This study presents the sketch of a theory of musical listening based on historical considerations of the role of music in Western culture. A universal element of musical listening might lie in the notion that all music is the product of a fundamental human capacity to hear, harnessed in countless ways by diverse cultures. Secondly, there is the type of music, covering very broad historical and cultural boundaries, that presupposes attentive listening or even a participating audience; this is perhaps the simplest and most familiar category, at least in the West. Finally, there is the range of music that might contain an ‘implied listener’, something which I suggest is much more elusive, with specific historical and cultural boundaries within Western modernity. While this sense of the implied listener – someone developing the sense of a consistent and unitary self over time – is understandable today and might well still be employed in a broad range of new music, I would suggest that it now reflects only one way of being human among an alarmingly broad array of choices.

The particular listener-friendliness of later eighteenth-century music is no secret; it has been an article of faith for some more recent writers, but has not that often informed the basic approach to this repertory. Theories of rhetoric, schema or topic are certainly premissed on such an understanding, but do not necessarily address what the author believes to be a central aspect of the musical aesthetics (and indeed of the wider culture) of the time: sociability. Yet music, especially instrumental music, arguably forms the most powerful expression of sociability that has reached us from that time – not merely reflecting wider practices but actively providing models for human behaviour. I discuss some of the common syntactical mechanisms that convey the sociable impulse, in line with Judith Schwartz's definition of an art that ‘communicate[s] by means of pattern rather than momentary passion’, and with particular reference to Pleyel, J. C. Bach and Haydn.

Even the most enthusiastic admirer of fourteenth-century isorhythm would have to admit that the collection of French motets published in the series Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century must present a somewhat forbidding appearance to the casual reader. Certainly a large number of the surviving pieces are characterized by a uniformity of melodic, harmonic and rhythmic style which contrasts all too clearly with the remarkable diversity to be found in contemporary song repertories. And while, upon closer acquaintance, characteristics individual to particular works may increasingly be discerned, it remains surprising just how alike many of these pieces continue to seem to be. That this is not simply a failure on the part of the reader to distinguish more widespread differences between works becomes clear as soon as one begins to investigate their structures in more detail: far from each work being unique in itself, many of the motets surviving from the are nova are found to be related quite closely in matters of compositional detail. Thus instead of representing, as one might expect, widespread activity over a large geographical area, the motet repertory appears increasingly to be confined in matters of both form and content, and thus also, it might be argued, in place and date of origin.

All musicians are familiar with the repeat conventions of classical music and most are accustomed to standard responses to them which have been built into the performing practice of our own time. It is, for example, relatively common to hear the first repeats of sonata-form movements observed, much less common – in fact remarkably rare – to hear second-half repeats. The decision whether or not to observe a repeat is shared between current convention and the caprice of the performers. In modern practice, for example, unimportant factors make repeats more likely to be observed. The existence of first- and second-time bars is persuasive, for fear that valuable music under the first-time bar may otherwise be lost, even though the essence of the music is not affected: a first-time bar is, after all, usually the result of small awkwardnesses in the cadence rather than the expression of structural necessity. Similarly, in variations, just one variation having its repeat written out in varied or ornamented form is enough to constrain the players to observe every other repeat in the set when a first instinct might have been to observe none, or first-half repeats only. Then there is the universal habit of scrupulously observing minuet or scherzo repeats on the play-through and scrupulously overlooking them on the da capo, even when, as often happens in Beethoven's scherzos, the first section of the movement is a single eight-bar phrase which makes little sense unless it is repeated. It is odd that the minuet, often the least sophisticated section of a classical work, is heard generally three times while development and recapitulation, of intrinsically higher interest, are usually heard but once.

