Slåtter, op. 72, was composed in 1902-3, and is thus among Grieg's very last works. It is also one of his least familiar. ‘Here [in Norway] my early position is still being promoted, praised at every available opportunity at the expense of my current one’, he wrote in his diary on 21 March 1906. Earlier that day he had played six of the 17 slåtter at a concert in Kristiania (now Oslo), and he was disappointed by the lukewarm response. Grieg did, however, live long enough to witness the successful reception of the work, not least in France where avant-garde circles talked about ‘le nouveau Grieg’. Nevertheless, the widespread perception of Grieg - even today - is based on his lyrical pieces, the ‘wheat buns’, as he himself called them. Yet Slåtter is without doubt one of Grieg's most fascinating works. We do indeed meet a ‘new Grieg’ here, and there is good reason to believe that the work played some part in Béla Bartók's development. There was a copy in Bartók's library, and in an article in the Hungarian journal Zeneközlöny from 1911 (a year before he visited Norway) he mentions Norwegian slåtter and Romanian joe as distinctive types of instrumental folk music. According to the Norwegian Grieg scholar Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe, he probably became aware of Grieg's Slåtter in Paris in 1910.

It has been claimed that Burlington House and Cannons, the homes of the Earl of Burlington and the Duke of Chandos, were homosexual or homoerotic settings and that Handel's presence in these environments suggests that he was ‘gay’ or influenced the secular works he composed there. Examining in detail biographical information about John Gay, Alexander Pope and William Kent, eighteenth-century biographical accounts of Handel and insights from the history of sexuality, this article argues that there is no basis for these claims about the homosexual milieux at Burlington House and Cannons or for Handel's sexuality.

Musical reminiscence or recall of the type that became familiar in nineteenth-century opera was not a common feature of the late Baroque opera seria. Any instances of musical recall that do occur seem to fall into one of two categories: firstly, those where a musical motive, with a particular association, is used to link a series of musical ‘numbers’; secondly, those instances where the repetition of a text later in a scene or act prompts a repeat, or partial repeat of the original music. From amongst the vast corpus of eighteenth-century Italian librettos, Metastasio's Alessandro nell' Indie (1729) is one such piece that contains a notable instance of textual repetition used for the purpose of increasing dramatic conflict. I am not the first to comment on the unusual qualities of this libretto. Several notable scholars, including Friedrich Chrysander, Michael Robinson and Winton Dean, have drawn attention to the musical reminiscences that portions of this libretto have engendered, particularly in settings by Leonardo Vinci and G. F. Handel. Yet there has been little attempt to explain this particular phenomenon in musico-dramatic terms, nor to compare the approaches of such diverse composers as Vinci, Handel and Hasse to the problems that the textual recall produces. This, then, is the purpose of my paper.

The 18 June 1821, the sixth anniversary of the last and decisive battle of the British and Prussian armies against Napoleon, the Battle of Waterloo or Belle Alliance, and the day of the triumphal first performance of Weber's Freischütz, is commonly regarded as the birthday of German Romantic opera, a genre which was to dominate the opera houses of the German-speaking countries until well beyond the middle of the century and which was eventually to create Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, out of Wagner's own German Romantic operas Die Feen, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, which in turn depended directly and to a considerable degree upon Weber's Freischütz and Euryanthe. A day of great importance in the history of music, then, and a day of paramount importance in the history of German music. Again it is Wagner who gave expression to the feelings of what was apparently the vast majority of music-loving and patriotic Germans of his time, in the famous beginning of his report on the first performance of Berlioz' adaptation of Freischütz for the Grand Opéra, the report Le Freischütz. Bericht nach Deutschland, published on 20 June 1841 – and so unfortunately two days too late for the 20th anniversary of the Freischütz première and the 26th anniversary of Waterloo – in the Dresdener Abendzeitung:

Restoration and reproduction have served as two of the primary means by which the present has approached the past. These practices are the focus of Luciano Berio's Rendering and John Cage's Europera 5, two recent works that draw upon earlier compositions. In Rendering, Berio ‘restores ’ the drafts for what would have been Schubert's Tenth Symphony. Contrary to conventional restorations, Berio not only builds up the sketch materials but also fragments them, having Schubert's themes disappear into musical voids. Europera 5 looks back at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera, which is presented in a collage of live performance and reproductions. During the course of the work, opera gradually disappears into a world of reproductions, losing its vocality and presence. In both compositions, restoration and reproduction ultimately make the past more distant and inaccessible. A similar use of these two practices occurs in recent visual artworks by Igor Kopystiansky and Mike and Doug Starn. Both the musical and visual artworks create scenes of decay, in which the past appears as crumbling and the present as an emptiness.

