RIPM (Le Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale) is widely regarded as the most comprehensive resource offering electronic access to music periodicals from the early Romantic era to the twentieth century. Founded in 1980 by H. Robert Cohen, RIPM is the youngest of the so-called ‘4 R's of International Music Research’; its partner initiatives include RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales), RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale), and RIdIM (Répertoire International d'Iconographie Musicale). Cohen's ambitious project was notably visionary in its use of technology: not only did it use computing from the start (beginning with DOS-based indexing systems), but it was also the first of the 4 R's to explore full text searching. RIPM seeks to address ‘two main problems that have prevented these [historic music] journals from being systematically collected and examined: (1) the limited number of libraries possessing the journals, and (2) the difficulty encountered when one attempts to locate specific information within an available source’. The project has thus focused on collection building, curation, indexing and accessibility. This international cooperative's accomplishments are impressive: as of July 2020, the database contains 527 music periodicals, 430 available in full text complete runs, totalling 996,000 annotated records and 1.47 million full-text pages of music periodicals.

This article offers a series of experiments exploring the potential for ‘distant reading’ in French music criticism. ‘Distant reading’, a term first coined by literary theorist Franco Moretti, refers to quantitative approaches that allow for new insights into a large corpus of texts by aggregating data. While the main corpus employed here is the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris (1831–1877), I also use secondary corpora of reviews of Félicien David's Herculanum in 1859, Berlioz's reviews of Gluck and Beethoven in the Journal des débats and reviews that mention Gabriel Fauré in the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America database. My experiments employ a text analysis tool named Voyant, built by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair, thereby also offering a basic introduction to the range of visualizations employed in distant reading. My experiments focus on areas in which quantitative methods are particularly well suited to generating new knowledge: corpus-wide visualizations and queries, moving beyond traditional text searching, investigations of music critics’ authorial styles and detecting sentiment in reviews, and finally, to geographies of music criticism.

The Enlightenment witnessed the rise of a public whose role as sovereign arbiter of operatic taste irreversibly changed the processes by which fame and renown were bestowed upon composers. The public sphere – a conceptual space in which texts (including music) were disseminated and debated – emerged as an expansive intellectual forum in which composers, performers and works could be evaluated. In spite of opera's long-standing association with fame and renown, its role in the processes leading to ascriptions of musical value and fame in the Enlightenment public sphere is a significant dimension of canon formation that has yet to be fully investigated. This article offers a case study of Electress Maria Antonia of Saxony (1728–1780), whose mutually beneficial relationship with the Breitkopf firm, coupled with its redesigned ‘movable type’ in 1755, prompted a new mode of opera criticism, one that focused sharply on the music itself. Maria Antonia's Il trionfo della fedeltà (1754) and Talestri (1762) were the first operas to receive reviews featuring in-text musical examples, fuelling the public's quest to monumentalise Maria Antonia as celebrated composer. Ultimately, the inclusion of musical excerpts in opera criticism was an important step toward the construct of the work as separate from individual localised performances.

This article examines aspects of variation and transmission in the Office of Thomas Becket in the Diocese of Trier, Germany. Palaeographic evidence suggests that by the mid-fifteenth century, liturgical sources in Trier exhibited numerous transmission errors and disruptions in the modal scheme of the Thomas Office. However, a subset of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century manuscripts from St Florin and St Castor in Koblenz displays efforts to restore the theoretical modal scheme of the Office by composing new melodies for four items; the uniqueness of these items has been confirmed with the assistance of a large-scale electronic project cataloguing the Office of Thomas Becket across Europe, headed by Andrew Hughes at the University of Toronto. The present study provides a detailed melodic and modal analysis of the four newly composed items: the invitatory, Adsunt Thome martyris; the fourth responsory for Matins, Post sex annos; the ninth responsory for Matins, Iesu bone per Thome; and the fourth antiphon for Lauds, Ad Thome memoriam. Numerous melodic allusions to the Office of St Gorgonius – a martyr also venerated in Koblenz from the turn of the fifteenth century – have been uncovered in the four newly composed items. The re-ordering of the modal schemes of the Thomas Office and the colourful array of musical and theological echoes and allusions between the Becket and Gorgonius Offices suggests a desire to establish, reflect and cultivate a local liturgical identity within the community in Koblenz.

In this article I assert that our modern understanding of the singspiel as a genre has been shaped not by eighteenth-century principles but rather by nineteenth-century notions of ‘romantic’ German opera. In contrast to a later through-composed ideal, Johann Adam Hiller’s comic operas, often viewed as the prototype of the German comic genre, were designed precisely in order that the songs might easily be detached from the spoken dialogue, disseminated outside of the public opera house and sung by audiences in various other contexts. The express purpose of these songs, as articulated by librettist Christian Felix Weisse, was to promote communal singing in social circles across Germany. The genre was thus designed for circulation within what Habermas describes as the public sphere: a conceptual space between the State and the private home in which texts, ideas and musical works were circulated and debated.

Composed in what was called the German Volkston (in the manner of the Volk), Hiller’s melodies are recorded as being sung and played throughout the streets and parks of major German cities and became so popular that they became known as folksongs. This idea of the Volk as a collective entity and of the Volkston, however, was rooted in a deeper sense of the public as nation. Inspired by Le devin du village and J. J. Rousseau’s writings on politics, language and the fine arts, Weisse and Hiller’s operas employ the pastoral mode, in which idealized peasants sing in the manner of a folksong. The idyllic simplicity of these early German-language comic operas appealed to a diversified German audience by affirming their roots, the public use of their language and their morally upright character as a nation. Thus comic opera as a genre was circulated within the public sphere with the intention of transcending the boundaries of social class to unite the German nation in song.