A ‘hindostannie air‘ may be defined as a short piece derived from an Indian original but arranged in a European idiom. The genre came to prominence among the English inhabitants of Calcutta during the 1780s and 1790s. A small group of women, reflecting the currently fashionable interest in anything oriental, began to employ professional musicians to ‘collect’ Indian songs – that is, to notate them as best they could from the performances of leading Indian singers. Once the melodies had been transcribed, they were arranged as solo keyboard pieces or as songs, a process which necessitated the use of a key signature, a time signature and a harmonization in a European idiom. At the height of the fashion, pieces were performed regularly at the fashionable soirées of Calcutta society, often to great applause, with the singers sometimes adopting Indian dress to add to the ‘authenticity’ of the presentation. At the same time the repertory began to attract the attention of the small group of orientalists led by Sir William Jones, who were engaged in the first serious European attempt to understand the principles that lay behind Indian music. By the turn of the century, with Anglo-Indian attitudes to Indian culture becoming steadily more hostile, the genre began to decline in popularity, but it was then taken up by scholars in England. ‘Hindostannie’ specimens from collections brought back from India provided important material for the compilations of national airs published by Crotch, Jones and others. Having thus established a small but distinctive niche in popular English culture as exotic imports, Indian tunes of one kind or another continued to appear throughout the nineteenth century.

Mozart's financial situation has been the subject of controversy and speculation since his death in December 1791, when a rumour circulated through Vienna that he had left debts of 30,000 fl. (see Table 1 for information on currencies). Although this fantastic figure was ten times too high, his widow's situation was indeed precarious, at least at first.

The investigations of the late Sir Charles “Wheatstone on the subject of the powers of resonance of different masses of air enclosed in chambers of certain definite simple forms, were brought before us by Professor Adams in 1876, and it appeared to me that it might be a matter of interest to this Association to enter briefly upon the consideration of the resonance of brass wind instruments as illustrating Wheatstone's laws. There is very commonly a vagueness used in the description of such instruments which I submit is misleading; they being usually considered to be cones, or cones combined with cylindrical tubing, neither of which descriptions properly applies. And farther, they are commonly considered to be of necessity in tune, that is, in just intonation, having the vibrational numbers of the notes that may be produced from them without altering their length, in the proportion of the numbers, 1, 2, 3, &c. As so great an authority as Prof. Helmholtz writes (‘Sensations of Tone,’ pp. 511, 641): ‘Horns and trumpets have already naturally just intonation,’ and ‘brass instruments naturally play in just intonation, and can only be forced to the tempered system by being blown out of tune,’ it seemed to me worth attention that this must be taken only as being particularly, and not generally true: that is, that though the ideal brass instrument has such characteristics, this ideal is not necessarily attained to in practice. The relative and absolute numbers of vibrations of the first eight tones required on a brass instrument, taking the 4 feet C of 128 vib.

Questions concerning Western art music's relation to language can be seen to arise directly from the most fundamental paradox of so-called ‘autonomous’ or ‘absolute’ musical works: that they seem to say something, the precise meaning of which remains concealed. It is the aim of this article to explore the ‘linguisticality’ of autonomous music – its similarity to, and yet difference from, language – through a close reading of certain motifs in the work of T. W. Adorno. Crudely stated, Adorno identifies the fundamental polarity underlying autonomous music's ‘language-character’ (Sprachcharakter) as that between the internal relations of the hermetically sealed musical work and the external social relations of music's production, reproduction, distribution and consumption. It is the tension between these extremes which generates music's dynamic context or ‘complex of meaning’ (Sinnzusammenhang). Implicit in the approach taken here, therefore, is the argument that linguistic (or indeed any other) theories applied to music make sense only in the context of a larger cultural theory.

Is there an answer to the question ‘what is a refrain?’ Traditionally, scholars of thirteenth-century French song begin their reply by noting that a refrain is the characteristic formal feature of a rondeau, that is, an element which is repeated, usually with a separate half-repetition, in alternation with a strophic ‘respond’:

Moreover, most modern attempts to define refrains have explicitly begun by collecting rondeaux. But since only a small proportion of refrains occurs in rondeaux (in van den Boogaard's bibliography approximately one tenth), it is clearly not a comprehensive definition.

