Recent developments have uncovered the early correspondence of Heloise and Abelard. This discovery has allowed the identification of a number of ‘lost’ lyrics by Abelard and has revealed that Heloise, too, was a lyricist of great stature. This article reviews some of their works and touches upon their connection with the ‘goliardic’ tradition, the Carmina Burana, and their influence upon Walther von der Vogelweide and other poets. The sequences and liturgical dramas of Heloise survive with music of an individual style. The dramas, moreover, are of notable originality: they influenced the later history of the genre (including the Carmina Burana Easter dramas) to a considerable and enduring extent.

When I was an undergraduate attempting to write canons, it would have been convenient to have known that composers cheated. By the time I was a don, in turn trying to teach undergraduates to write canons, I now had this knowledge, though I would doubtless have called it ‘composers' expertise’; but, unfortunately, I was still not aware of the precise way in which this expertise was employed. Later, I found out that many canons (such as those of Bach's ‘Goldberg Variations’) were written on the scaffolding of a ground bass; although Bach's use of this bass is here obvious, as it is in Pachelbel's more mundane canon on the same ground, composers would often cover their tracks by removing the scaffolding from the finished work.

Genetical factors cannot be excluded from the forces which determine vocal colour. There is no reason to suppose, therefore, that English singing should resemble that of any other nation in all respects. The facility for falsetto singing (by adult male, boys' and women's voices), the paucity of ‘true’ tenor voices and the ‘duller’ tone production all may be cited as characteristic of English singing, and might have a genetical basis. Vocal quality would also be affected by the time at which boys' voices changed, and if Latin were superseded by the somewhat duller English language.

In Revue de Musicologie XLIX (1963), 3–17 (henceforth cited as RM XLIX), and again in Studies in Honor of Benno Landsberger (= Assyriological Studies No. 16, Chicago (1965), 268–272, henceforth cited as AS 16), Mme. Duchesne-Guillemin has put forward a theory for the tuning of the Babylonian harp, based on a tablet from Ur, U.3011, and another tablet of unstated provenance in the University Museum, Philadelphia, CBS 10996. The CBS tablet contains a list of intervals with their names, repeated twice over, while the Ur tablet gives the names of the nine strings, presumably of the harp, followed by part of a similar list of intervals (extremely fragmentary). Starting from the observation that the third string has the name “thin string”, Mme. Duchesne-Guillemin infers that the semitone occurred between the third and fourth strings, so that the harp would have been tuned to a scale equivalent to our C major, running from C to the D in the octave above (using, as throughout this article, names of notes and scales in a relative not absolute sense). Observing further that the list of intervals contains three rising fifths followed by four descending fourths, she suggests that the list is a tuning cycle, in which the inclusion of thirds and sixths is explained by the principle that “c'est la superposition des gestes sur les mêmes cordes, pour les regler et les corriger, qui constitue l'accord” (her italics; see RM XLIX, 15), though this view is modified in RM LII. The inclusion of the tritone—an impossible tuning interval—she can only explain by the necessity for completeness (ibid). She remarks incidentally that the fourth string, named “Ea made it”, is to be identified with the Greek μέση.

In sixteenth-century choral music there are two problems of performance that prove most vexing to sensitive choirmasters and to those musicologists who are hot tone deaf: they are the twin problems of pitch and vocal scoring. There are, of course, those ostriches who cannot see such difficulties, having a touching belief in the absolute quality of the written pitch. Such a fundamentalist faith is not exceeded by the claims of the Jehovah's Witnesses or by the dear old lady who protested against a new translation of the New Testament with the words: ‘The Authorized Version was good enough for St. Paul, and it's good enough for me’. Assuming the present gathering to be rather more scientific, I shall illustrate these problems by concentrating on English music of the period, not because of parochialism, but because of the limitation of time and my belief that our prophets deserve honour even in their own country.