Sergei Rachmaninoff is widely regarded as one of the great pianists of the twentieth century. In a research project that has stretched over two decades, I have compiled data on Rachmaninoff’s performance career, comprising research in archives as well as published sources in Russian and English languages. The resulting Rachmaninoff Performance Diary has been publicly available online since 2011. A missing link in the data has been the complete programmatic details of over 1,080 solo recitals. In 2006, I discovered research that was apparently unrecognized in its completeness in an archive of the Library of Congress, undertaken and donated by Rachmaninoff’s sister-in-law, Dr Sophia Satina. In this article, I examine the details of the 1924/25 season, which was a critical time for Rachmaninoff: after the collapse of his personal fortune caused by the Russian Revolution, he at last had achieved sufficient success and financial security from his hectic touring to allow him to return to composition the following year, his ‘sabbatical’ break of 1926. From the data, a clearer picture emerges of how Rachmaninoff varied his repertoire in his many concert appearances and recording sessions, showing how frequency of performance and, in instances, apparent self-assessment of his own music, were key factors.

This article explores creative processes in the many settings of the prosula BENEDICAMUS in laude ihesu, transmitted in a large number of European manuscripts during a period of at least three hundred years. The fourteen different polyphonic elaborations reveal a desire for multi-voiced performance shared across the whole period and geographical area under discussion. Moreover, while many of the compositional techniques are similarly widespread, the individual settings remain insistently discrete, suggesting that it was more common for a community to produce its own version of the chant than to absorb another community’s practices. This study includes a list of all known sources with polyphonic inscriptions of the prosula, highlighting the hitherto unrecognized prominence of BENEDICAMUS in laude ihesu in musical and liturgical traditions of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries.

Scholarship on early modern English Catholic music after the reformations tends to focus on the activities of male musicians and male institutions. Despite increased study of English convent culture by scholars of religious, social, and literary history, there remains little specialist examination of music at post-Reformation English convents in exile, and their role in wider musical networks in early modern Europe is markedly under-acknowledged. This article aims to highlight how complex miscellanies with links to English monastic institutions in exile can offer insight into the convents’ otherwise elusive musical world. Using a hitherto unanalysed miscellany – Douai Ms 785 – this article will show how codicological study of manuscripts, combined with study of concordances and unica, can illuminate the role of English convents in early modern musical networks. In doing so, it will demonstrate the need to understand miscellanies like Douai Ms 785 as witness to interacting, overlapping musical and religious ecosystems in early modern Europe.

Thomas Clayton’s opera Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus (1705), while acknowledged as the first opera in the Italian manner produced in England, is also possibly the most reviled opera of the era, a reputation launched in 1709 by the anonymous author of ‘A Critical Discourse on Opera’s and Musick in England’. The opera’s success during its three-season run is at odds with its present reputation. This article offers a reconsideration of Arsinoe based on examining the historical sources and corrects misconceptions about Clayton’s authorship and attribution of the libretto to Peter Anthony Motteux. Examined are the opera’s recitative, aria forms, melodic style and dramaturgy. It argues that critics have been evaluating Arsinoe according to inappropriate criteria drawn from later eighteenth-century Italian-style operas of Scarlatti, Bononcini, and Handel.

After tracing the genesis of the opera, the article examines the recitatives and the structure and melodic style of the arias. The arias do not follow the usual forms of later opera. The melodic style of the short sectional arias is not ‘Italianate’ and is closer to the native multi-sectional English theatre song. Understanding of the opera’s dramaturgy has been hindered by the graphic layout of the 1705 London wordbook. To aid comprehension of the opera and its relation to its Bologna source libretto and to readily assess the work of the librettist, three online supplements to this article present: (1) parallel texts of the London and Bologna librettos (given in translation); (2) a facsimile of the London wordbook indicating text set by Clayton as aria, duet, or chorus; and (3) a reformatted version of the London wordbook.

The article argues that Arsinoe should not be seen as a failed Italian-style opera but as an innovative, sui generis realization of the ideal of an all-sung dramatic entertainment that would meet the expectations of a London audience that had not yet become familiar with the operatic style of Bononcini and Scarlatti. One feature added to the London libretto, the Epithalamium musical entertainment, shows the opera’s link to England’s dramatic operatic tradition.