Until quite recently music historians thought that the Chapel Royal was founded in the fifteenth century. In 1895, Henry Davey wrote: ‘We may … date the rise of English music about 1400–20, and suppose that a Chapel Royal was first set up by Henry IV or Henry V’. Since then, much pioneering archive work has been done by Mr. John Harvey, Dr. Frank Harrison and Dr. Brian Trowell. It was Grattan Flood who, in 1924, first revealed to musical scholars what the medieval historian had long known: that the Chapel Royal in England dates back at least a further three centuries. Taking his cue from Flood, Stanley Roper delivered a paper to this Association three years later, which he called ‘Music at the English Chapels Royal c. 1135–Present Day’.

Far from being always unjustly neglected until the late twentieth century, as a recent view would have it, Berlioz's music enjoyed dedicated attention and considerable admiration a century earlier. His orchestral works, in particular, were taken up by a range of skilful players and conductors in Britain from the 1870s, yielding performances in the English regions, the London suburbs and in Scotland that impressed ordinary listeners much more than many experienced ones. I argue that structural change and professional competition within the British concert industry to 1920 assisted this remarkable reception – largely ignored in the historiography of Berlioz's reputation as well as in that of British musical culture – while imaginative musicians, astute promoters, writers and thousands of listeners continued to benefit from contact with his work. Berlioz's challenging music indeed became an agent of aesthetic change in Britain – a benchmark, and a calling-card, of modern orchestral presentation that was both standard and commonly accessible before the First World War.

The dispute between Arnold Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker—witnessed in Schoenberg's ironical remarks in the Harmonielehre and Schenker's vigorous polemics in the second volume of Das Meisterwerk in der Musik—was in the first instance a controversy concerning the significance of nonchordal notes (in the German, literally, notes foreign to the harmony), a subject that appears harmless enough. The dispute as such would be hardly worth examining if it revealed nothing beyond each antagonist's lack of understanding of the other and the failure of both to do justice to the subject about which they claimed to be speaking. But beneath the surface of a discussion about technical details is concealed a conflict of fundamental principles concerning modes of musical thought—modes of thought that cannot simply be reduced to the clichés of ‘progressive composer’ and ‘conservative theorist’.

The importance of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni of Rome in the history of early eighteenth-century Italian music is widely appreciated. We remember him as the illustrious patron of music and the other arts, and the benefactor of Corelli, Alessandro Scarlatti, Handel and a host of other musicians. It is a matter for regret, however, that so little is known of what became of his music library, which, by the time of his death in 1740, would have grown to enormous proportions. In the fifty years since he was created a cardinal he must have amassed a rich collection of vocal and instrumental pieces, for there was not a single genre which he failed to promote. He surely possessed settings of his own librettos and those of other dramas whose production he had supported, manuscript scores of cantatas and sacred works, presentation volumes given to him by grateful recipients of his munificence, numerous prints dedicated to him and all manner of material relating to the regular accademie and other performances at his establishment. Ultimately such treasures became dispersed; they were probably disposed of in the sale of Ottoboni's works of art to which Horace Walpole refers in a letter from Rome in 1740. We know, at any rate, that the collection did not remain intact.

My title is as much a play on words, or even a choreographic flourish, as the statement of a thesis. After all, to say that theorists have, or should have, a sense of history is rather like saying that composers, singers or instrumentalists tend on the whole to be able to read music. Having a sense of history is not just a necessary preliminary to adequate professional attainment in all branches of musicology: it is what being a theorist, and an analyst, is all about. And that is just as true for the theorist as practitioner - as pedagogue promoting the perception of structures - as it is for the theorist who is primarily an historian of theory. For the theorist, having a sense of history means knowing something of the past, and being able to interpret that ‘something’ in ways which may be judged uncontroversially orthodox or wildly idiosyncratic, but which in the end enable theorists to make worthwhile contributions to the state of the discipline in their own time.

