The Studio di Fonologia Musicale of Milan, Italy's first electronic music studio, opened in 1955. Housed in the national broadcasting (RAI) studios in Milan, the studio was founded by two celebrated Italian composers: Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. The institution is often remembered nowadays for being the first electronic music studio to focus its activity on the human voice. As I argue, this focus was not only of an aesthetic nature, but rather reflected long-standing political and intellectual conceptions of voice, speech and public space that were rooted in Italy's early days as a republic, and in mid-twentieth-century Milan as the flagship city for this newly achieved political modernity.

This article argues that songwriting can be an autobiographical activity. I trace a long-standing mistrust of self-expression in popular music through a branch of scholarship fixated with performance and personification, demonstrating its underlying affinities with post-structuralism and modernist dreams of impersonality. What we have lost as a result of this undue insistence on mediation is an awareness of the two-way traffic between life and lyrical craft. A poetics of song should pay increased attention to this intricate relationship – not reducing lyrics to biographical contingencies, but rather viewing autobiography itself as a complex process of self-reading, a public act of autobiographical making. My argument is illustrated with reference to three contemporary singer-songwriters who have interpreted aspects of their lives through song: Vic Chesnutt, Sun Kil Moon (Mark Kozelek) and Anohni (formerly of Antony and the Johnsons). Their work ultimately traverses and obscures the interstices between experience and imagination.

This article takes a site-specific, interactive sound installation called Pleasure Garden as a space for thinking about contemporary forms of musical experience. I develop a relational account of the ‘co-reception’ of Pleasure Garden, not centred on listening subjects, but distributed across audience members, artists, researchers and the more-than-human assemblage of the installation itself. I also discuss the effects of several overlapping cultures of ‘audiencing’ associated with Western art music, sound art and other forms of cultural experience – variously individualistic, distracted and participatory – characteristic of late capitalism. Tracing how Pleasure Garden both responded to and was interrupted by these wider forces, I take this case as suggestive of a deep ambivalence: that musical experience is at once powerfully conditioned and generatively uncertain. Throughout the article, problems of method, interpretation and representation intertwine, raising questions about how to study forms of musical experience that evade conventional ethnographic enquiry.

The purpose of this paper is to describe some aspects of the agenda of listening in the Western tradition. Ancient and modern versions of some of the myths of listening (Orpheus, the Sirens) are compared to illustrate what might be at stake in the activity of listening. A basic contrast is drawn between ancient rhetorical ideas of the power of music to affect the listener and the demand of instrumental music, from the late eighteenth century on, that we understand what the music wants of us. The paper continues with a discussion of some ancient ideas about philosophical listening, which precludes talking and is directed both inwards and outwards, and it ends with some suggestions about themes that a history of listening might pursue.

The story that Mozart was commissioned to write three piano quartets for publication in Franz Anton Hoffmeister's subscription series has proved to be remarkably resilient in the Mozart literature. According to the account that first appeared in Georg Nikolaus von Nissen's biography (1828), Hoffmeister gave Mozart an advance payment for the works, but decided to withdraw after the first quartet, K.478, was poorly received. The article exposes a series of flaws in this narrative by locating Hoffmeister's edition of K.478 in a wider contextual and bibliographical framework than has been hitherto attempted. A revised chain of events, based on a new understanding of Hoffmeister's business, suggests a more complex narrative for Mozart's dealings with the publisher. It also prompts us to reconsider the circumstances surrounding Mozart's composition of his two completed piano quartets and the reception of his chamber music in Vienna before 1791.

In the paper which I had the honour of reading before the Musical Association in January, 1900, I spoke of the innate musical genius of the Russian people, and of their blind, instinctive groping towards a desired end—the foundation of a School of National Music. I showed how the ideas of Varlamov, Cavos, Lvov, Verstovsky, and other musicians at the beginning of the last century, tended continually in this direction; but how none of them—gifted amateurs as they were—had been strong enough to achieve their purpose. Finally, I related how Glinka, with the intuition and power which belong to genius alone, caught up the spirit, not only of Russian music, but of the music of the neighbouring East—and in “A life for the Tsar” and “Rousslan and Lioudmilla” realised the long dream of a national epic opera.

