Johann Georg Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–4) exerted considerable influence on late eighteenth-century German musical writers. But for many modern commentators, it typifies the negative attitude to instrumental music characteristic of much Enlightenment rationalism. A reassessment of Sulzer, taking account of his philosophical background in Leibniz, Wolff and Baumgarten, shows that in fact he considered music the first of the fine arts. The arts have an ethical, civilizing role; but while most can affect only people who are already partly civilized, music possesses a special ‘aesthetic force’ which energizes the minds of cognitively passive people or ‘savages’.

Orchestral colour can be read as an important part, both literally and metaphorically, of Theodor W. Adorno's approach to Mahler. Adorno's examples of ‘breakthrough’, ‘suspension’ and ‘fulfilment’ show that timbre, traditionally considered largely irrelevant to music's deep structure, plays a significant role in his conception of Mahlerian form. For Adorno, these musical relationships resonated strongly with his post-Second World War concern for the plight of the outsider within the homogenizing bounds of modern society.

The polyphonic fiddling of the Black Sea coast of Asia Minor is remarkable enough as a type of folk music; but it is the more remarkable to find such polyphony within the territory of the Islamic musical world, the territory of the purely homophonic (or at most mildly heterophonic) classical Perso-Arabo-Turkic tradition. From passages in the surviving treatises of Al-Kindī (ninth century) and Ibn Sīnā (eleventh century) it is known that these authors were familiar with fourths, fifths and octaves and their use; and in the Mūriṣtus MSS quoted by Farmer, triads are mentioned and their affective properties described. But these are the only traces of such knowledge in the history of a tradition which as it reaches us today is homophonic. The nature of this tradition has often been misunderstood, as is shown by such a statement as: the Arabs never got beyond the stage of homophony. This implies that homophony as practised in the Islamic world is primitive, or if not primitive is yet a stage in the evolution of harmony. Either view is false; false to that which can be observed all over the world at the present time, and historically false as well. The music of Islam is a music of high sophistication, and its sophistication was well established by the ninth century.

In this paper we offer a preliminary framework that highlights the relational nature of solo music-making, and its associated capacity to influence the constellation of habits and experiences one develops through acts of musicking. To do so, we introduce the notion of extended musical historicity and suggest that when novice and expert performers engage in individual musical practices, they often rely on an extended sense of agency which permeates their musical experience and shapes their creative outcomes. To support this view, we report on an exploratory, qualitative study conducted with novice and expert music performers. This was designed to elicit a range of responses, beliefs, experiences and meanings concerning the main categories of agency and creativity. Our data provide rich descriptions of solitary musical practices by both novice and expert performers, and reveal ways in which these experiences involve social contingencies that appear to generate or transform creative musical activity. We argue that recognition of the interactive components of individual musicking may shed new light on the cognition of solo and joint music performance, and should inspire the development of novel conceptual and empirical tools for future research and theory.

Roland Barthes's perception of voice having a ‘grain’ is one of the best-known legacies of the last century's history of ideas, especially in discussions of popular music. His evidence, the singing of Charles Panzéra, compared with that of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, is explored and illustrated here in the context of a discussion of the origin of ‘grain’ and its wider implications. It is only rhetorically that one may consider the ‘geno’-song separately from the ‘pheno’-song, but the implied interplay of structure and effect is a powerful critical resource, neglected to date because Barthes's vision requires explanation, as proposed here.

The historian John Keegan was one of the first to ask the simple yet searching question: what actually happens in combat? It is well known that English footsoldiers received a charge by French knights at the battle of Agincourt in 1415, but what took place when men and horses collided? Keegan gives his answers in The Face of Battle, and it may be time for musicologists to modulate the sonorous questions that he poses there for their own purposes. What actually happened, for example, when a motet by Johannes Ciconia was performed in northern Italy c 1400? When friends and associates gathered together to hear such music, what was the nature of their various musical aptitudes and interests? Did women participate in the performances? What was the role of instrumentalists? Some of these questions, no doubt, will never find an answer; there are no medieval chronicles devoted to musical gatherings as there are chronicles – and many other writings – devoted to battles like Agincourt. None the less, literary and iconographical sources are among those which may still have something to reveal about ‘the face of performance’ (to coin a phrase after Keegan's own), and the purpose of this article is to examine the contents of one that has been unjustly neglected: the Tractatulus de differentiis et gradibus cantorum by Arnulf de St Ghislain. This brief treatise classifies the kinds of musicians who performed or admired polyphonic music and is therefore quite exceptional among the works loosely classified as medieval music theory.

