Few extant collections of late-medieval polyphony have been linked definitively to composers whose works they transmit. A dearth of documents that are literally ‘authoritative’ – in the sense that they come directly from the hand of the author – is not surprising in light of the small survival rate of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts and the likelihood that pieces were not written down for the first time in versions for presentation. Most surviving manuscripts appear to be several generations removed from written originals. Nevertheless, presentation manuscripts and other anthologies were not necessarily compiled by scribes in isolation. When composers were nearby they probably were consulted, either directly or through scribal access to authoritative written exemplars. Therefore, despite a paucity of documented relationships, some extant manuscripts may have been compiled in close association with the composers whose music they contain, perhaps even under their guidance.

This article explores the treatment of space in Gustav Mahler's First Symphony from the perspective of the composer's experience as a conductor of opera. It considers the ‘theatrically’ located offstage utterances in the work's introduction in light of passages from Beethoven's Fidelio (Act 2, scene ii) and Tristan und Isolde (Act 2, scene ii), and against the backdrop of Mahler's controversial attempt to assign the Alla marcia section from the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to a small offstage orchestra. By considering in turn the implications of Mahler's treatment of offstage space on the work's overall structure, specifically with respect to the moment of ‘breakthrough’ in the first and last movements, I suggest that Mahler ultimately re-establishes the vitality of the symphony as genre at the intersection between the waning symphonic tradition and the immediacy of operatic convention.

In 1058 Pope Stephen IX visited Montecassino, of which he had been made abbot only shortly before his elevation to the papacy the previous year. This German Pope was the former papal chancellor Frederick of Lorraine, the second northern abbot of Montecassino. On the occasion of this visit the Pope strictly forbade the singing at Montecassino of ‘Ambrosian chant’: ‘Tune etiam et Ambrosianum cantum in ecclesia ista cantari penitus interdixit.’

Michael Gallope’s book Deep Refrains is an in-depth study of the ineffable core of musical experience.4 But it engages ineffability without eliminating the pragmatic material of music’s economic, technological and even ethical mediations; and it posits a synergistic relationship between these realms. Gallope casts equal doubt on the determinism that construes music’s ineffability as wholly absorbed in mediation and on the vitalism that construes it as radically open. Framed by and theoretically grounded in the thinking of four twentieth-century philosophers (Ernst Bloch, Theodor W. Adorno, Vladimir Jankélévitch and Gilles Deleuze), the book deftly steers between the Scylla of music’s irreducible sensuous materiality (and its attendant invitation to decipherment) and the Charybdis of its elusive ineffability (and its attendant vanishing act in the face of decipherment). The book begins by reflecting on the fascinations and prohibitions of the harmoniaia in ancient Greek philosophy. Already here, Gallope revises the standard interpretation of these founding texts, demonstrating the ways in which Socrates, Glaucon, Aristotle and others in fact consider music as at once deeply mysterious and also strictly rule-governed. This conception of music’sperplexing precision is shown to be shared in ‘global’ contexts less available to music history, including (for example) the Ikhwan Al-Safa, an eleventh-century priesthood of Islamic scholars. At the same time, Gallope draws attention to the continuity between simplified taxonomies of the ancients and the instrumentalization of their axioms for contemporary engagements with affect, so rampant in the era of emerging neuromedia. Instead of recoiling from music’s indeterminacy (retreating to silence, say, or insisting on music’s unspeakable mystery), Gallope attempts to unpack the critical potential at the heart of auditory experience. On the other hand, he argues, such potential is not harnessed by marking the movements of music’s conceptual nomenclatures alone. Noting that music ‘never speaks like a language, nor is it entirely nonlinguistic’, Gallope seeks to account for the specificity of its ‘vague impact’.5 In other words, while there is a residue of conceptual mediation at work in all sonic encounter, music’s ‘sensory impact’ cannot be subsumed by that residue.

