This article addresses the early Italian reception of Verdi's Messa da Requiem (1874), premièred in Milan on the first anniversary of the death of the novelist Alessandro Manzoni. Previous literature has focused on issues of musical genre and the work's political implications (particularly its connections with Manzoni and with late nineteenth-century Italian revivals of ‘old’ sacred music). The article examines, instead, the curiously pluralistic concerns of contemporary critics, as well as certain aspects of Verdi's vocal writing, with the aim of destabilizing traditional dichotomies such as old/new, sacred/operatic, vocal/instrumental and progress/crisis. It argues for more broad-ranging political resonances of Verdi's work, suggesting that the negotiation of a variety of boundaries both in Verdi's music and in its contemporary discussion made the Requiem dovetail with wider cultural attempts to define Italian identity.

Mr. Stephens.—Before the paper is read, I wish to make a few observations on the discussion which ensued on the very interesting paper which was read at the last meeting, On that occasion Mr. Whomes challenged the audience, and I accepted the challenge, to name the key of every piece that he played, the pianoforte being concealed from us. I put down on paper, and read afterwards, the key of every piece which he played, as they appeared to me at least, and the Chairman, who had sat at the pianoforte, came afterwards to the table and read out the key in which he had seen Mr. Whomes play. In every case the key in which Mr. Whomes had played on the pianoforte was a semitone higher than the one I had named. Now I am very anxious that any impression should be removed that I had been guilty of a failure on that occasion. It was simply that Mr. Whomes had, for the special purpose of his lecture, caused the pianoforte to be tuned a semitone lower; consequently, I was right in every instance, and Mr. Whomes has kindly come here on this occasion to corroborate what I say, and acknowledge that, for the purpose of his lecture, he was obliged to practise what, applied to my own particular case, would appear a deception, and he will acknowledge, I believe, that I was right in every instance as regards the true pitch, and when a selection from a Concerto of Beethoven in C minor was played, I said, not in C minor, but in B minor, and so it proved. After several of the audience were gone away, we compared the pianoforte with another one in the room, and found it was exactly what I have said, half a tone below pitch; therefore, whatever the position may be with regard to tone colourists, I wish to claim that I was in every instance correct in my judgment as to the key which was played.

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.

The bicentenary of a major composer performs a variety of functions, some praiseworthy and rewarding, some trivial. First and foremost it is an occasion for reassessing his stature at the present time, and partly to this end it calls forth a vast number of performances of his music. Some of the performances are likely to be of unknown or little-performed works, and these, as well as the greater and more familiar pieces, are valuable material for making a second assessment of the composer, this time in relation to his contemporaries. It is from a study of that sort that we gain a surer picture of the circumstances that aided and that limited his achievement, and of the degree to which he was governed by the artistic conventions, habits and ideals of his age, even where he is recognized to have been at the same time the possessor of an original, indeed unique vision. But there is at least one more type of assessment that is surely appropriate to a bicentenary and not necessarily touched on by the other two: an assessment of his working methods. This is my justification for approaching a theme that might otherwise appear somewhat grandiose, namely a discussion of how Beethoven composed.

There are periods in the history of music when the problems of musical form seem to have been solved once and for all. At such times, there are fixed formal schemes, there are species each of which has its average length, and with each of which the musical world of the particular time can associate something definite, familiar and often apparently unchangeable that has always been and always will be. With a perfectly safe tradition behind them, the composers of such a period see no need to strive for new and ever new forms, and are content to demand a certain amount of freedom or variety within the established tradition. Such a time was, for instance, the age of Mozart, Beethoven and the Romantics, which had its Sonata form with three or four movements each of which was a type that meant something more or less well known to everybody, which had also the Rondo form, Aria form, Opera and Lied form, and so on.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Of all the Indian arts one of the most popular is that of music, and perhaps of them all the least known to Europeans. Almost every one who has been in India knows that native music exists, but there are comparatively few who recognise the deep hold that it possesses over Indian minds. Europeans, as a rule, leave India with the idea that the national music of the country consists only of noise and incessant drumming, varied, perhaps, by nasal drawling—equally repulsive as unmusical. That there is a real musical art—with an employment of various scales, abounding in rhythmical beauty and full of passionate expression, seems to many almost incredible. And yet this is so.

The emergence in 1756 of the Journal encyclopédique, published in Liège (later in Bouillon), encouraged an international readership to view cultural developments across national boundaries. An anonymous review of Rameau's new version of Zoroastre was prefaced by ‘Mémoires d'un musicien’, whose author recalls significant events in his musical education and life history to date. These include extended travels to England and Italy. The narrator describes meeting Handel and also Marie Sallé in London, and details various contents of Handel's library supposedly seen and discussed on more than one visit, deduced as occurring late in 1746. These accounts are analysed and contextualized, and a report on archival searches for the author's identity provided, together with an English translation of the 1756 text.

To all concerned with the presentation of music the study of the audience is a matter of obvious moment. To executants and composers who wish to be heard it is vital.

The Tudor Era was remarkable for the interest shown in music by all classes of society. Educationists as Sir Thomas Hoby through his translation of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, Sir Thomas Elyot in The Boke of the Governour, Roger Ascham in Toxophilus, and Richard Mulcaster in The Elementarie write at length on the value of musical education.

In the early months of 1637, a Roman opera company of six singers with instrumentalists presented Francesco Manelli's Andromeda in the newly reopened Teatro San Cassiano at Venice. These performances marked the beginning of a vital period of development in opera: the new art form of drama in continuous music had hitherto been largely the privilege of the aristocratic few, but was now presented to a cross-section of Venice's richly varied population. Andromeda and its successor, La Maga Fulminata, given by the same company in the following year, aroused in Venetian dramatists, composers and audiences alike a voracious appetite for operas, and were the source of an almost continuous flow of such works presented in Venetian theatres throughout the rest of the century.

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.

Charles Villiers Stanford belongs to history.

He died on 29 March, 1924, a voluntary exile from his native country. For Dublin, city of bis birth, had what proved almost its last sight of him in 1870. It was the year in which he exchanged the Liffey for the Cam. Thereafter he crossed and re-crossed the Narrow Seas, searching the continent for stimuli his native city, for all its fantastically brilliant wit and fascinating society, could not provide.

In taking the subject of “Cadences and Closes” as the theme of my paper to-day, I am of course aware that an excellent paper, under the heading “Closes,” was read before the Musical Association by Mr. F. Corder on January 7, 1889. This paper, however, was in the main an exposition of the wondrous variety and exceptional treatment of the Cadence in the works of modern writers, and I believe that the subject of the Cadence from an historical point of view has not been put before you.