Vaughan Williams's music divides fairly easily into three Beethovenian periods: the works written up to 1914, which include several of his most deservedly popular and lyrical works; those written between the two wars, when he was striking out in several new directions; and the final period, from the Second World War to his death in 1958, during which he became even more prolific. His reputation rests on the nine symphonies, on the ballet Job, which like Elgar's Falstaff is of symphonic stature, on his operas and on a number of large-scale choral works. Also, of course, on the delightful songs which first made his name a household word.

The survey which I propose to take of the popular dances of the eighteenth century cannot profess to deal with any but the smallest part of the contents of the dance books which appeared in such numbers during the period now under our consideration.

Most of the members of this Association are doubtless aware that from time to time efforts have been made to obtain a permanent record of music played extemporaneously. A little consideration of some of the conditions attached to our art will show the desirability of successfully achieving such an aim. Before this assembly there is no need to dilate on the fact that the trained composer is just as able—so to speak—to hear with his eyes, as ordinary people are to understand the import of words from silently reading them. The musician composes, or should at least write down his ideas, at the desk; indeed, in the case of orchestral or elaborate polyphonic music, no other course is practicable. This is the sound and proper method; and so long as intelligible “form” rather than disconnected rambling is recognised as an indispensable necessity on which to build, so long will the trained composer prefer the comparative slowness of writing at his desk, to dashing off his, perhaps cruder, ideas when sitting at his instrument. But having admitted the advantage of this mode of proceeding, we must not forget that there is also another side of music-art that ought not to be overlooked, and that is extemporaneous playing. I need not waste your time by dwelling on the various grades of this feature. Such extemporaneous playing as consists of fearful and wonderful chords, more or less vague, coming from nowhere in particular, and leading to the same place, that one too frequently hears doing duty as an in voluntary in our churches, or the astonishing preludising of youthful scramblers on the pianoforte, cannot too soon be forgotten. But above and far beyond these immature essays is the playing of true artists, whom nature has richly endowed with the faculty that we term inspiration.

The work of the late Sir Charles Wheatstone was very varied in character, and was not limited to one, or even two, of the branches of physics. He investigated the laws of sound, of ordinary and polarised light, and he greatly advanced our knowledge of electricity and magnetism. But there is one characteristic, at least, which runs through all his investigations: he always sought to embody the results of his study of the laws of nature in a practical form, so that they might be beneficial to mankind. Thus he made use of the polarisation of the light of the sky to determine the correct solar time by means of his solar clocks; and again, in his electric instruments, he has enabled us to make electric measurements, and also to interchange ideas with our fellow-creatures all over the globe.

Imagine yourselves in a tropical forest. You see here pendulous trails of brilliantly-coloured flowers; there, bunches of gaudy fruits: high up, above your heads, filmy fronds of foliage wave in the breeze; at your feet gnarled and far-rambling roots wander in every direction. You wonder if you are beholding some fabled creeper of monstrous growth, or whether fruit, flowers and foliage belong to different plants that have become inextricably entangled. You attempt to follow a young shoot to its parent stem, and thence to its root; you find yourself baffled and baulked at every turn. Set yourselves the task of tracing the history of the creations named Intermezzi, Intermedii, Intermèdes, or Interludes to their source or sources, and you will experience similar feelings.

The vocal music of William Byrd consists of the Latin Masses and motets, a comparatively small amount of Anglican church, music, and a substantial body of ‘secular’ compositions. Among the latter, settings of psalms and spiritual texts abound, but they were designed for a secular context and rarely taken over for church use; their musical style confirms their non-liturgical character. The numbers of works involved, though approximate on account of doubtful attributions and incomplete sources, are nevertheless instructive: there are three Masses and about 180 motets; the Anglican works comprise two complete services, two evening services, some smaller liturgical items and probably no more than twenty anthems; the secular vocal music amounts to almost 160 pieces. Often extending to two or more sections, the motets generally dwarf the songs, many of which are single-stanza settings. Even so, this last number indicates a degree of involvement sometimes not appreciated by those who comment on Byrd's music.

