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.

In the seventeenth century the process of appointing court musicians was often complicated by struggles between conflicting agendas. Recently discovered letters of Saxon Prince Johann Georg II (1613–80) document the nature of the process in Dresden during the tenure of court Kapellmeister Heinrich Schütz, and the attempts of Schütz and the prince to steer Elector Johann Georg I's hiring decisions in a direction that would further their cause: the cultivation of an awareness of the modern Italian style of singing in the Dresden court musicians. The letters reveal the previously unknown collaborative effort of Schütz and the prince to fill the position of vice-Kapellmeister with the ‘right’ musician (i.e. an Italian or Italian-trained one), and to keep the ‘wrong’ man out of the job. In the course of this enterprise, the prince participated in the negotiations for several appointments, including that of Christoph Bernhard, whom he then sent to a northern court to study with an Italian singer. Although the collaborators' mission ended in failure, the story of their efforts casts light on the musical politicking at a seventeenth-century court and on the implications such campaigns had for the lives of individual musicians.

Crucial to understanding the reception of Renaissance music in nineteenth-century Germany is an appreciation of the contradictory components of Romantic historicism. The tension between subjective and objective historicism is fundamental to the historiographical reception of Renaissance music, epitomizing the interdependency of historical representation and modern reform. Protestant authors seeking to reform church music elevated two distinct repertories — Renaissance Italian music and Lutheran compositions from the Reformation era — as ideal archetypes: these competing paradigms reflect significantly different historiographical and ideological trends. Early romantic commentators, such as Hoffmann and Thibaut, elevated Palestrina as a universal model, constructing a golden age of old Italian church music by analogy with earlier narratives in art history; later historians, such as Winterfeld and Spitta, condemned the subjectivity of earlier reformers, seeking instead to revivify the objective foundations of Protestant church music. Both approaches are united, however, by the use of deterministic modes of narrative emplotment.

The internationally known Londonderry Air carries the status of a cultural symbol of Ireland. Both its collector and its publisher claimed in 1855 that the music was very old, a belief which has passed into conventional wisdom. In 1934 and 1979 two writers cast doubts on the tune's age and suggested that its collector had more to do with the moulding of the tune than the process of tradition. Subsequently, doubts about the music have prevailed in academic circles but remained unexamined. This article queries the deductions of these writers and explores the musical origins and evolution of the Air. The methodology is historical and musicological. From an examination of collections of Irish traditional music evidence is presented in support of the tune's age and fashioning by tradition. The lost verses of a song known to have been accompanied by the tune in the nineteenth century are revealed as the likely original words to the music.

Bartók's essay ‘The Relation of Folk Song to the Development of the Art Music of our Time’, published in 1921, was written as he was working on the score of The Miraculous Mandarin. Three main issues in the essay, the question of origin, the position of the creative subject with relation to ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’, and the character of the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, are given fresh contexts by the musical work's emphasis on the character and function of differing types of eroticism. The possibility of cultural renewal based on the recovery of erotic self-expression in the face of the oppressive, objective conditions of the modern metropolis emerges as a central concern. This links Bartók's work to that of the Sunday Circle group of intellectuals, including Karl Mannheim, György Lukács and Béla Balázs, who sought an affirmative alternative to Georg Simmel's pessimistic view of the ‘tragedy of modern culture’.

‘Lateness’ is a musicological concept relevant to Tippett's oeuvre – if applied dialectically. His Triple Concerto (1978–9) is arguably the first work to reveal the ‘late’ trait of renewed lyricism and tonal transparency which together serve as an immanent critique of the fragmentation and dissonance of his second period (which began with King Priam). The co-presence of both sets of characteristics, whose synthesis is only partial, issues in a heterogeneity suggestive of a future social order in which the particular is not subsumed into the totality. This world-view sedimented in the musical structure constitutes a pluralism which invites comparison with, but may not be identical to, notions within postmodernism. Its paradigm may also have been distilled from the (problematic) social mediation of self which Tippett would have experienced as a gay person.

This article explores the metaphorical identification of the tonic key as ‘home’ in relation to the first movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in B♭, D.960. Rejecting conventional readings whereby a ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’ element is ultimately assimilated into the ‘home’ sphere, it argues that in this movement Schubert succeeds in doing the reverse, rendering the tonic ‘unhomely’ (unheimlich; ‘uncanny’) at a critical moment in the recapitulation. Schubert's practice in this instance is contrasted with that of Beethoven in selected middle-period works; and Schubert's own fragmentary continuity draft for the movement, as well as songs from Die Winterreise and Schwanengesang, are brought to bear on the investigation of ‘home’ and ‘das Unheimliche’.

Lawrence Kramer has highlighted some of the myths that surround early writing on Wolf — in particular the myth that he was able to realize a poem's ‘natural breath’ by submitting his identity entirely to the poet's. Kramer prefers to link Wolf with the figure of the harper from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, casting him as a musician who is compelled to reflect his own inadequacy. Yet such a picture still underestimates the complexity of the Lieder composer's role, as suggested by Goethe and confirmed by Wolf. In the ballad Der Sänger Goethe disturbed early Romantic conceptions of the lyric by implying the harper was aware of how his ‘song’ both failed and succeeded in the hoped-for communication with his listeners. Wolf's own layered interpretation of Der Sänger takes the challenge to our understanding of the lyric one stage further; it thus offers a crucial clarification of the potential of the musical Lied as the composer's vehicle for active and effective criticism.

Restoration and reproduction have served as two of the primary means by which the present has approached the past. These practices are the focus of Luciano Berio's Rendering and John Cage's Europera 5, two recent works that draw upon earlier compositions. In Rendering, Berio ‘restores ’ the drafts for what would have been Schubert's Tenth Symphony. Contrary to conventional restorations, Berio not only builds up the sketch materials but also fragments them, having Schubert's themes disappear into musical voids. Europera 5 looks back at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera, which is presented in a collage of live performance and reproductions. During the course of the work, opera gradually disappears into a world of reproductions, losing its vocality and presence. In both compositions, restoration and reproduction ultimately make the past more distant and inaccessible. A similar use of these two practices occurs in recent visual artworks by Igor Kopystiansky and Mike and Doug Starn. Both the musical and visual artworks create scenes of decay, in which the past appears as crumbling and the present as an emptiness.