Broadly speaking, we can divide Renaissance polyphony into five groups: works not using any pre-existent material, and pieces based on sacred monophony, secular monophony, sacred polyphony or secular polyphony. This is not the common way to classify Renaissance compositions. The more normal breakdown is by the technique applied to the pre-existent material – cantus firmus, paraphrase, parody – regardless of what that material was. Yet much is to be gained by starting with the original material, and that was, after all, what the composer probably did at least some of the time.

Throughout most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a three-act structure prevailed in Italian opera. Spoken plays in Renaissance Italy had been in five acts, a structure which was maintained both when music was inserted into them (as in Guarini's Il pastor fido of 1584) and, later, when they were set entirely to music (as was Rinuccini's Orfeo of 1600). Whereas spoken plays generally continued to follow a five-act structure, the favola in musica soon assumed a different, three-act structure (T. de Cupis's Eumelio of 1606 set by Agostino Agazzari and Ottavio Corsini's Aretusa of 1620 set by Filippo Vitali were among the first to be in three acts) and this remained the norm until the 1770s.

‘There is no music in Chinese music history.’ This paradox is often expressed by music scholars in Hong Kong, a modern metropolis in which Chinese and Western musics and music scholarship mingle and thrive. Highlighting the contrasts between traditional Chinese and contemporary Western views of music and music historiography, the paradox refers to the scholars' observation that Chinese music histories include few descriptions of actual music, and that performances of early Chinese music are often inauthentic. Published accounts of China's musical past include little hard evidence about the structure and sounds of specific musical works. Thus, the scholars argue, the accounts are more theoretical than factual, and their musical descriptions disputable. Public performances and recorded examples of early Chinese music reveal obvious use of Western tonal harmony and counterpoint, and thus cannot be authentic music from China of the past. The scholars' arguments, however, cannot refute that in Hong Kong many Chinese music masters and audiences find the so-called early Chinese music authentic and its histories credible.

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.

History can often be read as story or drama, with the events of the narrative partitioned into scenes. As a play, the history of music theory in eighteenth-century France has Jean-Philippe Rameau as its main character. The scenes in which Rameau and his opponents debated his theory are filled with contentious dialogue. Even if the historian excludes Rameau and devotes scenes to his predecessors, contemporaries and interpreters, the plot still revolves around the story's protagonist who stands in the wings.

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.

THIS, in a letter to Mary Anne Wood dated 7 February 1842, is the earliest specific mention of Bennett's last piano concerto, which was never published and for many years was missing. Only a ‘tantalising fragment’ of a two-piano reduction made by the composer's son and biographer, J. R. Sterndale Bennett, was known to researchers. Autograph manuscripts of two versions of the work, and two sets of orchestral parts copied for different performances, have recently come to light during the present author's research on Bennett. The discovery enables a fresh assessment to be made of an ‘unpublished work of outstanding importance’ by a composer of relatively few large-scale pieces, composed at the end of his most creative period and when he was arguably at the height of his powers. It also presents the possibility of the concerto's performance and publication, 150 years after its conception. A summary of all the sources now known is given in Table 1.

The reception history of Ludwig van Beethoven's symphonies in America offers striking evidence of multiple, previously unidentified, Continental and English connections to the musical thought of John Sullivan Dwight (1813–93), the first American-born critic of art music, and therefore to early American conceptions of the symphony in the 1840s. These direct links illuminate the history and criticism of the first performance in America of Beethoven's Symphony no. 9 in D minor, op. 125, which took place in New York in 1846. From the many sources associated with Dwight's musical learning and aesthetic education, I have chosen in this article to examine Dwight's literary interest in Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller's poem ‘An die Freude’ and in Thomas Carlyle's biography of Schiller, to document his knowledge of commentary on the symphony by the German critic Adolf Bernhard Marx, and to describe Dwight's response to the initial American performance of the Ninth Symphony.

Britten‘s music is usually thought of as tonal, even if the term is sometimes qualified.’ Much of the drama of his operas (at least, up to and including A Midsummer Night's Dream, op. 64 (1960)) has been discussed in terms of ‘tonal action’, as have the structures of individual songs, song cycles and purely instrumental works. Yet his earliest published works are not tonal in the same way as later, more widely known ones. Not until the works of his American years (1939–42) do we begin to see the kind of tonal structure that enabled Peter Grimes, op. 33 (1945), to be conceived – structures like the highly focused tritonal opposition of Les illuminations, op. 18 (1939), or the E/C ambiguity (eventually resolved in favour of E) of the Hymn to St Cecilia, op. 27 (1942). Nevertheless Britten's first three works with opus numbers, written while he was a student at the Royal College of Music from 1930 to 1933 (the Sinfonietta, op. 1, completed in July 1932; the Phantasy Quartet, op. 2, completed in October 1932; and A Boy was Born, op. 3, completed in May 1933), are quite clearly diatonic in basis. This essay explores the ways in which this diatonicism is structured, and sketches the subsequent history of the main procedure involved.