The ‘cultivation of the self’, which Carl E. Schorske has identified as a characteristic of the Viennese bourgeoisie, establishes a ‘link between a devotion to art and a concern with the psyche’. Such a life ‘appropriated the aesthetic, sensuous sensibility’ leading to ‘narcissism and a hypertrophy of the life of feeling’. Szymanowski, who was for many years fascinated by Viennese culture, reflects many of these characteristics. He was, furthermore, greatly influenced by the work of Pater and Wilde, central figures in the English ‘decadent’ scene which, in Arthur Symons's words, was marked by ‘an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity’. It is unsurprising, therefore, to find narcissism appearing as a prominent theme in many of Szymanowski's works.

Robert Schumann's review of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique has attracted continued intensive scholarly attention since its serialized publication in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1835. There is a marked tendency in that attention to focus on a set of closely related critical themes: to use the review as a key to the German reception of Berlioz; to read it in terms of what it demonstrates about Schumann's own critico-aesthetic position; to see it as a model of music-critical practices in the first half of the nineteenth century; to scrutinize it in terms of the insights it furnishes into music-analytical practices. More recent scholarship has also added to this cluster of scholarly topoi the formal design of the text, its polyvalent texture and, in particular, what Fred Everett Maus terms ‘intersubjectivity’, scrutinizing the text for any clues it might offer as to the manner in which constructions of forms of subjectivity are engaged, sustained, problematized or subverted. Maus's attention to this ‘intersubjectivity’ stands as testament to musicology's (somewhat belated) interest in theories of subjectivity (or subjectivities), and opens Schumann's text to myriad new readings. In particular, Maus begins to tease out the text's potential as an artefact for the study of contemporaneous formations of ‘the composer’ as a cultural ‘type’ in the music-critical idiom.

Drawing on writings concerning the cyborg and the posthuman, this article considers songs by Radiohead, Moby and others that use processed voices, digitally generated speech and sampled vocal loops. In these songs the technological sphere is made the locus of expression, while the human voices are mechanized and drained of subjectivity. These pieces – products of a rock band that relinquishes its voice to a computer, and of a ‘techno’ DJ striving to make mechanized dance music sing – can illustrate some ways musicians have used posthuman voices to chart and destabilize the boundaries of race, gender and the human.

Hans Abrahamsen’s recent music has been the subject of much critical and public acclaim, with his output of the last decade finding a new directness of expression even as it incorporates and develops elements of his musical language that have remained consistent over many years. This article examines the use of compositional processes within a number of these large-scale works – Schnee (2008), Wald (2009), the Double Concerto (2011) and Let me tell you (2013) – and explores the ways in which Abrahamsen generates and controls material through a variety of techniques of transformation and repetition. How smaller-scale systems interact to create music of great allusive complexity is considered through discussion of the variation form of Wald; finally, Abrahamsen’s embracing of types of paradox and illusion are presented as strategies to unlock broader aesthetic issues within his music.

The method of determining absolute pitch, to which I shall ask your attention this afternoon, does not pretend to compete in point of accuracy or completeness with some of the other methods which have been employed, particularly in the last few years, with success. But I think it stands alone in the extreme simplicity and general availability of the means which it employs. Of course to determine the pitch of a note you must have the note, and you must also have some standard of time. I hardly want more than that. All that is necessary is two notes on the harmonium, and a watch, and by those means alone I am able to say how many vibrations in a second the notes make. To carry out the observations with ease requires a little more in the way of instrumental assistance, but the feasibility of the method does not at all depend upon this extra assistance.

The reason why music appeals to every side of our nature is that music itself is the result of the activity of the whole nature of a man. Being called forth by the travail of thought, feeling, and will, its effect is the stirring of the thoughts, emotions, and volitions of the listener. It reminds me of one of the natural phenomena in my Oriental country—those mysterious springs that well forth from unknown depths and penetrate into mysterious depths again; the strength which enabled them to break their way from the dark, also enables them to find their path into new depths—the greater the warmth that gave existence to the well, the brighter it sparkles, the higher it rises, and the deeper it sinks again.

In introducing for your consideration this afternoon the subject of memory in connection with piano playing, I can hardly doubt that my subject is one in which every earnest student and every competent teacher of the piano must feel no slight or passing interest. From the time the beginner learns the alphabetical names of the notes of the keyboard, by remembering their position in relation to the groups of two and three black notes, until he reaches — if he ever does — the highest summit of his profession as a pianist, does the cultivation of the power of memory, in one form or another, enter in no small degree into his studies.

The changed position of music in English life during the present century should profoundly modify accepted views of history. Even conservative historians are placing more and more emphasis on what we may call the progress of civilisation; on the formation and disintegration of cultural traditions. Political history is being dwarfed not only by economic history but by the study of the important aspect of man's mind that is represented by the arts. In this tendency there is still a time-lag from the 19th century in that music has so far played only a minor part. The Victorian period knew little of music and cared less: musicians were specialists who were hardly ever invited to join in any discussions on general culture. We recognise the importance of musical history, but have not yet gone far towards digesting it with other kinds of cultural history. When we have accomplished that process it will probably cast fresh light on the traditions of English culture and on our judgment of its present position.

