Vivaldi's indebtedness to Roman models in his formative years as a composer has generally been recognized, although the Roman link is often viewed simplistically and inaccurately as an apprenticeship, stylistically speaking, with Corelli. A more careful review of the evidence leads to the conclusion that the Corellian features in his first three published collections were acquired at second hand via a slightly older generation of Venetian composers (Gentili, Albinoni, Caldara) rather than through independent study of Corelli. Undeniably, the pioneering concertos of op. 3 (L'estro armonico, 1711) betray the strong influence of the Rome-based composer Giuseppe Valentini, whose Concerti grossi, op. 7, had been published the previous year in Bologna But the few manuscript works by Vivaldi that survive from this early period (notably the sonatas RV 60 and 779, and the concertos RV 402, 416 and 420) offer clear evidence that for ordinary purposes he remained as close as any of his Venetian contemporaries to the norms of the local tradition.

The singing of metrical psalms, canticles, some anthems and a few hymns in the ‘old way’ constituted almost the sole musical activity in English parish church services after the Restoration. By the start of the eighteenth century a reform was under way. Parish clerks ceased to line out the psalms for the benefit of congregations. As the clergy and gentry generally disdained to assist the improvement of music and only the wealthiest urban churches could afford organs, congregations took their lead from choirs trained by itinerant singing-masters. Church music became divided between the art music of cathedrals, chapels and rich parishes and the popular psalmody performed elsewhere.

The precious collection of manuscript scores and printed libretti dating from the late seventeenth century and housed today in the Biblioteca Estense at Modena is ample proof that Duke Francesco II d'Este (1660–94) was one of Italy's most generous patrons of music. Indeed his library, which good fortune has preserved almost intact, is an indispensable resource for the study of oratorio, opera and instrumental music in northern Italy in the last quarter of the century. Its contents show him to have been a man of catholic and modern taste, acquiring and promoting works by living composers active in Rome, Florence, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice and, of course, Modena. On the evidence of the Este music collection, historians have been consistent in applauding the cultural achievements of Francesco II's reign and yet, surprisingly, there have been no detailed studies of the way in which the duke exercised his patronage.

The music of the twelfth-century song Dulcis Jesu memoria has been almost entirely neglected in modern scholarship, though its text (or rather a version of it) is well known in settings by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century composers. This article presents a new edition and translation of the song, and seeks to interpret its music and text as partners in an exegetical whole. The song's complicated relationship with the sequence genre proves a fruitful backdrop against which to interpret both text and melody, and analysis of the song's only notated manuscript source leads to new conclusions about the purpose to which the song may have been put by the manuscript's first readers.

Sheffield pop band Pulp's album This is Hardcore (1998) problematizes media constructions of fame, masculinity, youth and sexuality as self-aggrandizing fantasies. Pornography and glamour function in the album as cyphers for the disparity between fantasy and reality - a disparity fuelled by the media and their highly alienated cultural forms. The album's critique of these fantasies is made both in its subject matter and through the alienated subject position it solicits - a subject position at odds with constructions of macho masculinity as the protagonist in sexual encounters, and with constructions of fame and stardom. Drawing on media theory, I situate the album as part of a more general critique of spectatorship and voyeurism, and of the forms of cultural consumption (including music) which encourage passivity and disengagement.

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.

In 1773 Johann Christian Bach filed a bill of complaint in Chancery for breach of musical copyright, initiating what was to become a landmark case in British copyright law. Bach claimed that the publishing firm of Longman, Lukey & Co. had brought out unauthorized editions of two of his compositions: a ‘new lesson for the Harpsichord or Piano Forte’ and a ‘new Sonata’ for keyboard and viola da gamba.

The subject of my paper is the use of new technologies in serious musical creation. Although I cannot develop the comparison with popular music and its mass market, one will understand implicitly the importance of the fact that ‘all of my story’ is set within the institutions and environment located on the edge of the market. My aim is not to show why diverse technologies that have appeared in the last 40 years have been exploited by composers, but rather how innovations such as electroacoustic and computer music were able to ‘succeed’. I employ the word ‘success’ in the organizational sense: it is the lasting formation of new segments of musical creation and the mobilization of composers, of partners from the scientific world, and of the technical and financial resources for establishing these new segments.

The object of this paper is to draw attention to a bye-path of musical history. The Sol-fa syllables now play an important part in elementary musical education. It may, therefore, be worth while to give a brief account of their birth and adventures.

It is forty years since Willi Apel published his important article which linked Frescobaldi's keyboard music with that of the contemporary Neapolitan composers, Mayone and Trabaci. By drawing attention to generic, formal and stylistic features common to the music of Frescobaldi and the Neapolitans he established a more balanced outlook on Italian keyboard music of the seventeenth century, and also pointed to Cabezon as an influence on Mayone and Trabaci. There is, however, a case for reconsidering this current view in the light of the artistic contacts between Naples and Ferrara in the last decade of the sixteenth century, and for examining the possible origins of some of the compositional processes that have appeared to link Frescobaldi to his southern counterparts. Professor Apel singled out features common to Frescobaldi, Mayone and Trabaci; and more recent work by Roland Jackson has established further musical evidence to support the specific influence of Trabaci on Frescobaldi's chromatic compositions and toccatas, and to suggest a more general pattern of musical practice in Naples, exemplified in the chromatic and other compositional procedures found both in Trabaci's music and in the works – vocal as well as instrumental – of Gesualdo and de Macque. Amongst these procedures is the device of inganno which Jackson has identified in some of Frescobaldi's mature chromatic music.