The recent publication of Heinrich Schenker's Das Meisterwerk in der Musik (1925-30) in a translation by Ian Bent, William Drabkin and others reminds us that in the highest modern traditions textual criticism and exegesis — editing and analysis — are inseparable. Much of Schenker's commentary on Mozart's Symphony in G minor, K.550, is devoted to isolating discrepancies between manuscript and edition, and some of his most fascinating analytical suggestions grow out of just this. Conversely, analytical strategies may have editorial consequences, and decisions taken by editors of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe have been challenged justly on stylistic grounds. If a passage occurs twice in a composition, for instance, does it have to be articulated in the same way on both occasions? And if there are differences in the articulations, what exactly do they tell us? Given the intricacy of the modern analytical debate over Mozart, such questions may not be answered by editors alone. Nor can editions be undertaken without reference to changing social circumstances: for composers in general have shown themselves more than ready to provide their own variants for different performing situations (again, Mozart's re-orchestration of the Symphony in G minor is a case in point). Indeed, in another field, scholars have asked that cultural issues should also influence editorial practice; these issues similarly require learning and sensitivity, and again deserve attention.

The spectre of music as a transcendent artistic ideal figures prominently in the literary criticism of Victorian aestheticism, though the extent to which aestheticism of the movement actually influenced the thinking of British composers has received only marginal scholarly attention. By the first decades of the twentieth century, aestheticism had become decidedly unfashionable even in literary circles, so it is unsurprising that composers of the time would choose to distance themselves from its rhetoric. The prevalence of a certain type of metaphysical conception of the creative act of the artist and intuitive act of the critic, however, may suggest an important remnant of aesthetic influence. Drawing from new critical trends which themselves mirror those of aestheticism, this article posits a revised conception of aesthetic discourse as an activity of self-cultivation, and examines its role in shaping the lives of selected British composer-critics from the early part of the twentieth century. By casting the aesthetic ethos not as a doctrine but as a set of internal practices that inform the creation and subversion of doctrine, the article demonstrates how a ‘relational musicology’ can act as a tool for historical inquiry.

The Franciscan mission repertory in California, c.1770–1830, includes numerous collections of chant and polyphonic music. Scholars have assumed some direct connection with music used in Mexico, but this assumption remains difficult to prove on the basis of the surviving Mexican repertory, which is mostly associated with cathedrals. Chant and polyphonic settings from the Liturgy for the Dead in Californian sources are compared with those from Mexico. Mexican cathedral music, even in the 1790s, reveals connections with pre-Tridentine liturgical traditions; but the California repertory is based on different liturgical and chant traditions. This supports William J. Summers's hypothesis that polyphonic works in the California Missions are based on a peripheral tradition associated with the religious orders.

In 1913, at the Théâtre des Arts in Paris, a controversial but highly successful ballet choreographed a circus-style pantomime to the music of Fauré's Dolly Suite. With its apparently incongruent relation of dance to music, the ballet displayed, as one reviewer put it, ‘criticisms in action’. This article investigates how we might conceive the production as an act of musical and cultural criticism, by examining its close relation with contexts such as early comic film, music-hall entertainment, the children's literature market, medical and anthropological theories, and surrealist thought. The ballet implicitly challenged conventional interpretations of Fauré's music as reflecting a particular perception of childhood – one which was rather too close to the sentimental attitudes vehemently dismissed in contemporaneous literature. The production was an important manifestation of an emergent understanding of the ‘childlike’ in early twentieth-century French culture – as a condition enlightened by irrationality, with important physiological traits.

An abyss separates the research of Mahler from that of social historians on anti-Semitism in fin-de-siècle Austria and Germany. Mahler specialists tend to study the assaults he endured in terms of the centuries-old intolerance. Social historians, however, have pursued a different tack. They trace the liberal thought of the mid-nineteenth century, the legal emancipation of the Jews and its aftermath to the rise of ‘new’ anti-Semitism in the 1870s, centred in Vienna. The reasons why Mahler resigned as director of the Vienna Court Opera involve many more factors and subtleties, even concerning the expression of anti-Semitism. It is on these elements that this article attempts to shed light.

