Manuscripts of sacred music of the Renaissance fall into various categories. Some of them, like the famed series of codices of the Sistine Chapel, were written for the Church; others, like the parchment choirbooks of Jena, with their magnificent illuminations from the workshop of the famous Alamire, were done for a court chapel; many manuscripts, of modest appearance and written on paper, were executed for the churches of cities.

The fame of John Jenkins as a composer has rested almost entirely on his magnificent series of fantasias. There are more than 100 of these embracing a variety of instrumental groupings and differing styles. The quality of the music and the pre-eminence of the fantasia as an instrumental form in the early seventeenth century made these works a natural starting-point for modern scholars seeking some assessment of Jenkins's contribution to the development of English instrumental music. There are, however, many other compositions by him worthy of detailed study and I hope that the collection published recently in Musica Britannica will focus attention on some of these, among them not only the large-scale fantasia-suites, but also the very attractive, though relatively humble airs.

Mily Balakirev, the leader of the small group of Russian nationalist composers nicknamed by Vladimir Stassov the ‘moguchaya kuchka’ (the 'mighty handful'), was a controversial figure in his lifetime, and has remained so ever since. What was it that led him to take such seemingly odd actions as his retirement from music at the age of 35 ? What induced him to quarrel with nearly all his former friends and sympathisers? Was he, as Gerald Abraham put it, a flawed genius ? Why did the great works which were expected from him never materialise in anything like the numbers that all his friends hoped for? Why were they nearly all profoundly disappointed that one whom they knew to be an outstanding composer failed (in their opinion) to achieve in the works he did produce that greatness which he exuded in their presence, 'bewitching' them, as Rimsky-Korsakov put it, with his magnetism and hypnotising them with the ‘incomparable beauty’, as Stassov wrote, of his extemporisations at the piano?

Little enough has been written on the Venetian operas of the second half of the seventeenth century, and to all save a few, familiar perhaps with Hellmuth Christian Wolff's pioneering work on that subject, or with Simon Towneley Worsthorne's more recent study, Carlo Pallavicino can hardly be more than a name. Indeed, doubts have been raised about the name itself. The libretti to three of his operas name the composer as Pallavicini, and perhaps following these, or impressed by his prolific output, Burney and others since have also pluralised the composer. However, there is good authority for the spelling which I adopt for this paper, for two documents preserved in the Venetian archives bear the composer's signature, and without doubt he signs himself, in a neat and confident hand, Carlo Pallavicino.

Until comparatively recently the history of musical notation has been synonymous with the desire of the composer to exercise an increasing degree of control over the performance of his works via the medium of the written score. Viewed in historical perspective, it will be seen that during the last thirty years virtually every aspect of this complex composer/performer relationship has been radically changed—in many instances the outcome has been an almost total reversal of roles.

The Renaissance attitude to art as craft is reflected in a veritable cult of competitive setting testing the composer's ingenuity and invention. Already in the fifteenth century one finds abundant evidence of this trend in rival versions, sacred and secular, by famous professional musicians of chansons like ‘De tous biens plaine’, ‘J'ay pris amours’ and ‘Fors seulement l'attente’. A similar situation is found in the poetry of the time: thus in the fifteenth century one finds numerous rondeaux with the same incipit but with different continuations, while the sixteenth century provides a parallel case with the résponse (or rebours) which borrows its form, ideas, images and even whole lines from the model. The entire neo-Petrarchist repertoire is emulative, and the vogue of the blason, instituted by Clément Marot in exile at Ferrara in 1535, was overtly competitive.

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.

The chamber duets for two voices and continuo by Agostino Steffani (1654–1728) have always been considered models of perfection. In 1739 Johann Mattheson wrote that in this form Steffani was above comparison with any other composer known to him—and he was presumably including Handel.

Mattheson defined the chamber duet as an aria for two voices instead of one. That both singers speak with one and the same voice is true not only of the duet movements but also of the solo movements within chamber duets. In the duet examined later, for example, both the soprano and contralto represent the lover of Cloris, to whom the text is addressed. This feature helps to distinguish most chamber duets from dialogue cantatas, in which each singer has a different role.

The first necessity in a paper of this nature is to offer some definition of the term ‘Mannheim concerto’. In the past there has been some tendency to view the musicians working at the Palatinate court during the reign of the Elector Karl Theodor from 1743 to 1778, and the last years of his predecessor Karl Phüipp, as a somewhat isolated school. It is clear, however, from the studies of Hugo Riemann and more recently Gerhard Croll, that not only did the orchestral personnel come from many different parts of Europe, including Düsseldorf, Innsbruck, Vienna, Bohemia and Italy, over a period of many years, but that they were also constantly leaving Mannheim for posts elsewhere, or else going on often lengthy concert tours, especially to Paris, which throughout the period remained the great centre of attraction for the Mannheimers in view of its important publishing trade and flourishing concert life, both public and private. In addition, the Elector, who in musical matters was certainly among the more enlightened and generous rulers of his day, was continually sending promising young musicians off on study tours to Italy to complete their musical education. Among such musicians can be counted Christian Cannabich, Johann Ritschel and Georg Joseph Vogler. Thus the musical contacts with the outside world were indeed wide, and it is often impossible to tell whether particular concertos were composed for Mannheim, Paris or elsewhere, especially as the Mannheim court music library has long since totally disappeared, and we now rely on the relatively few printed sources and the manuscript copies to be found distributed throughout Europe. For present purposes the term ‘Mannheim concerto’ will be taken to include all concertos by composers whose activities were centred for a substantial time at the Mannheim court, and will thus include the works of those such as Carl and Anton Stamitz, the sons of Johann, who spent their formative years within the Mannheim circle, even though they both left Mannheim in 1770.

The year 1911 was in many respects a landmark in Prokofiev's early career as a composer. He was then twenty years old and a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, where his studies at the time included classes in conducting with Nikolay Cherepnin, and an intensive piano course with the famous Anna Nikolayevna Yesipova. He was already known in St. Petersburg as an exponent of his own piano music and had frequently appeared in this role at Nuvel's Evenings of Modern Music as well as at student concerts. He had also performed his works in Moscow, and the enthusiastic reviews of his compositions which Myaskovsky and Boris Asafyev contributed to the avant-garde magazine Muzyka had further promoted his reputation in the more musically-conservative capital. In 1911 his music appeared in print for the first time, when Jurgenson published the First Piano Sonata and the Four Piano Pieces of Op. 3. The same year saw the beginnings of the First Piano Concerto, Op. 10, which was to have its successful premiere in Moscow the following summer with the composer as soloist. By 1911 also, Prokofiev had composed the Sinfonietta, Op. 5, and the two short symphonic poems. Dreams, Op. 6, and Autumnal Sketch, Op. 8.

In my paper published in the last number of the Proceedings, I attempted to see how far back could be traced the string formation of the Welsh crwth, i.e. four central strings above a finger-board and two drone strings at the side. The late fourteenth-century carving on a misericord at Worcester Cathedral seemed to be the earliest known English example with six strings and a fingerboard, but in this case there is nothing to indicate that two of the strings are lateral drones.