In 1977 I discussed some common ways of writing about the social and economic contexts of music, and then suggested alternative procedures. Expressing dissatisfaction with prevailing fashions, that paper was essentially a plea for the use of economic history, recommending its analytical insights and quantitative sense. It sought discussion of typical events, and deliberately challenged the ‘deep-seated antipathy felt by most humanists toward anything that smacks of statistics’. The desired emphasis was also upon ‘thick’ description and analysis, by which one might avoid such contrasted, but equally fruitless, pursuits as unsubstantiated dogma and antiquarianism. Ten years later the invitation to arrange a conference on ‘music in the market-place’ provided an opportunity to look again. There was no attempt to survey current research systematically; less still to restrict subjects and speakers to any particular discipline. Indeed, despite the conference title, conventional approaches to the analysis of markets were scarce, with the notable exception of Julia Moore's paper, an exemplary demonstration of ‘thick’ economic history. Trying to achieve some coherence without imposing a strait-jacket inevitably brought overlaps and gaps. But if penalties were attached to open-mindedness, it also ensured the stimulus of diverse and multi-disciplinary papers, and informal contributions by active participants in the market-place. This introduction is not a summary of the conference, and is not confined to, though it touches upon, what was said there. Schematic, and therefore thin, it merely introduces a few possible themes which are further developed elsewhere, or still await exploration.

Some people may ask: “Why have centenary celebrations?” My answer must be in the form of a legend of a certain British composer. He was praised by foreigners and called “The Father of Counterpoint.” Most of his MSS. are in Vienna; and about twenty years ago Vienna honoured him and honoured herself by publishing some of them. Here in England, however, his music is absolutely unknown. His name was even confused at one time with that of an early Saint of the Church, who was thus, quite unjustifiably, endowed with miraculous musical powers. Such a thing could only happen in England; and this is sufficient answer to those who decry centenary celebrations. They may be dangerous; but England needs at least one a week. 1923 is a good year to begin; for 1623 saw the death not only of Byrd and Weelkes, but of Rosseter, the Lutenist composer, and the birth of John Playford, the first systematic collector of English folk-dances and their tunes; while in 1523 Merbecke was born, who was the first to write a special plainsong for the (then) new English Prayer Book, and Hugh Aston died, who was called the “Inventor of Instrumental Music in Europe”; but about whom so little is known.

In introducing for your consideration this afternoon the subject of memory in connection with piano playing, I can hardly doubt that my subject is one in which every earnest student and every competent teacher of the piano must feel no slight or passing interest. From the time the beginner learns the alphabetical names of the notes of the keyboard, by remembering their position in relation to the groups of two and three black notes, until he reaches — if he ever does — the highest summit of his profession as a pianist, does the cultivation of the power of memory, in one form or another, enter in no small degree into his studies.

It was in 1842 that John Curwen, a Congregationalist minister aged 26, began his life's work as one of the most notable pioneers of popular musical education. For fully fifty years his was the dominant single influence on music in the state schools of England, Scotland and Wales, and hence upon the large mass of the community. Even today, at the end of a period of more than twenty-five years during which the trend of musical education has tended to discredit his teaching, his figure still broods over the teaching of vocal music, and quantities of school songs continue to be published with the Tonic Sol-fa ‘interpreting’ notation along with the standard Staff notation. Nevertheless, except in Scotland, the true essentials of his teaching are no longer an effective force—a fact which makes possible an attempt at an analytical re-statement of his principles today in a less controversial atmosphere than formerly. Curwen's own writings will be examined in an effort to get behind the numerous adaptations, modifications and dilutions which his method underwent before being discredited.

The ambiguity of the title of my paper is intentional—I wish to speak on “The Teaching of Musical History” in more than one sense. A further preliminary explanation I have to make is this. If I present to this Society a plea for a proper and more general study of musical history, it is not because I think the members to be in need of advice and guidance, but because I look upon them as influential agents able to bring about a change in a now obtaining unsatisfactory state of matters. In short, my object in drawing your attention to the importance of certain facts is to inspire you with missionary zeal, to induce you to go forth and spread the light that is in you among the ignorant, the idle, and the indifferent. This, however, is not my only object. I wish also to lay before you some views of perennial interest, and invite you to discuss them —to discuss them for our own profit and, if possible, for the profit of the world at large.

Here we have the indigenous definition of folk-music, given to mark the distinction between this music and mãrga-music; that is to say, classical or art-music, a different thing altogether. This mãrga music is not primarily for the enjoyment of the people, but is considered as a means to salvation, namely, the breaking of the endless succession of birth, death and re-birth. It is of divine origin, brought down to our times by an unbroken succession of teachers, not only considered as music masters but definitely as spiritual preceptors. The superior attitude of the exponents of classical music towards deçï, popular or country-music, finds its origin in this spiritual claim of mārga-music. Nevertheless folk-music naturally is one of the parents of art-music whether the latter acknowledges this parenthood or not.