There is never much danger of historians underrating the political, social or literary importance of the French Revolution. While that cataclysmic event is acknowledged to have affected the course of musical development, as of everything else, the music composed in Paris at the time has received little attention. This neglect has distorted our view of the past. We are apt to think of the romantic movement in music as a German development, stemming from Beethoven, who in turn built on tidy foundations laid by Haydn and Mozart. This view, fostered by German scholarship, contains an element of truth; but it is very far from being the whole story. If there was such a thing as a romantic breakthrough, it occurred in France in the early 1790s. before Beethoven had formed his style. It was largely a product of the Revolution, and like most other musical innovations during the baroque, classical and romantic periods—monody, the symphony, sonata form, the Mozartian concerto, the relaxation of tonality in Wagner—its origins must be sought in the opera house.

Nel giorno, che sublime in bassi manti
Isabella imitava alto furore;
Estolta con angelici sembianti
Ebbe del senno altrui gloria maggiore;
Alhor saggia tra 'I suon, saggia tra i canti
Non mosse piè, che non sorgesse Amore,
Né voce aprì, che non creasse amanti,
Né riso fè, che non beasse un core.
Chi fu quel giorno a rimirar felice
Di tutt'altro quaggiù cesse il desio,
Che sua vita per sempre ebbe serena.
O di Scena dolcissima Sirena,
O de' Teatri Italici Fenice,
O tra Coturni insuperabil Clio.
Gabriello Chiabrera

In the spring of 1589, the commedia dell'arte company known as the Gelosi travelled to Florence in order to perform for the wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinando de' Medici and Christine of Lorraine. The Gelosi were among the very best commedia dell'arte players of the time, their fame heralded throughout the noble and royal households of western Europe.

Because of its bearing on his freelance career, the question of private patronage in Vienna during the 1780s is of great interest to Mozart scholarship. Serious investigation into this question, however, has been hampered by a lack of sources. The chief source to date has been the Mozart correspondence, especially Wolfgang's letter of 20 March 1784 to his father, in which he lists the subscribers to his forthcoming concert series. Another valuable source exists in the Zinzendorf diaries, which, although often dipped into, have not been systematically examined for their potential in this regard. My recent transcription of all the passages in the diaries that deal with theatre and music in Vienna from Easter 1783 to Easter 1792 includes the private entertainments of the nobility in whose circles Zinzendorf moved. These are summarized in Appendix 1, which forms the basis of the present discussion.

In the autumn of 1748 the opera audience in London was introduced to a newly arrived troupe of Italian singers, an eccentric impresario and an operatic genre previously unknown in England. The buffo company, led by ‘Doctor’ Giovanni Francesco Crosa, would entertain the King's Theatre public for the first time with full-length Italian comic operas. In May 1750, after two tumultuous seasons which saw the gradual dissolution of the troupe and financial disaster for the management, Crosa fled the country, never to return. The King's Theatre closed its doors, to reopen only in the autumn of 1753 with a programme devoted exclusively to serious opera. It was not until 1766, when Piccini's La buona figliuola conquered the London opera stage, that Italian comic opera found real success at the King's.

