One of the more nefarious generalizations of popular musical history is that which asserts a change from ‘modality’ to ‘tonality’ around the year 1600. The old canard is nowadays scarcely met with in its pure form, but it is surprising how much it still influences even sophisticated discussions of tonality both before and after that date. Lowinsky in his epoch-making Tonality and Atonality in Sixteenth-Century Music is largely concerned with the ways in which sixteenth-century music foreshadows the tonal procedures of the baroque and classical periods. In his articles on ‘Tonality’ and ‘Harmony’ in The New Grove, Carl Dahlhaus, while offering a series of widely-ranging definitions of tonality, and while recognizing also the capacity of melody to be tonally organized, nevertheless regards the major and minor scales as the essential pre-requisites of ‘harmonic tonality’, and its growth as a phenomenon of music composed since 1600. I find myself in sympathy only with the wider definitions of tonality there given, principally that of Fétis, and it will be the function of this paper, first, to argue against the retention of narrower definitions, and, secondly, to put the case for recognizing that the development of harmonically controlled tonality occurred much earlier than 1600. A reading of Dahlhaus's articles (which I take to be an authoritative digest of his considered standpoint as well as an informative summary of the points of view expressed by many theorists down the centuries) has also reminded me how much I am opposed to theories of melody and harmony which depend on acoustic absolutes, and to functional theories of harmony, principally that of Riemann, which assert a rigid hierarchy of chords, or fail to recognize the historical development of harmony from counterpoint. Some of these prejudices will surface in this paper, but they are not its primary purpose.

While masque texts tell us a great deal about some aspects of musical performance, on other issues they are reticent and equivocal. Textual information is at its most frustratingly perplexed on the question of the extent to which the new Italian monody influenced the music for the Jacobean masque. There is some difficulty in deciding when recitative was first introduced to England, and it depends on the reliability of two references in the 1640 Folio edition of Ben Jonson's Works. In the text of Lovers Made Men performed on the 22 February 1617, Jonson begins by describing the opening scene and then adds,

Jonson's remark that in 1617 a whole masque ‘was sung (after the Italian manner) Stylo Recitativo’ poses a riddle of nomenclature. When did the Italians first use the phrase ‘stile recitativo’, and from what time on was the term used fairly consistently?

When the subject of research into Italian solo song in the first half of the seventeenth century comes under discussion – in itself a rare enough event – such discussion is mostly limited to the Florentine style of solo song with chordal accompaniment, and its followers. The harmonic daring, the declamatory ideas, and the ornamental practices of such solo madrigals have proved more interesting to scholars than strophic, dance-like compositions, which have tended to be relegated to the sidelines as unimportant, at best entertaining, little tunes. Even Nigel Fortune, who argues in his highly convincing thesis, presented in several articles, that the Florentine style led only to a dead end, while the future of solo song lay in the strophic compositions, has not yet been able to rewrite the history books, immune as they seem to change.

The importance of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni of Rome in the history of early eighteenth-century Italian music is widely appreciated. We remember him as the illustrious patron of music and the other arts, and the benefactor of Corelli, Alessandro Scarlatti, Handel and a host of other musicians. It is a matter for regret, however, that so little is known of what became of his music library, which, by the time of his death in 1740, would have grown to enormous proportions. In the fifty years since he was created a cardinal he must have amassed a rich collection of vocal and instrumental pieces, for there was not a single genre which he failed to promote. He surely possessed settings of his own librettos and those of other dramas whose production he had supported, manuscript scores of cantatas and sacred works, presentation volumes given to him by grateful recipients of his munificence, numerous prints dedicated to him and all manner of material relating to the regular accademie and other performances at his establishment. Ultimately such treasures became dispersed; they were probably disposed of in the sale of Ottoboni's works of art to which Horace Walpole refers in a letter from Rome in 1740. We know, at any rate, that the collection did not remain intact.

The 18 June 1821, the sixth anniversary of the last and decisive battle of the British and Prussian armies against Napoleon, the Battle of Waterloo or Belle Alliance, and the day of the triumphal first performance of Weber's Freischütz, is commonly regarded as the birthday of German Romantic opera, a genre which was to dominate the opera houses of the German-speaking countries until well beyond the middle of the century and which was eventually to create Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, out of Wagner's own German Romantic operas Die Feen, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, which in turn depended directly and to a considerable degree upon Weber's Freischütz and Euryanthe. A day of great importance in the history of music, then, and a day of paramount importance in the history of German music. Again it is Wagner who gave expression to the feelings of what was apparently the vast majority of music-loving and patriotic Germans of his time, in the famous beginning of his report on the first performance of Berlioz' adaptation of Freischütz for the Grand Opéra, the report Le Freischütz. Bericht nach Deutschland, published on 20 June 1841 – and so unfortunately two days too late for the 20th anniversary of the Freischütz première and the 26th anniversary of Waterloo – in the Dresdener Abendzeitung:

Wagner's compositional procedure, as shown by surviving sketch material, has been widely discussed, firstly in the pioneering work of Otto Strobel, and more recently by Curt von Westemhagen, Robert Bailey and John Deathridge. Detailed studies of this type concern Rienzi, Siegfrieds Tod, Der Ring and the first act of Tristan. Discussions of sketches for Parsifal, however, have either been restricted to arguments of nomenclature or to a general description of their nature rather than their content; that is, we are merely made aware of the fact that there are two musical drafts of the complete opera, to use Strobel's terminology, the ‘composition sketch’ and the ‘orchestral sketch’, the first being written in pencil on two instrumental staves under a vocal line, and the second more detailed version being in ink with the instrumental parts now on up to four or five staves, and the vocal parts on as many as two to three staves. This apparent neglect seems even more curious when one discovers the wealth and nature of the sketch material that survives for Parsifal.

An account of the origins of the RMA was given by Gerald Abraham in his address to the Association entitled ‘Our First Hundred Years’ given at the Annual Conference in April 1974: the idea of forming a musical society on the lines of a learned society apparently arose in conversation between Sir John Stainer and Dr William Pole, Professor of Civil Engineering at University College, London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society, after lunch in Oxford one day in 1867, as Stainer, then President of the Association, recollected in an occasional note in The Musical Times in 1901. When Stainer subsequently became organist at St Paul's Cathedral in 1872 and moved to London, the idea bore fruit and steps were taken to found such a society. Detailed knowledge of how the Association came to be established however became available only comparatively recently, when an accident brought to light the minute books of the Association from its foundation down to 1949. These had been considered lost for a number of years until they appeared in the catalogue for a sale at Christie's in 1981 and were recovered from the vendor (who had come upon them by chance) by private arrangement. Prior to this fortunate recovery, the record of the achievement of the Association depended on the successive volumes of Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association. These remain the major basis for such a record, including, as they do, the names of speakers, their papers and a transcript of the discussion following the papers; however the newly recovered minute books, containing a record of both General and Council meetings, add important circumstantial detail to the general outline. The volumes have been deposited in the British Library Department of Manuscripts. The following account of the early years of the RMA is based on both sources.“

One of the most important poetic forms in Java is inseparably connected with melody: the form known as tembang. Tembang have always been sung, never spoken. The word ‘tembang’ itself is used in two senses: it refers both to a broad category of verse-forms and to the various melodies associated with them. There are very many different types of versification which come under the general heading ‘tembang’, but the three most important are tembang gede, tembang macapat and tembang tengahan.