One of Shakespeare's most eloquent eighteenth-century apologists was an Italian: Dr. Johnson's good friend Giuseppe Baretti, who had acquired the taste during his residence in London in the 1750s. When Johnson's Shakespeare edition appeared, Baretti, now back in Italy again, wrote to request a copy: he wished, he explained, ‘to expound the great tragedian to the ladies of Italy’. Baretti was as good as his word, writing in the literary magazine Frusta in January 1764 of this poet who ‘in both the tragic and the comic style stands quite alone, ahead of all the Corneilles, all the Racines, and all the Molières of Gaul’. And it was Baretti who took up arms against Voltaire, whose prestige as a Shakespeare critic had been hitherto unquestioned in France and Italy, publishing in 1777 his Discours sur Shakespeare el sur Monsieur de Voltaire.

The many researchers who have transcribed Tudor music during the last half-century or so have been acutely conscious of the problems of interpreting accidentals in sources. Few, if any, scribes seem to follow a completely consistent or determinable set of conventions, and the difficulties are compounded when manuscripts of different date give significantly different readings. Some editors of Henrician music have taken the principal sources of that period at, by and large, their face value. Others have preferred the evidence of later (mainly Elizabethan) manuscripts on the assumption that they attempt to spell out earlier unwritten practices of various kinds. In a paper published in the last issue of this journal Roger Bray offered a case for the second of these views. The present article seeks, not to disprove his case, but rather to question some of his premises and methods of deduction, and to enter a plea for caution. It does not claim to do more than touch on some of the issues involved.

It is perhaps still true that research into sacred types of music in early seventeenth-century Italy lags behind that into madrigal, monody and opera; it is certainly the case that the textual aspects of sacred music, themselves closely bound up with liturgical questions, have not so far received the kind of study that has been taken for granted with regard to the literary texts of opera and of secular vocal music. This is hardly to be wondered at: unlike great madrigal poetry or the work of the best librettists, sacred texts do not include much that can be valued as art in its own right. Nevertheless, if we are to understand better the context of the motet – as distinct from the musical setting of liturgical entities such as Mass, Vespers or Compline – we need a clearer view of the types of text that were set, the way in which composers exercised their choice, and the way such taste was itself changing in relation to the development of musical styles. For the motet was the one form of sacred music in which an Italian composer of the early decades of the seventeenth century could combine a certain freedom of textual choice with an adventurousness of musical idiom.

In 1977 I discussed some common ways of writing about the social and economic contexts of music, and then suggested alternative procedures. Expressing dissatisfaction with prevailing fashions, that paper was essentially a plea for the use of economic history, recommending its analytical insights and quantitative sense. It sought discussion of typical events, and deliberately challenged the ‘deep-seated antipathy felt by most humanists toward anything that smacks of statistics’. The desired emphasis was also upon ‘thick’ description and analysis, by which one might avoid such contrasted, but equally fruitless, pursuits as unsubstantiated dogma and antiquarianism. Ten years later the invitation to arrange a conference on ‘music in the market-place’ provided an opportunity to look again. There was no attempt to survey current research systematically; less still to restrict subjects and speakers to any particular discipline. Indeed, despite the conference title, conventional approaches to the analysis of markets were scarce, with the notable exception of Julia Moore's paper, an exemplary demonstration of ‘thick’ economic history. Trying to achieve some coherence without imposing a strait-jacket inevitably brought overlaps and gaps. But if penalties were attached to open-mindedness, it also ensured the stimulus of diverse and multi-disciplinary papers, and informal contributions by active participants in the market-place. This introduction is not a summary of the conference, and is not confined to, though it touches upon, what was said there. Schematic, and therefore thin, it merely introduces a few possible themes which are further developed elsewhere, or still await exploration.

In 1816, Richard Fitzwilliam died, bequeathing his important music collection to the University of Cambridge. In 1824 the University decided to allow selections from it to be published. The most important outcome was Vincent Novello's five-volume The Fitzwilliam Music (1825–7), containing Latin church music by Italian composers of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, but there was also an edition by Samuel Wesley of three hymn tunes by Handel to words by his father, and Wesley also projected an edition of motets from Byrd's Gradualia which for financial reasons was never published. This article discusses Fitzwilliam's bequest, the involvement of Novello and Wesley, the two publications that resulted in the 1820s, and Wesley's unsuccessful Byrd project.

