When the meal drew to a close the lady who had served the wine produced a harp and began to play it so sweetly that it was a wondrous thing to hear. So Sir Gawayn listened to her very willingly for a while until he began to feel the cold, for his tunic was not at all well dried. And when the cold got to him he rose up and went to the great fire which was in the middle of the Hall and took a stool and sat down before the fire, turning his shoulder and his back [to the flames] and warmed himself until he slept, as one who had been afflicted the whole day with the rain and the wind.

The subject of this lecture, because of its exotic nature, would appear, at first sight, to be of little moment to Westerners. For that reason it may be advisable to indicate why attention should be directed to this question quite apart from any intrinsic worth that it may have. The doctrine of the Éthos, so highly prized in the art of antiquity, has an abiding interest, and therefore one may assume that its history may have a similar attraction. As Jules Combarieu pointed out not long since,∗ the doctrine of the Éthos had its origin in magic, and I take the liberty to draw up for you its genealogy, because, in the subject under discussion, it plays an important part.

After the very erudite paper on the Genevan Psalter which was read before this Association (in June, 1918) by Dr. Woodward, there is very little ground left for me to cover.

The whole question of metrical psalmody has been so thoroughly ventilated by so many authorities that but for the little book we are to discuss this afternoon, I doubt if I should have had anything fresh to say to you.

The modern choirboy is such a familar object, at any rate to those who go to Church, that it is not generally realised that he is in any sense an historical figure, and by some is even regarded as a necessary nuisance or as a person of no serious importance.

Yet in this familar figure we can, perhaps as nowhere else, see the living embodiment of some of those things which are most distinctively national in the music of our country.

I feel that my presence here requires a double apology for I can claim to be neither an authority on eighteenth century music nor a pianist. My interest in eighteenth century music is mainly a practical one and my only claim to your attention is that I have in certain transcriptions and arrangements both for the concert hall and the theatre succeeded, I hope, in popularising certain old music which might otherwise have remained familiar only to the scholar. As a pianist my limitations are even more marked and I can hardly hope to demonstrate that, as a writer for the keyboard, Roseingrave was second only to Domenico Scarlatti. Roseingrave's most striking work, however, lies not so much in his brilliant toccata-like movements as in his more introspective and experimental voluntaries and I hope that later on I may be able to give at least some slight account of these fascinating and original works.

The subject of Orchestral and Choral Balance has by no means received the attention due to it from concert-givers, conductors, writers on music, or the public. It has occasionally called forth a casual remark from Press critics when something beyond the ordinary has been noticeable in a performance; writers on orchestration have touched upon it to some extent, and an occasional lecture has been devoted to it; but in nearly every case there has been a mere nibbling at the fringe of a great subject. Even where a general survey has been attempted, it has often taken the form of a sermon preached upon some definite text, such as, for example, the otherwise valuable paper read by Professor Prout before the last Conference of the Incorporated Society of Musicians. In that paper, Dr. Prout showed that his choice of the subject was due to his having noticed a few bad examples of ill-considered balance between choir and band, where the choir was numerically much too strong for the orchestra, such as at the Handel Festivals, to a smaller extent in the Albert Hall, and to a still smaller extent at the Festivals of Birmingham and Leeds. But this is only one aspect of the subject. And though one must admit that the indictment against these performances was justified, I fail to see any justification for a general attack in the same direction upon the relative proportions of bands and choirs in this country. It is sufficient to point out that though the band may be frequently overpowered by the choir at the Crystal Palace and at the Albert Hall, the complaint of many musicians who really know what they are talking about is that many choral societies are painfully overweighted by their accompaniments.

It so happened that my first acquaintance with English music of the time of Queen Elizabeth was made, not with the madrigal, but with the music of the virginals. I have devoted one of my former books to virginal music, and it is my pleasant duty to admit that the authors really responsible for that work are two members of your Association, Mr. Fuller-Maitland and Mr. Barclay Squire. In fact, without their edition of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, with its great store of learning, I should not have been able to write the greater part of my book.

