This paper aims to demonstrate that listening is not only a highly complex sensory-perceptive phenomenon, but also an activity that invites considerations of its moral, political and religious dimensions. Drawing from the perspective of an early monastic tradition that understood theology as a sounding practice rather than a primarily cognitive one, the author draws attention to the fact that the biblical tradition itself prioritized hearing over seeing in its portrayal of the human being as ‘all ear’ when communicating with and responding to a God that addresses her from the first. Analyses of Martin Luther's account of the new creation in Christ as one that will be awakened to hearing afresh, thus becoming attentive to the ‘address of creation through creation’, and of his theology of the psalter, in which the reformer presents an excitingly different hermeneutics of scriptural interpretation based on the sensory perception of hearing/chanting the text, prepare for concluding remarks on the inevitably communicative and quasi-sacramental character of listening.

The MS Modena, Biblioteca Estense e Universitaria, α.F.9.9 is by far the most lavish collection produced in the short-lived history of the musical frottola. In its pages, unassuming four-voice secular settings are preceded by citations from Pliny and Isidore and surrounded by dazzling illuminations of birds, fruits and plants. If splendour is never amiss in gifts, one must wonder what the relationship was between the components of this intriguing artefact. In this article I investigate the gift value of the source by examining the musical repertory and style in conjunction with its other features. I propose that musical strambotti enabled fifteenth-century educated Italians to perform symbolic gestures associated with ancient music. The repertory was also perfectly congruous with the poetic and decorative choices made for the manuscript. The examination of this peculiar source helps shed more light on the musical strambotto, its uses and its implied cultural associations.

What lover of eighteenth-century music, hearing Burney's characterisation of the Mannheim orchestra as ‘… an army of generals, equally fit to plan a battle, as to fight it’, or upon reading Schubart's description of that group,

has not been filled with curiosity to hear such an ensemble? Recently a few performing groups have begun to try to satisfy that curiosity. We are reminded of the pioneering nature of such undertakings by recalling that a respected music dictionary defines ‘Performance Practice’ as ‘the study of how early music, from the Middle Ages to Bach, was performed and the many problems connected with attempts to restore its original sound in modern performance.

Brahms's dedication of his op. 51 string quartets (1873) to the surgeon Theodor Billroth provides a window into Brahms's musico-political views in the 1870s that has hitherto been unexplored by music scholars. Analysis of correspondence, performance traditions and the scores of these two quartets demonstrates that Brahms chose to align himself and his works with the learned connoisseurs of the domestic chamber-music-making tradition, represented by Billroth and his frequent musical soirées. Brahms's music also shows the influence of Joseph Joachim, his oldest and dearest friend and Europe's premier chamber musician. Brahms's compositional choices in these two works combine public and private musical styles, to offer a touching memorial to earlier composers and friends, and to provide a teachable moment for the musical public.

It used to be thought that Willaert invented double-choir music, drawing his inspiration from the famous organ galleries in San Marco. That his Salmi spezzati were not unique or even innovatory is now beyond dispute. His predecessors and contemporaries working in other important churches of the Veneto — Albertis in Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, Ruffino and Passetto in Padua Cathedral and the Basilica del Santo, Santacroce in Treviso Cathedral — contributed to a significant regional repertory of double-choir psalms, many of which are more adventurous in their use of the medium than those of Willaert. Ruffino extended the use of double-choir to the ordinary of the mass.

A central theme of Nietzsche's Wagner criticism is the theatre and acting. Nietzsche professes a deep suspicion of the ‘herd mentality’ promoted by theatre and the shallowness and persuasive power of the actor. Wagner and Bayreuth, he claims, embody these characteristics in their most intense form, compounding the theatre's worst features with a thoroughly modern set of blind contradictions. But Nietzsche's writings can also embrace theatrical masks and ‘histrionics’, presenting them as the key to a conception of identity as plural, mobile and random. In fact the very form of his writings, with its weave of multiple authorial identities, reinforces this view. This article argues that Nietzsche's anti-Wagnerian rhetoric is a mask that conceals more sympathetic attitudes. While repelled by Wagnerian theatre on many levels, Nietzsche also positions Wagner and the experience of music drama as a model for new definitions of identity.

