When the meal drew to a close the lady who had served the wine produced a harp and began to play it so sweetly that it was a wondrous thing to hear. So Sir Gawayn listened to her very willingly for a while until he began to feel the cold, for his tunic was not at all well dried. And when the cold got to him he rose up and went to the great fire which was in the middle of the Hall and took a stool and sat down before the fire, turning his shoulder and his back [to the flames] and warmed himself until he slept, as one who had been afflicted the whole day with the rain and the wind.

Since there is no standard description of the style of a Frescobaldi toccata, this study must begin by setting out the stylistic characteristics of these pieces, especially as manifested in what one might call the normal toccata type – the first eleven of Book I and the first, second and seventh of Book II. In this initial stage, the reader is referred for more detailed development of my points to my paper Ascoltare e guardare le toccate, soon to be published as part of the acts of the International Frescobaldi Congress, held in Ferrara in September 1983 to celebrate the quadri-centenary of Frescobaldi's birth. That paper illustrates the distinctive features of Frescobaldi's toccata style through close analysis of a single toccata (the ninth of Book I). I shall briefly lay out these features, proceeding from the make-up of the individual section to the make-up of the entire piece, and stressing not only what kind of things one finds in an individual section or entire piece, but also what gives those things coherence and shape.

The real rise of Lucca dates from the end of the twelfth century when many of the nobility moved within the city walls, declared themselves ready to defend them, and chose a Podestà as their head. But the ensuing centuries found Lucca often in conflict with other comuni such as Florence and Modena, with the Church especially over control of the Garfagnana mountains, and with the nearby sea republic of Pisa which sacked Lucca in 1314 in order to form with it a strong ghibelline force against Florence. Due to a series of unfortunate political manoeuvres, Lucca next found itself tossed from one owner to another. First it was sold to Francesco Castracani, then to Gherardo Spinola, to John of Bohemia, to the Rossi of Parma, the Scaligeri of Verona, and to Florence from where it passed back to Pisa in 1342. In 1369 Emperor Charles IV freed Lucca of Pisa, and although he kept it somewhat under himself, he allowed it to write a statute as a republic in 1372. Unfortunately independence soon gave way to domination by Paolo Guinigi who managed to keep control from 1400 to 1430. Only then was Lucca once again able to assert itself as a republic, a situation it guarded proudly and jealously for three centuries, until 1799 when France and Austria began. alternately to occupy it. In 1805 Napoleon installed his sister Elisa Bonaparte and her husband Felice Baciocchi as rulers of what then became the Principality of Lucca.

More frequent performance of Rameau's major works is beginning to stimulate long-overdue analysis of those aspects of his technique that make the sound of his scores so immediately recognizable. Such analysis enables us to distinguish these characteristics from the body of traditional French baroque procedures which Rameau inherited in common with his contemporaries. Some of these procedures had remained virtually unchanged since their development by Lully, but many others were evolved by the generation between these two great masters of the French stage. It was the achievement of Lalande, Couperin, Campra and their contemporaries to absorb successfully stimuli from Italy while retaining a distinctive Gallic flavour, a process openly acknowledged in works such as Couperin's Les goûts réunis. It is particularly important to recognize these developments in different periods of the French baroque when we consider the evolution of the orchestra, and the new technical demands that were made of players, since without a knowledge not only of the Lullian tradition but also of that which followed it, we cannot properly evaluate Rameau's contribution to style and technique.

In the spring of 1770 Marie-Antoinette, the 14-year-old daughter of Empress Maria Theresa, arrived at the court of Louis XV. Her marriage to the dauphin (later Louis XVI) on 16 May was the cause of general celebration. In the event, the French saw a guarantee of the alliance with Austria and hope for peace after decades of very costly wars. For such a major state occasion, operas played an important part in the festivities. New works were given, and lavish productions of those in standard repertory entertained the court during much of the year. The first that Marie-Antoinette saw (on the day after her wedding) was Lully's Persée (as revised by François Francoeur, François Rebel, Antoine Dauvergne and Bernard de Bury – all court musicians as well as successful composers for the Académie Royale de Musique [the Opéra]). Papillon de La Ferté, the intendant des Menus-Plaisirs du Roi (the government official in charge of court entertainments among other duties) recorded in his diary that in general the court were very pleased with the magnificence of the spectacle. But with a touch of chagrin, he noted that ‘Madame la Dauphine did not seem to have acquired a taste for it. It is true that it is a rather too serious opera for someone who is not yet familiar with the genre and who does not like music’. During her stay at Versailles, Marie-Antoinette also had the opportunity to see Rameau's Castor et Pollux and Dauvergne's new opéra-ballet, La tour enchantée (which made use of several pieces by Rameau and his contemporaries), as well as three tragédies (Racine's Athalie and Voltaire's Tancrède and Sémiramis), but only one comédie (Poisson's L'impromptu de campagne). The choice clearly was intended to present masterpieces from the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV.

