I begin this essay epigrammatically with song, with a single song that came to tell an historical tale of the nineteenth century (Fig. 1, p. 3). We know this single song in many versions, though it is perhaps the second version that most musicians and scholars of the nineteenth century, more accustomed to playing or hearing the keyboard music of Johannes Brahms than singing Child ballads, know best (Ex. 1). In the Brahms setting, the first of his op. 10 Balladen for solo piano, it may perhaps no longer be a song at all, for its narrative has been stripped of words.

The year 1846 was a watershed for Fanny Hensel: in that year she published collections of music in her own name. Felix Mendelssohn, withholding personal approval of his sister's decision to go public, nonetheless acknowledged a change of status when he offered his ‘professional blessing upon your decision to enter our guild’. This much is well known, but the decision to publish was one of several signs that in the 1840s Hensel sought to set her life-long cultivation of composition on a more formal and professional footing. With her Piano Sonata in G minor (autumn 1843) she tackled a genre largely off-limits to earlier female composers in northern Germany. The genre involved extended instrumental forms and Hensel was alternately confident and full of doubts about her abilities in this area. In a letter to her brother concerning her String Quartet, she pictured herself trapped in the ‘emotional and wrenching’ (‘rührend u. eindringlich’) style of late Beethoven. Countering her brother's criticisms of the quartet she asserted, ambivalently, that she did not lack ‘the compositional skill’ (‘die Schreibart’) to succeed so much as ‘a certain vital force’ (‘ein gewisses Lebensprinzip’) and the ‘strength to sustain my ideas and give them the necessary consistency’.

The history of live street music is the history of an endangered species, either suppressed or trivialized as little more than ‘local colour’. Five hundred years ago the streets of Elizabethan London were rich with the sounds of street vendors, ballad-makers and musicians, and in general the worst that might be said of the music was that the same songs were too often repeated – what we would now call ‘on high rotation’. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the poet Wordsworth and advocate of the ‘common man’ was describing street music as ‘monstrous’, and throughout that century vigorous measures were being applied to suppress such sounds, which were now categorized as noise. By the twenty-first century, live street music has been virtually silenced but for the occasional licensed busker or sanctioned parade. Paradoxically, this process of decline is intersected by a technologically sustained ‘aural renaissance’ that can be dated from the late nineteenth century. This article explores the reasons for the gradual extinction of live street music and the transformation of the urban soundscape. It argues connections with issues of class, the rise of literacy, the sacralization of private property and the formation of the politics of modernity.

Recent critiques of organicism in music studies have assumed that such features as part–whole integration and end-oriented development are essential to comparisons between music and the organic realm. Yet if what is thought to constitute organicism varies with perspectives on organisms in general, then perhaps it is time to take a different view of organicism’s historical legacy. What if the problem is not with the impression that music presents a semblance of the organic, but with the models of the organism brought in to give content to that semblance? In light of novel accounts of organic life currently being formulated by both scientists and thinkers affiliated with post-humanism, I propose to imagine an organicism that dispenses with humanistic conceits and prompts creative reflection on the points of connection between music and organic processes. To that end, this essay first dismantles conventional notions of wholeness and development before going on to consider aspects of the Western musical tradition through the twin lenses of self-organization and the systems theory of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. In sum, the essay seeks to conserve affinities between music and the organic domain intuited by nineteenth-century listeners while transposing organicism into a register more in tune with contemporary scientific and philosophical thought. By adding new nodes to a critical network established over two centuries ago, this article argues that a post-humanist organicism challenges us to think afresh about what our bodies, our sociality, and our creativity share with non-human entities and ecologies.

This paper originated in the keynote address delivered at the Fanny Hensel bicentenary conference organized by the University of Oxford, Faculty of Music and held at St Catherine's College, Oxford, 22–24 July 2005. As its title suggests, it marks a quarter-century acquaintance with Fanny Hensel. Although in recent years my research has expanded into opera on film, and that has obviously taken me into very different terrain, still Hensel continues to exert a special fascination. Preparing the edition of her letters to Felix Mendelssohn brought me into her private world, a world she assumed would remain private. I came to admire, and even love, her intelligence, her wit and her musical sophistication. It is not unusual for researchers to be enthusiastic about the person they are studying or to identify with them – this may be one reason for choosing that person in the first place, and is undoubtedly a reason why we chose to celebrate Fanny Hensel's bicentenary with the Oxford conference. In short, Fanny Hensel fascinates us.