The first important centre of viol making and viol playing in the late fifteenth century was the Mediterranean city of Valencia, capital of the southernmost province of the Kingdom of Aragon. From Valencia the viol quickly spread to nearby parts of the Aragonese kingdom such as the Maestrazgo region, the provinces of Aragon and Catalonia, and the islands of Majorca and Sardinia. Late fifteenth-century paintings of the Madonna and Child serenaded by music-making angels clearly reflect the growing popularity of the viol throughout this area of the western Mediterranean. One of the earliest depictions of the viol, probably dating from the 1470s, appears in the work of a Catalan artist active in a northern district of the province of Valencia known as the Maestrazgo. Photographs of this painting (plate 1) show it to have been in a very poor condition, but it has since been restored (perhaps even completely repainted) and can now be seen in the church of San Felíu just above the town of Játiva.

A comparison of the 1854 and 1891 versions of the Piano Trio in B, op. 8, explores how musical allusion can be interpreted to convey Johannes Brahms's attitudes to critics, friends, other composers and his own past. The young Brahms's attachment to E. T. A. Hoffmann's literary alter ego Johannes Kreisler helps explain the extent to which the music of others makes itself heard in the first version of the trio. Changing standards of criticism affected the nature and scope of Brahms's revision, which expunged perceived allusions; the older Brahms's more detached compositional approach shared elements with Heinrich Schenker's analytical perspective. There are also parallels between Brahms's excisions and the surgical innovations of his friend and musical ally Theodor Billroth. Both Brahms and Billroth were engaged with the removal of foreign bodies in order to preserve organic integrity, but traces of others – and of the past – persist throughout the revised trio.

It was in the Shakespeare year of 1964 that I first realized to what extent my work on English stage music lacked foundation and depth without a better knowledge of the practices of dramatic music in Italy. Even at that early stage I recognized that the key plot for intermedi and the first operas was the story of Orpheus which looms so impressively, both in quantity and in quality, at the birth of opera. Indeed, it is a plot that continues to act as a springboard for the imagination of composers of operas and ballets, even after the seventeenth century, as witnessed by the works of Gluck, Offenbach and Stravinsky.

As well over a century of reception history attests, qualities of memory, reminiscence and nostalgia seem to constitute some of the most characteristic attributes of Schubert's music. Yet despite the undoubted allure of this subject and its popularity in recent years, the means by which music may suggest the actions of memory and temporal consciousness are often unclear or under-theorized in scholarship. This article examines how such nostalgic subjectivities are constructed in Schubert's music and the language used to describe it. Rather than overturning the now habitual associations between Schubert and memory, the article seeks to question more deeply how they are, and indeed might better be, supported. It looks principally at the String Quartet in A minor, D.804 (‘Rosamunde’), and draws further on such staples of the Schubertian memory discourse as the Quartet in G, D.887, and the Piano Sonata in B♭, D.960.

May I ask you to consider with me some questions such as these:—Whether, historically, musicians and listeners, have known what they wanted acoustically and have made demands upon, and modelled, a building type. Or whether conversely an existing building has been the deciding factor? Whether we are now in a historical era quite different from the past and ought to make clear acoustic demands? And if so what demands? And what degree of consent have we on the present musical situation and its vital needs?

If it were possible to consult representatives of a cross-section of ordinary European church choirs towards the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, it would be interesting to see how much unanimity there would be in their answers to our questions about the performance of the chant. The sort of men one would like to question would be the precentors of churches with a great liturgical tradition, such as Salisbury Cathedral, and also of some of the smaller churches, for example, St Mary-at-Hill in the City, where music was fostered as a matter of course and where members of the Chapel Royal occasionally sang. One would also like to consult the organists; those concerned with the teaching of the chant and those engaged in editing new service-books, such as Dr. Sampson of King's College, Cambridge, in the first quarter of the sixteenth century.