In October 1945, five months after the end of the Second World War in Europe, German critic Edmund Nick wrote the following in the American-sponsored Munich newspaper Neue Zeitung:

In this article I argue that Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony assumes a pivotal role in advancing the romantically tinged narrative in Luchino Visconti’s film Senso (1954) through a politically recoded message. Visconti offers in this film a reflection upon the political climate in Venetia during the Risorgimento through the pre-eminent role of music. In particular, Bruckner’s music emphasizes the condition of the Venetians under Austrian rulers by dominating as an oppressive and overpowering force, not unlike the Austrian supremacy over the north Italians. Bruckner’s music, which relies on a decisively Wagnerian idiom, conveys throughout the film ideas of betrayal, on both the microlevel and the macrolevel. Such betrayals refer to the Christian Democracy, which excluded the Marxist partisans from governing post-war Italy. These events mirror, for Visconti, the failed revolution of the bourgeois-driven Risorgimento in the 19th century due to the idleness of the aristocracy. Interpreted through Visconti’s Marxist ideology, Bruckner is thus an indicator that the hegemony of the elite remained in place, unchanged and unaltered. As the sonic representative of the Austrian monarchy, it opposes the Risorgimento ideal of the bourgeois class and reassures the supremacy of the ruling class.

It has been said, with a great deal of truth, —and I think that few of those present will want to question the validity of the statement,—that a love of discussion is one of the most elementary and most permanent characteristics of the human race. It is, indeed, natural and right that our desire should be to exercise actively those gifts which have placed us above the lower animals; and the progress towards freedom of thought and conduct in all spheres, which is a mark of the English speaking races beyond others, is assuredly due to our highly-developed love of combat in word as well as in action. So true is this, that as a nation we are commonly accused of being willing, and even anxious, to maintain a position we have no belief in, provided only we can thereby provoke and sustain an argument.

In venturing to offer for your consideration a few thoughts on “Judgment and Taste with regard to Music,” I might almost take as my starting point, if not exactly as my motto, the words of the Laureate with regard, not to music, but to the spirit or tendency of the age generally:—

French Baroque composers, like their counterparts all over Europe, regarded the bass viol, the cello, the bassoon and, in some circumstances, the double bass as suitable sustaining continuo instruments. The choice of one or another, or a combination, depended no less upon circumstances than it did on the desire for a specific stylistic nuance or timbre. In this paper I propose to examine the evidence – in memoirs and other accounts, and in manuscript and printed scores – that documents the rise and decline of the bass viol and the emergence of the cello as a chamber music instrument. The nature of the musical evidence is often contradictory in itself, but ultimately it is indicative of a larger process, of which the use of the viol and the cello were a significant part: the assimilation of Italian genres into the French musical idiom.

The subject of this paper deserves an entry in music dictionaries, yet it has received none, no doubt because the Hunt's Up has been studied not as an entity but as different things: a ground, a type of song, a few pieces of instrumental music, a musical genre, a custom. To my knowledge, no writer has discovered what if anything beyond a name relates the various aspects, though it is in the ways they are related that the importance of the Hunt's Up for the history of English music is to be found. The purpose of this paper is to establish what those relationships are. My indebtedness to the work of other scholars – William Chappell, Anne Gilchrist, and Claude Simpson, to name but three – will be evident to anyone who has worked with this subject.

