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.

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.

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 explores the theme of self and other in Wolfgang Rihm's music drama Die Eroberung von Mexico. After examining how the vocal distinctions between Montezuma and Cortez serve to dramatize the mutual cultural incomprehension of these two characters, it considers how each of them becomes mentally deranged. Finally, it traces how each figure subsequently searches for a means of communication in the last act. By analysing Rihm's understanding of music as a medium, and by deploying the critical resources offered by Tzvetan Todorov, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, this article argues that Die Eroberung makes a significant contribution to understanding the mechanisms by which identities are enacted.

The peacefulness and longevity of the Venetian Republic prove that it had solved one of its greatest problems – that of poverty Not that it was rid of its poor even in times of prosperity: but at least they were cared for by a wealth of charitable organizations, and that desperation which leads to civil insurrection never gained a hold. The chronically sick, the girls having no dowry, the orphans and the beggars were each helped by various institutions which were supported by the more fortunate. The four largest of these could between them claim to cater for any poor person who was really in need. The beggars were taken off the streets by the Ospedale di S. Lazzaro et Mendicanti, founded and endowed by three noble families. The sick went to the Incurabili, originally a house for poor pilgrims, but later turned to this more pressing need. Orphans and poor children were housed in two ospedali: the Derelitti near the monastery of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, and later known as the Ospedaletto; and the Pietà.

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

According to one of his more heart-rending letters to Michael Puchberg, Mozart expected to receive 200 ducats from the directorate of the Viennese court theatres for composing Così fan tutte. This amount, equivalent to 900 gulden, would have been twice the usual fee paid for a newly composed opera at that time. Mozart's statement to Puchberg has long been accepted at face value, because the theatrical financial records for the season in which Così fan tutte had its première have been thought to be lost. Recently, however, an entry in a little-known theatrical ledger has come to light which shows that, in late February 1790, Mozart was paid 450 gulden for composing Così fan tutte, half of what he had claimed to expect. In attempting to account for the discrepancy between the documented payment and Mozart's expectation, this essay will investigate all fees and gifts received by composers and librettists for operas commissioned by the Viennese Nationaltheater from the founding of the German Singspiel in 1778 until the end of the theatrical season 1791–2. This investigation will not only help to suggest an explanation for the discrepancy, it will also illuminate the wider context in which Mozart's Viennese operas were commissioned, and will put into perspective the fees he was paid for them.

Slåtter, op. 72, was composed in 1902-3, and is thus among Grieg's very last works. It is also one of his least familiar. ‘Here [in Norway] my early position is still being promoted, praised at every available opportunity at the expense of my current one’, he wrote in his diary on 21 March 1906. Earlier that day he had played six of the 17 slåtter at a concert in Kristiania (now Oslo), and he was disappointed by the lukewarm response. Grieg did, however, live long enough to witness the successful reception of the work, not least in France where avant-garde circles talked about ‘le nouveau Grieg’. Nevertheless, the widespread perception of Grieg - even today - is based on his lyrical pieces, the ‘wheat buns’, as he himself called them. Yet Slåtter is without doubt one of Grieg's most fascinating works. We do indeed meet a ‘new Grieg’ here, and there is good reason to believe that the work played some part in Béla Bartók's development. There was a copy in Bartók's library, and in an article in the Hungarian journal Zeneközlöny from 1911 (a year before he visited Norway) he mentions Norwegian slåtter and Romanian joe as distinctive types of instrumental folk music. According to the Norwegian Grieg scholar Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe, he probably became aware of Grieg's Slåtter in Paris in 1910.

A Rondellus is a round; a rota is a canon at the unison. The rondellus is much the senior of the two, though in some of its moods it does not at all behave like a venerable relic of the Middle Ages. But that is what it is, and in its early life it had a respectable place in the music of the church. It is true that during some of that time one might have heard rounds sung in every ale-house, but if so nobody bothered to write them down, and the first printed collection is no earlier than 1609.

