This study addresses listening as a hinge between therapeutic and musical contexts. In the first two sections I examine the productive confluence of Jean-Luc Nancy's thought and Moshe Feldenkrais's somatic practice. I show that the ‘subject’ is configured as both embodied and enactivist. Drawing on Nancy's work, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud and educational and developmental child psychology, I position the listening subject on a fulcrum of balance and imbalance essential to learning and musical practice. In the third part of this study, I concretize Feldenkrais's ideals of correct action and listening in musical practice. Using Glenn Gould and empirical work on musical practice, I explore the significance of listening between acts of playing. Listening is proposed not merely as a phenomenological form of making sense (Nancy), but as a form of self-negotiation and an enactivist and imaginative space that leads to new possibilities of thought and refinement of action.

Focusing on two influential broadcasts staged for British television in 1963–4, this article traces transatlantic attitudes towards blues music in order to explore the constitutive relationship between race, spectatorship and performativity. During these programmes, I claim, a form of mythic history is translated into racial nature. Ultimately, I argue that blues revivalism coerced African American musicians into assuming the mask of blackface minstrelsy – an active personification of difference driven by a lucrative fantasy on the terms of white demand. I ask why this imagery found such zealous adherents among post-war youth, situating their gaze within a longer tradition of colonialist display. Subaltern musicians caught within this regime were nonetheless able to ‘speak’ via sung performances that signified on the coordinates of their own marginalization. The challenge for musicology is thus to heed the relational syncretism arising from intercultural contact while acknowledging the lived experience of African American artists unable fully to evade the preordained mask of alterity.

During the past forty years much of the finest pre-Restoration service music has come back into the cathedral repertoire. So many are the distinguished scholars who have contributed to this welcome revival that one hesitates to single out any by name. Nevertheless some small tribute must be paid to Dr. Fellowes who has been responsible for publishing so much music of the period and who has written several valuable historical studies, including one on the subject of English Cathedral Music. As Dr. Fellowes pointed out in this very book, however, there is still much to do before a definitive survey of pre-Restoration church music can be attempted. Many sources have yet to be collated and much music scored. With this in mind I began some time ago to catalogue the contents of all the known sources of early seventeenth century anthems. I would like this evening to discuss one or two points which have resulted from my work, all of which are connected, directly or indirectly, with the anthem.

The large-scale structure of Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is defined by three major articulations: at E.5, I.1 and T.5. The proportions these define are remarkably constant across 12 recordings and Vaughan Williams's own metronome indications. Those at E.5 and T.5 help create a state of structural stability defined by quarter–half–quarter symmetry, while the articulation at I.1 coincides almost precisely with the ‘short’ Golden Section. These proportions find fascinating analogues in the structure of Gloucester Cathedral, for which venue the piece was composed, although this connection (especially with regard to the Golden Section) was probably not conscious. The proportions defined by E.5 and T.5 in the original version (1910) differed from those in the version we hear today (second revision, 1919), and Vaughan Williams's motive in making two waves of cuts (1913 and 1919) may have arisen from an instinctual desire to establish the sense of quarter–half–quarter symmetry.

The Franciscan mission repertory in California, c.1770–1830, includes numerous collections of chant and polyphonic music. Scholars have assumed some direct connection with music used in Mexico, but this assumption remains difficult to prove on the basis of the surviving Mexican repertory, which is mostly associated with cathedrals. Chant and polyphonic settings from the Liturgy for the Dead in Californian sources are compared with those from Mexico. Mexican cathedral music, even in the 1790s, reveals connections with pre-Tridentine liturgical traditions; but the California repertory is based on different liturgical and chant traditions. This supports William J. Summers's hypothesis that polyphonic works in the California Missions are based on a peripheral tradition associated with the religious orders.

When the subject of this address was decided upon, I had an idea that I might bring before the attention of this meeting many unfamiliar facts in connection with a most important, possibly the most important, branch of musical composition; but in the interim there has appeared the beginning of an article in Mr. Grove's Dictionary—which, although it is not yet signed, I guess from internal evidence to be the production of Mr. Rockstro—which anticipates many of the novelties I might have advanced, and sets those forth in the most clear, in the most interesting, and (I can say nothing short of the highest terms of eulogy) the most satisfactory and instructive light.

