Many practitioners of the magical arts in English Renaissance drama rely on music to achieve their occult goals. Indeed, music often comes to represent the audible sound of arcane forces at work, for to the Renaissance music itself was a dual art with both obvious and hidden properties. On one hand, music was a delightful, practical science concerned with the production of ordered sound by the human voice or artificial instruments. On the other hand, music, like magic, was a powerful numerical art capable of unlocking the obvious and hidden aspects of all creation. As Thomas Morley carefully reminds his readers in the most famous contemporary English treatise on music theory,

Of all the genres of thirteenth-century vernacular polyphony, none is more elusive than the so-called refrain cento. Such types of composition as the motet enté and the motet with a single terminal refrain make regular appearances in the literature on the thirteenth-century motet. Most of these genres are defined by the presence or absence of a refrain, the musico-poetic entity which seems to drift from chanson to rondeau, to verse narrative, to motet. The nature of the problem concerns the degree to which the pieces which have been termed refrain cento can actually be seen to constitute a genre. Generic considerations will therefore be given some weight in this article.

The operatic reforms of Gluck and his subsequent conquest of Paris have received much critical attention, but discussion of his rival Piccinni tends to be anecdotal rather than analytical. The term ‘Piccinnisme’ is also liable to misunderstanding. Terry, for example, setting the scene for J. C. Bach's French opera, refers to Gluck's ‘heresies’ against Lully and Rameau, and states that his opponents summoned Piccinni as a champion of orthodoxy. Although the previous alternatives to Gluck, in the critics' eyes, were those representatives of a style since decayed, Piccinni was certainly not their champion and his supporters must be numbered among those who would gladly have buried the traditional French opera once for all.

To have borrowed the music of one work for the composition of another is, understandably I think, not a confession that composers are fond of making. If they are afraid of the misunderstanding and sarcastic comment that it might arouse in the minds of the unthinking, it is our duty, it seems to me, to study and explain (where explanation is necessary) this pelican-like habit. Berlioz has suffered particularly in this respect for being a ‘programmatic’ composer, although, as I shall later try to show, the very existence of so much borrowed material demonstrates the fatuity of such a term as an attempt to isolate one particular type of composer.

The mention of the term ‘colossal baroque’ brings to mind the Missa Salisburgensis in fifty-three parts, which was long thought to have been written by the Roman composer Oratio Benevoli and performed at the Consecration of Salzburg Cathedral in 1628. While it has often been cited in standard text books as the prime example of music of the Roman ‘colossal baroque’, it has been shown by Ernst Hintermaier that the work is not by Benevoli and, far from being performed in 1628, it dates from the second half of the century. In the wake of the historical vacuum created by this discovery it will be the purpose of this paper to examine archival and musical evidence of multiple-choir music in the period in which the mass was originally thought to have been written and so to outline the development of large-scale music in Rome.

Music theory has increasingly been attempting to find points of conjunction between the analytical methods of Heinrich Schenker and those of Arnold Schoenberg. However, the move toward a reconciliation has encountered obstacles because of the uneven development of the two schools and differences in the philosophical background of their procedures. The present article focuses on these differences through an examination of three standard examples: the first movements of Beethoven's sonatas op. 2 no. 1, op. 10 no. 1 and op. 57. The comparison of Schenker's analyses in Der Tonwille and Der freie Satz with those of Schoenberg, Webern, Rufer and Ratz shows that the disagreement principally concerns musical form and the functions of its components. The differences can finally be traced back to two opposite paradigms: music as nature and music as language.

In this paper my chief concern is with the place of the musical glasses and glass harmonica in musical and social history, and only incidentally with their technical development. I want to trace some little-known phases in their origins and use, and to try to build up a picture of their continuity in one form or another. The only work in English on the subject is C. F. Pohl's Cursory Notices on the Origin and History of the Glass Harmonica, written for the London Exhibition of 1862. This admirable pamphlet of sixteen pages is now very rare, and so I make no apology for repeating some of its contents. But as it deals almost entirely with Germany, apart from Benjamin Franklin, and does not go back beyond 1677, I shall take the subject farther afield in both time and place.

