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.

Since it has been observed that artistic singers and also instrumentalists have somewhat digressed from the notes here and there, and thus have given occasion to invent an agreeable kind of figure; for what can be sung with reasonable euphony might well indeed also be written down.

The history of the development of national music—like that of every other popular movement in Russia—presents a continuous conflict. On the one hand we see a strong natural impulse moving irresistibly towards fulfilment; on the other, a policy of repression, and, at times, even of active persecution. That the close of this century has witnessed the triumph of Russian music proves how strong must have been the innate capacity for this art, and how deep the love of it, which could overcome every obstacle to its development.

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.

In this paper I concentrate on two points which are, I hope, of interest not only to musicologists but also to historians of ideas in other fields. I deal mainly with the works of the two Galileis, but of course mention the views of other musical theorists, in particular of Zarlino, since a large part of Vincenzo Galilei's writings is directed against him. This brings me to the first of my two general points: that polemical writings often present to the historian peculiar difficulties of interpretation, especially when the two adversaries, on the one hand, genuinely hate each other, and, on the other, may in fact agree on the main subject under discussion. This was, I believe, the case in the controversy between Vincenzo Galilei and Zarlino, and the resultant dishonesty and evasion of crucial problems makes very tricky the task of disentangling their true thought.

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.

This article develops a theoretic base for the hermeneutics of spatialization in recorded popular song, drawing from work in ecological perception, cognitive linguistics, proxemics and some music semiotics. It uses this base in order specifically to observe a range of uses of the deictic expression ‘here’ in the lyrics of popular songs, and from this observation to construct a typology. It draws from a very wide range of Anglophone genres, stretching across most of the previous century and beyond, exploring the varying extents to which the music that encompasses such lyrics helps to fix a type of location indexed by ‘here’. Such an exercise forms part of a larger programme to establish a grounding that permits a reasoned response to Ricoeur's call to interpret the text by means of disclosing a ‘possible way of looking at things'.

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’.

It is inevitable that any branch of historiography should in its early stages submit itself to the discipline of severe objectivity. Nineteenth-century political historians saw it as their duty to present ascertainable fact; and it is only in this century that their successors have begun to take the facts for granted, and have gone on to make inferences, to express opinion on unanswered questions, and, to some extent, to use their imagination. Musicology, being a much younger branch of the art, is still at a relatively objective stage. There are such formidable gaps in our knowledge of music before 1600 that scholars have shown a natural caution about filling those gaps with anything in the nature of speculation or guesswork. The standard work on English music before the Reformation is, of course, Frank Harrison's Music in Medieval Britain, a brilliant presentation of archival material and of liturgical and musical analysis. It is precisely that objectivity and caution that make the book so valuable. However, I am prepared to argue that, once a book of that kind has been written, it is perhaps justifiable to go beyond it and make inferences which, though they could well be proved wrong, may stimulate argument and so help to arrive at right answers. Much of this paper, therefore, is frankly discursive and conjectural, deficient in corroborative detail, and clearly open to the Scottish verdict of ‘not proven’.

In 1876, the National Training School for Music was established by the Society of Arts as a model of advanced music education after the pattern of leading European conservatoires. But, despite having Arthur Sullivan as Principal, the School failed amidst the rumblings of an academic scandal that dogged George Grove's attempt to establish the new Royal College of Music. The article sets this failure against the successful start of the Royal College and explains how conservatoires, after being in all practical senses virtually an irrelevance to professional concert life, managed to reinvent themselves as vital incubators of British musical talent.

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.

The Studio di Fonologia Musicale of Milan, Italy's first electronic music studio, opened in 1955. Housed in the national broadcasting (RAI) studios in Milan, the studio was founded by two celebrated Italian composers: Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. The institution is often remembered nowadays for being the first electronic music studio to focus its activity on the human voice. As I argue, this focus was not only of an aesthetic nature, but rather reflected long-standing political and intellectual conceptions of voice, speech and public space that were rooted in Italy's early days as a republic, and in mid-twentieth-century Milan as the flagship city for this newly achieved political modernity.

This article examines ongoing efforts to associate the decline of the modernist electroacoustic music tradition with the rise of digital technologies. Illustrative material is drawn from ethnographic and archival fieldwork conducted in 2011 and 2012 in the Canadian city of Montreal. The author surveys examples of institutions, careers, performances and works showing how the digital is brought into the ideological service of existing musical orders and power structures by musicians, policy-makers and other intermediaries. Drawing upon the social theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Georgina Born, as well as on contemporary media theory, the author argues that accounts of the disruptive agency of digital mediation are incomplete without a corresponding attention to the complex cultural mechanisms by which it is kept under control. What is at stake in the transformation of Montreal's electroacoustic tradition is not a collapse so much as a further remediation of modernist social and aesthetic principles.

Broadly speaking, we can divide Renaissance polyphony into five groups: works not using any pre-existent material, and pieces based on sacred monophony, secular monophony, sacred polyphony or secular polyphony. This is not the common way to classify Renaissance compositions. The more normal breakdown is by the technique applied to the pre-existent material – cantus firmus, paraphrase, parody – regardless of what that material was. Yet much is to be gained by starting with the original material, and that was, after all, what the composer probably did at least some of the time.

This article concerns the use of dance in the Act 3 finale of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, starting from the problem articulated by Alan Tyson in his Mozart: Studies of the Autograph Scores. Tyson points out that the absence of the fandango from the Viennese musical sources is at odds with Da Ponte's statement that the dance scene was restored at the emperor's command. New evidence shows that the fandango was performed for the three performances that constituted a première at this time in Vienna and was then removed from the score. However, before its removal, the score with the fandango intact was copied for at least one other theatre, hence accounting for the two versions that circulated through Europe. The article goes on to consider the dramatic function of the fandango by exploring the nature of the dance itself and examining the stage directions in the autograph in combination with those in Beaumarchais's play, several early librettos and editions, and the original first-desk first-violin part.

In 1969 the Institute of Verdi Studies in Parma convened an international congress on the subject of Don Carlos. Fifty-two papers were read, and the proceedings fill a fat volume of over 600 pages. Two speakers had looked beyond the printed sources: Ursula Gunther had examined the autograph of Act I, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and David Rosen had discovered, folded down in the conducting score used for the first performance, and still in the Paris Opera library, a hitherto unknown section of the Philip/Posa duet which Verdi had cut before the premiere. He also found evidence for other pre-performance cuts, in the form of stub-ends of pages which had been literally cut from both the autograph and the conducting score; some opening and closing bars remained. A few months later I found this ‘lost’ music, in the original orchestral parts, still preserved at the Opera: the cut passages had simply been stitched or pinned together, or pasted down; the same had happened in the singers' scores. Line by line, it was possible to reconstruct a good deal of totally unknown music by the mature Verdi.