Beethoven's sharp criticism of Mozart's Don Giovanni was an expression of uncompromising moral and artistic standards. One wonders, however, to what extent it also reflected an aristocratic Viennese bias against a plot disreputable per se, which in addition had been handled by a librettist and a composer neither of whom had really achieved an approved social status in the capital of the Habsburg Empire.

One of the more nefarious generalizations of popular musical history is that which asserts a change from ‘modality’ to ‘tonality’ around the year 1600. The old canard is nowadays scarcely met with in its pure form, but it is surprising how much it still influences even sophisticated discussions of tonality both before and after that date. Lowinsky in his epoch-making Tonality and Atonality in Sixteenth-Century Music is largely concerned with the ways in which sixteenth-century music foreshadows the tonal procedures of the baroque and classical periods. In his articles on ‘Tonality’ and ‘Harmony’ in The New Grove, Carl Dahlhaus, while offering a series of widely-ranging definitions of tonality, and while recognizing also the capacity of melody to be tonally organized, nevertheless regards the major and minor scales as the essential pre-requisites of ‘harmonic tonality’, and its growth as a phenomenon of music composed since 1600. I find myself in sympathy only with the wider definitions of tonality there given, principally that of Fétis, and it will be the function of this paper, first, to argue against the retention of narrower definitions, and, secondly, to put the case for recognizing that the development of harmonically controlled tonality occurred much earlier than 1600. A reading of Dahlhaus's articles (which I take to be an authoritative digest of his considered standpoint as well as an informative summary of the points of view expressed by many theorists down the centuries) has also reminded me how much I am opposed to theories of melody and harmony which depend on acoustic absolutes, and to functional theories of harmony, principally that of Riemann, which assert a rigid hierarchy of chords, or fail to recognize the historical development of harmony from counterpoint. Some of these prejudices will surface in this paper, but they are not its primary purpose.

Jacopo Peri, the so-called ‘inventor’ of opera, is well known to music historians. To concentrate solely on his Dafne and Euridice, however, is to present a distorted picture of this court musician. The time has come to seek out a more balanced view of a composer who was not quite the revolutionary that the history books would have us believe.

We are relatively well informed about both the theory and the practice of embellishing late sixteenth-century music. Treatises by Bassano, Bovicelli, Conforto, Dalla Casa, Rogniono and others supply numerous and elaborate decorative formulas which were intended to be superimposed upon the unadorned melodic lines of madrigals, chansons, and even motets by Cipriano da Rore, Alessandro Striggio, Philippe de Monte, Andrea Gabrieli, the ‘inviolable’ Palestrina, and their contemporaries. Most of the treatises offer as well examples of actual music embellished in this way so that we can know for certain how virtuoso soloists, both vocal and instrumental, transformed apparently sober polyphonic music into accompanied monodies filled with fioriture and the most extravagant virtuoso display.

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.

The year 1911 was in many respects a landmark in Prokofiev's early career as a composer. He was then twenty years old and a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, where his studies at the time included classes in conducting with Nikolay Cherepnin, and an intensive piano course with the famous Anna Nikolayevna Yesipova. He was already known in St. Petersburg as an exponent of his own piano music and had frequently appeared in this role at Nuvel's Evenings of Modern Music as well as at student concerts. He had also performed his works in Moscow, and the enthusiastic reviews of his compositions which Myaskovsky and Boris Asafyev contributed to the avant-garde magazine Muzyka had further promoted his reputation in the more musically-conservative capital. In 1911 his music appeared in print for the first time, when Jurgenson published the First Piano Sonata and the Four Piano Pieces of Op. 3. The same year saw the beginnings of the First Piano Concerto, Op. 10, which was to have its successful premiere in Moscow the following summer with the composer as soloist. By 1911 also, Prokofiev had composed the Sinfonietta, Op. 5, and the two short symphonic poems. Dreams, Op. 6, and Autumnal Sketch, Op. 8.

Until comparatively recently the history of musical notation has been synonymous with the desire of the composer to exercise an increasing degree of control over the performance of his works via the medium of the written score. Viewed in historical perspective, it will be seen that during the last thirty years virtually every aspect of this complex composer/performer relationship has been radically changed—in many instances the outcome has been an almost total reversal of roles.

