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:

A study of Johann Christian Bach's keyboard music prompts the obvious and important question: which of his sonatas and concertos were composed for harpsichord, and which for the piano? (Indeed, did he think of them as two distinct instruments at all?) And what sort of pianos did he have available on the occasions when he played them in public? Did he really play his ‘Solo on the Piano Forte’ at the Thatched House on 2 June 1768 (in a concert that consisted mainly of orchestral music) on a little Zumpe square, or was he already using a prototype English grand? When were these various models of piano first made in London, and what musical use did other composers and performers, as well as J. C. Bach, make of them?

‘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.

The early history of the London Symphony Orchestra and its association with Richter and Elgar have been well documented, yet there is much still to be learnt about the 1904 break with the autocratic Henry Wood and about the artistic and commercial decisions facing the new self-governing orchestra. From the start, the LSO confidently allied itself with international standards and cosmopolitan repertoire, and a roster of celebrated conductors to match. But financial security was less easily gained. Detailed analysis of the finances of the prestigious subscription series shows initial eclecticism giving way to concentration on the Austro-German canon in reaction to commercial and social pressures. British music came in and out of focus, despite the nationalistic mood of the time, and the analysis places in sharp relief the successes and failures of the link with Elgar. Furthermore, in an extraordinary sacrifice of self-interest, the freelance members decided to renounce normal fees for the subscription series in order to gain lucrative engagements elsewhere: thus the orchestra acted more as an agency than as a stable business proposition. Nevertheless, the innovative governance structure, underpinning a combination of resolute management, entrepreneurial energy and communal decision-making, eventually proved a viable and sustainable model that has remained influential up to this day.

Of the two types of Italian opera, ‘opera seria’ and ‘opera buffa’, that existed in the eighteenth century, opera seria is the one which has received more adverse comments from modern historians. The artificial division of its text and music into arias and recitative, its stereotyped plots, its concert-like and undramatic character, are easily recognised weaknesses. Musicians, moreover, have not only admired Gluck but sympathised with the sentiments expressed in his preface to Alceste and have therefore concluded that the conditions and standards he rebelled against promoted a decidedly inferior art. Perhaps for this reason a comprehensive study of the aria in opera seria has rarely been undertaken.

For there can be no doubt that a great part of art lies in imitation. Discovery clearly came first, and is of first importance. But it is none the less profitable to follow up other people's successful discoveries. And every technique in life is founded on our natural desire to do ourselves what we approve in others. Hence children follow the shapes of letters to attain facility in writing; musicians look for a model to the voice of their instructors, painters to the works of their predecessors, countrymen to methods of growing that have been proved successful by experience. In fact, we can see that the rudiments of any kind of skill are shaped in accordance with an example set for it. Certainly we must either be like or unlike those who excel. It is rarely that nature makes one man like another: but imitation often does.

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.

This study presents the sketch of a theory of musical listening based on historical considerations of the role of music in Western culture. A universal element of musical listening might lie in the notion that all music is the product of a fundamental human capacity to hear, harnessed in countless ways by diverse cultures. Secondly, there is the type of music, covering very broad historical and cultural boundaries, that presupposes attentive listening or even a participating audience; this is perhaps the simplest and most familiar category, at least in the West. Finally, there is the range of music that might contain an ‘implied listener’, something which I suggest is much more elusive, with specific historical and cultural boundaries within Western modernity. While this sense of the implied listener – someone developing the sense of a consistent and unitary self over time – is understandable today and might well still be employed in a broad range of new music, I would suggest that it now reflects only one way of being human among an alarmingly broad array of choices.

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.

‘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.

The growth of the public concert was, perhaps, one of the most important factors which influenced the course of music in England towards the close of the seventeenth century. A number of music clubs were in existence before the Restoration as we know from Pepys and Anthony à Wood, but these, one gathers, were principally for the mutual delight of their mainly amateur participants. Cromwell, too, invited the members of the House of Commons to hear ‘rare music’ at Whitehall in 1657, but this was a State rather than a public occasion. The public concert, as we understand the term, did not come into existence until after the Restoration, when social conditions were established which were conducive to its success. The centralization of social life in London which followed the resumption of Court activities there created a large new audience, eager for all forms of entertainment. The influence of the King's personal preferences has perhaps been overstressed, but it cannot be denied that his hedonistic inclinations set a pattern of behaviour which was only too readily followed by London society. The theatres, closed during the greater part of the Commonwealth period, flourished once again, and in 1672 John Banister established a series of public concerts at Whitefriars which became the model for many similar ventures, at York Buildings and elsewhere.

