In the Clark Library at the University of California Los Angeles, there is a 1691 copy of the printed playbook for Dryden's An Evening's Love: or, The Mock-Astrologer (London: Henry Herringman), which was used as a promptbook in revivals of the play at Drury Lane between 1705 and 1717 (Edward A. Langhans, Eighteenth[-]Century British and Irish Promptbooks: A Descriptive Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987), 44–45). Amongst other alterations in it, songs are excised and musical flourishes are added (a digitized version is available at https://archive.org/details/dryden_mock_astr_clarklib; see, for example, page 20). It is a comforting object that – when reassessing the recordings made in 2019 by Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort of Purcell's dramatick operas King Arthur (Winged Lion SIGCD 589, 2019) and The Fairy Queen (Winged Lion SIGCD 615, 2020), for which I performed as a bass violinist and prepared the editions – reassures me that our processes were well grounded.

The rediscovery of a unicum manuscript source of cantates françaises by Philippe II d'Orléans in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, provokes a re-evaluation of not only the provenance of the collection to which it belongs, but also the role played by diplomacy, sociability and cultural exchange in the history of the cantate française. The manuscript's contents all reflect Philippe's use of international connections to acquire music and engage musicians in the period 1701–1706. The manuscript forms part of a corpus of French scores that belonged to Marie-Thérèse de Lannoy de La Motterie, an aristocratic amateur harpsichordist with an interest in both French and Italian music, and in cantates. As wife of Joseph Lothar von Königsegg und Rothenfels, representative of the Austrian emperor to Philippe, then regent of France, she was engaged in the cultural life of Paris during the period 1717–1719, not only acquiring cantate prints but also a copy of Philippe's own works in the genre. Her collection reflects both her personal interests and her diplomatic cultivation of the social circles around Philippe in which music connoisseurship was an important skill. The manuscript thus highlights the important role played in the international transmission of cantates françaises by diplomatic and familial connections of noble amateurs, especially those curious about musical developments beyond their own regional practices.

In June 1791, having composed almost no church music for ten years, Mozart wrote the short motet Ave verum corpus, k618, a setting of the Latin medieval eucharist hymn. The theological teleology in the text introduces a process-like aiming at a goal that cannot, however, be reached. This study is about how teleology operates in the motet – the ways in which the text's ultimately unfulfilled goal-directed processes operate in Mozart's music. The music is approached from a variety of analytical perspectives that reflect different aspects of this theme: the new Formenlehre and phrase structure, topic theory, and the analysis of voice-leading structure, register and hypermetre. Together, these approaches elucidate the multiplicity of musical processes that, as in the motet's text, announce a goal but fail to reach it.

The long careers of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Joseph Haydn coincided with fundamental transformations in how keyboard instruments were built and played and how composers wrote for them. Haydn's keyboard music probably saw the more profound changes in compositional style, yet C. P. E. Bach and others preceded him in discovering ways to incorporate new keyboard idioms into pieces written for new types of instruments. Bach gradually shifted from writing generic keyboard music to composing in idioms most appropriate to two-manual harpsichords, unfretted clavichords or fortepianos. Haydn likewise began writing in a generic idiom; many works that have been posited as having been meant for the clavichord cannot in fact be assigned clearly to that or any other specific instrument. Although Haydn did eventually turn to writing specifically for the fortepiano, he too made a gradual, and relatively late, transition from a generic approach to one that centred on the grand fortepianos of the late eighteenth century. Bach's influence on Haydn is inseparable from the matter of the keyboard instruments. Although the precise nature and extent of Bach's influence cannot be determined, compositional elements derived by Haydn from Bach's music range from superficial thematic and notational parallelisms to fundamental conceptions of what keyboard music could be or could express.

Compositions for musical clocks made possible a newly objective exploration of the relationship between music and time. Works by George Frideric Handel, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach reflected the absolute and uniform flow of Newtonian time. In contrast, Leopold Mozart's clock music alternated between two different metres and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart used more complex tempo ratios in a musical installation (k608) built around a dramatically illuminated pendulum. Repeated thousands of times, this installation pitted clock against music, in effect providing a new kind of experiment that favoured relative Leibnizian time over uniform Newtonian time. As if responding to k608, Joseph Haydn incorporated his own clock music into his Symphony No. 101 in order to underline, yet then to stop, time, while Schubert's Fantasy in F minor, d940, brought these temporal experiments into a new realm of intimate musical experience.