‘There is no music in Chinese music history.’ This paradox is often expressed by music scholars in Hong Kong, a modern metropolis in which Chinese and Western musics and music scholarship mingle and thrive. Highlighting the contrasts between traditional Chinese and contemporary Western views of music and music historiography, the paradox refers to the scholars' observation that Chinese music histories include few descriptions of actual music, and that performances of early Chinese music are often inauthentic. Published accounts of China's musical past include little hard evidence about the structure and sounds of specific musical works. Thus, the scholars argue, the accounts are more theoretical than factual, and their musical descriptions disputable. Public performances and recorded examples of early Chinese music reveal obvious use of Western tonal harmony and counterpoint, and thus cannot be authentic music from China of the past. The scholars' arguments, however, cannot refute that in Hong Kong many Chinese music masters and audiences find the so-called early Chinese music authentic and its histories credible.

The Baroque, which manifested itself in Muscovy during the course of the seventeenth century, has been recognized as one of the most dynamic and influential eras of Russian musical and artistic creativity. When looking at the history of Russian music one has a tendency to equate the new stylistic trends of the second half of the seventeenth century with those of the highly westernized eighteenth, and to dismiss both merely as periods of Western imitation. In reality music manuscripts reveal otherwise, and now that compositions are finally becoming available in transcription we realize that an entire era remains to be recognized and re-evaluated. In art and architecture, that era, known as the ‘Moscow’ or the ‘Naryshkin’ Baroque, is distinguished by a blend of Italian, Dutch, Russian, Ukrainian and Bielorussian features in a style that, although influenced by foreign elements, was none the less distinct from any in existence at the time. The Moscow Baroque embraced many aspects of the arts, from iconography, architecture and the applied arts to literature and music. Endorsed by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (1645–76), foreign influence began to penetrate Muscovy, ushering in a cognizance of Western concepts that began to clash with the rich and long-established spiritual and cultural traditions. In fact Muscovy was just emerging from an aesthetic explosion known as the Golden Age of national artistic expression. Familiar are the magnificent onion-dome churches that were created during the sixteenth century and the flourishing musical centres in Novgorod and Moscow, where composers and singers developed an intrinsically Russian musical style. This was also the age of indigenous Russian polyphony (e.g. strochnoe moskovskoe, strochnoe novgorodskoe, znamennoe and demestvennoe mnogogolosie) which preceded the wave of Western infiltration that inadvertently led to an untimely halt of the evolutionary process of national awakening. Prior to that halt, the Moscow Baroque stands as a brief but unique chapter in the development of the Russian choral tradition.

In 1850, after five years of planning, Liszt began composing music for his Italian opera, Sardanapalo, after Byron. It was central to his ambition to attain status as a European composer, but he abandoned the project halfway through. La Mara (1911), Humphrey Searle (1954) and others declared the manuscript fragmentary and partially illegible, but in 2016 this verdict was categorically overturned when work began on an edition of what Liszt notated: almost the entirety of Act 1. This article draws on an array of sources – published and unpublished – significantly to update our knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Liszt's composition and abandonment of Sardanapalo. In light of his inconsistently Italianate music and idiosyncratic treatment of the libretto, it also reinterprets Liszt's mid-century aesthetic orientation, as a confidant of Wagner and would-be pillar of Franz Brendel's future neudeutsche Schule. By contextualizing key aspects of the uncovered musical score and libretto within Liszt's mid-century writings on aesthetics, it posits character, declamatory melody and the visuality of the stage as (initially) critical criteria in the communication of a literary narrative, and suggests that Liszt's impulse towards symphonic poetry may first have been kindled within the aesthetic potential of opera.

“The music of Waits—rude as may be their minstrelsy—breaks upon the mid-watches of the night with the effect of perfect harmony.” So writes Washington Irving, and though the experiences of those present will perhaps fail to endorse this description, we may, I think, spend an hour profitably in considering the origin, history, decay and disappearance of this old musical combination.

Music in mediaeval drama is, to some extent, a ghost subject. I hope in the course of this paper to enable you to hear nearly all the surviving music from the vernacular drama of late mediaeval England—from the cycles of religious plays known variously as the Miracle Plays, the Mystery Cycles, the Corpus Christi plays. My chief endeavour will be to build up a picture of a lost musical world. But—and this is why it must be described as a ‘ghost subject’—the actual musical remains are tantalizingly small: two English songs in the ‘true-Coventry’ plays; some Latin polyphony in the York cycle; a snatch of plainsong in the Chester cycle. The paucity also of stage-directions about music in some plays (especially of the Towneley cycle) is much to be regretted. But as there are over thirty clear directions in the Chester cycle and the same number in the Hegge plays, we do not work entirely in the dark.

