The music theory of the Middle Ages had its origins in the music theory of late antiquity. As Markovits observes, ‘The fundamental structure of ancient music theory is the tetrachord’; in turn, the medieval gamut had its origin in the Greater Perfect System, and was similarly constructed from conjunct and disjunct tetrachords. The chromatic and enharmonic genera disappeared, but the tetrachord synemmenon remained as the source of the only sanctioned medieval altered note, the B♭.

The ‘rhetorical’ character of Renaissance music – or, more precisely, of the vocal music of that period – is generally well known. Briefly: the musical segmentation of every vocal composition of that period is determined by the syntactic division of its text; each individual word that is suited to musical ‘translation’ not only renders this quasi-allegorical representation possible, but absolutely requires it; and the ability to discover such ‘allegories’, to apply them appropriately and thus to enrich the expressive vocabulary of music was regarded as the chief measure of the competence of a composer.

Many practitioners of the magical arts in English Renaissance drama rely on music to achieve their occult goals. Indeed, music often comes to represent the audible sound of arcane forces at work, for to the Renaissance music itself was a dual art with both obvious and hidden properties. On one hand, music was a delightful, practical science concerned with the production of ordered sound by the human voice or artificial instruments. On the other hand, music, like magic, was a powerful numerical art capable of unlocking the obvious and hidden aspects of all creation. As Thomas Morley carefully reminds his readers in the most famous contemporary English treatise on music theory,

The precious collection of manuscript scores and printed libretti dating from the late seventeenth century and housed today in the Biblioteca Estense at Modena is ample proof that Duke Francesco II d'Este (1660–94) was one of Italy's most generous patrons of music. Indeed his library, which good fortune has preserved almost intact, is an indispensable resource for the study of oratorio, opera and instrumental music in northern Italy in the last quarter of the century. Its contents show him to have been a man of catholic and modern taste, acquiring and promoting works by living composers active in Rome, Florence, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice and, of course, Modena. On the evidence of the Este music collection, historians have been consistent in applauding the cultural achievements of Francesco II's reign and yet, surprisingly, there have been no detailed studies of the way in which the duke exercised his patronage.

The singing of metrical psalms, canticles, some anthems and a few hymns in the ‘old way’ constituted almost the sole musical activity in English parish church services after the Restoration. By the start of the eighteenth century a reform was under way. Parish clerks ceased to line out the psalms for the benefit of congregations. As the clergy and gentry generally disdained to assist the improvement of music and only the wealthiest urban churches could afford organs, congregations took their lead from choirs trained by itinerant singing-masters. Church music became divided between the art music of cathedrals, chapels and rich parishes and the popular psalmody performed elsewhere.

The question of musical narrativity, while by no means new, is making a comeback as the order of the day in the field of musicological thought. In May 1988 a conference on the theme ‘Music and the Verbal Arts: Interactions’ was held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. A fortnight later, a group of musicologists and literary theorists was invited to the Universities of Berkeley and Stanford to assess, in the course of four intense round-table discussions, whether it is legitimate to recognize a narrative dimension in music. In November of the same year, the annual conference of the American Musicological Society in Baltimore presented a session entitled ‘Text and Narrative’, chaired by Carolyn Abbate, and, at the instigation of Joseph Kerman, a session devoted to Edward T. Cone's The Composer's Voice. A number of articles deal with the subject in our specialized periodicals: I am thinking in particular of the studies published in 19th-Century Music by Anthony Newcomb – ‘Once More “Between Absolute and Programme Music”: Schumann's Second Symphony’ and ‘Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies’ – or, on the French-speaking side of musicology, of Marta Grabocz's article ‘La sonate en si mineur de Liszt: une stratégie narrative complexe’ and the essays of the Finnish semiologist Eero Tarasti. No doubt a good many articles will emerge from the above conferences. And we are awaiting the appearance of Carolyn Abbate's book Unsung Voices: Narrative in Nineteenth-Century Music.