In the world of historically informed performance (HIP) the word ‘authenticity’ is, if not exactly dead, certainly taboo (‘I know that we shouldn't use the A-word’), fenced in with qualifiers (‘Of course we can't be fully authentic’) or softened to clarify that of course HIP performances are aiming for something less than a full realization of the composer's intentions (‘This may be the way Mozart could have heard it’, or ‘This represents some of the practices of the time’). But at least for the most successful practitioners of HIP (epigones may be a different matter), authenticity discourse was always a significant but simplified version of one part of a more complex and even contradictory set of justifications for using old instruments and techniques. Indeed, HIP practitioners regularly invoke chapter and verse from the treatises or other primary sources in the same breath as claiming not to be interested in authenticity per se or not to be engaged in any kind of ‘reconstruction’. This discursive rupture may be more striking with music of the later seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where the performance-practice sources are more numerous and the scores are more ‘complete’ by modern standards than those of much earlier music, whose performance has always been more frankly imaginative and conjectural.

In his 1720 poem ‘To the Musick Club’ Allan Ramsay famously called upon an incipient Edinburgh Musical Society to elevate Scottish vernacular music by mixing it with ‘Correlli's soft Italian Song’, a metonym for pan-European art music. The Society's ensuing role in the gentrification of Scottish music – and the status of the blended music within the wider contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment and the forging of Scottish national identity – has received attention in recent scholarship. This article approaches the commingling of vernacular and pan-European music from an alternative perspective, focusing on the assimilation of Italian music, particularly the works of Arcangelo Corelli, into popular, quasi-oral traditions of instrumental music in Scotland and beyond. The case of ‘Mr Cosgill's Delight’, a popular tune derived from a gavotte from Corelli's Sonate da camera a tre, Op. 2, is presented as an illustration of this process. The mechanics of vernacularization are further explored through a cache of ornaments for Corelli's Sonate per violino e violone o cimbalo, Op. 5, by the Scottish professional violinists William McGibbon and Charles McLean. The study foregrounds the agency of working musicians dually immersed in elite and popular musical traditions, while shedding new light on McGibbon's significance as an early dual master of Italian and Scots string-playing traditions.

Large-scale programming studies of French Revolutionary theatre confirm that the most frequently staged opera of the 1790s was not one of the politically charged, compositionally progressive works that have come to define the era for posterity, but rather a pastoral comedy from mid-century: Les deux chasseurs et la laitière (1763), with a score by Egidio Duni to a libretto by Louis Anseaume. This article draws upon both musical and archival evidence to establish an extended performance history of Les deux chasseurs, and a more nuanced explanation for its enduring hold on the French lyric stage. I consider the pragmatic, legal and aesthetic factors contributing to the comedy's widespread adaptability, including its cosmopolitan musical idiom, scenographic simplicity and ready familiarity amongst consumers of printed music. More broadly, I address the advantages and limitations of corpus-based analysis with respect to delineating the operatic canon. In late eighteenth-century Paris, observers were already beginning to identify a chasm between their theatre-going experiences and the reactions of critics: Was a true piece of ‘Revolutionary’ theatre one that was heralded as emblematic of its time, or one, like Les deux chasseurs, that was so frequently seen that it hardly elicited a mention in the printed record?

Although Fedele Fenaroli's partimento and counterpoint pedagogy has been the subject of a number of recent publications, several aspects of its organization and contents require further research. Thanks to the recent discovery of multiple manuscripts, I am able to elaborate on two of them in this article. First I deal with Fenaroli's partimento curriculum. As several manuscripts illustrate, Fenaroli appears to have maintained a progressive method consisting of four parts (or books) almost throughout his entire career. A partimento student had to work through the first three books successively, which served as Fenaroli's basic partimento course. When these three books had been satisfactorily assimilated, the student could proceed with book 4, which was clearly intended by Fenaroli as his advanced partimento course. Secondly, I engage with Fenaroli's views on dissonance treatment and place them in the broader context of eighteenth-century Neapolitan pedagogy, and thoroughbass and music theory treatises in general.