There are many aspects of nineteenth-century violin playing that have received little attention from scholars. The subject is a vast and complicated one, far beyond the scope of a short article to treat adequately, but there are a number of important areas in which problems have not even been recognized, let alone investigated. For instance, the most substantial recent work on this subject, Robin Stowell's Violin Technique and Performance Practice in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1985), provides a useful digest of what the major violin methods of the period say, but because it is mainly confined to these sources, ignoring for the most part journalism and other contemporary accounts, and because it has a rather artificial terminal date of 1840, it fails to illuminate major underlying patterns of continuity and change in nineteenth-century violin playing. It may be valuable, therefore, to put forward a few ideas and suggest a few fruitful lines of enquiry which have until now remained largely unconsidered.

Joseph Addison's Spectator is perhaps the best-known early eighteenth-century periodical, its title a byword for the period's acute critical sensibility, its pages of enthusiastic enquiry a fitting monument to what we like to call the ‘Age of Reason’. Of the many commentaries on opera included in its pages, Spectator no. 5 (6 March 1711), critiquing the inadequacy of attempts at scenic verisimilitude on London's operatic stage, is justly renowned. Addison's tale of the undesirable (and wholly unmusical) results of releasing quantities of sparrows inside a theatre derives much of its pungency from the consequences of what Addison feels to be an improper juxtaposition of 'shadows and realities': sparrows and castrati alike escape pastoral fantasy to invade more sordid reality, penetrating ‘a lady's bed-chamber’ or perching ‘upon a king's throne’.

One of the main challenges facing early printers and publishers of music was how to distribute their products to a dispersed, niche market. At the start of the seventeenth century there were two principal routes of dissemination in German-speaking lands: the general book trade (including the fairs at Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig) and the composer's own initiatives (whether via presentation copies, or via self-publication as pursued by Michael Praetorius, Johann Hermann Schein and Heinrich Schütz). This article traces the transactions by which music was disseminated, examines the range of music available through the book trade, and asks how booksellers and musicians negotiated the market for printed music.

How did John Dunstable compose? What principles did he follow when he sat down to plan a piece of music? Manfred Bukofzer's collected edition of his works is now twenty-six years old, and when we consider how little of his music is performed and known as sound, over a quarter of a century after its publication, it is plain that I am not the only person to find him an enigma. We hear a great deal more of Dufay's music: his concise, elegant phrasing, neat, sectional, easily apprehended construction, constant variety of texture and integrated, purposeful bass-lines make Dunstable seem obscure, remote and inhuman by comparison – for all his mastery of the long melodic vault and springing ribs of cross-rhythm. One can follow the harmonic logic and the bar-to-bar detail of rhythm and phrasing, but not the plan of the whole, with the one exception of the isorhythmic works, which accordingly are performed more frequently than his other sacred music. One feels much more at home with their clear, logical structure and steady, purposeful crescendo of rhythmic excitement.

This article documents and analyses a creative collaboration between the composer Jeremy Thurlow and the violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved in the production of Ouija, a work for solo violin and laptop computer. The article situates the account of this creative process within recent literature on distributed and collaborative creativity, and focuses on three aspects of the project: verbal interaction between the two musicians, analysed in terms of ‘creative-talk’ and ‘face-talk’, and the relationship between immediate and more contextual concerns (‘inside/outside the room’); a quantitative analysis of changes in the musical material, focusing on timing; and a qualitative analysis of the role of the violinist's embodied and instrumental engagement with the music. The article discusses the findings in relation to forwards-orientated (process) and backwards-orientated (product) conceptions of creativity, the operation of different social components in creative collaboration and the relationship between craft, history and embodiment.

Early recordings raise fundamental questions about our response to music. Why do these performances seem so strange to us? How could they ever have made musical sense to listeners? How might we make sense of them now, in our very different music-cultural environment? This paper looks at some of the ways in which musical sounds model other processes involving change over time. A mechanism is proposed that may underlie the cross-domain mappings generating musical meaning. Music is seen to be exceptionally adaptable to the modelling of other experiences, able to offer many potential likenesses, among which those with most relevance to what an individual brain already knows and believes are favoured by conscious perception. Performance and perception styles change over time as certain kinds of potential meaning are selected for their relevance to other aspects of contemporary experience. The model helps to explain how subjectivity is constructed and how it changes.

