Some people may ask: “Why have centenary celebrations?” My answer must be in the form of a legend of a certain British composer. He was praised by foreigners and called “The Father of Counterpoint.” Most of his MSS. are in Vienna; and about twenty years ago Vienna honoured him and honoured herself by publishing some of them. Here in England, however, his music is absolutely unknown. His name was even confused at one time with that of an early Saint of the Church, who was thus, quite unjustifiably, endowed with miraculous musical powers. Such a thing could only happen in England; and this is sufficient answer to those who decry centenary celebrations. They may be dangerous; but England needs at least one a week. 1923 is a good year to begin; for 1623 saw the death not only of Byrd and Weelkes, but of Rosseter, the Lutenist composer, and the birth of John Playford, the first systematic collector of English folk-dances and their tunes; while in 1523 Merbecke was born, who was the first to write a special plainsong for the (then) new English Prayer Book, and Hugh Aston died, who was called the “Inventor of Instrumental Music in Europe”; but about whom so little is known.

The Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum owns an appreciable number of Beethoven letters and also of musical manuscripts from his hand. These comprise holographs of finished compositions, sketchbooks and sketch sheets, corrected printer's copy, and the like. At one period, from around 1870 to 1895, the Museum would appear to have been in the market for Beethoven material, in a small but discriminating way; and its holdings have been augmented by occasional gifts and bequests, from the time of Vincent Novello (1843) to E. H. W. Meyerstein (1952).

In order to avoid any misapprehension, it may be well to explain at the outset that the term “Colour-music” is used in this paper in a limited sense, as descriptive of the dual nature of the experiments, and not in the sense in which it is generally used, as the title of a separate art, in which the medium of sound is replaced by mobile colour. Such an art is far more nearly allied to painting than to music.

Two of the most old-fashioned towns to be found in Europe are Nuremberg and Chester, and comparisons between them are often made and similarities and coincidences pointed out. It is a remarkable fact that the only sets of Recorders now known to exist are to be found in those two cities. In the year 1886, the Chester Archaeological Society moved into new quarters in the freshly built central “Grosvenor” Museum. Amongst the lumber from its old rooms was a peculiarly shaped box (which crumbled to pieces almost immediately) and in it the Secretary found what he thought to be “an ancient bassoon.” On viewing the remains, what was my delight to find that the Society was the possessor of a rare set of ancient Flutes-a-Bec, or Recorders.

The Plays of Shakespeare have been handled by the naturalist, the botanist, the ornithologist, the entomologist, the psychologist, the typographist, the angler, the lawyer, the physician, and the divine, but never, as far as I can discover, by one who has brought to bear on them a study of the flute. Yet Shakespeare has honoured the flute as he has honoured no other instrument. In “Hamlet” he has brought it on the stage, displayed it to the audience, and discoursed on its music, its structure, and its manipulation. This afternoon I will break new ground: I will bring before you the views of a flute-player on the well-known Scene. I shall suggest a change in the way of mounting it, express an opinion on how it might be played, and comment on the technical phrases it contains.

Of the two types of Italian opera, ‘opera seria’ and ‘opera buffa’, that existed in the eighteenth century, opera seria is the one which has received more adverse comments from modern historians. The artificial division of its text and music into arias and recitative, its stereotyped plots, its concert-like and undramatic character, are easily recognised weaknesses. Musicians, moreover, have not only admired Gluck but sympathised with the sentiments expressed in his preface to Alceste and have therefore concluded that the conditions and standards he rebelled against promoted a decidedly inferior art. Perhaps for this reason a comprehensive study of the aria in opera seria has rarely been undertaken.

The most trustworthy contemporary biographer of Joseph Haydn, Georg August Griesinger, interviewing the aged composer, asked him whether it was true that he had composed the Andante of the ‘Surprise’ Symphony in order to waken the English who fell asleep at his concert. Haydn replied:

In 1585 a set of Vesper psalms for four voices by Paolo Isnardi, a choirmaster at the cathedral and court of Ferrara, was brought out by the printer Giacomo Vincenzi. In the dedication to the abbot of Santa Maria della Charità in Venice, Vincenzi states that the psalms are composed ‘con nova maniera di consonanza, over come dicono falsobordone’ (‘in a new style of consonance, or, as it is called, falsobordone’). Falsibordoni had been published before, for in Isnardi's Vesper psalms for five voices, printed in 1579, wordless falsibordoni in all eight tones were appended at the end of the partbooks, obviously designed as easier alternatives to the conventional contrapuntal settings; but with the 1585 volume, a publication, for the first time, was devoted exclusively to examples of the style, with specific verbal underlay for each voice (ex. 1). The dedication to the abbot probably indicates an intended market of non-professional choirs made up of resident clerics or musically less-proficient monks and juvenile novices, who preferred some variation to the unison plainsong recitation of the Office: it is significant that the falsibordoni are scored for four voices, as opposed to the ubiquitous five-voiced psalm settings of the late Renaissance.

As recently as two decades ago it was generally assumed that the liturgical music of fourteenth-century Italy consisted of only a few Mass movements in madrigal style, and that the motet appeared—with a few exceptions—only in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, that is, at the time of Ciconia. Such a view can no longer be maintained, now that scholars like F. Alberto Gallo, Ursula Günther, William Layton, Nino Pirrotta, Dragan Plamenac, Giuseppe Vecchi and others have presented the results of their research. The music in square notation and early mensural notation was published in facsimile in 1968, and an edition of the liturgical pieces in partly mensural and mensural notation will appear in 1976.

