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’.

On 29 August 1865, an audience of critics and the general public gathered at the Salle Herz in Paris to witness and pass judgment on the results of an experiment set up three years earlier by the instrument manufacturer Alphonse Sax Jr, who aimed to demonstrate not only that women were capable of playing brass instruments, but that it was in their interests — on moral, health and potentially even career grounds — to do so. Although this concert of brass-band music, with supplementary items for harp and voice, marked the band's third public appearance (they had performed at the Palais d'Industrie in December 1864 and at a brass-band competition in Orbec earlier in August 1865), it was their first appearance at a major concert venue and represented their début in front of the massed Parisian press. When they walked on stage, members of the audience sniggered at the sight of a group of young women carrying brass instruments covering the entire range from the portable cornet to the heavyweights of the bass section. Plainly dressed, with only moderately full skirts, they proceeded to play an arrangement of Partant pour la Syrie, a popular romance set as a quick march, which was then thought to be by Eugénie de Beauharnais, and which under the reign of her son Napoléon III had gained the status of a national hymn. The march had been arranged by the group's conductor, Laure Micheli, who directed the ensemble in two other pieces. To wide acclaim, Émilie Lacroix then played a set of variations for cornet à pistons, arranged by J.-B. Dias, on the tune Le carnaval de Venise. The remaining members of the sextet are shadowy figures: Mlle Dias on second cornet (presumably the sister or daughter of the arranger Dias), Mlle Suzanne Legrand and Mme Neckra in the alto section, and Mlle Marie Legrand (presumably the sister of Suzanne) and Mme Worms playing bass instruments. The supporting artists were all women: the singers Mlle Marcus (also referred to in the press as Mlle Marens or Mlle Marius) and Mme Neulat de Chambon, and the harpist Mlle Waldteufel (a joint first-prize winner at the Paris Conservatoire and former pupil of Antoine Prumier); Suzanne Legrand doubled as accompanist for the singers.

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

It is well known that during the Baroque period an important role in Vienna's cultural life was played, not only by the commedia dell'arte, but by all kinds of comedies, both Italian and German, in which music was an essential ingredient. Theatre history in Vienna during the eighteenth century cannot be separated from musical history, since music, like dance and pantomime, had been an integral part of the popular theatre for centuries. It was not at all exceptional for the operetta Der neue krumme Teufel of 1758, for which Haydn composed the music, to include a pantomime (also with music by Haydn) and an Italian intermezzo (the composer of which has not yet been identified). Also typical of most Viennese popular dramas during the eighteenth century was the traditional combination of comic and serious elements.

[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.

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.

There is a need for published film-score editions in film musicology, both to preserve the contents of manuscripts and to aid critical readings of films. How to accomplish this, without re-inscribing the Romantic conceptions of authorship commonly associated with edition creation, is the subject of this article. After considering the relevant editorial problems and models, a postmodern ‘anti-edition’ is proposed, using examples drawn from Korngold's score for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).

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.

Facsimiles of musical autographs are typically thought to require photography, and to have a primary purpose of clarifying composers’ intentions. But there was a robust culture of music facsimile prior to photography. Made by transfer lithography, these facsimiles served different purposes and reading habits. The activity of collecting handwriting samples was paramount, as was the idea that handwriting was a mirror of character. This article surveys ways of using and finding meaning in composer autographs in the 1820s to the 1840s, focusing especially on music facsimiles in Paris. Here, composers used facsimiles to help shape their public image, and publishers used them to entice consumers. When facsimiles reproduced documents of friendship, they crossed private and public expression in ways that could be advantageous or problematic, as seen through a look at the publication in facsimile of a Rossini waltz by the Revue et gazette musicale and the ensuing legal battles.

The appearance of a ghost in Alfred Brendel's poem ‘Brahms II’, set by Thomas Adès for baritone and orchestra in 2001, is not the first time Brahms the composer has been discussed with reference to the supernatural. In order to provide a hermeneutic interpretation of Adès's Brahms, op. 21, and an explanation of why Brahms continues to haunt composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this article draws on Derrida's notion of hauntology, exploring notions of the uncanny, late Brahms and Schoenberg's ‘Brahms the Progressive’.

In a sense, avant-garde music is a rear-, not an advance-guard action, for it is both a consequence of, and a reaction against, five hundred years of European ‘consciousness’. The Renaissance started with man's dualistic awareness of the distinction between the Self and the Non-Self: which in musical terms became the dualistic, and peculiarly European, phenomenon of harmony. Perhaps this burden of harmonic consciousness begins to work itself out in Wagner's Tristan. At the opening of the third act, Tristan lies in a state of near paralysis in his cobwebby castle, and hears the unaccompanied monody of the Shepherd's pipe. Alternating shiftily between God's perfect fifths and fourths and the Devil's imperfect ones, it is a ‘horizontal’ sublimation of the dualism of the notorious ‘Tristan’ chords. Harmonic resolution, after four and a half hours, is at last achieved, and Tristan sheds sensuality and guilt to enter Nirvana. Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, an opera closely related to Tristan, carries the process a stage further, for although harmonically sensuous, it dispenses with even the desire for resolution. It's a premature existential opera, for it concerns, both dramatically and musically, what happens to passion when the will is extinct.

The Italian Madrigal style adopted by English composers towards the close of the sixteenth century seems, on the face of it, to have almost eclipsed the native forms of secular vocal music. But although the madrigal and the lute-song account for much of the finest music of the time, the traditional style continued to exist and to develop in the songs of a number of composers who were not wholly committed to the new forms. Since these composers include William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons, we can be sure that the artistic achievements of the style are not negligible and that an understanding of their true nature is vital to our grasp of the period.

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,—Before beginning this paper on the Collecting of English Folk-Song, may I ask indulgence should I seem unduly egotistical this afternoon?

The subject when approached proved so wide, and to lead to my poaching so heavily upon the preserves of far better collectors and lecturers than myself, that there seemed nothing for it but to limit myself to my own experiences and collection.

I offer no apology for introducing this subject to the Musical Association; it possesses sufficient interest to command attention—attention that I think it has not yet received. I do not pretend that my treatment of the subject will be at all adequate to its importance, nor do I come forward to advocate the cause of woman in musical art; she is, in the present day, quite capable of taking care of herself. It is only necessary to present a fair view of her position, to clear away misconception and prejudice, and it will be seen that the subject is by no means speculative, but very tangible and real; and its discussion will, I trust, be both interesting and profitable.

The ‘rhetorical’ character of Renaissance music – or, more precisely, of the vocal music of that period – is generally well known. Briefly: the musical segmentation of every vocal composition of that period is determined by the syntactic division of its text; each individual word that is suited to musical ‘translation’ not only renders this quasi-allegorical representation possible, but absolutely requires it; and the ability to discover such ‘allegories’, to apply them appropriately and thus to enrich the expressive vocabulary of music was regarded as the chief measure of the competence of a composer.