Geraldine Farrar's performances in Ruggero Leoncavallo's Zazà (1900) at New York's Metropolitan Opera House in the early 1920s were widely acclaimed as an unexpected triumph for the soprano. This article examines Farrar's Zazà in the context of New York's post-war operatic crisis, the concurrent emergence of Hollywood cinema and Farrar's own highly prominent movements between operatic and cinematic media throughout the 1910s. While Leoncavallo's opera raised a number of pressing difficulties for New York critics, Farrar's critical and popular success in Zazà points to new understandings of operatic performance at the dawn of the cinematic age.

This article illustrates, with particular focus on Rolando Chaparro’s rock fusion album Bohemio (2011), the way in which music operates in expressing Paraguayan national, racial and class identity. It first reviews the literature on music and identity generally, as well as more specifically in relation to Paraguay. It then explores expressions of nationalism and paraguayidad (Paraguayanness) in folkloric ‘popular’ musics (música popular) and the concept of raza guaraní (a widespread belief in a common ancestry based on Spanish and Guaraní ethnic identity) in the construction, maintenance and expression of identity. Finally, it examines the Agustín Barrios revivals in Paraguay and people’s class consciousness as it is expressed in Paraguayan guitar music culture.

Reacting to recent materialist developments in music studies and beyond, I argue for the value of dialectics in accounting for compositional orientations vis-à-vis their objects – be these objects sound-producing, non-human entities, such as musical instruments, or the object that is ‘sound itself ’. Engaging the compositional thought and practice of Busoni, Russolo, Varèse, Cage and Tudor by way of example, I highlight two intersecting tendencies: the first constitutes a presumed mastery over the object in question; the second is suggestive of an exploration of the object on its own terms. Interweaving aspects of post-Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, I argue that, ultimately, our orientation towards the object manifests a negotiation of the self in a changing material world.

Few extant collections of late-medieval polyphony have been linked definitively to composers whose works they transmit. A dearth of documents that are literally ‘authoritative’ – in the sense that they come directly from the hand of the author – is not surprising in light of the small survival rate of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts and the likelihood that pieces were not written down for the first time in versions for presentation. Most surviving manuscripts appear to be several generations removed from written originals. Nevertheless, presentation manuscripts and other anthologies were not necessarily compiled by scribes in isolation. When composers were nearby they probably were consulted, either directly or through scribal access to authoritative written exemplars. Therefore, despite a paucity of documented relationships, some extant manuscripts may have been compiled in close association with the composers whose music they contain, perhaps even under their guidance.

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.

In examining the relationship between Tchaikovsky and Balakirev, I shall investigate in some detail the influence upon the Moscow composer of the leader of the St Petersburg group or ‘mighty handful’ (which included, besides Balakirev himself, Cui, Borodin, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov). Balakirev's group had been established before the St Petersburg Conservatoire of Music was founded by Anton Rubinstein in 1862; this, coupled with the fact that there were no textbooks on the theory of music in the Russian language, meant that Balakirev and his protégés had had no formal musical education, but had learned the technique of composition solely by studying the actual works of other composers, past and present. Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, had been a student at the Conservatoire from the time of its foundation till 1865, his graduation exercise taking the form of a setting of Schiller's ‘Ode to Joy’ which was performed at the end of that year and was torn to pieces by Cui in a typically vituperative article. By the time this article had appeared early in 1866 Tchaikovsky had already moved to Moscow to take up a teaching post at the new Conservatoire there. According to Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev's group knew Tchaikovsky only as having composed a Symphony in G minor (his First) of which the two middle movements had been performed at a concert of the Russian Musical Society in St Petersburg in February 1867. As a product of the despised Conservatoire, they viewed Tchaikovsky askance.

Many of the pieces in Matthew Locke's seven sets of consort music, whose principal source is the great score-book in the British Museum, Add. MS 17801, were subjected to a process of careful and repeated revision. The changes Locke made were sometimes extensive, involving the restructuring of an entire movement, the introduction of new material, or the substantial modification of that existing already. The editor of such works must decide whether he is going to present a single version—in this case presumably the composer's final revision—or to embody the variant readings in a textual commentary, or to print such readings in their entirety as parallel texts. The usefulness of a textual commentary tends to be in inverse proportion to its length: the more variants there are to be listed the less easy it becomes to perceive the overall shape of that version of the text embodying them. In the case of Locke's music ‘For Several Friends’ and the movements of the Flat Consort which were subjected to much change the ideal solution is obviously to print both first and last versions in full. But Locke is after all not Beethoven, and in the recent Musica Britannica edition only the composer's final versions have been presented, with a few examples of movements from the early version of the Flat Consort to illustrate the extent and nature of the modifications. Nevertheless, Locke's revisions are worth considering in some detail, for they reveal a composer with a mind both restless and fastidious. The best point of departure is the autograph score-book itself which Locke entitled ‘Compositions for Broken, and whole Consorts, of two, three, Fower, Five, and Six Parts, made by Matthew Locke, Composer in Ordinary to his Majestye’.