One of the most important poetic forms in Java is inseparably connected with melody: the form known as tembang. Tembang have always been sung, never spoken. The word ‘tembang’ itself is used in two senses: it refers both to a broad category of verse-forms and to the various melodies associated with them. There are very many different types of versification which come under the general heading ‘tembang’, but the three most important are tembang gede, tembang macapat and tembang tengahan.

Carlo Goldoni left his native Venice to practise law in Tuscany for five years starting in 1743. Up to this point he had written some twenty comic librettos, most of them Intermezzi in two acts for two or three characters, but some of them full-length dramas in three acts for several characters. La Contessina, which ranks as the latest and finest of his dramas in the latter category up to this time, received its première in the San Samuele theatre at Venice during the Carnival of 1743. In his edition of the playwright's complete works, Ortolani suggests that Goldoni's model for La Contessina was a specific Neapolitan comedy, Madama Ciana, with text by Barlocci and music by Gaetano Latilla. The satire in both turns upon a poor family with pretensions to noble rank, manifested most appallingly in the person of the daughter and the question of her dowry. The music of the original production of La Contessina is lost; all we know is that the piece was a pasticcio, involving among others the young Jommelli. There were no revivals, which tells us something even so: Venice at this time was in no position to compete with Naples in the production of original comic operas.

When the subject of research into Italian solo song in the first half of the seventeenth century comes under discussion – in itself a rare enough event – such discussion is mostly limited to the Florentine style of solo song with chordal accompaniment, and its followers. The harmonic daring, the declamatory ideas, and the ornamental practices of such solo madrigals have proved more interesting to scholars than strophic, dance-like compositions, which have tended to be relegated to the sidelines as unimportant, at best entertaining, little tunes. Even Nigel Fortune, who argues in his highly convincing thesis, presented in several articles, that the Florentine style led only to a dead end, while the future of solo song lay in the strophic compositions, has not yet been able to rewrite the history books, immune as they seem to change.

In England more than in any other country, music has been constantly associated with the performance of stage plays. There is very early evidence of this. In the Miracle Play (1512) the minstrels are asked “to do their diligence” before the prologue and at the end “To give us a daunce.” Shakespeare relied on music to emphasize certain dramatic situations. No fewer than some three hundred times do his stage directions demand the employment of music. I do not speak of references to music on the part of his characters; these are frequent, always correct, and often jocular, but to actual demand for music,—such as “Music plays “—“Soft music within,” and the like. Dr. Naylor in his interesting little work “Shakespeare and Music” declares that such stage directions as these appear no less than forty-one times, music during speeches seven times, and that eighteen times a march is required. Of songs—catches—dirges—trumpets—hautboys, countless examples are to be found in the plays. Very often Shakespeare makes quite subtle distinctions to suit the situation in his directions for music. In “King Lear” there are some interesting examples of this. The first appearance of Lear in regal state is heralded by a Flourish of Trumpets. Later on, in Scene 4, Horns are directed to be played before his entrance. This is no doubt done with a view to denoting his lessened state. He has also just returned from hunting. This shows, I think, that more than a casual thought was given to the matter. Again, in “Lear,” in Act 4, we find the direction “Soft music playing.” Lear is on a bed asleep. That Shakespeare intended the music to continue through the scene and dialogue is evident, as the doctor refers to it in his lines “Louder the music there.” At this point the dramatist no doubt' felt that the beautiful words of Cordelia, “O my dear father ! Restoration, hang thy medicine on my lips,” would be greatly helped by the musical support. The very next scene opens with drums beating and soldiers marching, music very different in character from the “Soft music playing” of the previous scene This I feel sure was not mere accident, and that Shakespeare well knew the value of this contrast which at the same time connects the two scenes.

This article investigates the contribution that musical participation makes to people's lives by reporting on a study carried out at the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in August 2001 in Buxton, Derbyshire. The audience are shown to have a strong commitment to the musical genre and its preservation through live performance, whilst the performers are more likely to value membership of their society and the personal satisfaction that comes from successful performance. The festival therefore serves diverse purposes for those who attend it, and raises further questions about the interaction between social, personal and musical experience at events of this kind.