It has long been recognized that journalistic discourse about the string quartet in early nineteenth-century sources stressed its elevation and seriousness in comparison to other genres, and that the string quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were described as ‘classical’ very early in the century. Less well known is that the idea of performance is embedded in this discourse – particularly around the question of the group dynamics of ensemble performance. The tendency to blur the roles of the parts and the roles of the players are evidence of this, as is the discussion of the relation between first-violin-centricity and the ideal of free and equal contribution by all four parts/players in ‘true’ or ‘classical’ works. This ideal, I argue, is distinct from the longstanding metaphor of ‘conversation’ to describe the relations of the parts. The first part of this article explores these broad topics. The second part of the article focuses on a single measure in the slow movement of Beethoven's op. 59 no. 2 and argues that in various ways it raises and thus exemplifies the issues of the distribution of power, of musical initiative or the ‘genius of performance’, and ultimately of differing subjectivities in the early nineteenth-century notion of the quartet.

In her 1899 pedagogy manual Touch: Piano Instruction on the Basis of Physiology, the composer and pianist Marie Jaëll (1846–1925) describes pianistic touch as a ‘polyphony of sensations’, a synthesis of vibrations that is both physical and psychical. This article examines Jaëll's recourse to nineteenth-century experimental science, specifically experimental psychology, to develop a theory of pianistic touch. Touch, Jaëll contends, necessitates a pianist's attention to haptic and aural impulses in an elusive, ‘simultaneous and successive’ process that collates the pianist's tangible sensation of the keyboard and the ineffable mental impressions conjured by sound. This braided sense of musical touch can be cultivated in performers and transmitted to listeners. Jaëll makes this assertion using a novel kind of visual evidence: fingerprints. Fingerprinting her students before and after the execution of selected piano études and treating the prints as diagnostic documents, Jaëll posits that isolating and attending to minute variations in touch is akin to attuning to the aesthetic content of a musical work. Jaëll crystallized her methodology in a vibrant collaboration with Charles Féré (1852–1907), a criminologist and one-time student of Jean-Martin Charcot. More broadly, Jaëll's treatise is a striking exponent of the era's ‘graphical method’, pioneered by Étienne-Jules Marey, which sought to supplant scientific rhetoric with ‘objective’ truth, depicted as machine-generated wave forms. The ethos that motivated the creation of such representations, propagated by an array of influential scientists including Ernst Heinrich Weber and Hermann von Helmholtz, underscores a tendency to intertwine physiology and psychology in an enterprise that quantified sensation as a fact of mechanistic causes. Jaëll's emphasis on attention – how thought modifies touch and sound – sets her theory apart from experimental psychology's more determinist premises. In Jaëll's experimental apparatus, fingerprints are not objective; rather, they index the variable haptic and sonic sensations experienced by the pianist. As a nascent theory of embodied cognition, Jaëll's pedagogy bespeaks a fluid relationship between mind and body at the dawn of the twentieth century.

One of the aims of this article is to clarify and align more closely the respective priorities of researchers and practical musicians in using music notation. To that end, the first part surveys existing digital editions of music both in general and from the standpoints of different types of performer. Consideration is then given to a new ‘digital edition concept’ which might achieve more creative engagement with music on the parts of instrumentalists and singers alike. Two ostensibly conventional editions of nineteenth-century music serve as the basis of case studies that show how the notorious limitations of the printed page might be transcended more effectively and propitiously. The conclusion is that digital editions of music (DEMs) are unlikely to replace printed editions and that wholesale replacement should not be the goal in any case. Instead, in developing future DEMs for performers, the aim should be to take fuller advantage of the affordances of the digital medium so that musicians can engage with and make music all the more creatively. Only by moving conceptually beyond the stasis of ‘the material medium’ and harnessing the dynamic flux of the digital medium can the dynamic flux inherent in music itself best be captured. At the same time, it is important to recognize and respect musicians’ need for a fixed version of the score on given performance occasions, even if it is bound to be superseded thereafter.