Let me begin by confessing that the first date in the title of this paper is unintentionally but unavoidably misleading. For when, on June 7, 1753, the British Museum was incorporated by an Act authorizing the purchase of Sir Hans Sloane's collections of books, manuscripts, prints, medals and other curiosities, the library material contained little or no music. The latter part of the 18th century did indeed see the uncertain beginnings of the copyright deposit of music, and several purchases for the general library included a small quantity of antiquarian works, but the Music Room did not coalesce into something like its present shape until well into the reign of Victoria.

Before I start on the main body of what I have to say, a few words of explanation are perhaps necessary.

First of all, with regard to the limits which I have set myself. You will have seen the dates—1870–1895—and possibly wondered at their apparent arbitrariness. But all I could hope to do here is to trace the main outlines of the first stage of France's musical revival. Debussy is only just on my map; Ravel, Roussel and even the later Fauré quite off it. But by 1895 all the main contributory elements which formed these later styles had made their appearance. Satie and Chabrier—the models acclaimed by a later generation—were active before Franck was dead: the Schola Cantorum was founded in the same year as Debussy's Après midi d'un faune appeared—in 1894. These twenty-five years are not the most glorious: much of the music was still tentative and the sense of national style was by no means complete. But because they were years of growth they are particularly worthy of sympathetic study.

When I was invited two years ago to read a paper on some subject connected with the research work on which I was then engaged, I felt a certain hesitation about doing so. For I naturally assumed that in the case of Beethoven a good deal of ground must have already been covered by earlier contributors. But on looking up the records of the Royal Musical Association I discovered to my surprise that since 1874, the year of its foundation, only six papers had been read on subjects closely relating to Beethoven (and in one of these he shares the honours with Mozart). Six papers in 88 years! And, what is even more startling, not one has been read since 1927, the centenary of Beethoven's death, that is to say, for the last 35 years. I need hardly add that such an apparent lack of interest in the life and work of this composer prompted me to make some amends, however small, for an indignity amounting almost to lèse-majesté.

The death, on 14 August 1587, of Guglielmo Gonzaga Duke of Mantua and Monferrato, heralded a sudden shift in the political, economic and artistic policies of the Duchy. His successor, Vincenzo, had notions of a Mantuan role in the peninsular greatly disproportionate to the size of its territory and population, and it was undoubtedly an important part of his conception that the Gonzaga should be seen as patrons of the arts on a scale compatible with these ambitions. During the 1580s, Vincenzo had conspicuously preferred the hedonistic atmosphere of Ferrara and Florence to the Counter-Reformation gloom of his father's court, and in the years immediately after his accession began to import cultural fashions from these other centres. One important change in the musical establishment was the formation, probably completed by April 1589, of a permanent ensemble of virtuoso singers on the Ferrarese model. Another was the rejuvenation of theatre and spectacle at court, culminating in the presentation of opera and ballet during the carnival seasons of 1607 and 1608 and the wedding celebrations of the latter year. The following considers one aspect of this revived interest in music and spectacle, the attempted productions of Battista Guarini's Il pastor fido during the 1590s. The first section deals with the problems surrounding the gestation of the play, the attempted productions and the surviving music. The second considers some of the novel aspects of that music in relation to other traditions.

When the subject of research into Italian solo song in the first half of the seventeenth century comes under discussion – in itself a rare enough event – such discussion is mostly limited to the Florentine style of solo song with chordal accompaniment, and its followers. The harmonic daring, the declamatory ideas, and the ornamental practices of such solo madrigals have proved more interesting to scholars than strophic, dance-like compositions, which have tended to be relegated to the sidelines as unimportant, at best entertaining, little tunes. Even Nigel Fortune, who argues in his highly convincing thesis, presented in several articles, that the Florentine style led only to a dead end, while the future of solo song lay in the strophic compositions, has not yet been able to rewrite the history books, immune as they seem to change.

The Masque of the English Court in the seventeenth century was the vigorous and richly endowed descendant of a long line of gradually developing progenitors.

Both Italy and England had their share in the nurture and improvement of this species of entertainment; its origin and earlier cultivation belonging to Italy, and its final and most successful elaboration to our own country.

The subject which I have chosen is the most important in the whole range of musical aesthetics, and it is one with which we are particularly concerned to-day, when the air is alive with experiments of the most far-reaching kind, the results of which must affect the very foundations of music itself.

