue and the Neue Mozart Ausgabe. The same may be said about other music for his immediate circle of friends, colleagues and patrons, as well as his dance music and his contributions to pasticcios. Neglect of these ‘minor’ genres perhaps arises at least in part from anachronistic paradigms, for instance ‘masterpieces for posterity’. And the canons suffer additionally from the peculiar nature of their sources and transmission, from uncertainty about the position of canons in the ‘canon’ of Western art music and probably also from embarrassment over some of Mozart’s texts. Mozart’s canons have been studied not only less often than his operatic, church, chamber and orchestral music, but also less well.

Italian opera is increasingly receiving well deserved attention. Yet the process by which the chorus in opera seria was created remains largely unexplored. Between 1759 and 1769 Tommaso Traetta and Christoph Gluck composed path-breaking, reform-inspired opere serie for Parma’s Teatro Ducale which integrated chorus, dance and stage spectacle in the French manner. In an era when operatic choruses usually comprised amateurs and chapel singers, evidence from printed librettos and documents from Parma’s Archivio di Stato reveal that many of the Teatro Ducale’s choristers were professional singers hired from neighbouring Bologna. Perhaps in response to logistical and financial difficulties in engaging skilled personnel for Traetta’s choruses, Parma established a singing school to provide choristers for theatre. Gluck’s choruses employed a combination of students from this school and professionals. The evidence from Parma shows that the wide-ranging circuit within which Italy’s opera theatres functioned embraced not only leading soloists and other personnel, but choral singers as well. It demonstrates the impact of practical circumstances surrounding the production of Parma’s operatic choruses on the success of operatic reform in Parma.

With its intense drama and marked eroticism, the story of Judith's slaying of Holofernes was often represented in baroque visual art and music. The overwhelming majority of musical representations are found in oratorios, with only three cantatas known to have been devoted to the subject. The oratorio's dramatic framework was suited for emphasizing Judith's multifaceted figure through character depiction, contrast and conflict, while the cantata's epic nature and lack of direct character intervention made staging conflict in that genre more difficult. Yet precisely because of these limitations, the cantata constitutes a revealing case study for exploring the strategies composers employed to give agency to Judith.

This article focuses on the baroque cantata settings of the Judith story by Sébastien de Brossard and Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (both from about 1708, both based on a text by La Motte). To illustrate their differing perspectives on Judith, I employ the concept of focalization – used in literary theory to mean point of view or filtered perspective – as a theoretical framework. The well-known Judith paintings by Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi (the so-called Uffizi Judith) provide a lucid example of focalization through the differing perspectives of the two maidservants and offer a valuable methodological tool for understanding the two differing compositional approaches. Whereas Brossard follows La Motte's narrative dutifully by emphasizing swiftness of action at the expense of character depiction, Jacquet de La Guerre bypasses it through instrumental accompaniments and independent symphonies that give voice to Judith, despite a text that downplays her character.