In a monograph entitled Zdenko Fibich published within a year of the composer's death, the musicologist Zdeněk Nejedlý asked the following question: ‘And who was more versatile than Fibich?’ The answer as far as Nejedlý was concerned was: ‘No one in the whole of the nineteenth century.’ Many of Fibich's contemporaries were quite certain that he occupied a position equal to his more internationally successful colleague Antonín Dvořák. Evidence of his contemporary standing is abundant, and his position in the firmament of Czech composers was characteristically summed up by William Ritter in 1896 when he described Fibich as the ‘Son’ in the ‘Holy Trinity’ of Czech music, in which Smetana was, naturally enough, the ‘Father’ and Dvořák the ‘Holy Spirit’. In an obituary article the critic Emanuel Chvála had no hesitation in putting Fibich next to Dvořák as ‘… the most eminent of our contemporary composers’. Nejedlý's assertion concerning Fibich's versatility is not entirely unworthy of examination. He contributed to many genres and expanded the scope of his theatrical activities with his cultivation of scenic melodrama. As a composer of opera Fibich stood aside from his Czech contemporaries in his deliberate avoidance of folk-orientated material and his compulsive interest in theatrical experiment. His intellectual demeanour led to collaborations with the finest Czech librettists of the time, and a close identification with the views of the aesthetician Otakar Hostinský (1847–1910). Believing strongly in the role of experiment in art, 4 and with a firm commitment to the principles of Wagnerian music drama, Hostinský was an ideal partner for the composer in the opera The Bride of Messina, the work which set the seal upon Fibich's position as an innovative force in Czech musical theatre.

I would like to begin my paper with a quotation from Sir John Hawkins's History of Music, because it was his short note about the music of Christ's Hospital, which set me off on my present investigation.

‘In this Hospital anno 3 Jac. a free singing school was founded and endowed by Robert Dow, … wherin, as in the College of Dulwich … the children were to be taught pricksong. These, as far as can be recollected, are the only endowments of the kind since the Reformation. At Dulwich the boys are taught musical notes, and are able to chant; but at Christ's Hospital they sing only psalm tunes, and those by ear.’

In my last paper on the development of Russian opera, I spoke of Dargomijsky and Moussorgsky, whose dramatic and realistic tendencies separated them to some extent from the direct influence of Glinka; and I also gave some account of Serov, the one thorough-going disciple of Wagner whom Russia has produced. To-day, I return with Borodin to that original type of national, lyric opera which Glinka inaugurated in “A Life for the Tsar.”

In The Times of 24 April 1963 there appeared a headline which read: ‘The Computer as Composer?’. A mathematics lecturer in Bristol had been reading into a computer the elementary rules of melodic construction, in order that the computer should be able to compose, in return, well-constructed melodies. The lecturer had spoken of programming the characteristics of the great composers, as to melody and harmony, and of getting back ‘original compositions in their style’. We in this, the first paper to be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association on computers and their applications to music, are not going to make such extravagant propositions. We aim to give an introduction to the ways in which a computer may be used for musical analysis, and at the same time to convey the ‘feel’ of working with a computer. We shall present two analytical projects which have been designed specially for demonstration in this paper. But before presenting our analytical projects, a few preliminary words must be said about the computer and how we use it. We shall speak very briefly about the nature of a computer, about the way in which we submit work to it, about the way in which we present music for it to ‘read’, and about the way in which we tell the computer what it is to do with that music.

The Attwood papers recently entered the public domain, having been acquired by the British Library. This is fitting, for they constitute a kind of national monument—a vital force that has made itself felt upon English musical thought and training for nearly two centuries. Ever since Attwood brought them back from his period of study with Mozart in Vienna in 1785–7 they have been used repeatedly for teaching purposes, and handed on with reverence from master to disciple (thus escaping total destruction, the usual fate of such documents). Upon Attwood's death in 1838 the papers passed to his pupil John Goss, who had already published the Minuet in C major, perhaps the best known of Attwood's pieces rewritten by Mozart, in his Introduction to Harmony and Thorough Bass (1833).

Although domestic music appears to have flourished in England during the Madrigalian Period, i.e., from 1588 to 1638, as witness well-known and often-quoted passages from Morley's “Plaine and Easie Introduction,” 1597, and Peacham's “Compleat Gentleman,” 1620 (a work, by-the-bye, just reprinted by the University of Oxford), any idea of a public performance does not appear to have suggested itself. The professional musician of that day was either a member of a Cathedral choir or was attached to some family of distinction, as, for instance, Christopher Simpson to that of Sir John Bolles. The pursuit of music as a relaxation was of necessity confined to those who possessed means and leisure. The political troubles effectually put a stop to such pursuits, with the result that several well-known musicians, among them Captain Cook and Wm. Lawes, found their occupation gone, and from a feeling of loyalty actually took up arms in the Royalist cause, in which the latter lost his life.