The Sanskrit word tāla, and its common vernacular forms tāl (Hindi) and tālam (Tamil), denote, in musical terminology, both rhythmic organization in general, and specific patterns of organization. Among various non-musical meanings the most significant, perhaps, is ‘slapping the hands together or against one's arm’ (Monier-Williams), since in Indian art-music, patterns of claps and silent gestures with the hands are traditionally used for beating time. The earliest Indian musicological texts show that this practice was already elaborately developed by the early first millennium a.d. In modern practice, tāla implies a steady pulse-beat: no fluctuation of this pulse is permitted, apart from a tendency to accelerate in the north Indian tradition, and music in free tempo (such as ālāp) is not considered to exhibit tāla. Tālā further implies a pulse organized into measures, each measure containing the same number of pulse-beats; the first beat of each measure, called sam, is accented, and is regarded as the culmination of the preceding measure as well as the beginning of a new measure. The measure is therefore conceived, in Indian terminology, as a cycle (āvārd or āvartanam).

This paper summarises the progress of my work on the Henrician set of musical partbooks belonging to Peterhouse, Cambridge. These books will be best known by their old catalogue numbers as Peterhouse manuscripts 40, 41, 31 and 32; recently, however, they have been reclassified as Peterhouse manuscripts 471–474. Along with all of the Peterhouse music manuscripts they are now kept in Cambridge University Library, where, because of their increasingly fragile condition, they are not normally made available to readers. I should like to record my thanks to the Librarian of Peterhouse for permission to examine and handle the partbooks, and to the College Archivist for allowing me to consult the account rolls, registers and other documents of the college.

This paper is basically a study of some of the numerous textual divergencies which exist between the first printed edition of the libretto of Die Zauberflöte, and Mozart's autograph score. I begin, however, with some remarks about a peculiar forgery which purports to be a letter from Schikaneder to Mozart, bearing a date which has led scholars to believe that the composition of Die Zauberflöte was already far advanced by September 1790, over a year before the opera was first performed.

This paper looks at some aspects of the expansion of the role of the orchestra in the early decades of French operatic history, especially after the death of Lully, and in particular at the orchestra's increasing involvement in, and enhancement of, the spectacular and the dramatic. It focuses on three types of scene, in each of which the orchestra plays a key role in the construction of the scene and in supplying its distinctive musical features. The paper is based on part of a thesis which, for reasons' of manageability, set a terminal date of 1715, but I have where appropriate stepped outside diis self-imposed limit

The tendency to accept that music has a social context while resisting its definition as a social commodity is not particular to the conservative wing of British musicology (albeit influenced by Carl Dahlhaus). The aesthetics of European musical idealism have consistently, and since well before Hanslick, opposed any suggestion that ‘serious’ music should be seen or heard to engage with the market-place, let alone that it might, willy-nilly, be in one. The cherishers of musical purity, however, are to be found not only amongst reactionary critics, with their specific culturally inherited involvement with the Classical style. Pre-1914 modernists and decadents saw the market-place as the creation and province of a philistine bourgeoisie and expressed an often uncompromising, anti-popular idealism of their own. Debussy in 1901 stated:

The enthusiasm of society spoils an artist for me, such is my fear that, as a result, he will become merely an expression of society

- a fear that would have been comprehended by the Viennese Schoenberg, who later formulated the belief that

no musician whose thinking occurs in the highest sphere would degenerate into vulgarity in order to comply with a slogan such as ‘Art for all'… . If it is art it is not for all, and if it is for all it is not art … .

This article explores the ways in which audio in the home was figured in (and helped shape) changing consumer and gender roles in post-war Britain. It looks at the ways in which innovations in home-furnishing and audio-equipment design and manufacture created an environment with new tactile as well as sonic qualities; it examines the ways in which changing music styles helped develop new markets for audio equipment and new meanings for audio discourse. But before it does so, the article sets out some arguments on cultural-historical method. Extant academic writing on post-war home audio tends to privilege the study of media representation – and the critique of ideology constructed therein – at the expense of other kinds of enquiry and source-work. In making use of a broader range of sources and interpretative approaches, this piece aims for a thick reading of the ‘social’ along with the ‘cultural’.

In sixteenth-century choral music there are two problems of performance that prove most vexing to sensitive choirmasters and to those musicologists who are hot tone deaf: they are the twin problems of pitch and vocal scoring. There are, of course, those ostriches who cannot see such difficulties, having a touching belief in the absolute quality of the written pitch. Such a fundamentalist faith is not exceeded by the claims of the Jehovah's Witnesses or by the dear old lady who protested against a new translation of the New Testament with the words: ‘The Authorized Version was good enough for St. Paul, and it's good enough for me’. Assuming the present gathering to be rather more scientific, I shall illustrate these problems by concentrating on English music of the period, not because of parochialism, but because of the limitation of time and my belief that our prophets deserve honour even in their own country.