Of the many possible relationships between music and poetry, which are but a small subset of the possible relationships between music and text, I have chosen a still narrower focus for inquiry. I will investigate two independent, lyric poems whose musically poetic language and form was fully conceived without any expectation that a composer might use their texts as structural scaffolding and expressive inspiration for related, and emergent, musical and artistic ends. Two lyric poems by Goethe, each set by Schubert, will serve to illustrate the conflict between poetic and instrumental/vocal musics, in which the lyric poems inevitably concede something of their music to an appropriation by, and not merely a translation into, another artistic medium. Even when Schubert succeeds in exemplifying, or expanding upon, the symbolic richness of meaning embodied in the poem, we should consider the fate of overwritten meaning embodied in the musical language and form of the poem by itself.

The nineteenth century was the major turning point in traditional Japanese music, leading to changes in the musical world that rendered it well-nigh unrecognizable. With the introduction, in 1871, of a primary school curriculum in which only Western music was to be taught, traditional Japanese music began its journey to marginalization – in the end becoming a genre that sounded foreign to a majority of the inhabitants of its own native country.

The vertical bamboo flute shakuhachi was particularly affected by the new Meiji government's modernization process. During the Edo period (1603–1867), mendicant monks organized in the Fuke sect had enjoyed a monopoly on playing the instrument. With the abolishment of the sect, in 1871, and the prohibition of begging for the following decade, the social position of shakuhachi players was radically changed. This article explores the ways in which shakuhachi players adapted to these changes in order to survive. That adaptation affected not only the construction of the instrument, but also the music itself.

Clara Schumann, née Wieck (1819–1896), and Fanny Hensel, née Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1805–1847), were among the outstanding women musicians of their time. Both kept diaries that still exist, and from these we can learn a great deal about the inner and outer lives of the two women. Fanny Hensel's diaries were originally used by her son Sebastian for his book Die Familie Mendelssohn, 1729–1847. He gave us her life story as seen through his eyes, and furnished the major information available about his mother until the recent publication of her diaries: Fanny Hensel, Tagebücher. This book was based on the diary manuscripts acquired by the Mendelssohn Archive of the Berlin Staatsbibliothek in 1969, 1970 and 1999. Fanny Hensel's Tagebücher cover the years 1829 to 1847, thus from the year of her marriage to the year of her death.

Our contemporary perspective of the relationship between the composer, the score and musical performance during the nineteenth century has been largely shaped by Lydia Goehr's widely accepted and equally widely contested narrative regarding the appearance of the regulative concept of the ‘musical work’ at the end of the eighteenth century. This narrative has been based on the assumption that during the nineteenth century the score was regarded as the locus of the work and the music. Goehr's account, however, is contrary to the essence of performance-oriented discourses of the nineteenth century. In this article, I present a narrative account of a neglected thread running along the music theoretical, aesthetic and pedagogical discourses of this period leading to the emergence and establishment of a profound conceptual transformation in the way the fundamentals of music making were understood and explained, and depict the rise of the concept of ‘phrasing’ as a specifically nineteenth-century phenomenon that diverges from the fundamentals of eighteenth-century performance pedagogy. I discuss the role of the new concept of phrasing in the performance theories of Mathis Lussy, Tobias Matthay and Stewart Macpherson and point out some of the widely employed metaphors and images in the teaching of phrasing during this period. The article posits that in the performance-oriented discourses of the nineteenth century, the performer's first and foremost loyalty was expected to be to ‘the music’ rather than to the score, the work or the composer.

The later music of Franz Schubert confers a remarkable blend of impact and intimacy. Some masterpieces, such as Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, capture striking images of despair and loneliness. Others, such as the String Quartet in A minor, the Piano Trio in E major and the String Quintet in C major, carry stirring impressions of struggle culminated by success. Yet all captivate us with sensitivity and sincerity, the products of considerable self-investment.

