The music of The Whole Book of Psalms (first printed in 1562) was not a product of English tradition, but a new congregational system brought home from Geneva. Psalm tunes in Edward VI’s time had been secular, iambic and based on dance rhythms; in so far as Thomas Sternhold’s metrical psalms were sung in church, they were chanted by choirs to Sarum tones. The tunes created for congregational use by the Marian exiles had to satisfy Calvin’s principle that they must be distinct from secular songs. They avoided strong rhythms and imitated the Huguenot psalter, which catered for a very different French prosody. Elizabethan congregations were enthusiastic about singing, but did not take to many of these tunes. Evidence shows a growing tendency for the printed tunes to be ignored in practice, and to be replaced by orally transmitted ‘common tunes’ restoring the secular Edwardian idiom. These, rather than the Elizabethan tunes, became the lasting model for the English hymn tune.

On the last occasion on which the subject of Spanish music was discussed at a meeting of this Association, we were able to listen to the finished product—a product “finished” in every sense of the word, for, as members will recollect, the illustrations, consisting of a number of Spanish madrigals, were beautifully performed by the English Singers. This time, I should like to begin at the other end, as it were—with the remains of early Spanish music as they confront the researcher, and the traveller. For the researcher is not confined to musical MSS. or to the statements of the theorists. Sculpture, ivories, miniatures and contemporary descriptions in prose or verse, often throw more light on the conditions of performance and the character of the music itself, than the actual MS. with the musical notation (supposing it to exist and to be intelligible), and they are certainly more illuminating than the treatises on musical theory.

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.

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.

But surely the founding of the Royal Society was an act of some wisdom? It set the example for the French Academy, and Paris set the fashion for the courts of Europe. Philosophy was recognised in high places, and the cult of orderly thought encouraged. How important this fashion of an age of reason proved to be we know from every aspect of the eighteenth century history : in the musical works of the classicists just as much as in British business enterprise. There was a belief in the virtues of rationalisation amounting almost to a religion.

The outlines of the history of Madama Butterfly are well known. The first performance took place at La Scala on 17 February 1904, and was one of the most spectacular flops ever seen at that famous opera house, or indeed at any other. Puccini immediately withdrew the opera and made a number of revisions. A few months later, on 28 May, the work was performed at Brescia, and was received enthusiastically by public and critics alike. Further alterations were made to the score during the next two and a half years or so, and by early 1907, following a series of performances in Paris, the version we know today had been arrived at.

A problem that continually makes its presence felt in the medieval field is that of the use of instruments in church. The sources of sacred music offer little internal evidence, and for a variety of reasons the evidence of the literary and visual arts must be treated with reserve. Many of us would now probably subscribe to F. Ll. Harrison's view that ‘… there is no evidence that any instruments but the organ were normally played in church. …’ It is with the exceptions implied by the word ‘normally’ that this paper is concerned. Documentary evidence shows that other instruments were indeed played in church—that has never been disputed. Granted that these occasions were in some way exceptional, we must set out to answer certain questions: in what circumstances were other instruments used ?—what instruments were involved?—and what traditions, if any, are represented by these apparently isolated occasions? It is the attempts to answer the last of these, especially, that have caused disagreement in the past.

Papers communicated to learned societies generally deal with the results of investigation into some little understood subject of historical interest. It is not often possible to carry that subject up to modern times and to discuss its present-day implications. That, however, is what I am able to do this evening. I have chosen to take the last years of the early keyboard instruments as my starting point, to draw attention to activities relating to them during the nineteenth century, and to outline the circumstances in which the manufacture of the harpsichord and clavichord began once more towards the end of that century. That will bring us to a date some sixty years ago, and I think that is far enough back to enable one to place those happenings in an historical perspective.

Attempts to promote the aesthetic prestige of serial and post-serial music were grounded in theories of material and philosophies of history. As composers explored new aspects of sound and subjected these to rational organization, they saw themselves pushing history forward, with new musical materials providing physical evidence for each new stage of progress. The continual search for new material fashioned a thread that bound together vastly different personalities, and similar ideas about material and history linked a diversity of approaches to, and reactions against, serialism. Believing themselves to be renouncing a subjectivity made untrustworthy by the recent past, many post-war composers turned to something larger to guide their compositional decisions: to the objective dictate of historical progress. Such deference to a fictitious construction of history veiled subjective aesthetic preferences and provided a way to legitimate new techniques with the authority of ‘higher laws’. This article reconsiders post-war serialism in central Europe from the perspective of theories of material and examines how these theories coupled aesthetic and social concerns with philosophy of history to justify compositional techniques.

In the year 1954, two great Mozart scholars, Schmid and Giegling, brought to light a transcription for Harmonie of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail in the archive of Prince Schwarzenberg at Ceský Krumlov in southern Bohemia. Their reports caused no small excitement, even though they merely suggested the possibility that this was the long lost Harmonie transcription of the opera made by Mozart himself. They reported that the manuscript was in the hand of Haydn's copyist, Johann Elssler. It is the only anonymous Harmonie transcription of a Mozart opera in a group of five scored for pairs of oboes, English horns, bassoons and horns; all the others bear the name of Johann Went. Went is known to have made a transcription of Die Entfuhrung for pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns; this was advertised in the Wiener Zeitung in 1784 by Lorenz Lausch, and the Entfuhrung transcription now in Florence probably represents a copy of this version. Schmid and Giegling mentioned obvious similarities between the Florence and Krumlov transcriptions, and noted the possibility that Went had copied Mozart's transcription.