This well-known passage by Francis Bacon might be regarded as an appeal for common sense in the instrumentation of Elizabethan and Jacobean music. The principle of avoiding combinations which do not blend may still be applied today, but, as Bacon goes on to say, ‘for the Melioration of Musicke, there is yet much left (in this Point of Exquisite Consorts) to try and enquire’.

When in 1710 or 1711 Joseph Anton Stranitzky's company of German actors took over the recently built Theater nachst dem Karntnertor in Vienna they established a tradition of plays with music that was to last for a century and a half. They were themselves heirs to various traditions—most notably the companies of strolling players (englische Comödianten) that had been popular in German lands from Shakespeare's time, but also assimilating features from the commedia dell'arte and the Parisian théâtres de la foire, and imitating (and frequently parodying) the Italian court opera, as well as developing even further the extensive comic scenes and intermezzi both of the opera and of the Jesuit drama. Music was an important component in the Viennese Jesuit dramas and the theatres de la foire, and collections like the Engelische Comedien und Tragedien … of 1620 and Liebeskampf oder Ander Theil der Engelischen Comoedien und Tragoedien … of 1630, containing the tunes as well as the words of a number of songs, indicate the extent to which music was readily available for ambulant troupes in seventeenth-century Germany. Parallel to the use of music in German plays at this time is the extent and nature of the comic scenes in operas and Jesuit dramas in Vienna. J. B. Adolph's carnival play of 1700, Carnisprivium proscriptum, with music by J. B. Staudt, includes three large-scale musical sequences, a light-hearted German song in praise of the joys of angling, and also a vernacular parody of a Latin lament. During the reign of Amalteo as court poet, and even more during that of Minato (1669–98), comic scenes and dialect interpolations reached such a height that the reforms of Zeno and Metastasio became entirely necessary. One example of Minato's methods must serve for many: in the Minato/Draghi La lira d'Orfeo of 1683 Orpheus is by no means Euridice's only admirer. When he leaves her after a tiff, she is forced to admit: ‘Lassa! Perdendo vo tutti gli Amanti’.

In these days when it is, perhaps, not considered impolitic or impolite unblushingly to vaunt one's wares, the invitation graciously conveyed by the Council of this Association to me, as the compiler of the work entitled “The King's Musick,” to say some few words regarding my literary first-born, did not so much startle me as it might have done in my salad days. Still, it is not an easy task to preserve an even balance when speaking of one's own particular efforts, and the only efficient way is to assume to a large extent the position of one looking at the book from a perfectly unprejudiced point of view, such as a member of the outside public can alone possess.

Two traits distinguishing the music of the Renaissance may be singled out as relevant to this study: a spirit of emulation leading to appropriation by composers of various aspects of the music of their peers and the development, to a degree not previously seen, of a historical sense. Both in my opinion play a role in the choices made by Palestrina in approaching the L'homme armé theme.

As a repertory where recitative and air were not always delineated and where lyrical, mellifluous recitative was the most essential element, eighteenth-century French opera confronts historians and critics with a situation rather different from that of other operatic repertories. Whereas we can delve with relative confidence into questions about the style, shape and content of da capo arias, for example, we are confronted in French opera with a host of nagging details that make even the simplest assertions problematic. How did composers and audiences think about recitative and air? How and to what extent did the distinction between the two matter to them? Given that purely musical values, the kind informing Italian arias, resided elsewhere in French opera – primarily in its divertissements – how did one judge the musical content of recitative and to what end?

In the year 1496 Franchino Gafurio referred to the use of tempered fifths on the organ, but he did not specify the amount of the tempering, and Murray Barbour has concluded that ‘we have no way of knowing what temperament was like’ at that time. I believe, however, that a careful analysis of contemporary theoretical writings, and particularly of the information given by Ramos de Pareja in his Musica Practica of 1482, will show that the kind of tuning in question was almost certainly some form of regular meantone temperament, that is, with the fifths tempered rather more than in equal temperament for the sake of more resonant thirds and sixths.