Recent investigations into the survival and dissemination of traditional songs have elucidated the intertwining relationship between print and oral song traditions. Musical repertories once considered distinct, namely broadside ballads and traditional songs, now appear to have inhabited a shared space. Much scholarly attention has been focused on the print and oral interface that occurred in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

Less attention has been paid, however, to music in Ireland where similar economic, cultural and musical forces prevailed. Yet, Ireland’s engagement in various nationalist activities throughout the nineteenth century added a distinctly political twist to Ireland’s print–oral relationship. Songbooks, a tool for many nineteenth-century nationalist movements, often embodied the confluence of print and oral song traditions. Lacking musical notation, many songbooks were dependent on oral traditions such as communal singing to transmit their contents; success also depended on the large-scale distribution networks of booksellers and ballad hawkers. This article seeks to explore further the print–oral interface within the context of Irish nationalism. Specifically, I will examine how one particular movement, Young Ireland, manifested this interface within their songbook, Spirit of the Nation. By examining the production, contents, and ideology of this songbook, the complex connections between literature, orality and nationalism emerge.

In my experience, everyone among my acquaintances, friends, family members, students and colleagues who has encountered Fanny Hensel's ‘Song without Words’ [Song for Piano] op. 8, no. 1 in B minor, has recognized its special character – perhaps responding above all to its sense of ‘multum in parvo’, or ‘much in a small space’. This article offers some reflections on what it is that makes this piece so special and gives it this particular effect. As well as paying attention to the patterns, relationships and textures created by the notes, it seeks to suggest that one way of ‘reading’ the music may lie in its author's personality and circumstances.

I should begin by declaring immediately my standpoint that there is no such thing as race. Race and, by extension, racism may have a social reality but they have no sound scientific grounding whatsoever. No convincing biological evidence has ever been produced that establishes the existence of different human races. DNA analysis offers little support to theories of genetic difference, and has revealed that even the most geographically separate social groups vary in only 6 to 8 per cent of their genes. Race does not present a medical problem when it comes to organ transplants. My research questions are, therefore: When and why did the idea of ‘race’ arise, and how did this fiction affect the production and consumption of music in the nineteenth century? In seeking answers, I make illustrative references to Liszt's Gypsy, Wagner's Jew, Celtic music, African-American music and American Indian music.

We are accustomed to seeking the ‘music itself’ in the musical text. The actual and spiritual spaces that are inscribed in music, and the people connected to these sites, are thereby in danger of being left out of consideration. In my view, place and people are part of the music. It is thus against a background of an understanding of music that does not only mean the opuses in the sense of the written musical texts, but also implies all aspects of life connected with the production, reproduction and reception of music, that I offer this enquiry into the meaning of the Leipziger Straβe Drei for the artistic works emanating from Fanny Hensel.

‘Invasion from the Orient’; ‘Young Violinists from Asia Gain Major Place on American Musical Scene’; ‘Suzuki's Pupils Learn Music First’: in the 1960s, headlines such as these drew attention to how successfully Asians had made Western art music their own; violinists from Japan were among the first. Observers have speculated on the reasons, but few know enough about Japanese history to realize that the phenomenon had its roots in developments during the Meiji period (1868–1912).

Perhaps as a consequence of the late-nineteenth-century tendency to differentiate Brahms from the Wagnerian coterie at all costs, his enduring interest in exoticism has received little attention. This is not unreasonable, since his untexted works show no evidence of any foreign links further than Hungary. In addition, for obvious reasons, the specific tropes associated with exoticism, or more specifically orientalism, manifested themselves most clearly through art-forms better equipped to portray specific verbal content, such as opera, literature and painting, none of which is strongly associated with Brahms. Biographically, it is even harder to reconcile Brahms with exoticism, since the connotations of sensuality sit oddly with the bürgerlich North German Protestant work ethic that generally defines perceptions of him. Still, the effect of over 30 years in cosmopolitan Vienna cannot be overlooked; also Brahms was a friend and supporter of artists as well as of musicians. Although Max Klinger and Adolf von Menzel spring primarily to mind, his interest in German painters dated from his early twenties, following his visit to the Schumanns in Düsseldorf. In particular, from the mid-1860s onwards he expressed constant interest in the works of the painter Anselm Feuerbach. Interestingly, both Brahms's and Feuerbach's concept of orientalism, specifically through the Persian poet Hafis, was mediated by the poetry of Georg Friedrich Daumer. This study will explore the simultaneous burgeoning of interest shown by Brahms in his Hafis settings and Feuerbach in his works Hafis vor der Schenke and Hafis am Brunnen in the mid-1860s, as well as the background of the poet who inspired them both.