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,

Until quite recently music historians thought that the Chapel Royal was founded in the fifteenth century. In 1895, Henry Davey wrote: ‘We may … date the rise of English music about 1400–20, and suppose that a Chapel Royal was first set up by Henry IV or Henry V’. Since then, much pioneering archive work has been done by Mr. John Harvey, Dr. Frank Harrison and Dr. Brian Trowell. It was Grattan Flood who, in 1924, first revealed to musical scholars what the medieval historian had long known: that the Chapel Royal in England dates back at least a further three centuries. Taking his cue from Flood, Stanley Roper delivered a paper to this Association three years later, which he called ‘Music at the English Chapels Royal c. 1135–Present Day’.

As well over a century of reception history attests, qualities of memory, reminiscence and nostalgia seem to constitute some of the most characteristic attributes of Schubert's music. Yet despite the undoubted allure of this subject and its popularity in recent years, the means by which music may suggest the actions of memory and temporal consciousness are often unclear or under-theorized in scholarship. This article examines how such nostalgic subjectivities are constructed in Schubert's music and the language used to describe it. Rather than overturning the now habitual associations between Schubert and memory, the article seeks to question more deeply how they are, and indeed might better be, supported. It looks principally at the String Quartet in A minor, D.804 (‘Rosamunde’), and draws further on such staples of the Schubertian memory discourse as the Quartet in G, D.887, and the Piano Sonata in B♭, D.960.

The dispute between Arnold Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker—witnessed in Schoenberg's ironical remarks in the Harmonielehre and Schenker's vigorous polemics in the second volume of Das Meisterwerk in der Musik—was in the first instance a controversy concerning the significance of nonchordal notes (in the German, literally, notes foreign to the harmony), a subject that appears harmless enough. The dispute as such would be hardly worth examining if it revealed nothing beyond each antagonist's lack of understanding of the other and the failure of both to do justice to the subject about which they claimed to be speaking. But beneath the surface of a discussion about technical details is concealed a conflict of fundamental principles concerning modes of musical thought—modes of thought that cannot simply be reduced to the clichés of ‘progressive composer’ and ‘conservative theorist’.

It so happens that almost all the music which Schenker edited had previously appeared in editions by Hans von Bülow. On each occasion, Bülow's edition provoked from Schenker what he himself described as his ‘frequent and energetic criticism’. Examining the basis of these criticisms may lead us to a better understanding of Schenker's own editorial work – work which had an importance within Schenker's total output that theorists, if not musicologists, have tended to underestimate. For Schenker, editing meant restoring the masterworks of the past to their authentic state (the title-page of his edition of the Beethoven sonatas describes it as a ‘reconstruction’) and thereby ensuring their survival in a world that, in Schenker's eyes, had lost the capacity to appreciate their significance. And such editing called for respect for the masterworks and a profound understanding of them; hence the extraordinary virulence with which Schenker attacked editors such as Bülow, who in his view lacked these qualities. In his study of the G minor Symphony, Schenker wrote: ‘Editions of Mozart's works no longer have anything in common with the original manuscripts.’ And he added: ‘Then is Mozart dead?’ This extreme sense of the editor's responsibility – a responsibility that extended to the life and death of the masterworks – informed everything that Schenker did. I would go so far as to say that Schenker's theory of levels was conceived as, more than anything else, a decisive contribution to editorial method. And to say this entails a considerable revision of the image of Schenker prevalent today.

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.

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.

May I ask you to consider with me some questions such as these:—Whether, historically, musicians and listeners, have known what they wanted acoustically and have made demands upon, and modelled, a building type. Or whether conversely an existing building has been the deciding factor? Whether we are now in a historical era quite different from the past and ought to make clear acoustic demands? And if so what demands? And what degree of consent have we on the present musical situation and its vital needs?