Johann David Heinichen's treatise Der General-Bass in der Composition (Dresden, 1728) is the most comprehensive study of thoroughbass ever written, yet it has been continually overshadowed in historical accounts by works published in the same decade by Jean-Philippe Rameau (Traité de l'Harmonie) and J. J. Fux (Gradus ad Parnassum). Despite Heinichen's nuanced treatment of a wide variety of musical subjects, Der General-Bass has yet to receive wide acclaim, in large part because it lacks a reductive pedagogical framework that can rival Rameau's basse fondamentale or Fux's species in simplicity and immediate appeal. Yet fortunately, the ‘partimento renaissance’ of the last decade has brought renewed scholarly attention to the centrality of thoroughbass is the only acceptable break in eighteenth-century music-making. Thus the time is ripe for a reappraisal of Heinichen's monumental work. On at least one occasion, Heinichen does indeed outline a pedagogical method of eminent simplicity: his four-step instruction in how to improvise a prelude at the keyboard. According to Heinichen, this method, which seems to be completely unknown today, is to be understood not only as instruction in improvising, but also as training for beginning composers. In explicating the pedagogy of one of eighteenth-century Europe's leading composer-theorists, this article contributes to both the historically informed analysis and the practical teaching of baroque music today.

In Dahomey (Benin) during the period of autonomy and the first years of independence, the reference to a colonial past was an important instrument and point of debate. Members of a new group of politicians used it to accuse trade union leaders to make unrealistic claims; local peasants mobilized it as their point of reference against infrastructure projects; officials discussed it to make sense of tax refusals, while locals invoked older forms of tax resistance they had practiced under colonial rule. This article follows the different relationships with the colonial past, through the regions of Abomey and Porto-Novo, and shows how these experiences were viewed by local residents and by nationalist leaders, such as Justin Ahomadegbé. It also serves as an example and an injunction to make use of the administrative postcolonial archive.

Most histories of East Africa's precolonial interior only give cursory attention to Islam, especially in histories of present-day west-central Tanzania and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Most converts to Islam in this context are usually viewed as ‘nominal’ Muslims. This article, by contrast, builds on recent scholarship on other regions and time periods that questions the conceptual validity of the ‘nominal’ Muslim. New converts necessarily questioned their social relationships, ways of living, and ritual practices through the act of conversion. On the shores of Lake Tanganyika, new converts were observable through the act of circumcision, dietary restrictions, abidance by some of Islam's core tenets, and the adoption and adaptation of certain phenomena from East Africa's Indian Ocean coast and islands. Interior populations’ conversion to Islam was bound up with broader coast-interior material, cultural, and religious exchanges.

Musicological literature devoted to the life and works of Gregor Joseph Werner (1693–1766) has remained very limited. Researchers have usually been motivated to discover more about him for two reasons: the fact that from 1728 he was Kapellmeister at the court of the Esterházy princes in Eisenstadt, and that while there he met and worked with the great Joseph Haydn. It is no exaggeration to claim that Werner is usually mentioned only because of this association: he has found his way into music history on account of his connection with Haydn. However, this approach leaves too much room for a superficial assessment of Werner's achievements as a composer. Haydn valued his music and commented on it favourably. His private music collection included Werner's Good Friday oratorios and arrangements of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. In a striking testament to the respect he had for Werner's music, Haydn also arranged six of Werner's fugues for string quartet, writing his own musical introductions, and published them with Artaria in Vienna in 1804 as VI Fugen in Quartetten auf zwey Violin, Viola und Violonzell von G. J. Werner Weyland Kapelmeister S. D. des Fürsten N. Esterházy etc. / Aus besonderer Achtung gegen diesen berühmten Meister nun herausgegeben von dessen Nachfolger J. Haydn, a volume dedicated to Prince Nicholas Esterházy II.

Cities develop around industry, markets and transport links. Dublin in the nineteenth century was similar, but additionally the north-west of the city developed around the expansion of a complex of institutional buildings for the reception, confinement and welfare of the poor and sick. This article argues that these institutions were implicit in the development of the modern city in the same way as industry and commerce. The physical development of the buildings altered and defined both the streetscape and, over time, the social identities and historical communities in the locale, in the same way that industrial development defined urban areas.

Between 1845 and 1850, the Congo coast became the most important source of slaves for the coffee growing areas in the Brazilian Empire. This essay develops a new methodology to understand the making of the ‘nations’ of 290 Africans found on the slave ship Jovem Maria, which boarded slaves in the Congo river and was captured by the Brazilian Navy near Rio de Janeiro in 1850. A close reading of such ‘nations’ reveals a complex overlapping between languages and forms of identification that alters the historian's use of concepts such as ‘ethnolinguistic group’ and ‘Bantu-based lingua franca’ in the Atlantic world. Building on recent developments in Central African linguistics, the article develops a social history of African languages in the Atlantic that foregrounds how recaptives negotiated commonalities and boundaries in the diaspora by drawing on a political vocabulary indigenous to their nineteenth-century homes in Central Africa.

The Jeffersonian rise to power in 1801 ushered in sweeping political changes for the United States of America. It also focused attention on the newly established United States Marine Corps, as a group of hostile Congressmen sought to audit the service, dismiss many of its officers and do away with the executive function of its commandant. But Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was also a supporter of the new capital's growing cultural life, and no organization better defined the connection between music and the federal government than the United States Marine Band. While this ensemble was not officially authorized by Congress until 1861, Commandant William Ward Burrows had already transformed his small group of sanctioned field musicians into an ensemble that could provide ceremonial and entertainment music for Washington, DC. This article traces the earliest history of the Marine Band, documents its development from eighteenth-century signalling traditions and suggests the ways in which its presence in the capital helped to stem the growing Republican tide against the Marine Corps itself.