In July 1817 Benjamin Flight and Joseph Robson, two of London's most celebrated organ-builders, unveiled their latest concept in organ design — the Apollonicon. This mammoth finger-and-barrel chamber organ, predecessor to the giant orchestrions of the Victorian era, had been five years in the making. And when it opened for performances at the firm's fashionable West End premises, 101 St Martin's Lane, it heralded a new era of evolution for the organ in British concert life.

The ambiguity of the title of my paper is intentional—I wish to speak on “The Teaching of Musical History” in more than one sense. A further preliminary explanation I have to make is this. If I present to this Society a plea for a proper and more general study of musical history, it is not because I think the members to be in need of advice and guidance, but because I look upon them as influential agents able to bring about a change in a now obtaining unsatisfactory state of matters. In short, my object in drawing your attention to the importance of certain facts is to inspire you with missionary zeal, to induce you to go forth and spread the light that is in you among the ignorant, the idle, and the indifferent. This, however, is not my only object. I wish also to lay before you some views of perennial interest, and invite you to discuss them —to discuss them for our own profit and, if possible, for the profit of the world at large.

Focusing on two influential broadcasts staged for British television in 1963–4, this article traces transatlantic attitudes towards blues music in order to explore the constitutive relationship between race, spectatorship and performativity. During these programmes, I claim, a form of mythic history is translated into racial nature. Ultimately, I argue that blues revivalism coerced African American musicians into assuming the mask of blackface minstrelsy – an active personification of difference driven by a lucrative fantasy on the terms of white demand. I ask why this imagery found such zealous adherents among post-war youth, situating their gaze within a longer tradition of colonialist display. Subaltern musicians caught within this regime were nonetheless able to ‘speak’ via sung performances that signified on the coordinates of their own marginalization. The challenge for musicology is thus to heed the relational syncretism arising from intercultural contact while acknowledging the lived experience of African American artists unable fully to evade the preordained mask of alterity.

This study addresses listening as a hinge between therapeutic and musical contexts. In the first two sections I examine the productive confluence of Jean-Luc Nancy's thought and Moshe Feldenkrais's somatic practice. I show that the ‘subject’ is configured as both embodied and enactivist. Drawing on Nancy's work, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud and educational and developmental child psychology, I position the listening subject on a fulcrum of balance and imbalance essential to learning and musical practice. In the third part of this study, I concretize Feldenkrais's ideals of correct action and listening in musical practice. Using Glenn Gould and empirical work on musical practice, I explore the significance of listening between acts of playing. Listening is proposed not merely as a phenomenological form of making sense (Nancy), but as a form of self-negotiation and an enactivist and imaginative space that leads to new possibilities of thought and refinement of action.

In 1965, a short article entitled ‘On the Performing Arts: An Anatomy of their Economic Problems’ appeared in the American Economic Review, the flagship journal of the American Economic Association.1 Written by two Princeton-affiliated economists, William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, the article laid out in eight short pages a powerful explanation for why the operating costs of so many performing arts organizations consistently overran their earnings, and why this tendency had become more pronounced over time. The problem was not that lavish budgets were being spent on productions, nor that musicians’ unions had wrung too many concessions from management. Rather, the problem was more prosaic, having to do with ‘differential rates of growth in the economy’.2 To illustrate the argument, Baumol and Bowen asked readers to perform a thought experiment: ‘Think of an economy divided into two sectors: one in which productivity is rising and another where productivity is stable.’3 For the sake of simplicity, they explicitly assumed a number of useful fictions: that labour can easily and frictionlessly move between the two sectors; that wage increases across the board will keep pace with productivity growth (a standard if problematic assumption in modern economic theory);4 and that the monetary supply is sufficiently controlled to maintain overall price stability. What, given these assumptions, is the outcome of such a stark split in the economy? In the productive sector, the increase in wages that workers receive will be offset by increased productivity. In the stagnant sector, wages will rise but output will not. And if an organization is to avoid bankruptcy, the only way to do so is by raising prices to cover the rise in labour costs. (Remember, one of Baumol and Bowen’s working assumptions is that wage increases will keep pace with productivity growth, in both productive and stagnant sectors.) Yet this solution to the problem creates another one, since over time prices in the unproductive sector will increase at a much faster rate than those in the productive one, making the products of the former unaffordable to an increasing number of workers.

During the past forty years much of the finest pre-Restoration service music has come back into the cathedral repertoire. So many are the distinguished scholars who have contributed to this welcome revival that one hesitates to single out any by name. Nevertheless some small tribute must be paid to Dr. Fellowes who has been responsible for publishing so much music of the period and who has written several valuable historical studies, including one on the subject of English Cathedral Music. As Dr. Fellowes pointed out in this very book, however, there is still much to do before a definitive survey of pre-Restoration church music can be attempted. Many sources have yet to be collated and much music scored. With this in mind I began some time ago to catalogue the contents of all the known sources of early seventeenth century anthems. I would like this evening to discuss one or two points which have resulted from my work, all of which are connected, directly or indirectly, with the anthem.