The problem of range-finding—i.e., finding the distance of an object—is generally reduced to that of finding the direction of the object from each of a set of base points. Usually the object ranged is in motion, and the necessary measurements must be made rapidly.

Many of the pieces in Matthew Locke's seven sets of consort music, whose principal source is the great score-book in the British Museum, Add. MS 17801, were subjected to a process of careful and repeated revision. The changes Locke made were sometimes extensive, involving the restructuring of an entire movement, the introduction of new material, or the substantial modification of that existing already. The editor of such works must decide whether he is going to present a single version—in this case presumably the composer's final revision—or to embody the variant readings in a textual commentary, or to print such readings in their entirety as parallel texts. The usefulness of a textual commentary tends to be in inverse proportion to its length: the more variants there are to be listed the less easy it becomes to perceive the overall shape of that version of the text embodying them. In the case of Locke's music ‘For Several Friends’ and the movements of the Flat Consort which were subjected to much change the ideal solution is obviously to print both first and last versions in full. But Locke is after all not Beethoven, and in the recent Musica Britannica edition only the composer's final versions have been presented, with a few examples of movements from the early version of the Flat Consort to illustrate the extent and nature of the modifications. Nevertheless, Locke's revisions are worth considering in some detail, for they reveal a composer with a mind both restless and fastidious. The best point of departure is the autograph score-book itself which Locke entitled ‘Compositions for Broken, and whole Consorts, of two, three, Fower, Five, and Six Parts, made by Matthew Locke, Composer in Ordinary to his Majestye’.

Since there is no standard description of the style of a Frescobaldi toccata, this study must begin by setting out the stylistic characteristics of these pieces, especially as manifested in what one might call the normal toccata type – the first eleven of Book I and the first, second and seventh of Book II. In this initial stage, the reader is referred for more detailed development of my points to my paper Ascoltare e guardare le toccate, soon to be published as part of the acts of the International Frescobaldi Congress, held in Ferrara in September 1983 to celebrate the quadri-centenary of Frescobaldi's birth. That paper illustrates the distinctive features of Frescobaldi's toccata style through close analysis of a single toccata (the ninth of Book I). I shall briefly lay out these features, proceeding from the make-up of the individual section to the make-up of the entire piece, and stressing not only what kind of things one finds in an individual section or entire piece, but also what gives those things coherence and shape.

The earlier part of the nineteenth century is considered a ‘bad’ period of English music. It has been labelled, like the earlier period discussed by Dr. Sadie at our last meeting, a ‘Dark Age’. It is interesting to see on what basis these judgments are held. How much music written by English composers in the years 1800–1860 is still generally known? I have compiled a rough list of works that are still in current use, apart from occasional revivals. It is based on recent programmes, chapel lists, publishers’ catalogues, and so on.

The history of the flat, sharp, and natural is not a dull record, but a tale full of stirring incidents. If my narrative does not succeed in engaging your interest, in stimulating your curiosity, and in now and then sending a thrill of excitement through you, I have failed to do justice to the noble subject of my choice. These remarks may lead you to suppose that I am going to speak of the human flats, sharps, and naturals of our profession. This, too, is, if not a noble, certainly an interesting subject; but it is not the one of which I intend to treat on this occasion. My subject is the origin, rise, and vicissitudes of the musical signs that raise and lower natural notes and restore raised and lowered notes to their natural state. No doubt most people would suspect such a history to be dull; but nothing is dull if only we go deep enough into it. The subject in question is certainly not an exception to this rule, which could be confirmed by the study of hundreds of the apparently dry details of our notation. It is with these details as with the humble constituents of society; with the flat, sharp, and natural as with those lowly neighbours of ours whose lives seem to us an unbroken level desert. How great is always our astonishment when chance allows us to get a glimpse of what is hidden behind the plain, prosaic exteriors, and we discover loves and hates, hopes and disappointments, joys and sorrows, aspirations, successes, and failures—in short, at least as much romance as in the lives of the great and mighty. Well, let us try to get a glimpse of what is hidden behind the plain exteriors of the humble friends now under consideration.