Some weeks ago, a paper was read by Mr. Jacques on the “Composer's Intention,” and it struck me, while listening, that a great deal might be said from the composer's point of view to show how his intention might be worked out in his composition.

The study of a musical manuscript for its purely physical features—the paleographic and diplomatic study of a manuscript—may seem a far cry from the music it contains, which ought to be our main focus of study. But such investigation can inform us very precisely about the preparation and purpose of a manuscript. It can suggest a great deal more about the ways in which the minds of scribes, performers, even composers worked. (A second thought, for example, can be twice as significant if you have deciphered the first thought erased beneath it.) It is, in other words, the archaeology of music, and relates to the music itself as excavation does to our understanding of civilisation.

It has been said that by naming him Hector, Berlioz's father determined his fate, marked him out for glory and tragedy, heroic deeds and the bitterness of failure and mutilation. A fanciful idea, no doubt; but the more one considers Berlioz's life, the more it seems almost mystically inevitable that his crowning work should be an epic on the Trojan war and its aftermath, the wanderings of Aeneas and the myth of the founding of Rome, and the more one comes to see his discovery of Virgil during adolescence and his precocious response to the passion and tenderness of the Aeneid as the most important single event of his imaginative existence. As Gounod justly remarks, Berlioz, like his great namesake Hector, died beneath the walls of Troy; for the final blow in a lifetime of vain struggles against a hostile musical environment was its rejection of the very work which he knew to be his culminating achievement and artistic justification. When we read the letters written during the two years of its composition we cannot help sensing something special about them. In their mood of exhilaration and their sense of destiny fulfilled they recall the passage at the end of The Gathering Storm where Churchill describes his feelings on taking power in May 1940: ‘I felt … that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial’.

Alessandro striggio was the major composer working in Florence between 1560 and 1590. His musical production, as a whole, has not attracted a just degree of attention up to now, but several scholars have described, and, more recently, critically evaluated his role in the main Medici festivities of the period. Striggio's madrigal books, seven in all, together with selections of his work printed in anthologies of the time, represent an important source of music used in a great variety of festive occasions; and although scholars have dipped into this material, it has not yet been examined systematically. What now survives of Striggio's work in this field consists of over thirty compositions, about one-fifth of his total output. As a percentage, this is higher than that of most other contemporary madrigalists. The surviving quantity probably accounts for less than half of Striggio's festive production, if we remember the almost complete loss of sources for the main celebrations.

This short extract from Professor Housman's Introductory Lecture delivered before the Faculties of Arts and Laws and of Science in University College, London, in the year 1892, is set down here to help me to disencumber my mind and to tell a plain tale in simple words; indeed, you too will have pondered upon those things which appertain to Music Studies. Throughout this Paper “I tell you that which you yourselves do know,” and I shall hope to be instructed in the Discussion.

No foreigner can fail to be struck by the Church music of Russia. Even if his acquaintance with the country be limited to a short visit—say a fortnight spent in St. Petersburg, with perhaps a flying visit for a few days to Moscow, he is sure to be impressed by the excellent unaccompanied singing of the choirs not only in the large cathedrals and monasteries, but also, if he visit them, in the ordinary parish churches. He will be loud in his praise of the marvellous richness and compass of the voices, and more especially of the deep notes sung by some of the basses, going down to the A, G, and even F of the 16-ft. octave of the organ, voices the like of which are to be heard in no other country. Although there is no organ or instrumental accompaniment of any kind to sustain the voices, the singing is never out of tune. Even the clergy seem to be universally possessed of musical ears. In the long ectenæ, which recur so frequently in every one of the Greek Church services, and which in form somewhat resemble our Litany, neither the deacon who sings the suffrages nor the choir which responds ever seem to lose the right pitch, and get flatter and flatter as we so often hear in this country. In fact, I don't think that anyone who has had the opportunity of comparing the ecclesiastical music of the various nations of Europe will refuse Russia the credit of surpassing all other countries in the general excellence of her church singing.