Music psychologists interested in the perception of tonal closure might do worse than investigate the Classical retransition as a sign of impending resolution. Haydn tends to attract more than his fair share of ‘listener-orientated’ approaches, perhaps on account of his attested sensitivity to his audience's cognitive ‘processing limits’. His well-known remark to Griesinger that, isolated at Eszterháza, he ‘could make experiments, observe what elicited or weakened an impression, and thus correct, add, delete, take risks’ conveys the impression of an artist clearly in touch with his public. And yet this most playful of composers exploited this rapport to mislead his listeners, making aesthetic capital out of systematic disinformation.

Several attempts to renovate the stage took place towards the middle of the eighteenth century. Goldoni was substituting written comedies of character for the improvised and stereo-typed roles of the Commedia dell' Arte. Diderot and Lessing were introducing serious contemporary subjects which perforce affected acting, setting and costume. Cahusac, Noverre and Angiolini were working, by precept or example, to create a more dramatic ballet. On English stages Garrick was perfecting a style of acting that broke sharply with the stately declamation and movement of the past. All these and other ‘reforms’ came to a head in the decade after 1750. I propose to consider some of them with a view to the light they may shed on the celebrated reform of opera.

This article is an attempt to understand music theory from the perspective of written and sounding media. It examines three radically different music-theoretical practices, which operate with different forms of written notation and different musical instruments, and have surprisingly different purposes in mind: the monochord-based theory of Franchinus Gaffurius (1518), the siren-based theory of Wilhelm Opelt (1834) and the piano-and-score-based theory commonly practised in our age. The instruments used in these three music theories hold the key to a fuller understanding: they can be understood as ‘epistemic things’ – that is, in producing sounds, these objects simultaneously produce knowledge about music. From a media-archaeological perspective, I suggest, these three music-theoretical practices stand emblematically for Pythagorean, digital and textual approaches to music.

Taking into account the sources now available at the Archivio Luigi Nono in Venice, this article first looks at Nono's serial masterpiece Il canto sospeso (1955–6) in its historical context, both in Germany and in Italy. Having outlined the political circumstances and aesthetic premisses, the article goes on to provide a detailed analysis of the serial technique employed. Particular attention is paid to a technique of pitch permutation that explains the pitch structures of several movements, hitherto not fully understood. Each of the nine movements is examined in view of a better understanding of the work's expressive qualities and in order to show the underlying formal and compositional relationships.

‘Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.‘ So wrote John Dowland of Robert Cecil, first earl of Salisbury, in the dedicatory epistle of Andreas Ornithoparcus his Micrologus, published in 1609. Beneath the hyperbole natural to a dedication lie the essential characteristics of Cecil's musical patronage. The first part of this paper examines his royal entertainment of music in terms of the form and scale of his patronage and the ways in which music could be used within the patron-client relationship. The second part explores Cecil's excellent understanding of music and comments on his personal taste.

Handel's music was a key source for Drury Lane entertainments from 1728 to 1745. Ballad-opera writers regularly deployed Handel tunes, generating multiple performances of his music in low-style, native works that long preceded his oratorios. The soprano Kitty Clive, the biggest star of this genre, initially performed Handel airs both in ballad operas and as additional songs. From 1737, Handel compositions helped bolster Clive's ‘high-style’ reputation, while Handel benefited from Clive's audience-drawing power. In its politics, narratives and musical forms, the design of music Handel composed for Clive shows him adhering closely to the soprano's already established star persona.

This paper presents a view of musical listening as an active, dynamic and interactive process. After briefly considering the historical valorization of listening as critical act within Western musical culture, the paper describes the cognitive processes of schematization that are involved in musical listening. The central role of active engagement with the auditory environment in eliciting emotional responses to music is then sketched out, and the scope and limits of the attentional and motoric processes involved in processes of entrainment – focal in the experience of musical time – are outlined. Neuroscientific evidence that suggests that music is best conceived in terms of a perception–action cycle is reviewed, and the paper concludes by proposing that music is best conceptualized – from a biological perspective – as a communicative medium that is optimal for the management of situations of social uncertainty.

The tune called ‘L'Homme armé’ has long been famous as the structural basis for more than 30 Mass settings ranging from Dufay to Palestrina and even beyond, ending anachronistically with Carissimi. Yet many questions that were raised by pioneering scholars 40 and 50 years ago about the melody and its elaborations are as open now as when they were first proposed, and it seems likely that a review of several major problems—in so far as this is possible within a single paper—may serve to redefine the boundaries of the present state of knowledge and perhaps to stimulate new initiatives.

