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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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'.

Although Rameau's amazingly resourceful treatment of the orchestra has been discussed by a number of previous writers,’ there is one important aspect of the subject that has been largely ignored. Little attention has so far been paid to the ways in which thee composer's orchestral practice changed during his fertile thirty-year operatic career. Yet one has only to compare the scoring of his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), with that of his last, Les Baréades (1764), to see that a whole series of changes have come about. This development has been badly obscured by the nature of the composer's Œuvres complètes, still the most easily accessible ‘modern’ source of most of his works. Outwardly, this appears to be a respectable scholarly edition, with lengthy and authoritative prefaces, lists of sources and critical apparatus. Nowhere is it stated, however, that many of the operas have been partly re-orchestrated, some of them quite extensively.

In a monograph entitled Zdenko Fibich published within a year of the composer's death, the musicologist Zdeněk Nejedlý asked the following question: ‘And who was more versatile than Fibich?’ The answer as far as Nejedlý was concerned was: ‘No one in the whole of the nineteenth century.’ Many of Fibich's contemporaries were quite certain that he occupied a position equal to his more internationally successful colleague Antonín Dvořák. Evidence of his contemporary standing is abundant, and his position in the firmament of Czech composers was characteristically summed up by William Ritter in 1896 when he described Fibich as the ‘Son’ in the ‘Holy Trinity’ of Czech music, in which Smetana was, naturally enough, the ‘Father’ and Dvořák the ‘Holy Spirit’. In an obituary article the critic Emanuel Chvála had no hesitation in putting Fibich next to Dvořák as ‘… the most eminent of our contemporary composers’. Nejedlý's assertion concerning Fibich's versatility is not entirely unworthy of examination. He contributed to many genres and expanded the scope of his theatrical activities with his cultivation of scenic melodrama. As a composer of opera Fibich stood aside from his Czech contemporaries in his deliberate avoidance of folk-orientated material and his compulsive interest in theatrical experiment. His intellectual demeanour led to collaborations with the finest Czech librettists of the time, and a close identification with the views of the aesthetician Otakar Hostinský (1847–1910). Believing strongly in the role of experiment in art, 4 and with a firm commitment to the principles of Wagnerian music drama, Hostinský was an ideal partner for the composer in the opera The Bride of Messina, the work which set the seal upon Fibich's position as an innovative force in Czech musical theatre.

Few readers will be unfamiliar with E. T. A. Hoffmann's imaginative music criticism, and especially with his essay on Beethoven's instrumental music in which the author compares the music of Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn. Haydn, Hoffmann suggested, leads us through green groves and amongst throngs of happy people. We find there life such as was before the Fall, full of bliss, with no pain or suffering other than a sweet, sad longing for the beloved. Mozart, however, leads us into the very heart of the spirit world. Fear grips us, but not a torturing fear; rather a premonition of the infinite. Tender accents of love and melancholy are to be heard, and we follow with inexpressible longing the figures that wave to us in friendly greeting as they soar through the clouds in the eternal dance of the spheres. Beethoven, on the other hand, transports us to the realms of the monstrous and the unfathomable. Glowing rays flash through the deep night and we are conscious of giant, surging shadows that close in on us, obliterating everything within us other than the pain of infinite yearning. Hoffmann's prose is striking; indeed, nothing quite like it had existed before. His criticisms are veritable symphonies in words of which Ludwig Tieck would surely have been proud. Original as this kind of criticism may have been, though, the ideas behind it owe rather more to the immediate past than is at first sight apparent. We have only to explore one or two of the paths that lead through the forbidding no-man's-land of eighteenth-century musical aesthetics to see that this was so, paths that once were much frequented but which are now sadly overgrown.

The invasion of Electricity into the realms of Art. Greater scope for the musician's skill. Electrical self-expression in Autophonic music. Ways and Means. Duddell's “singing lamp” (1890). Electrical waves and Sound waves. Tone-frequency. The Sphærophon, Theremin or Aetherophon, and Electronde. With manual guides; the Martenot, Hellertion and Trautonium. Application of the keyboard; the Klaviatur-Sphærophon, Emicon, and Coupleux Organ. Electricity on an acoustical basis; the Orgatron, Baird and Puget Pipe Organs, the Neo-Bechstein Piano. Mechanical production; the Telharmonium, Magnetton, Hammond Organ, Wave Organ, Electrone, Superpiano, Phototone and Rangertone. Pros and Cons; and what of the Future?

Musical criticism is a subject which, I am of opinion, may be investigated and discussed with advantage by the members of the Musical Association. It is a field which may be thought delicate ground to tread upon. The atmosphere by which it is surrounded may be impregnated with explosive matter; but I am not dismayed from pursuing the inquiry I have proposed to my. self. With the safety lamp of good faith and good temper, I believe that the ground may be traversed without any apprehension of danger.

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.

The electromagnetic basis of video technology allowed sound and image to be recorded simultaneously: as a result, composers could visualize their music and artists could sound their images. Many believed that such intermedial audio-visuality signalled a brand-new art form that was free from lineage. Using Nam June Paik as an example, this article suggests that this is inaccurate. During the twentieth century, composers were experimenting with spatializing their sounds, while artists were attempting to include time as a creative element in their visual work. The intermedial capabilities of video technology allowed these two disciplines to come together, acting as a conduit that facilitated the fusion and manipulation of pre-existing elements. Understood in this way, music and art in the twentieth century cannot coherently be discussed as individual disciplines, but rather encourage a more lateral history – or spatial sensibility – that moves fluidly through the space between them.

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.

I do not flatter myself that so numerous an assemblage has come here this evening to listen to me, for it is much more likely that' you have foregathered to hear Mr. Arthur Alexander play some of Scriabin's remarkable music. I cannot—at any rate this evening—enter into a full discussion of Scriabin's music and aims, as our present subject is concerned with the harmonic method of Scriabin rather than with his actual music.

The Picture of Gottfried van Swieten which is found in musical literature can scarcely be described as wholly favourable. It has long been recognised that his tastes in music influenced Mozart profoundly, but his close-fistedness has been blamed for contributing to the composer's poverty, and finally for giving Mozart only the cheapest possible funeral. In his dealings with Haydn, Swieten is acknowledged as the leader of that group of the nobility which sponsored the Creation and the Seasons, but this credit is more than balanced by criticism of his libretti to the two oratorios. At the best, it would seem, van Swieten's presence in Vienna was a mixed blessing.