‘Music in 18th-Ccntury Oxford’ perhaps most immediately evokes the names of Handel, Haydn and the Holywell Music Room. But these represent only part of a continuous tradition of music, richly cultivated in Oxford society and established as important in various aspects of Oxford life. The title of this paper might more accurately have been phrased ‘Music in the University of Oxford in the 18th Century’, although in fact, then as now, town and gown appear closely connected from a musical point of view. Music in a university context has received concentrated scholarly attention with regard to an earlier period, but there seems to be no equivalent study of post-Renaissance music from this particular angle. Nor does there appear to be any published survey of music in Oxford. Apparently no one has previously put together information on music in 18th-century Oxford, except, partially but most valuably, the Rev. J. H. Mee in his book on the Holywell Music Room, and Charles Abdy Williams, whose lists of musical degree-holders are complemented by general commentary on university music. In the New Grove article on Oxford, the period up to and including the 17th century, and the 19th and 20th centuries, are, quite rightly, treated to extended discussion; little, however, is said to link the 18th century historically with either of these periods. Yet it was in the 18th century that the outcome of those weekly music meetings which had begun at Oxford during the Commonwealth was seen in the Holywell concerts, and that an interest in early music, again traceable back to origins in the preceding century, developed in Oxford circles; and both of these, and other, aspects of music in Oxford were then taken up into various 19th-century developments.

The object of this paper is to bring before your notice the clavier or keyboard stringed instruments that preceded the pianoforte; to make it evident, by performance upon instruments of various kinds, wherein they differed from the pianoforte and from each other, and to show, as far as is in a short time possible, the historic development of composition for them and of the corresponding technique. The instruments shown, taken in the order of illustration, are an Italian trapeze-shaped spinet of sixteenth century model, an English transverse spinet of late seventeenth century; a Flemish double keyboard harpsichord, dated 1614; an English double keyboard harpsichord, dated 1771; and a German clavichord made about the middle of the last century. In order of invention the clavichord was first; it will be seen why I prefer to place it last in the historic order of illustration. The use of the spinet began about the year 1500; it was nearly contemporary in its start with the larger harpsichord, and both remained popular until nearly the close of the eighteenth century. Relatively they were met with much as grand and smaller pianos are met with now. As I have said, the clavichord or keyed monochord was invented and came into use earlier, and most likely in the fourteenth century—about the time of the composer Josquin des Près; but it was a pitch carrier or interval measurer only for a very long while, without the least suggestion of independent musical effect. The dawn of such effect in keyboard stringed instruments was due to the invention of the spinet jack, with its quill, or perhaps, at first, brass plectrum, and little cloth damper. This was in the last years of the fifteenth century. As far as we know, independent instrumental compositions or separate accompanying parts to the voices did not exist until about 1529; the keyboard instruments of all kinds and even the lute, viol, and psaltery, were treated as voices, and as such were submitted to the interweavings of contrapuntal ingenuity. When an instrumental treatment, as apart from vocal, arose, it was by grafting upon the counterpoint and canonical imitation, the devices of variation, a natural and world-wide tendency, accomplished chiefly by figuration and passages contrived to display executive skill. The great secular revolution which, following the invention of printing, ushered in the sixteenth century, brought about the recognition of the people's song and dance which the domination of church modes and school theories had hitherto kept out of notice. From this time came about, by degrees, the substitution of the major and minor scales for the ecclesiastical modes, helped no doubt by the facilities the keyboard instruments, including the organ, gave to the practice of harmony, upon which our modern European music rests.

The subject of modern music presents us with some of the most actual, and at the same time controversial problems with which musicians are faced to-day, actual in the sense of affecting directly the livelihood of countless composers and instrumentalists, controversial as a result of the multiplicity of conflicting opinions expressed by musicians and non-musicians alike, and the heat with which they are contested. In such circumstances the consideration of the subject by a learned society such as the Musical Association is important in the very highest degree. Only musicians who are in the habit of looking at their art in a detached and scientific way and from a historical point of view can hope to throw any light on or provide any basis for the fruitful discussion of the questions involved. The present paper is an attempt to clear away some of the difficulties in understanding the trends which can be seen to exist in the music which is usually described as modern, and to provide some objective standards of judgment, which, while not entirely beyond the influence of personal opinion, are yet not merely the individual subjective reactions of like and dislike for any particular work, which are not infrequently dignified by the name of musical criticism.