It is generally accepted that women are the musical sex. It is taken for granted that nearly all women in the middle and upper classes are musically inclined, and practically every girl of these classes “learns music,” or better still, “studies music.” Our musical colleges have far more girls than men. Socially, ladies monopolise any performance there is; a man may sing a song, but that is generally all; he hardly ever plays the piano or violin. Some of us remember times when a man playing the piano was considered odd; it was essentially a lady's instrument. At a concert, especially a ballad concert, or a piano or fiddle recital, women fill most of the seats.

I am sure that no one of the party of American visitors to which I have the honour to belong could open his lips on this occasion without first of all trying to express something of our hearty appreciation of the innumerable and overwhelming courtesies that have been heaped upon us ever since we set foot on English soil. It falls to others who can do it more gracefully than I to make the ampler acknowledgments that are due for most of these beautiful attentions. But I cannot begin this paper without tendering to the Council and the members of this famous Association a word of special recognition of the peculiar honour you have done us in asking us not only to be your guests this evening, but to participate formally in your deliberations. It would surely have been enough if you had permitted us to attend simply as listeners. But you have insisted with a cordiality which we cannot doubt that we should do more. And, while the duty is to us a most delicate and difficult one, we could not but accept it, believing that somewhere in the symphonic outburst of hospitable good-will with which we have been greeted, there would be the reassuring strain of kind forbearance for any failure on our part fittingly to discharge the obligation so courteously laid upon us.

In 1913 Milhaud set passages of André Gide's La porte étroite as a song-cycle, Alissa. However, he subsequently left the youthful work unpublished, although it was performed by Jane Bathori and Milhaud at the Sorbonne on 11 February 1920. 18 years after its composition he returned to it, and the revised score was published in 1931 as op. 9. It was rare for him to revise earlier works (and, indeed, he seldom made sketches for any compositions). However, he did return to some other works from the same period, the First String Quartet, op. 5 (1912), and the Suite for Piano, op. 8 (1913), simply indicating sections to be cut from the published score of the quartet, and removing a movement from the suite. That Milhaud chose to intervene more extensively in Alissa indicates his attachment to the work and reveals, within the context of one work, the process of compositional growth more generally discernible in his output between these dates.

This article explores the first attempt to reform Handelian oratorio, by the Revd John Brown, in 1763. Concerned about the waning popularity and literary flaws of Handel's works, Brown launched a reform campaign through his own oratorio The Cure of Saul, performed at Covent Garden Theatre, and the publication of A Dissertation on […] Poetry and Music. He also produced the first monograph of oratorio criticism, An Examination of the Oratorios which have been performed this Season, at Covent-Garden Theatre (1763). Published within weeks of one another, the three works shaped an intellectual offensive with aesthetic and moral goals mounted on an educational platform. Although a failure, Brown's attempt reflected Britain's national anxiety in the wake of the Seven Years War.

This article explores the filmic relationship between music, text and image through an intertextual reading of Herzog's two Amazonian films, Aguirre: Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. When Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo encounter each other in the rainforest, 300 years apart, a complicated interplay of history and legend, truth and fiction, is initiated. Awash with magical occurrence, the forest has its own endlessly repeating soundtrack (written by Popul Vuh). The ability of both explorers to defend themselves from the forest depends on their relationship to this music: Aguirre, the earlier explorer, is deaf to the circular sound and attempts to overlay it with a written account of their journey. Fitzcarraldo, on the other hand, enters the forest equipped with a gramophone that plays Verdi arias; he comes with his own soundtrack. Comparison between the two journeys exposes the conventional uses of text/speech and music/song in film, to reveal music as the predominant driving force behind filmic narrative.

The last time we had any discussion of aesthetics in our Association was in 1945, when I read a paper written by Dr. Glen Haydon, which related art to theory of knowledge. This intellectual line is favoured by American philosophers. Susanne Langer, a pupil of Whitehead, has in her Philosophy in a New Key (1942) used not so much art in general as music in particular as the key to her theory of knowledge, which is a semantic theory like Glen Haydon's. This trend is worth noting and contrasting with theories of musical aesthetics in which emotion is the kernel. Among musicians it is almost axiomatic that the stock-in-trade in which they deal is feeling in the medium of sound. They apply their technique to sound production in order to do a deal with their audiences in feeling. One of the fundamental problems of the aesthetics of music is therefore to examine this presupposition.