It so happens that almost all the music which Schenker edited had previously appeared in editions by Hans von Bülow. On each occasion, Bülow's edition provoked from Schenker what he himself described as his ‘frequent and energetic criticism’. Examining the basis of these criticisms may lead us to a better understanding of Schenker's own editorial work – work which had an importance within Schenker's total output that theorists, if not musicologists, have tended to underestimate. For Schenker, editing meant restoring the masterworks of the past to their authentic state (the title-page of his edition of the Beethoven sonatas describes it as a ‘reconstruction’) and thereby ensuring their survival in a world that, in Schenker's eyes, had lost the capacity to appreciate their significance. And such editing called for respect for the masterworks and a profound understanding of them; hence the extraordinary virulence with which Schenker attacked editors such as Bülow, who in his view lacked these qualities. In his study of the G minor Symphony, Schenker wrote: ‘Editions of Mozart's works no longer have anything in common with the original manuscripts.’ And he added: ‘Then is Mozart dead?’ This extreme sense of the editor's responsibility – a responsibility that extended to the life and death of the masterworks – informed everything that Schenker did. I would go so far as to say that Schenker's theory of levels was conceived as, more than anything else, a decisive contribution to editorial method. And to say this entails a considerable revision of the image of Schenker prevalent today.

THIS, in a letter to Mary Anne Wood dated 7 February 1842, is the earliest specific mention of Bennett's last piano concerto, which was never published and for many years was missing. Only a ‘tantalising fragment’ of a two-piano reduction made by the composer's son and biographer, J. R. Sterndale Bennett, was known to researchers. Autograph manuscripts of two versions of the work, and two sets of orchestral parts copied for different performances, have recently come to light during the present author's research on Bennett. The discovery enables a fresh assessment to be made of an ‘unpublished work of outstanding importance’ by a composer of relatively few large-scale pieces, composed at the end of his most creative period and when he was arguably at the height of his powers. It also presents the possibility of the concerto's performance and publication, 150 years after its conception. A summary of all the sources now known is given in Table 1.

Your Association is so kind as to give me the opportunity to discuss some results obtained in the realm of musicology during recent years, and I will gladly use it to show you by a single example how much that branch of science is able to contribute to our knowledge of the history of civilisation.

When, some time ago, I was invited to read a paper before this Association, and I ventured to select Bach's ‘Art of Fugue’ as my theme, I did so because the study of the work had recently afforded me much enjoyment, and circumstances had led me to the conclusion that it was neither widely nor deeply known. When, however, I began to prepare for my task, I soon discovered that I should be in the position of the preacher who, in a thinly attended Church, scolded his congregation for the neglect shown by staying away from public worship, and then had to apologise when he remembered that his remarks could not apply to those present. I find myself in a somewhat similar position, when I reflect that many in this room must know the work on which I have undertaken to offer a few remarks, far better than I do. I can only ask their indulgence, and rely on the belief that in proportion as Bach's ‘Art of Fugue’ is known, its value and importance will be acknowledged, and its manifold beauties appreciated.

The first aesthetic impressions of an artist's childhood are rarely quite obliterated in his subsequent career. Often we may trace some peculiar quality of a man's genius back to the very traditions he imbibed in the nursery. Therefore, despite Browning's sarcasm, it is not always mere sensational curiosity which prompts the question “What porridge had John Keats?”

This article interprets Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci (1892) as a voicing of Italy's ‘Southern Question’ – the problem of the underdeveloped and socially troubled Italian South. Pagliacci juxtaposes cultural symbols that include a commedia dell'arte figure representative of the Italian South and antique genres perceived to be emblematic of ‘civilized’ northern culture. By interpreting the interaction of costumes and musical styles, I argue that the work incorporates images of southern Italy – that ‘violent’, ‘uncontrollable’, yet ‘picturesque’ region – into a broader, northern-dominated conception of Italian nationhood (an interpretative mechanism typical of contemporary image-making media such as magazines and novels).

The subject which I have chosen for the consideration of the Musical Association presents to the most casual observer so many obstacles in the way of treatment that it will be easily believed I approach my task with feelings of diffidence. The largeness of the field for discussion, the difficulty of treating the musical or, to me, unfamiliar portion in a manner worthy of this Association, and the fear lest the medical portion may be tediously or too technically dwelt upon, have tended to render me distrustful of success. Were I not well assured of the generous forbearance shown by professional men to those who have real desire to contribute to our common knowledge, I had many times turned back from the plough to which I have put my hand.