In the 1950s, using electronic devices to make music seemed a new paradigm for composers eager to remove the effects of interpretation on their relationship with their audience. The promise was that compositional ideas could be directly made into sound with the help of a technician whose task it was to carry out instructions. By making a new realization of Stockhausen's Studie II, composed in 1954, I interrogate many of the original techniques and practices, and show that there are many sites which require interpretation and raise issues of performance practice. The implication of these discoveries is that there may be advantages to an analysis of early electronic music of the 1950s and 1960s from the perspective of the practice of instrumental music, and that where there are references to ‘technicians’, great care should be taken to understand and appreciate the range of musical skills often required by such individuals. This approach to realization also raises serious questions about the ontology of electronic music.

Lorenzo Da Ponte is our main witness as to how he and Mozart put together their three operas. His memoirs, first published in 1823, mystify the topic more than they illuminate it. Some additional light is shed by an earlier publication entitled An Extract from the Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, with the history of several dramas written by him, and among others, II Figaro, II Don Giovanni e La Scuola degh Amanti set to music by Mozart. Whoever translated this from Da Ponte's original Italian worked from a text different in many details from what was published four years later as the Memorie. The well-known passage about how the poet must rack his brains in order to invent situations for the buffo finales will be familiar to most readers from its version in the memoirs.

We are remarkably well-informed about the liturgy of the Second Temple at Jerusalem in the years which preceded its destruction by the Romans in AD 70; the same is not the case, as will be seen below, with the contemporary Synagogue. The central source of our knowledge about Temple liturgy is the Talmud, that massive compendium of rabbinic learning and lore which had its first redaction in the Mishnah of about AD 200. There are numerous remarks on Temple liturgy scattered throughout the sixty-three tractates of the Mishnah, but two in particular give us as detailed a description of its daily services as do the ordines romani of the seventh-century Roman pontifical Mass. These are the tractates Middoth, literally measurements, which gives a description of the Temple with its dimensions, and Tamid, literally perfect or perpetual, which goes step by step through the daily sacrificial rites.

For practical reasons, this paper concerns not the complete corpus of Norman liturgical books, but simply those which contain music for mass (or information about it). The sources upon which my survey is based are listed in Table 1 on pages 14–16. They are grouped according to place of origin, in four sets: sources from (i) Normandy, (ii) areas of north France adjacent to Normandy, (iii) Britain, (iv) Sicily, South Italy and the Holy Land. When more than one source survives from a particular church, each is distinguished by a readily comprehensible qualifier in square brackets. The contents of the chosen sources are examined from six main points of view: post-Pentecost alleluia series, then the complete alleluia, sequence and ordinary of mass repertories, and finally variant readings in proper of mass chants and in sequences. The crosses in the columns opposite each source in Table 1 indicate that the source has been used in one of the six types of investigation. Thus the troper from St Evroult (Paris, Bibl. Nat., lat. 10508) contains material for a study of alleluia, sequence and ordinary of mass repertories, and the text and melody variants in sequences; but for the St Evroult post-Pentecost alleluia series one must consult the sacramentary Rouen, Bibl. Mun., 273, which has chant text incipits in its margin. No St Evroult book survives with chant melodies for all the proper of mass, so St Evroult must remain unrepresented in the study of melodic variants in the proper of mass. It goes without saying that some books can be assigned more confidently than others to particular churches. Table 1 is therefore followed by brief notes explaining the more tentative or less widely known among the assignations I have made. The churches of Normandy mentioned in this paper are shown in Map 1 on page 18.

Even though no medieval chivalric order was known to have patronized musicians, there was reason to believe that music had played a prominent role in the ceremonies of the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece in the fifteenth century. The first two sovereigns of the Order, Dukes Philip and Charles of Burgundy, were enthusiastic patrons of skilled composers and performers. And the meetings of the Order were unusually splendid, to judge from contemporary accounts, chronicles and paintings. Chronicles describing the Feast of the Pheasant organized by the Order in Lille in 1454 to launch a crusade are especially full of details about the performance of polyphonic music.

There are many aspects of nineteenth-century violin playing that have received little attention from scholars. The subject is a vast and complicated one, far beyond the scope of a short article to treat adequately, but there are a number of important areas in which problems have not even been recognized, let alone investigated. For instance, the most substantial recent work on this subject, Robin Stowell's Violin Technique and Performance Practice in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1985), provides a useful digest of what the major violin methods of the period say, but because it is mainly confined to these sources, ignoring for the most part journalism and other contemporary accounts, and because it has a rather artificial terminal date of 1840, it fails to illuminate major underlying patterns of continuity and change in nineteenth-century violin playing. It may be valuable, therefore, to put forward a few ideas and suggest a few fruitful lines of enquiry which have until now remained largely unconsidered.