His contemporaries did not find Giuseppe Matteo Alberti a composer out of the ordinary. In the diary of the Bolognese apothecary Ubaldo Zanetti where his death is noted he is described prosaically as ‘secondo violino e compositore riguardevole di musica’. In England, where his music was especially well disseminated as a result of its publication by Walsh in London and Le Cène in Amsterdam, it was regarded as fodder for less advanced players. Burney remarks that his twelve Sinfonie a quattro, ‘being slight and easy, were much played in England about fifty years ago, particularly in provincial concerts’. Less kindly, Avison placed him among the lowest class of composers (his companions in ignominy being Vivaldi, Tessarini and Locatelli) – those ‘whose compositions, being equally defective in various harmony and true invention, are only a fit amusement for children’. In his Remarks on Mr. Avison's Essay on Musical Expression William Hayes did his best to salvage Vivaldi's reputation - at the expense of the other three composers, whose ‘servile, mean copy’ he contrasted with Vivaldi's ‘original’.

Archbishop Marsh's Library, otherwise known as the Library of St. Sepulchre, is adjacent to St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, and was founded in 1704 by Narcissus Marsh D. D. (1638–1713), Archbishop of Armagh. Today the library contains over 20, 000 books and 300 manuscripts; the manuscripts and special books, including some music books, are located in the manuscript room, which is on the main landing before entering the first gallery of the library - all items in the manuscript room bear the press mark ‘Z’. To be found among the general holdings is a small, but valuable, collection of music manuscripts and printed books on music; some of the items were collected by Marsh himself, and date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among the seventeenth-century manuscripts is a group which contains instrumental consort music, and these are the ones which will be discussed in this article.

This catalogue lists all the twelfth- and thirteenth-century songs with English words known to exist, and is designed to be of interest to the transcriber, performer and general student of medieval English music. Although there are only nineteen items surviving from the period in question a number have never been published either in facsimile or transcription. A forthcoming appendix to this catalogue will include facsimiles of previously unpublished manuscripts to encourage work on new transcriptions and scrutiny of available ones. It is to be hoped that musicians who have already given much attention to the thirteenth-century repertoires of France and Spain will begin to perform these first English songs more frequently.

Morley started to publish his secular music in 1593, and maintained an average of more than a volume per year seen through the press until his death in 1602. This article attempts to discover whether there were any discernible motives for dedicating works to particular patrons thereby invoking their support. Such motives may well not be apparent today removed as we are from the everyday pressures and needs of an Elizabethan musician, and Morley may even have wished to conceal his reasons for adopting certain particular patrons for his publications - possibly to avoid allegations of nepotism or unfair dealings - even if he wanted the outward display of their public support. But searching for motives behind some of the dedications is not totally futile even if it is, for lack of concrete evidence, necessarily mostly speculative.

Lincoln College MS Latin 89 is really two manuscripts bound together, the second of which is the remains of an early 15th-century choirbook. In Coxe's catalogue of manuscripts in Oxford colleges and halls, no mention is made of the leaves containing music, although the copy in the Bodleian Library has a supplementary entry for the music, handwritten at the bottom of the page and easily missed. It is perhaps Coxe's omission that is responsible for the manuscript's exclusion from Anselm Hughes's invaluable hand-list and subsequently even from RISM.