It appears to me that in this world all things move onwards together, and that just as in things external, and what we are accustomed to call material, so in things which concern the mind, there is no department of philosophy, or science, or art which goes on quite by itself, without influencing and being influenced by the progress which goes on in other lines. The tone and predisposition of men's minds, and the character of the prevalent courses of speculation, seems to be determined by causes which affect all branches of mental activity in a similar way, and the tendencies which show themselves strongly and effectively in one branch are sure to appear sooner or later in another.

Vivaldi's indebtedness to Roman models in his formative years as a composer has generally been recognized, although the Roman link is often viewed simplistically and inaccurately as an apprenticeship, stylistically speaking, with Corelli. A more careful review of the evidence leads to the conclusion that the Corellian features in his first three published collections were acquired at second hand via a slightly older generation of Venetian composers (Gentili, Albinoni, Caldara) rather than through independent study of Corelli. Undeniably, the pioneering concertos of op. 3 (L'estro armonico, 1711) betray the strong influence of the Rome-based composer Giuseppe Valentini, whose Concerti grossi, op. 7, had been published the previous year in Bologna But the few manuscript works by Vivaldi that survive from this early period (notably the sonatas RV 60 and 779, and the concertos RV 402, 416 and 420) offer clear evidence that for ordinary purposes he remained as close as any of his Venetian contemporaries to the norms of the local tradition.

The singing of metrical psalms, canticles, some anthems and a few hymns in the ‘old way’ constituted almost the sole musical activity in English parish church services after the Restoration. By the start of the eighteenth century a reform was under way. Parish clerks ceased to line out the psalms for the benefit of congregations. As the clergy and gentry generally disdained to assist the improvement of music and only the wealthiest urban churches could afford organs, congregations took their lead from choirs trained by itinerant singing-masters. Church music became divided between the art music of cathedrals, chapels and rich parishes and the popular psalmody performed elsewhere.

The music of the twelfth-century song Dulcis Jesu memoria has been almost entirely neglected in modern scholarship, though its text (or rather a version of it) is well known in settings by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century composers. This article presents a new edition and translation of the song, and seeks to interpret its music and text as partners in an exegetical whole. The song's complicated relationship with the sequence genre proves a fruitful backdrop against which to interpret both text and melody, and analysis of the song's only notated manuscript source leads to new conclusions about the purpose to which the song may have been put by the manuscript's first readers.

The precious collection of manuscript scores and printed libretti dating from the late seventeenth century and housed today in the Biblioteca Estense at Modena is ample proof that Duke Francesco II d'Este (1660–94) was one of Italy's most generous patrons of music. Indeed his library, which good fortune has preserved almost intact, is an indispensable resource for the study of oratorio, opera and instrumental music in northern Italy in the last quarter of the century. Its contents show him to have been a man of catholic and modern taste, acquiring and promoting works by living composers active in Rome, Florence, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice and, of course, Modena. On the evidence of the Este music collection, historians have been consistent in applauding the cultural achievements of Francesco II's reign and yet, surprisingly, there have been no detailed studies of the way in which the duke exercised his patronage.

It is forty years since Willi Apel published his important article which linked Frescobaldi's keyboard music with that of the contemporary Neapolitan composers, Mayone and Trabaci. By drawing attention to generic, formal and stylistic features common to the music of Frescobaldi and the Neapolitans he established a more balanced outlook on Italian keyboard music of the seventeenth century, and also pointed to Cabezon as an influence on Mayone and Trabaci. There is, however, a case for reconsidering this current view in the light of the artistic contacts between Naples and Ferrara in the last decade of the sixteenth century, and for examining the possible origins of some of the compositional processes that have appeared to link Frescobaldi to his southern counterparts. Professor Apel singled out features common to Frescobaldi, Mayone and Trabaci; and more recent work by Roland Jackson has established further musical evidence to support the specific influence of Trabaci on Frescobaldi's chromatic compositions and toccatas, and to suggest a more general pattern of musical practice in Naples, exemplified in the chromatic and other compositional procedures found both in Trabaci's music and in the works – vocal as well as instrumental – of Gesualdo and de Macque. Amongst these procedures is the device of inganno which Jackson has identified in some of Frescobaldi's mature chromatic music.