My purpose this afternoon is to trace the development of the three-movement symphony-overture in England during the eighteenth century, as composed by English composers and not by visiting foreigners, whose works will only be mentioned in so far as they contribute to our knowledge of the native style. I use the hyphenated expression ‘symphony-overture’ advisedly, as its two component terms were completely interchangeable throughout the whole period under review; both signified a piece of music, usually for a full band of players, which could be performed either before or during a theatrical representation, or as a separate item in a concert. Both words had long been familiar in this country; ‘symphony,’ a word of Greek derivation, seems to have been the older in English usage, although more familiar as a term referring to various instruments of the hurdy-gurdy class than to any specific kind of music.

It was in 1842 that John Curwen, a Congregationalist minister aged 26, began his life's work as one of the most notable pioneers of popular musical education. For fully fifty years his was the dominant single influence on music in the state schools of England, Scotland and Wales, and hence upon the large mass of the community. Even today, at the end of a period of more than twenty-five years during which the trend of musical education has tended to discredit his teaching, his figure still broods over the teaching of vocal music, and quantities of school songs continue to be published with the Tonic Sol-fa ‘interpreting’ notation along with the standard Staff notation. Nevertheless, except in Scotland, the true essentials of his teaching are no longer an effective force—a fact which makes possible an attempt at an analytical re-statement of his principles today in a less controversial atmosphere than formerly. Curwen's own writings will be examined in an effort to get behind the numerous adaptations, modifications and dilutions which his method underwent before being discredited.

Here we have the indigenous definition of folk-music, given to mark the distinction between this music and mãrga-music; that is to say, classical or art-music, a different thing altogether. This mãrga music is not primarily for the enjoyment of the people, but is considered as a means to salvation, namely, the breaking of the endless succession of birth, death and re-birth. It is of divine origin, brought down to our times by an unbroken succession of teachers, not only considered as music masters but definitely as spiritual preceptors. The superior attitude of the exponents of classical music towards deçï, popular or country-music, finds its origin in this spiritual claim of mārga-music. Nevertheless folk-music naturally is one of the parents of art-music whether the latter acknowledges this parenthood or not.

In the present state of scientific knowledge in general, it may appear incomprehensible, to those who hare not pursued it in the direction of music, that we should have arrived beyond the middle of the nineteenth century of the Christian era without any work having yet appeared which has set forth even the elements of that science in a light which has carried conviction and met with general acceptance. I am not speaking here of the excellent treatises of Sir John Goss, John Hullah, Henry Lunn, Henry Banister, Alexander Hamilton, &c. These, and numerous others, do not profess to treat of the recondite view of the subject, but solely to supply the young student with practical applications of accepted facts. What is still wanting, despite numerous endeavours, is a work which shall convincingly trace the materials and combinations of the Harmonist to their true source, and show him (as I believe to be the case) that those materials and combinations are not arbitrary and conventional, but are supplied by Nature herself—thus enlarging his views, and, in fact, laying before him all of which, as a Harmonist, he can avail himself.

This response highlights the cultural specificity of the ‘work-concept’ and questions the tripartite scheme of listening proposed by John Butt. It offers an alternative set of listening categories, and makes reference to the issues of early-modern class structures and the role of music in religious devotions. The argument is supported by critiques of historical vignettes that include the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's transcription of Gregorio Allegri's Miserere and Jean Joseph Marie Amiot's demonstration of French music to a Chinese audience in the mid-eighteenth century.

When we use the term “Ancient Egypt,” a hazy picture of pyramids forms in the mind and we have a vague notion that it refers to a culture that reached an exceedingly high plane a very long time ago. How long ago, it is almost beyond the everyday mind to grasp. Our ideas of time are, after all, only relative; and when we speak of “six thousand years ago” it conveys little more to our minds than would “two thousand years ago.” Five hundred years is a very long time; yet if we enquire what was the state of music at that distance of time back, we should find things in a very primitive state. A thousand years ago we only find King Alfred burning cakes, and two thousand years ago we should see the Romans teaching our barbarous ancestors how to build roads, to dress themselves decently, and to take baths. Yet, when Greece was only just beginning to show her first promise of greatness later, the Twelfth Dynasty of Egyptian Kings was ruling a country that enjoyed a musical culture that must seem astonishing to us. We find evidences of musical activity as far back as the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties (ca. 4000–3500 b.c.), and the music made then, and the instruments upon which it was made, could not have been the result of a sudden inspiration and invention. A long era of development must have preceded these early evidences of music—and allowing for the inevitable periods of decline and decadence, we arrive at a date which is so remote that we could scarcely realise its meaning.

Reacting to recent materialist developments in music studies and beyond, I argue for the value of dialectics in accounting for compositional orientations vis-à-vis their objects – be these objects sound-producing, non-human entities, such as musical instruments, or the object that is ‘sound itself ’. Engaging the compositional thought and practice of Busoni, Russolo, Varèse, Cage and Tudor by way of example, I highlight two intersecting tendencies: the first constitutes a presumed mastery over the object in question; the second is suggestive of an exploration of the object on its own terms. Interweaving aspects of post-Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, I argue that, ultimately, our orientation towards the object manifests a negotiation of the self in a changing material world.

Studies of the Spanish Republican exile, both musicological and otherwise, have often worked under the assumption that the exiles were disconnected from Francoist Spain and were thus unable to contribute in any way to the musical life of their home country. This article re-examines these assumptions by analysing a hitherto unexplored corpus of correspondence between two exiled musicians, Julián Bautista and Adolfo Salazar, and other musicians who had stayed in Francoist Spain. Such correspondence suggests that the exiles could, and indeed did, contribute to Spanish musical life under Francoism in a variety of ways.