In a major publication of 1983 Bruno Netti identified the explanation of musical style as a central problem in ethnomusicological research. This essay is intended to offer a partial solution of that problem, seeking to define musical style as an abstraction of the matrix of cognitive and physical aspects which constitute human music-making. In the cognitive part of this equation I include the critically important role played by social context, concurring with John Blacking's statement that ‘the creation of a musical style is the result of conscious decisions about the organization of musical symbols in the context of real or imagined social interaction’. However, in this category, I accord equal recognition to the body of musical and music-related knowledge held by a musician or any other member of society, whether this knowledge is implicitly assumed or explicitly acknowledged, historically conditioned or geographically referent, abstractly theoretical or firmly practical. The ‘conscious decisions’ Blacking points to are indeed made in the actual or perceptual domain of social interaction, but they are also considered from the cognitive perspective of acquired musical thought. Physical ingredients which help form the concept of musical style include the limits and possibilities of the human body and its movement patterns and material factors such as the parameters of any musical instrument (size, shape, posture, potential playing techniques, etc.) and performance location.

A few puzzling features in the text of Figaro have been discussed for a very long time within the vast literature on this opera. Nevertheless there is little in the libretto that Lorenzo Da Ponte based on Beaumarchais's revolutionary play La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro, and in the music that Mozart then provided for it, which is really problematical. After all, almost the entirety of Mozart's long autograph score has come down to us, even though today Acts 1 and 2 are divided geographically from Acts 3 and 4 - the first two acts being in the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Berlin (DDR), and the last two (which left the Berlin library in World War II) being at present in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska at Kraków in Poland. (The whole autograph is fortunately accessible today.) It would seem that the only portions that have not come down to us in Mozart's handwriting are a couple of passages for recitative, and some of the supplementary wind parts for the last act's finale; we have these merely in the handwriting of copyists, included inter alia in scores made for early performances, or for sale in Vienna and other cities. Several of these copyists' scores will shortly be discussed here.

Orlando Gibbons was undoubtedly one of the greatest of English composers. Indeed, his music ranks among the finest written by any European composer of the day. His musical gifts received early recognition, and in 1605, at the age of twenty-one, he was appointed an organist of the Chapel Royal. John Bull and Edmund Hooper were among his colleagues. Doubtless, much of the organ music was written at this time, but since it is all stylistically mature it is impossible to date it accurately. However, some of the best keyboard music was included in Parthenia, and this dates from 1612–13. It is likely that much of the dance music—both for keyboard and for strings—was written after his appointment in 1619 as a musician of the Privy Chamber, for dancing was much in vogue at court and dance-music was enjoyed also in its own right. In 1623 Gibbons was appointed organist of Westminster Abbey, and two years later he died, at Canterbury.

The first movement of Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937) has been noted for its Beethovenian use of sonata form and shares a number of features with the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata. This article examines the relationship between these two composers and these two works, starting with an examination of Bartók's use of sonata form. It attempts to establish whether Bartók borrowed gratefully from his predecessor in an attempt to ‘synthesize’ old and new, folk and art, or whether he misread Beethoven in the anxious process of carving a place for himself in the musical canon.

It is easy to waste words on problems of definition while avoiding the wider significance of what one is supposed to be defining. In the case of a composer's sketches, an adequate terminology can best serve as a means of identification: to place any further claims upon it, especially in view of our underdeveloped concepts in this field, is to invite confusion where little enough order already exists. Nevertheless, it is worth spending a moment on the question as far as Wagner is concerned, if only because the problem of nomenclature has reached a point where it threatens to confuse a discussion of the sketches themselves—a discussion which in any case is only just beginning. This paper has no claim to finality, but rather attempts to clarify an unfortunate and premature entanglement.

Until recently Donizetti was not respectable enough for musicology. He was remembered for two or three comedies; yet he and Rossini both devoted their mature years almost entirely to serious opera. Of Donizetti's 70 stage works, a few of which are lost, exactly half belong to the opera seria class (that includes two French grand operas); three are early works on Classical subjects, nine are opere semiserie, and 23 are comedies or farces. But those figures do not give a true picture. In the first place, twelve of the comic operas but only one of the serious are in a single act. Second, if we take the end of 1828 as a dividing line—which is roughly when Donizetti reached maturity—we find that before that date he composed 29 operas, of which only six are serious, whereas after it he produced eight comedies (five in one act), four semiseria (one in one act), and 29 full-length serious operas. Clearly he regarded Romantic tragedy as his main line.

The well-known Treatise on Harmony, by Alfred Day, M.D., has already been prominently brought under the notice of this Association at least three times :—first, by Mr. Charles E. Stephens, in his paper entitled, “The Fallacies of Dr. Day's Theory of Harmony, with a brief outline of the Elements of a New System,” read during our First Session, 1875; secondly, by Mr. Gerard F. Cobb, M.A., whose paper on “Certain Principles of Musical Exposition, considered educationally, and with special reference to current systems of Musical Theory,” occupied our attention for two consecutive meetings of the Tenth Session, 1883–4; and lastly by Mr. Ebenezer Prout, B.A., whose paper on “Some suggested Modifications of Day's Theory of Harmony,” read as recently as the fifth meeting of the present (Fourteenth) Session, must be still fresh in our minds.

The years from 1795 to 1815, which separated the height of Cimarosa's career from the beginning of Rossini's, represent a watershed in the history of Italian opera, for they brought the final stages of the transition from Metastasian opera seria to nineteenth-century melodramma. Such now obscure composers as Simon Mayr, Ferdinando Paer, Niccolò Zingarelli and Stefano Pavesi – and their librettists – shaped this transition, and their works embody the continuities of development which link those very different operatic traditions. Consequently, these works hold the key to understanding the genesis of conventions which have habitually been attributed to Rossini and provide for modern scholars an essential context for assessing Rossini's particular role in establishing the new operatic prototypes.