The birth of a genre surely is one of the most fascinating occurrences in the history of music, and no genre of medieval music had a more interesting birth than the motet. Study of the motet in modern times found special impetus and direction in 1898 when Wilhelm Meyer announced his discovery of the origin of the motet in the discant clausulae of the Notre Dame organa. Demonstrating the musical identity of certain Latin motets and discant clausulae, he concluded that the motet arose through the addition of Latin texts to the melismatic upper voices of the two-voice clausulae and was thereby able to explain for the first time the previously baffling and unprecedented verse structures of many motet texts. In doing so, he at the same time made it clear that he understood the French motet to be of later origin than the Latin and brushed aside special questions concerning the French type, such as, for example, its most provocative feature: its characteristic use of refrains. How was one to understand the presence of refrains in a French motet supposedly derived from a sacred, liturgical model? This and other difficult questions refused to disappear, and they continued to be raised from time to time, but Meyer's explanation of the origin of the motet gained general acceptance, most decisively and influentially from Friedrich Ludwig. All of Ludwig's writings on the motet bespeak his endorsement of Meyer's position, but nowhere more explicitly than in the Repertorium:

Rameau's late entry into the world of opera is one of the best-known features of his biography. When Hippolyte et Aricie, his first tragédie, burst upon an unsuspecting public at the Académie royale de musique in October 1733, the composer had just turned 50. Of his earlier music, only the second and third books of harpsichord pieces and the cantata Le Berger fidèle would have been at all well known. Yet by the end of the decade, with the appearance of two further tragédies, Castor et Pollux (1737) and Dardanus (1739), and two opéra-ballets, Les Indes galantes (1735) and Les Fêtes d'Hébé (1739), the middle-aged newcomer had established himself as the foremost, if also the most controversial, French composer of his day.

‘Memetics’, a concept most elegantly expounded by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, asserts that human culture consists of a multitude of units transmitted between individuals by imitation and subject to evolutionary pressures. Such particles, ‘memes’, are broadly analogous to the genes of biological transmission. Four late pieces of Mozart's, including Pamina's aria ‘Ach ich fühl's’ from Die Zauberflöte, are examined in terms of the meme concept and a conglomeration, or ‘memeplex’, consisting of seven memes is identified within them. The nature of the musical memeplex, in this specific case and also more generally, is considered, particularly from the perspective of its location at different levels of the structural hierarchy. The evolutionary history of some of Mozart's memes is examined with reference to selected passages from works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Finally, relationships between the musical memes under investigation and memes in the verbal-conceptual realm are explored.

This article explores and contextualizes the Macnaghten–Lemare concerts, a London concert series run for six seasons in the 1930s by the violinist Anne Macnaghten and the conductor Iris Lemare, with the help of the composer Elisabeth Lutyens and others. Notable for their performances of the work of emerging British composers such as Benjamin Britten and Elizabeth Maconchy, the concerts are also remarkable for the central role played by women – as performers, organizers and composers – and for the space they provided for the unconventional and ignored. Drawing on interviews with Macnaghten and Lemare as well as extensive archival research, the article provides details of the 20 concerts and argues for their hitherto overlooked importance in understanding the British concert life of this decade.

A sexual division of musical composition emerged in nineteenth-century Britain: during that period, metaphors of masculinity and femininity solidified into truths about musical style. Contemporary social theory, domestic sphere ideology, the new scientia sexualis, and aesthetics of the sublime and the beautiful ensured that certain musical styles were considered unsuitable or even unnatural for women composers. Female creativity was also denied or inhibited by educational and socio-economic pressures born of ideological assumptions. In consequence, many women found themselves marginalized as composers, restricted to ‘acceptable’ genres such as the drawing-room ballad. Men, too, were affected by the sexual politics of the age, because the supposed revelation of biological truths in music meant that the presence of feminine qualities in their compositions could lead to invidious comparison with the less elevated output of women.

The Peacefulness and longevity of the Venetian Republic prove that it had solved one of its greatest problems—that of poverty. Not that it was rid of its poor even in times of prosperity: but at least they were cared for by a wealth of charitable organisations, and that desperation which leads to civil insurrection never gained a hold. The chronically sick, the girls having no dowry, the orphans and the beggars were each helped by various confraternities which were supported by the more fortunate. Some of these were specifically for members of a trade who had fallen on difficult times, like that founded in 1340 by a German cobbler called Henry, who left money to help infirm and needy shoemakers. Others, looked after ‘widows without male issue’; and old people attracted a great deal of money to provide homes for them.