The Trial of Queen Caroline for adultery in 1820 provoked comment in a deluge of songs, satires and caricatures. My aim here is to draw attention to some of the songs produced, and to locate them in relation to the nineteenth-century broadside tradition. This will require some general remarks on the broadside trade in London, which remained the chief centre for this type of literature, and where almost all the songs to be dealt with were printed. The years under discussion in the first part of the paper are, approximately, those between 1810 and 1860. (The precise dating of most broadsides remains difficult.) Inevitably, these limits are fairly arbitrary: the broadside trade, which stretches back to the sixteenth century, does not finally the out until the closing years of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the middle of the century seems to mark the point at which the broadside loses any claim to be considered the principal vehicle for the dissemination of popular songs – yielding on the one hand to the mass-produced songbook, and on the other to the emergent music-hall. And while one cannot discern at any single point in the history of broadside production a very sharp change in taste or style, by the second decade of the century a considerable body of material has appeared which is specifically nineteenth-century in character. Whatever earlier limit is chosen, the persistence of the old alongside the new, characteristic of so much in popular culture, means that any study of popular musical taste in the earlier nineteenth century will, to a large extent, be dealing with material originating in the previous century or even earlier.

Around 1400, the northern Netherlands were little more than a loose collection of quarrelling principalities, unified to some degree by their common language, Middle Dutch. Formally this unruly area was part of the Holy Roman Empire, but the German emperor's political weakness laid it wide open to the territorial ambitions of the Burgundian dukes. Under their rule, the Netherlands saw centralized regional government for the first time in their history. But it was not until the sixteenth century, when their Spanish Habsburg successors were increasingly regarded as foreign oppressors, that anything like a unified sovereign Dutch state came within sight.

The feast celebrated annually on 4 December as the Reception of the Relics is one that was peculiar to Notre Dame of Paris in the later Middle Ages. It commemorated the reception of relics of five saints into the still unfinished Gothic cathedral, including several hairs of the Virgin Mary, three teeth of John the Baptist, an arm of St Andrew the Apostle, some stones from the lapidation of St Stephen the Protomartyr and a large part of the head of St Denis. The event that prompted this feast in Paris took place during the reign of King Philip Augustus, who was on the throne from 1180 to 1223, and it has been the subject of occasional comment, debate and research ever since, with the most recent discussion coming in the excellent article by Craig Wright in the Festschrift for John Ward.

There are no fewer than twelve complete works of Sebastian Bach to which the name Toccata is applied, and in nearly all cases the title seems to have come from the composer himself. It is always worth while to trace, if we can, the reasons which led a great man to choose one name rather than another for his creations; and in the case of Bach, I think we are justified in supposing that the names he gave were not purely arbitrary, but were chosen for some good reason. Certain modern composers, notably Brahms, have shown a strange indifference to the effect wrought by a well-chosen name for their music. His later works for pianoforte, often grouped under the heading of “Fantasias,” are divided into “Intermezzi” and “‘Capricci” according to whether they are slow movements or fast. But Bach, with his methodical habits, never showed that kind of almost perverse nonchalance in regard to the names his works were to bear. Remember the “Partitas,” and how each of the six introductory movements had a different designation from all the rest. As a matter of fact, there is not much indication of any inner variety of structure among the six, for all are preludial in general character, and it is evidently only a whim of the composer to give the six different titles. One of these, the sixth by the way, is styled “Toccata,” but has none of the distinguishing marks which, I hope to persuade you, Bach had in his mind when he used the title for independent compositions. Mr. Albert Schweitzer in his exceedingly valuable book on Bach (I am speaking of the recent work in two volumes, translated from the French by Mr. Ernest Newman) says that these Toccatas might just as well have been called Sonatas, or by any other name. Here I cannot agree with him, and the main object of my remarks on the present occasion.is to examine into the structure and style of the pieces, and see if we cannot discern some characteristic common to them all, and not shared by any other compositions of Bach.

[The following is an abstract∗ of Dr. Terry's address on the above occasion.]

There is a great deal of literature on the subject, but the lecturer has been long familiar with Shanties from hearing his own sailor relatives sing them. There is this to be said about sailors' Shanties : there are so many variants of all the tunes that there is plenty of material for a lecture without having recourse to compiling from existing literature.