That the English style of the early fifteenth century was crucial to the development of later music seems undeniable. The oft-cited, passages from the writings of Martin le Franc and Tinctoris, whatever their obscurities of detail, are unequivocal in their placing of the English in general and Dunstable in particular at the head of a completely new style, and to set against this, we have a large and varied corpus of music, especially music for the mass Ordinary, which amply testifies to the richness of the insular tradition. Not only was this music considered distinctive in its own day, but it has also proved readily recognizable to modern scholars despite the relative dearth of ascriptions. Even so, one feels that any suggestion that it is the English style as such which is so obvious remains surprisingly premature. The main reason for this is not hard to find; in fact, nearly all the most convincing evidence for assigning English authorship to anonymous works has turned out to be either essentially non-musical (e.g. the presence of a piece in an insular source, the use of a distinctively English variant of a given plainsong, the presence of telescoping in settings of the Credo, the use of characteristic notational procedures) or concerned with relatively superficial aspects of style (e.g. the use of a standard mensural scheme, the appearance of one or more of a handful of melodic clichés). Since there are clearly much easier ways of recognizing English music than from the niceties of musical style, efforts at more specifically stylistic analysis have lagged behind somewhat, despite the important work of such scholars as Brian Trowell and Margaret Bent. Certainly, it has not proved possible to tease out that arcane quality, the contenance angloise, which has sometimes been assumed to infuse the entire repertory from the Old Hall Manuscript onwards.

In 1058 Pope Stephen IX visited Montecassino, of which he had been made abbot only shortly before his elevation to the papacy the previous year. This German Pope was the former papal chancellor Frederick of Lorraine, the second northern abbot of Montecassino. On the occasion of this visit the Pope strictly forbade the singing at Montecassino of ‘Ambrosian chant’: ‘Tune etiam et Ambrosianum cantum in ecclesia ista cantari penitus interdixit.’

An abyss separates the research of Mahler from that of social historians on anti-Semitism in fin-de-siècle Austria and Germany. Mahler specialists tend to study the assaults he endured in terms of the centuries-old intolerance. Social historians, however, have pursued a different tack. They trace the liberal thought of the mid-nineteenth century, the legal emancipation of the Jews and its aftermath to the rise of ‘new’ anti-Semitism in the 1870s, centred in Vienna. The reasons why Mahler resigned as director of the Vienna Court Opera involve many more factors and subtleties, even concerning the expression of anti-Semitism. It is on these elements that this article attempts to shed light.

The recent publication of Heinrich Schenker's Das Meisterwerk in der Musik (1925-30) in a translation by Ian Bent, William Drabkin and others reminds us that in the highest modern traditions textual criticism and exegesis — editing and analysis — are inseparable. Much of Schenker's commentary on Mozart's Symphony in G minor, K.550, is devoted to isolating discrepancies between manuscript and edition, and some of his most fascinating analytical suggestions grow out of just this. Conversely, analytical strategies may have editorial consequences, and decisions taken by editors of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe have been challenged justly on stylistic grounds. If a passage occurs twice in a composition, for instance, does it have to be articulated in the same way on both occasions? And if there are differences in the articulations, what exactly do they tell us? Given the intricacy of the modern analytical debate over Mozart, such questions may not be answered by editors alone. Nor can editions be undertaken without reference to changing social circumstances: for composers in general have shown themselves more than ready to provide their own variants for different performing situations (again, Mozart's re-orchestration of the Symphony in G minor is a case in point). Indeed, in another field, scholars have asked that cultural issues should also influence editorial practice; these issues similarly require learning and sensitivity, and again deserve attention.

The Franciscan mission repertory in California, c.1770–1830, includes numerous collections of chant and polyphonic music. Scholars have assumed some direct connection with music used in Mexico, but this assumption remains difficult to prove on the basis of the surviving Mexican repertory, which is mostly associated with cathedrals. Chant and polyphonic settings from the Liturgy for the Dead in Californian sources are compared with those from Mexico. Mexican cathedral music, even in the 1790s, reveals connections with pre-Tridentine liturgical traditions; but the California repertory is based on different liturgical and chant traditions. This supports William J. Summers's hypothesis that polyphonic works in the California Missions are based on a peripheral tradition associated with the religious orders.

The spectre of music as a transcendent artistic ideal figures prominently in the literary criticism of Victorian aestheticism, though the extent to which aestheticism of the movement actually influenced the thinking of British composers has received only marginal scholarly attention. By the first decades of the twentieth century, aestheticism had become decidedly unfashionable even in literary circles, so it is unsurprising that composers of the time would choose to distance themselves from its rhetoric. The prevalence of a certain type of metaphysical conception of the creative act of the artist and intuitive act of the critic, however, may suggest an important remnant of aesthetic influence. Drawing from new critical trends which themselves mirror those of aestheticism, this article posits a revised conception of aesthetic discourse as an activity of self-cultivation, and examines its role in shaping the lives of selected British composer-critics from the early part of the twentieth century. By casting the aesthetic ethos not as a doctrine but as a set of internal practices that inform the creation and subversion of doctrine, the article demonstrates how a ‘relational musicology’ can act as a tool for historical inquiry.