The front cover of Cod. 17561a in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, bears the following inscription: ‘Dieses vollständige Requiem, bestehend aus Bl. 1–64, wurde im Jahre 1838 angekauft’ (‘This complete Requiem, consisting of ff. 1–64, was acquired in 1838’). Similarly, on Cod. 17561b we read: ‘Dieses unvollständige Requiem ist aus zwei Bruchstücken zusammengesetzt: (1) Bl. 65–86 (alt 11–32) wurden vom Abbé Stadler gekauft. (2) Bl. 87–99 (alt 33–45) wurden vom Hof-Kapellmeister Eybler geschenkt’ (‘This incomplete Requiem is assembled from two fragments: (1) ff. 65–86 (olim 11–32) were bought from Abbé Stadler. (2) ff. 87–99 (olim 33–45) were presented by Hof-Kapellmeister Eybler‘).

The article discusses various historiographical problems created by Soviet music and, more broadly, music under the so-called ‘totalitarian’ regimes for the conventional modernism-driven narrative of the twentieth century. It reviews a number of existing challenges to the dominant narrative within musicology and related fields such as art and architectural history, and it proposes ways in which we can move forward. In conclusion, the author considers the new challenges to the breaking down of cold-war barriers, not only in a historical sense, but also today, in the midst of a new cold war.

London in 1500 was not the vast metropolis that we know to-day; it was a small walled city only about one square mile in area. Within that square mile was concentrated much of the wealth of the whole kingdom. The city's prosperity reached a peak in Tudor times when foreign wars closed up avenues of foreign trade upon which Norwich and Bristol relied; as a result of this, London alone, which had built up strong commercial ties with the Netherlands, was able to maintain any substantial continental trade; and here it naturally expanded rapidly. It is important to emphasise this accumulation of wealth in the City, for at a time when the uses of money were much more restricted than they are to-day, the effect was an ever-increasing splendour of religious observances and secular entertainment.

The Renaissance attitude to art as craft is reflected in a veritable cult of competitive setting testing the composer's ingenuity and invention. Already in the fifteenth century one finds abundant evidence of this trend in rival versions, sacred and secular, by famous professional musicians of chansons like ‘De tous biens plaine’, ‘J'ay pris amours’ and ‘Fors seulement l'attente’. A similar situation is found in the poetry of the time: thus in the fifteenth century one finds numerous rondeaux with the same incipit but with different continuations, while the sixteenth century provides a parallel case with the résponse (or rebours) which borrows its form, ideas, images and even whole lines from the model. The entire neo-Petrarchist repertoire is emulative, and the vogue of the blason, instituted by Clément Marot in exile at Ferrara in 1535, was overtly competitive.

This article engages with issues of musical historiography and politics – mainly in the 1930s and 1940s – through the example of Edward J. Dent, a towering figure of international musical and musicological life during that period. Dent's career was tightly interwoven with musical and musicological practice both in Britain and in the wider Western world. It offers a fascinating access point to European musical modernism on the one hand, and to mid-century concerns with the uses of music history on the other. In this article, I focus on these aspects of Dent's career and their intersections by exploring first Dent's involvement with the International Society for Contemporary Music, before turning to two further and closely related issues: Dent's scholarly work of that period – especially his turn to Handel – and his involvement in international cultural politics during the 1930s and 1940s.

In real life as well as on the theatrical stage, the voice is just one out of the many external features of a person such as facial expression, gestures and general appearance which inform us about his inner character. In opera, because of its very nature, the singing voice assumes a more dominant role. In analogy to the visual mask of old (the persona in the original meaning of the word), which conveyed to the theatre audience the character of the dramatic role, the voice type allocated to an operatic part can be regarded as an auditory mask, which through its distinctive tone quality provides an impersonation of the operatic character. In the same way as the visual mask was intended to give a broad idea of the kind of character appearing on the dramatic stage, the auditory mask of the voice type is meant to be expressive of the character type represented by the operatic personage.

The growth of the public concert was, perhaps, one of the most important factors which influenced the course of music in England towards the close of the seventeenth century. A number of music clubs were in existence before the Restoration as we know from Pepys and Anthony à Wood, but these, one gathers, were principally for the mutual delight of their mainly amateur participants. Cromwell, too, invited the members of the House of Commons to hear ‘rare music’ at Whitehall in 1657, but this was a State rather than a public occasion. The public concert, as we understand the term, did not come into existence until after the Restoration, when social conditions were established which were conducive to its success. The centralization of social life in London which followed the resumption of Court activities there created a large new audience, eager for all forms of entertainment. The influence of the King's personal preferences has perhaps been overstressed, but it cannot be denied that his hedonistic inclinations set a pattern of behaviour which was only too readily followed by London society. The theatres, closed during the greater part of the Commonwealth period, flourished once again, and in 1672 John Banister established a series of public concerts at Whitefriars which became the model for many similar ventures, at York Buildings and elsewhere.