To try to understand the vocal styles demanded by the famously exacting Giuseppe Verdi, I consider a wide range of evidence, including the composer's scores and letters, contemporary treatises, reports on performances, and selected early recordings. On the basis of this material, I contend that the vocal styles known and advocated by Verdi differed radically from what is proposed by most modern pedagogues and nearly always heard in opera houses today. An examination of the evidence, as it bears on specific technical and expressive procedures, sheds light on nineteenth-century vocal style, offering novel interpretative possibilities to the modern performer.

The music of many cultures is characterized by lengthy musical repetitions, especially where ceremony, text and dance determine the amount of music needed. In Western Classical music, formal repetition is an especially prominent feature. Considering the number of pieces in the customary concert repertoire which include repeats, even the casual observer may be surprised to see only a dozen column inches devoted to the topic in The New Grove Dictionary of 1980, with only five bibliographical references, all to peripheral sources. The dictionary entry is, however, well focused, with examples to support its general theme that ‘the evolution of the notation, its exact interpretation and the practice of making repeats .. raise certain problems, not all of which have obvious solutions’.

In September 1507, James IV of Scotland issued a licence to the Edinburgh printers Chepman and Millar to produce, among other books, mass books, manuals, matin books and breviaries ‘efter our awin Scottis use’. This same licence (see Appendix 1) prescribes that these new books be used throughout Scotland and that all imports according to Salisbury use be banned. This Scottish use, therefore, was considered to be a separate entity – but what was it?

Liztanei, the third movement of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, op. 10, and the first of its two vocal movements, is cast in the instrumental form of theme and variations. Schoenberg's analysis of the movement in ‘An Introduction to My Four Quartets’ identifies ‘a total of five variations, a coda … [and] a short instrumental postlude’. His conception of variation form as ‘a very strict form’ in which freedom is ‘absolutely to be forbidden‘ underlay Schoenberg's decision to construct the movement as a series of interlocking variations, for this decision was motivated to a large extent by his concern to curb the expressionistic tendencies of Stefan George's text. In the same essay the composer writes:

It has been generally recognized that the music of the Lock Hospital chapel was an important new influence in English and American church music during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The chapel attracted fashionable congregations and thereby disseminated an elegant, theatrical type of hymnody that was far removed from the norms of church music, whether in cathedral, town church, village parish or dissenting meeting-house. Many hymn tunes first used at the Lock Hospital became enormously popular; some still remain in common use; and their style became the model for a ‘school’ of hymn tunes that remained in vogue for several decades.

Bartók's essay ‘The Relation of Folk Song to the Development of the Art Music of our Time’, published in 1921, was written as he was working on the score of The Miraculous Mandarin. Three main issues in the essay, the question of origin, the position of the creative subject with relation to ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’, and the character of the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, are given fresh contexts by the musical work's emphasis on the character and function of differing types of eroticism. The possibility of cultural renewal based on the recovery of erotic self-expression in the face of the oppressive, objective conditions of the modern metropolis emerges as a central concern. This links Bartók's work to that of the Sunday Circle group of intellectuals, including Karl Mannheim, György Lukács and Béla Balázs, who sought an affirmative alternative to Georg Simmel's pessimistic view of the ‘tragedy of modern culture’.

Ferruccio Busoni could be called an advocate of absolute music because of his frequent description of music as ‘absolute’ and his discussion of music as consisting of pure tones and rhythms found in the vibrating universe. However, he developed idiosyncratic theories about the term, its usage and its ideal manifestation in Tonkunst that remain largely unexamined in scholarly literature. True, Carl Dahlhaus noted Busoni's use of the concept to refer to music unconstrained by traditional forms, but this is merely one aspect of Busoni's views, which also, paradoxically, allowed for and included the visual and explicit connections to culture. The hybridity of Busoni's notion, which this article explores through an examination of writings and representative compositions, is especially relevant for current musicological discourse about absolute music. Sitting uneasily with Dahlhaus's more consistent view of absolute music as music apart from text or programme as well as with new musicological approaches that seek to refute the notion of music's autonomy, Busoni's view of absolute music offers a fascinating middle ground between compositions as discrete artistic artefacts on the one hand and as representations of their immediate culture on the other.