Compositions for musical clocks made possible a newly objective exploration of the relationship between music and time. Works by George Frideric Handel, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach reflected the absolute and uniform flow of Newtonian time. In contrast, Leopold Mozart's clock music alternated between two different metres and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart used more complex tempo ratios in a musical installation (k608) built around a dramatically illuminated pendulum. Repeated thousands of times, this installation pitted clock against music, in effect providing a new kind of experiment that favoured relative Leibnizian time over uniform Newtonian time. As if responding to k608, Joseph Haydn incorporated his own clock music into his Symphony No. 101 in order to underline, yet then to stop, time, while Schubert's Fantasy in F minor, d940, brought these temporal experiments into a new realm of intimate musical experience.

The rediscovery of a unicum manuscript source of cantates françaises by Philippe II d'Orléans in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, provokes a re-evaluation of not only the provenance of the collection to which it belongs, but also the role played by diplomacy, sociability and cultural exchange in the history of the cantate française. The manuscript's contents all reflect Philippe's use of international connections to acquire music and engage musicians in the period 1701–1706. The manuscript forms part of a corpus of French scores that belonged to Marie-Thérèse de Lannoy de La Motterie, an aristocratic amateur harpsichordist with an interest in both French and Italian music, and in cantates. As wife of Joseph Lothar von Königsegg und Rothenfels, representative of the Austrian emperor to Philippe, then regent of France, she was engaged in the cultural life of Paris during the period 1717–1719, not only acquiring cantate prints but also a copy of Philippe's own works in the genre. Her collection reflects both her personal interests and her diplomatic cultivation of the social circles around Philippe in which music connoisseurship was an important skill. The manuscript thus highlights the important role played in the international transmission of cantates françaises by diplomatic and familial connections of noble amateurs, especially those curious about musical developments beyond their own regional practices.

In the Clark Library at the University of California Los Angeles, there is a 1691 copy of the printed playbook for Dryden's An Evening's Love: or, The Mock-Astrologer (London: Henry Herringman), which was used as a promptbook in revivals of the play at Drury Lane between 1705 and 1717 (Edward A. Langhans, Eighteenth[-]Century British and Irish Promptbooks: A Descriptive Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987), 44–45). Amongst other alterations in it, songs are excised and musical flourishes are added (a digitized version is available at https://archive.org/details/dryden_mock_astr_clarklib; see, for example, page 20). It is a comforting object that – when reassessing the recordings made in 2019 by Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort of Purcell's dramatick operas King Arthur (Winged Lion SIGCD 589, 2019) and The Fairy Queen (Winged Lion SIGCD 615, 2020), for which I performed as a bass violinist and prepared the editions – reassures me that our processes were well grounded.