An index reference in Donald Mitchell's study of Mahler's ‘Wunderhorn’ years seems to promise an appraisal of Mahler's debt to Liszt; on the page, however, an assumption precedes an exhortation to ‘serious research and documentation’. The debt is located in Mahler's ‘consistent and brilliant’ use of transformation of themes with particular reference being made to the ‘Faust’ Symphony. Elsewhere, Mitchell cites a trumpet tune from the finale of the ‘Resurrection’ Symphony and its subsequent transformation into a chorale as an example of ‘how closely Mahler had studied Liszt’. The species of transformation demonstrated is common in Liszt, mood and association being altered by radically changing the context while leaving melodic, harmonic and rhythmic contour relatively untouched. All of this, however, Mahler might have learned from Wagner, Smetana, Weber or many another composer of dramatic or programmatic music. Real documentation, in the form of letters or recorded comment, has always taken place in discussion of Mahler's debt to Liszt to the pursuit of technical and aesthetic parallels; Constantin Floras' study in progress is typical in that copious motivic and thematic cross-reference, and extensive documentation with regard to Mahler and Liszt individually far outweigh recorded discussion by Mahler of Liszt's personality and music.

The Musical world celebrates this month the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Mozart's birth, and your Council, being desirous that the occasion should not pass entirely unnoticed by the Association, have done me the honour of asking me to read a paper to-day.

Our time of progress is often specially designated a critical and even hypercritical period. But whilst so much deep thought and true feeling have flowed from the pens of profound thinkers in every direction, it has occurred to no one to attack a barbarous remnant of bygone times in music. The idea might have appalled one less deeply convinced than myself. But one must have courage to enter the lists for what one has well weighed and found to be true. I propose to deal here with no less a matter than the entire abolition of all part-repetition in music—e.g., in symphonies, sonatas, quartets, &c. Can there be anything more inconsistent than these stereotyped repetitions? The artist creates a work from his innermost soul, and places it before us in its entirety so that we might behold the same mirage which enchanted his mind, and follow him with the unabated energy of all our mental faculties. He receives us, as it were, upon his Mephistophelian mantle, and carries us in a trice across giddy heights and rugged rocks, over charming valleys, purling brooks, and roaring torrents. He transports us to the pinnacle of joy, and anon dashes into the abyss of sorrow, thrilling us with the ever-changing kaleidoscope of human emotions. Happy is he whose receptive powers can arouse that sympathy which warms into enthusiasm for the master's vision of the ideal. He approaches nearest to the creating genius.

The venerable founder of Soviet musicology Boris Asafiev aroused widespread dismay by his actions in 1948 after the promulgation of a Central Committee resolution condemning the USSR's leading composers: he not only acquiesced in his appointment as chairman of the Composers’ Union, but agreed to give a keynote address endorsing the resolution at its first national congress. His admirers have claimed that he must have been coerced into collaboration and that his address did not reflect his real views. The present essay re-examines the circumstances, arguing that the evidence of Asafiev's willing complicity is overwhelming. A close analysis of his keynote address reveals its contents to be wholly consistent with views that he had regularly expressed throughout his career, as one of the principal progenitors of an anti-modernist, ethnic nationalist and xenophobic strain in Soviet writing on music that was given forceful expression in the 1948 resolution.

Michael Gallope’s book Deep Refrains is an in-depth study of the ineffable core of musical experience.4 But it engages ineffability without eliminating the pragmatic material of music’s economic, technological and even ethical mediations; and it posits a synergistic relationship between these realms. Gallope casts equal doubt on the determinism that construes music’s ineffability as wholly absorbed in mediation and on the vitalism that construes it as radically open. Framed by and theoretically grounded in the thinking of four twentieth-century philosophers (Ernst Bloch, Theodor W. Adorno, Vladimir Jankélévitch and Gilles Deleuze), the book deftly steers between the Scylla of music’s irreducible sensuous materiality (and its attendant invitation to decipherment) and the Charybdis of its elusive ineffability (and its attendant vanishing act in the face of decipherment). The book begins by reflecting on the fascinations and prohibitions of the harmoniaia in ancient Greek philosophy. Already here, Gallope revises the standard interpretation of these founding texts, demonstrating the ways in which Socrates, Glaucon, Aristotle and others in fact consider music as at once deeply mysterious and also strictly rule-governed. This conception of music’sperplexing precision is shown to be shared in ‘global’ contexts less available to music history, including (for example) the Ikhwan Al-Safa, an eleventh-century priesthood of Islamic scholars. At the same time, Gallope draws attention to the continuity between simplified taxonomies of the ancients and the instrumentalization of their axioms for contemporary engagements with affect, so rampant in the era of emerging neuromedia. Instead of recoiling from music’s indeterminacy (retreating to silence, say, or insisting on music’s unspeakable mystery), Gallope attempts to unpack the critical potential at the heart of auditory experience. On the other hand, he argues, such potential is not harnessed by marking the movements of music’s conceptual nomenclatures alone. Noting that music ‘never speaks like a language, nor is it entirely nonlinguistic’, Gallope seeks to account for the specificity of its ‘vague impact’.5 In other words, while there is a residue of conceptual mediation at work in all sonic encounter, music’s ‘sensory impact’ cannot be subsumed by that residue.