Charles Koechlin showed little interest in silent films, and saw the film industry both at the beginning and end of his musical career as the worst aspect of the debased world of commercial art he so detested. According to his diaries, Koechlin first visited the cinema on i December 1912, and between this and his important visit to see Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel on 29 June 1933 he apparently went only eighteen times. Charlie Chaplin was the only silent film star that Koechlin really respected, for he represented eternal hope in misfortune, an escape from everyday problems into a world of fantasy, the ‘chimérique’ as Koechlin called it; all of this was relevant to his own existence as a composer. From the series of essays entitled Stars which he wrote in 1934 as a commentary to his Seven Stars' Symphony it is evident that Koechlin found silent film subtitles pretentiously banal, their stories conventional and superficial, often mutilating his favourite authors such as Jules Verne and Hans Andersen. With the arrival of the first sound films in the early 1930s, however, Koechlin suddenly found himself drawn to the cinema, and a curious, fascinating period of his life began, which brought to a head his inner conflict between the necessity to exist as a composer in real life despite serious financial difficulties, and his desire to escape into a private fantasy world in which he could compose. A passage from Tristan Klingsor's Scheherazade poem Le Voyage, which Koechlin set in 1922–23 and to which he often referred, summarizes his philosophy. The first phrase is the crucial one.

When I speak of the recorder as a musical instrument, I do so knowing that you cannot fail to have heard the instrument at some time, as it is now once again an integral part of our musical life.

This article examines a range of writings on the status of musical interpretation in Austria and Germany during the early decades of the twentieth century, and argues their relevance to current debates. While the division outlined by recent research between popular-critical hermeneutics and analytical ‘energetics’ at this time remains important, hitherto neglected contemporary reflections by Paul Bekker and Kurt Westphal demonstrate that the success of energetics was not due to any straightforward intellectual victory. Rather, the images of force and motion promoted by 1920s analysis were carried by historical currents in the philosophy, educational theory and arts of the time, revealing a culturally situated source for twenty-first-century analysis's preoccupations with motion and embodiment. The cultural relativization of such images may serve as a retrospective counteraction to the analytical rationalizing processes that culminated specifically in Heinrich Schenker's later work, and more generally in the privileging of graphic and notational imagery over poetic paraphrase.

This article explores aspects of transatlantic culture through the career and works of the baritone, librettist and impresario Henri Drayton (1822–72). Using the published operas as well as reviews from period newspapers, the author retraces the events of the Philadelphia-born Drayton's professional life. Concentrating on the creative works, the author shows how Drayton went from playing stock roles at London's Drury Lane Theatre to collaborating with composers such as Joseph Duggan and Edward James Loder. With his wife, the soprano Susanna Lowe, Drayton performed in what he termed ‘drawing-room’ operas. Their popularity attracted the attention of visiting US impresario P. T. Barnum, who brought Drayton to New York in 1859. When his success in the USA was cut short by the outbreak of the Civil War, Drayton returned to London and created a one-man ‘entertainment’, Federals and Confederates. Spending what would be his final years as a member of the Richings English Opera Company, Drayton returned to New York in 1869.

The Committee of the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation possesses material indicating that Mendelssohn wrote passionate love letters to Jenny Lind entreating her to join him in an adulterous relationship and threatening suicide as a means of exerting pressure upon her, and that these letters were destroyed on being discovered after her death. The notion that Mendelssohn would have written such letters conflicts strikingly with the received view of his character. Nevertheless, the veracity of the material is beyond doubt, and, while it does not include specific evidence that Mendelssohn and Lind began an affair, it points more clearly than has hitherto been possible towards an answer to this question. Thus it necessitates a radical revision of perceptions of these two major musicians. For Otto Goldschmidt, Lind's husband, destroying the letters was crucial in protecting the reputations not only of his wife and Mendelssohn but also of himself and his family.

The reception history of Ludwig van Beethoven's symphonies in America offers striking evidence of multiple, previously unidentified, Continental and English connections to the musical thought of John Sullivan Dwight (1813–93), the first American-born critic of art music, and therefore to early American conceptions of the symphony in the 1840s. These direct links illuminate the history and criticism of the first performance in America of Beethoven's Symphony no. 9 in D minor, op. 125, which took place in New York in 1846. From the many sources associated with Dwight's musical learning and aesthetic education, I have chosen in this article to examine Dwight's literary interest in Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller's poem ‘An die Freude’ and in Thomas Carlyle's biography of Schiller, to document his knowledge of commentary on the symphony by the German critic Adolf Bernhard Marx, and to describe Dwight's response to the initial American performance of the Ninth Symphony.