Everybody can imagine the following kind of operatic scene: many characters are on the stage, all singing, pronouncing different words, and expressing contrasted emotions simultaneously – but nothing happens. Action is suspended, the music goes on. The music does not need to be carried forward by action or even text; it has its own formal logic and extension. The last section of Mozart's second finale of Le nozze di Figaro, for instance, takes no less than fourteen pages in the vocal score. Its text consists of only two quatrains of four lines each, which are pronounced and repeated by one group of actors each. The piece comes at the end of a long finale that is full of action; but after the ‘colpo di scena’ provided by the entry of Marcellina, Dottor Bartolo, Don Basilio, with their marriage contract, nobody is able to act or even to speak coherently any longer, nobody causes the other to react to his words, nobody seems to hear the other – and they are all singing loudly and clearly. Not only does the surprise justify the standstill of actions and reactions on the stage: it is typical that in such operatic ensembles the characters behave as if they were not listening to each other.

Throughout most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a three-act structure prevailed in Italian opera. Spoken plays in Renaissance Italy had been in five acts, a structure which was maintained both when music was inserted into them (as in Guarini's Il pastor fido of 1584) and, later, when they were set entirely to music (as was Rinuccini's Orfeo of 1600). Whereas spoken plays generally continued to follow a five-act structure, the favola in musica soon assumed a different, three-act structure (T. de Cupis's Eumelio of 1606 set by Agostino Agazzari and Ottavio Corsini's Aretusa of 1620 set by Filippo Vitali were among the first to be in three acts) and this remained the norm until the 1770s.

Peircean semiotics has retained a place in the study of music for more than 40 years. Few studies, however, have focused upon arguably the most important aspects of Peirce's thought: his contribution to logic and his development of a pragmatic approach to epistemology. This article develops a theory of Peircean semiotics in music that is rigorously derived from the key insights Peirce offered to philosophy. It focuses upon his theory of the proposition and posits an approach to music analysis that is sensitive to the importance of music's internal structure while recognizing the enormously significant role played by cultural contexts and social forces in the development of musical meanings. The article introduces Peircean semiotics and develops a theory of musical valency with particular reference to the Allegro of Mozart's ‘Prague’ Symphony. It concludes by theorizing the role of cultural and ideological forces in articulating and saturating a music's valency.

The name of Johann Adolph Scheibe is at once famous and obscure in music history: famous perhaps for the wrong reasons, and largely as the result of his criticism of Johann Sebastian Bach, which can be found retold and frequently misinterpreted in almost all Bach biographies; obscure because little attention has been focused on his many significant contributions to the historical study of musical thought in the early eighteenth century. In the more than two hundred years since the 29-year-old musician and writer published his rather mild words of aesthetic disagreement with Bach's musical style, Scheibe's opinions regarding Bach have never received an adequate defence. Bach had been insulted, and his Leipzig friends as well as Scheibe's enemies declared him guilty of a heinous crime: he had dared to suggest that the master's music was not without faults. Scheibe has been assumed guilty ever since. He tried to counteract each critical attack aimed at him by Bach's circle of defenders with vigorous logic and at times unfortunate youthful sarcasm, but the war of words which developed never resolved itself positively one way or the other in his lifetime. Rather it faded away after a few years, only to be resurrected by Bach scholarship in the nineteenth century.

For there can be no doubt that a great part of art lies in imitation. Discovery clearly came first, and is of first importance. But it is none the less profitable to follow up other people's successful discoveries. And every technique in life is founded on our natural desire to do ourselves what we approve in others. Hence children follow the shapes of letters to attain facility in writing; musicians look for a model to the voice of their instructors, painters to the works of their predecessors, countrymen to methods of growing that have been proved successful by experience. In fact, we can see that the rudiments of any kind of skill are shaped in accordance with an example set for it. Certainly we must either be like or unlike those who excel. It is rarely that nature makes one man like another: but imitation often does.

This article engages with issues of musical historiography and politics – mainly in the 1930s and 1940s – through the example of Edward J. Dent, a towering figure of international musical and musicological life during that period. Dent's career was tightly interwoven with musical and musicological practice both in Britain and in the wider Western world. It offers a fascinating access point to European musical modernism on the one hand, and to mid-century concerns with the uses of music history on the other. In this article, I focus on these aspects of Dent's career and their intersections by exploring first Dent's involvement with the International Society for Contemporary Music, before turning to two further and closely related issues: Dent's scholarly work of that period – especially his turn to Handel – and his involvement in international cultural politics during the 1930s and 1940s.