Providing source material for liturgical practice on a significant proportion of feast days in each sanctorale cycle, the Commune sanctorum liturgies had crucial daily importance for medieval Christians. Despite their frequent use, or perhaps because of this prosaic nature, the Commune sanctorum has rarely been considered as a liturgical phenomenon in its own right. Focusing on the Old Hispanic liturgy, this article explores the creation and presentation of the Commune sanctorum. We address systematically a question left unexamined in previous scholarship: where did the Commune sanctorum come from? We first survey the Old Hispanic material shared with other rites. Turning then to the Old Hispanic rite’s unique material, we examine materials found only in the Commons and those shared elsewhere in the rite. We set out a methodology for determining the direction of origin for such shared chants, demonstrating the importance of proper saints’ liturgies in the creation of the Commune sanctorum as well as the creative interest in producing new Commons materials. In addition to the origin of the Commune sanctorum, this article engages with manuscript presentation, asking how Commons materials were organized and how such presentations guided liturgical practitioners. A deeper understanding of the Commune sanctorum opens a window onto one of the foundational devotional experiences of Western Christendom.

The activities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music collectors help to chart the development of the period’s canon and understand the connections between consumers as amateur musicians and collectors and the composers and their music. In 2014, a collection of music came to light at the ancestral seat of the Earls of Bradford, Weston Park in Shropshire, which reveals a scenario of amateur music-making intrinsically linked to the wider professional scene. This collection has been largely ignored due to its unbound state in a private residence. It is of importance for its association with the five generations of the Bridgeman family, and for numerous manuscripts of previously unknown cello works; but crucially, the presence of four manuscript catalogues, a teacher’s bill for music, and an auction sale catalogue dating from the time, helps to fill in the gaps of what was being performed in the house, by whom, where, and when. This article describes seven sources connected with family music-making and presents a catalogue of the current music collection at Weston Park as supplementary material in the form of a data set in an Excel spreadsheet. Readers can consult the collection as it stands today and how it developed over 150 years.

This article explores how historical musicology can use computational methods within a minimal computing framework, recovering the performance histories of three migrant musicians, producing valuable new information about their careers. Líza Fuchsová, Maria Lidka, and Paul Hamburger all left Nazi-occupied Europe during the late 1930s and settled permanently in the UK. Fuchsová (1913-1977) was a Czech pianist who became an advocate for Czech musical culture as well as an important piano soloist; Hamburger (1920-2004) was an accompanist and teacher who left Vienna for London and became a senior figure in BBC radio and Guildhall professor; and Lidka (1914-2013) [Marianne Liedtke], was a violinist, orchestra leader and later Royal College of Music professor. Their careers have been underexplored, but machine-read digitised archives have opened new possibilities for finding and sorting what can seem like an overwhelming amount of performance data. This article uses a minimal computing led approach to demonstrate building a robust and accessible structure to interrogate performance data and establish performance histories. This article will demonstrate the value of this framework and will show how it can be applied to historical musicology work.

At the turn of the twentieth century, numerous Argentine intellectuals embraced positivist thinking in order to claim the ‘superiority’ of the white race and exclude the indigenous and African-descendant population from the foundational mythologies of the Argentinian nation-state. Darwin’s ideas on evolution – especially the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ as filtered through the work of Herbert Spencer – coloured the discourses of a myriad of Argentine intellectuals, including artists. The creation of a nationalist music was a foremost concern among Argentine composers, who, influenced by these ideas, believed an Argentinian ‘high’ art should ‘elevate’ folk music through European techniques. In this paper, I concentrate on composer Alberto Williams to see how his career and relevant position in the musical milieu influenced and shaped the construction of an Argentine musical canon. I particularly focus on Williams’s speech, later published as an article, titled ‘La patria y la música’ (‘Fatherland and music’), to examine how his ideas on ‘music evolution’ and ‘race’, influenced by racial scientific ideas taken from European Positivism and Social Darwinism, shaped the discourses and development of a national (or nationalist) music in Argentina at the end of the nineteenth and through the twentieth centuries.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Muslim intellectuals sought to articulate new forms of Islamic thought and practice that would be suitable for the modern world. Islamic modernist movements drew on concepts of civilization, progress and science that were integral to European imperialism while also constituting a critical response to the latter. In this essay, I examine the views of prominent Ottoman Muslim reformists concerning music, and situate them within a transnational debate about Islam and modernity. While the views of earlier reformers were shaped by Eurocentric notions of musical progress, an oppositional discourse emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. This discourse, associated especially with Rauf Yekta (1871–1935), appropriated the idea of ‘the Orient’ in order to establish a pan-Islamic narrative of music history, which also emphasized the scientific aspects of Islamicate music theory. In the final part of the essay, I discuss how debates about musical reform were related to the political dynamics of the late Ottoman Empire, particularly in terms of religious and ethnic identity. In conclusion, I argue that the discursive categories of the late nineteenth century continue to underly music historiographies both in the West and in other places, precisely as a consequence of the global connections that emerged during this period. In order to write more ‘global’ histories of music, it is therefore necessary to move beyond the analysis of Western colonialist representations by engaging more closely with non-European sources and discourses, which reveal more entangled and ambivalent stories about music, empire and modernity.