In examining the relationship between Tchaikovsky and Balakirev, I shall investigate in some detail the influence upon the Moscow composer of the leader of the St Petersburg group or ‘mighty handful’ (which included, besides Balakirev himself, Cui, Borodin, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov). Balakirev's group had been established before the St Petersburg Conservatoire of Music was founded by Anton Rubinstein in 1862; this, coupled with the fact that there were no textbooks on the theory of music in the Russian language, meant that Balakirev and his protégés had had no formal musical education, but had learned the technique of composition solely by studying the actual works of other composers, past and present. Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, had been a student at the Conservatoire from the time of its foundation till 1865, his graduation exercise taking the form of a setting of Schiller's ‘Ode to Joy’ which was performed at the end of that year and was torn to pieces by Cui in a typically vituperative article. By the time this article had appeared early in 1866 Tchaikovsky had already moved to Moscow to take up a teaching post at the new Conservatoire there. According to Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev's group knew Tchaikovsky only as having composed a Symphony in G minor (his First) of which the two middle movements had been performed at a concert of the Russian Musical Society in St Petersburg in February 1867. As a product of the despised Conservatoire, they viewed Tchaikovsky askance.

With no startling incidents or striking events to mark its course, the life of Sterndale Bennett will yet be always interesting to every one who likes to trace the progress and development of a truly artistic genius. It will be my endeavour to put before you plainly and simply the salient features of a career highly important in the history of musical art in England. The Bennett family were of Derbyshire orgin. Sterndale Bennett's grandfather, John Bennett, was born in the picturesque village of Ashford-in-the-Peak in 1750. Whilst still a youth he left for Cambridge, where he was appointed lay clerk at King's. He married, and had a numerous family. Robert, one of the elder sons, father of Sterndale Bennett, studied the organ and composition with Dr. Clarke. He became a musician of ability, and settled in Sheffield, where he took an excellent position and held the office of organist at the parish church. Amongst his many friends were Mr. William Howard and Mr William Sterndale, the latter a man of literary tastes, some of whose verses were set to music by Robert Bennett and published by subscription. In 1812 he married Elizabeth, daughter of James Donn, curator of the Botanical Gardens, Cambridge, and author of a classified catalogue of plants. He had two daughters and a son— William Sterndale Bennett—who was born on April 13, 1816, in Norfolk Row, Sheffield. Little Sterndale was not fated to know for long a father's care or a mother's love. He lost his mother when two years old, and his father died a year afterwards. Thus he was doubly orphaned in tender age. Happily his grandfather adopted him, and Mr. Howard took charge of the child until he could be sent to Cambridge. Here he was placed, when eight years old, as chorister at King's College, and had the educational advantages afforded to the boys of the various choirs.

Ralph Vaughan Williams's father died when Ralph was two years old; his mother took her three small children to her own parents' house, Leith Hill Place, near Dorking, and brought them up much as she had been brought up herself. Besides the children, the household consisted of grandparents and a maiden aunt, and a staff of servants, mostly local people. Judging from a photograph of a group of them, none was young, and all were slightly eccentric.

Nearly all of Schumann's music contains or derives from words, whether as texts, titles, programmes or epigraphs. It is also famous for its structure of music qua mosaic, an aggregation of small-scale motifs. Now, surely these two basic facts about Schumann—his obviously verbal content, his obviously motivic form—may well be related? He works by way of motto-themes, I suggest, because that is literally what they are—mottoes turned into themes.