If we were to judge of the state of violin-playing and technics during the second half of the sixteenth and the whole of the seventeenth century from the didactic works published before 1700, we should be forced to the conclusion that the standard must have been very low indeed. The documentary evidence which we possess concerning the achievements of such virtuosi as Heinrich Johann Franz von Biber, Thomas Baltzar, Nicola Matteis, Davis Mell, etc., does not agree with that relating to the tutors printed during the period at which these players were active. We cannot imagine that the results obtained by the performers just enumerated were derived from the works published contemporaneously.

“Qu. Elizabeth,” wrote Roger North, “was a lover of musick, and used the Harpsicord & organ herself, and it is not likely that musick was under any discouragement in her time. But reg° Jas. I it flourished very much … & suerly in that reigne musick was notably courted wch encouraged Mr. Morley to publish his operose tract of musick by way of dialogue.” This is not the language of a modern text-book.

Björk's 2004 album Medúlla offers listeners radical and new combinations of vocal sounds in pop music. The album features emergent processes ranging from textural emergence, as in standard pop-rock formulas for song introductions, to less common emergent and transformative processes involving metrical, tonal, motivic and phrasal structure. When such processes involving different parameters are combined, other (non-emergent) processes recede to the background, and the effect of emergence assumes a fundamental role over the course of the composition as a whole. Recognizing emergent processes opens up connections with song lyrics and possibly also extra-musical narratives which can enrich our analytical understanding and ultimately our listening experiences of these songs. Furthermore, Medúlla models ways in which other contemporary songwriters could develop sophisticated emergent processes that disturb conventional understandings of popular music as simplistic and formulaic.

A membrane fragment in the Bibliothèque da la Ville de Metz (réserve précieux, MS 732bis/20) contains parts of four works (Premii dilatio, Ego reus confiteor, Sursum corda and one as yet unidentified composition), of which three are known from the Florence manuscript (Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, MS Pluteo 29.1). The notation, decoration and handwriting of the fragment suggest that the manuscript from which they were taken dates from c.1300. The notation of the fragment clearly distinguishes between longae and breves in passages cum littera; in sine littera sections, the graphic presentation of ligatures reveals attempts to reflect changing concepts of notational precision from the last quarter of the thirteenth century. The Metz fragment is therefore analogous with other late thirteenth-century redactions of conducti. Although all four compositions in the Metz fragment are in three parts, concordances for two of the works from earlier thirteenth-century sources are in two parts only. While normal practice in the late thirteenth-century transmission of the conductus was to strip away voices, the versions of Ego reus confiteor and Sursum corda in the Metz fragment added a new third part to a two-part original. Such a practice was more typical of the motet repertory, and in this as well as its use of mensural notation the Metz fragment shows how the conductus was beginning to approach the compositional priorities of the motet c.1300.

This paper is concerned with two decades when musical piracy was rampant, the 1770s and 1780s; with two cities where it flourished: Paris, a performing and publishing capital, and Leipzig, a centre of music copying; and with two imaginative men who sought panaceas or, in their view, rational solutions to the problems of piracy in music. One of these was relatively famous, Johann Gottlob Breitkopf; the other, Christian Gottfried Thomas, virtually unknown.

This article explores ways in which music intersected with the growth of sports in Victorian Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. Although there have been valuable studies of music and sports recently, their main emphasis has been on popular music and contemporary sporting events; a study of the period when playing and watching sports began to acquire its present-day shape has yet to be undertaken. This article moves towards that by examining connections between music and sports through broader social and cultural developments, in particular new ideas about morality, health and physical fitness. It situates commentaries about the healthfulness of music in relation to nineteenth-century discourses about sport, in addition to contextualizing notions of singing and health in the increasing professionalization of Victorian medicine. Finally, this article extends and relocates early twentieth-century encapsulations of singing as physical exercise in the context of concern over degeneration in national fitness.