There seems to be evidence in German and French-language opera in the second half of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th, that certain musical phenomena could carry extra-musical connotations. Some work, for example, has been carried out on the significance of wind instruments, particularly in relation to Masonic ceremonies. The extension of the enquiry into purely instrumental music has also been pursued, both from the point of view of a single composer's oeuvre and that of the presence of folk material. On the whole, the expressive power of the Classical orchestra and the ubiquity of opera in the repertory under discussion provide a solid basis for the type of empirical enquiry necessary in this type of investigation.

This paper is concerned with two decades when musical piracy was rampant, the 1770s and 1780s; with two cities where it flourished: Paris, a performing and publishing capital, and Leipzig, a centre of music copying; and with two imaginative men who sought panaceas or, in their view, rational solutions to the problems of piracy in music. One of these was relatively famous, Johann Gottlob Breitkopf; the other, Christian Gottfried Thomas, virtually unknown.

In the year 1496 Franchino Gafurio referred to the use of tempered fifths on the organ, but he did not specify the amount of the tempering, and Murray Barbour has concluded that ‘we have no way of knowing what temperament was like’ at that time. I believe, however, that a careful analysis of contemporary theoretical writings, and particularly of the information given by Ramos de Pareja in his Musica Practica of 1482, will show that the kind of tuning in question was almost certainly some form of regular meantone temperament, that is, with the fifths tempered rather more than in equal temperament for the sake of more resonant thirds and sixths.

In the year 1954, two great Mozart scholars, Schmid and Giegling, brought to light a transcription for Harmonie of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail in the archive of Prince Schwarzenberg at Ceský Krumlov in southern Bohemia. Their reports caused no small excitement, even though they merely suggested the possibility that this was the long lost Harmonie transcription of the opera made by Mozart himself. They reported that the manuscript was in the hand of Haydn's copyist, Johann Elssler. It is the only anonymous Harmonie transcription of a Mozart opera in a group of five scored for pairs of oboes, English horns, bassoons and horns; all the others bear the name of Johann Went. Went is known to have made a transcription of Die Entfuhrung for pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns; this was advertised in the Wiener Zeitung in 1784 by Lorenz Lausch, and the Entfuhrung transcription now in Florence probably represents a copy of this version. Schmid and Giegling mentioned obvious similarities between the Florence and Krumlov transcriptions, and noted the possibility that Went had copied Mozart's transcription.

In the early months of 1637, a Roman opera company of six singers with instrumentalists presented Francesco Manelli's Andromeda in the newly reopened Teatro San Cassiano at Venice. These performances marked the beginning of a vital period of development in opera: the new art form of drama in continuous music had hitherto been largely the privilege of the aristocratic few, but was now presented to a cross-section of Venice's richly varied population. Andromeda and its successor, La Maga Fulminata, given by the same company in the following year, aroused in Venetian dramatists, composers and audiences alike a voracious appetite for operas, and were the source of an almost continuous flow of such works presented in Venetian theatres throughout the rest of the century.

Among the main reasons for drawing attention to the work of a relatively obscure and neglected composer must be that his music is sufficiently attractive in style and skilful in construction to merit recognition, and that a study of it will add to our understanding of that particular period or form of music. Viennese music from approximately 1660 to 1740 has been relatively neglected outside German-speaking countries, especially when compared with the vast amount of scholarly interest and effort lavished on the adjoining period, 1740 to 1790. Historians of the music of the early 18th century have naturally tended to concentrate on the larger works—oratorios, operas and masses—and on the most impressive figures in the Viennese court establishment, such as Fux and Caldara.

The pibroch (derived from Scots Gaelic pìòbaireachd, ‘piping’) is an extended composition in theme and variation form for the Scottish Highland bagpipe. Pibrochs comprise a category of Gaelic music known as ceòl mór, ‘great music’, as opposed to the repertory of ceòl beag, ‘small music’, or dance tunes, song airs and military marches.

The contribution of Lionel Power to European sacred music during the first half of the 15th century has long been appreciated, and the current publication of a complete edition of his surviving work has long been overdue. The purpose of this article is to present such few details as are known of his career, and to sketch enough of their background to permit some approximation to a coherent picture of the circles in which he lived and worked.

The manuscript Shrewsbury School VI (formerly Mus. iii. 42), an English liturgical book of the early 15th century, includes texts and music for processions, Passions and plays, some of which may have originated in the late 14th century. It has the format and liturgical order of a small service book such as a processional, but contains single mensural melodies rather than the plainsong melodies usually associated with the texts. Previous studies of the manuscript have concentrated on the plays; besides neglecting the rest of the manuscript as a source of further information about the plays, they have ignored the importance of this source as a collection of English liturgical ritual music. Because of the unique nature of the manuscript, many questions arise besides the usual problems of date and provenance, principally because some or all of the music may not have been monophonic as the extant material suggests, but polyphonic.