Global music history projects have become increasingly popular in recent years. Going global has its advantages: it develops conversations between researchers working on disparate regions; it sheds light on larger frameworks that are less evident on smaller scales of analysis; it decentres how we teach music history; and it retraces a global hinterland for music systems that have conventionally been called ‘Western’. At the same time, the global history approach raises challenges for researchers working on the world beyond Europe. In particular, there is the danger of unintentionally reinstating Eurocentrism, either by uncritically exporting research questions based on the European experience to the wider world, or by narrowing our focus onto those musicians and scholars who engaged with European ideas and practices, especially in colonial settings. This work is valuable, but it also comes with risks. This essay considers these problems through a case study: a largely forgotten music scholar, Goswami Pannalal, who travelled and taught across north India in the late nineteenth century. Examining his musicological study in Hindi, the Nād Binod (‘Sonic Delight’, 1896), I consider how far asking ‘global’ questions might shed light on his work, and offer an alternative reading based on a ‘significant geographies’ approach.

It is June 2022 and the premiere of R.U.R. Torrent of Light, a multimedia opera, in Toronto is enthralling audiences. Inspired by Karel Čapek’s play that introduced the word ‘robot’ into 20th-century vocabulary, composer Nicole Lizée and librettist and playwright Nicholas Billon have conceived a science-fiction opera for our current fascination with AI (artificial intelligence). The production by Toronto’s Tapestry Opera Theatre is in partnership with the research and creation of new technologies at the Social Body Lab and the Digital Futures Initiatives at Ontario College of Art & Design University. It has been conceived to embed technologies into the scenographic dramaturgy as projections, wearable art and spatialisation of sound and light through the costuming and neologisms in instrumentation to create a ‘unique electronica-classical sound’ of the neo-futurist worlding. After the hiatus of the last two years, this live performance highlights our growing recognition of scenographic vocabularies of programmable performance affecting behaviours, as well as expanded definitions of sound and digital integration as contemporary opera. Such interdisciplinarity has often brought the spectator into fresh relationships with opera in performance, thereby activating the event of spectatorship.

This collection of papers explores the intellectual history of music in global context during the period between around 1870 and 1930. Following an introduction that discusses the state of the field, each of the three papers presents a case study that explores the intersection between music and global history from diverse perspectives. The first paper discusses a Hindi music treatise published in 1896. By situating this work within multiple ‘significant geographies’, the paper highlights the limitations of ‘global’ approaches that neglect the more immediate musical, social and intellectual environments of their subjects. The second paper analyses the intersection between music and Islamic modernism in the late Ottoman Empire. It argues that a Eurocentric understanding of music history propagated by earlier reformists was succeeded at the end of the nineteenth century by an oppositional narrative that drew on the geopolitical imaginary of pan-Islamism. The final paper discusses the work of the Argentine composer Alberto Williams, particularly in relation to his views on race and national music. The paper demonstrates how contemporary scientific theories such as positivism and Social Darwinism contributed to a narrative of national musical development that created hierarchies of musical genres and excluded Argentine composers of African descent.

During the nineteenth century, singers had a range of literature available to them for instruction on how to take care of their voice. This literature included the autobiographies and biographies of singers, works by quacks and doctors, recipes, and advertisements. This article demonstrates the degree to which all of this literature potentially played in the promulgation of health regimes for singers to keep their voice in the best possible working order. The article argues that these health regimes were likely based on superstition or medical advice (or both) and operated within a larger context of narratives pertaining to public health throughout the nineteenth century ranging from the need for breathing in quality air to taking certain kinds of baths. The article charts the oral and print sources through which singers took advice on vocal health and hygiene.