All musicians are familiar with the repeat conventions of classical music and most are accustomed to standard responses to them which have been built into the performing practice of our own time. It is, for example, relatively common to hear the first repeats of sonata-form movements observed, much less common – in fact remarkably rare – to hear second-half repeats. The decision whether or not to observe a repeat is shared between current convention and the caprice of the performers. In modern practice, for example, unimportant factors make repeats more likely to be observed. The existence of first- and second-time bars is persuasive, for fear that valuable music under the first-time bar may otherwise be lost, even though the essence of the music is not affected: a first-time bar is, after all, usually the result of small awkwardnesses in the cadence rather than the expression of structural necessity. Similarly, in variations, just one variation having its repeat written out in varied or ornamented form is enough to constrain the players to observe every other repeat in the set when a first instinct might have been to observe none, or first-half repeats only. Then there is the universal habit of scrupulously observing minuet or scherzo repeats on the play-through and scrupulously overlooking them on the da capo, even when, as often happens in Beethoven's scherzos, the first section of the movement is a single eight-bar phrase which makes little sense unless it is repeated. It is odd that the minuet, often the least sophisticated section of a classical work, is heard generally three times while development and recapitulation, of intrinsically higher interest, are usually heard but once.

In 1892 Bernard Bosanquet wrote:

As a Hegelian, Bosanquet had every reason to believe in the strength of the German idealist tradition, even if its supremacy was seriously challenged in the second half of the nineteenth century; as an Englishman, and brought up in the English philosophical tradition, he was fully aware of the important British contribution to both speculative and experimental psychology. However, bringing various intellectual and philosophical traditions together is no easy task and we can witness a continuing division in the orientation of many scholars who, although not philosophers themselves, felt the need to strengthen their critical theories with ideas which originated in the domain of philosophy.

More has been written about why Satie composed than about how he composed; about the aesthetic implications of his precursive art for the present century than about the techniques of his art itself. My aim is to attempt to redress the balance, in part at least; to try to focus on some of the problems Satie encountered as he sought to satisfy the increased demand for his music which followed his sudden rise to the forefront of public attention largely due to the efforts of Ravel, Ricardo Viñes and Jean Cocteau over the years 1911 to 1915. If I look to anything as a model, it is Patrick Gowers’ pioneering paper on ‘Satie's Rose Croix Music (1891–1895)’ which explored Satie's use of systematic harmonic devices, working methods and formal experiments from the evidence of his manuscript notebooks. To the best of my knowledge, no such complementary study relating to Satie's later years has yet appeared in print, though Gowers’ thesis’ does discuss Satie's compositional methods in the Nocturnes of 1919.

It is well known that the first, and strongest, branch of the Schenker family tree leads from Vienna to New York City. One of Schenker's early pupils, Hans Weisse, emigrated to America and taught at the David Mannes Music School in the early 1930s; it is thanks to Weisse's efforts that the ‘Five Graphic Analyses’, with which most musicians make their first contact with Schenker, were published simultaneously in New York and Vienna in 1932. Schenker's death, together with the Nazi threat to Austrian Jewish life and culture, led to what seemed like a complete transfer of the Schenker ‘school’ from Vienna to New York by the late 1930s. Two of Schenker's pupils, Oswald Jonas and Felix Salzer – both of whom (like Schenker) were Jewish and both of whom had published important books in Vienna' – had by this time left for America; and Schenkerian theory, which had never been looked on as more than a cottage industry in the 1920s and 30s, apparently ceased to be practised in Europe altogether.