This article provides a revisionist account of thirteenth-century refrain use, challenging the presumed connection between the refrain and oral song traditions. The distribution patterns in the surviving sources reveal no strong connection between refrain use and the rondet, the song genre often posited as the refrain's point of origin. Further, a significant corpus of refrains circulated only within the motet repertory, independently of monophonic song. Close comparison of refrain concordances in surviving sources reveals careful attention on the part of composers and scribes to the preservation of their melodic identity. Together, these findings suggest new contexts for understanding the refrain. The author relocates refrain use within clerical practices of quotation, particularly auctoritas, exploring case studies in which refrains are interpreted exegetically. In motets, chansons avec des refrains and a vernacular translation of Ovid's Ars amatoria, refrains are treated as sources of vernacular knowledge and objects of commentary.

Antoine Busnoys's Missa L'Homme armé must have been one of the most highly esteemed polyphonic Mass cycles of its time. It survives in no fewer than seven sources, an exceptionally large number not equalled by any other cycle from the 1460s or 1470s – even those by Dufay and Ockeghem. In this respect Busnoys's Mass stands alongside a work such as the anonymous English Missa Caput, whose widespread popularity in the fifteenth century is also well established. It is a measure of their extraordinary esteem that both Masses served as models for ‘imitations’ by later composers. The entire cantus firmus layout of the Caput Mass was copied in Ockeghem's and Obrecht's cycles on the same tune, and possibly in a fourth Caput cycle of which only the Agnus dei survives. Busnoys's Missa L'Homme armé likewise served as the model for a later work, Obrecht's L'Homme armé Mass. There exists however a second ‘imitation’ of Busnoys's cycle, an anonymous Missa de Sancto Johanne Baptista, which probably dates from the 1480s or 1490s. This Mass has a less conspicuous relationship with its model than the other ‘imitations’ mentioned here, but it raises as many important questions concerning Renaissance practices of borrowing and structural modelling.

Marie-Dominique-Joseph Engramelle's treatise La tonotechnie, ou l'art de noter les cylindres (1775) claimed that automated instruments driven by pinned cylinders would grant listeners direct access to music as the composer conceived it. Standard notation was insufficient, as it did not capture the music's mouvement – its temporal flexibility from moment to moment. Denis Diderot provided an aesthetic justification for automated instruments in terms that linked them to materialist philosophy. Like android automata, which simulated life through automated motion, automated musical instruments encoded live music to simulate the ideal performance of a composer. Yet Engramelle's collaboration with the composer Claude Balbastre, which resulted in a pinned-cylinder notage of one of Balbastre's keyboard pieces, raises crucial questions about the effectiveness of the technology and its notation, and about Engramelle's claims and his own musical skill. Engramelle's project is best understood as a performance unto itself – a manifestation of the cultures of public science that were widespread in the European Enlightenment.

Shakespeare was both deeply reverenced and whole-heartedly misunderstood in the Restoration period. Several of his plays were popular, but nearly all of these were more or less drastically altered to suit contemporary taste. The Tempest was perhaps the most maltreated of them all.

Throughout the nineteenth century, musical instruments were seen as embodiments of a country's distinction, useful in ‘the study of man, the diverse races, and their degree of civilization’. This article, focusing on the illustrated French press between 1870 and 1900, examines popular colonial representations of instruments in the context of the complex racial ideologies and the material as well as ideological struggles underlying imperialism. Images of exotic instruments, I argue, served not only to teach about foreign cultures, but also to shape French perceptions of Africa and Indo-China during imperialist expansion there. As such, they help us to situate ethnomusicology's prehistory within French colonialism.

On 22 July 1917 Maurice Maeterlinck wrote to the composer Lili Boulanger:

The first of an uninterrupted series of piano works to follow the orchestral Prometheus, op. 60 (1908–10), Scriabin's Sixth Sonata, op. 62 (1911), is a striking example of what may be termed an ‘octatonic sonata’. Indeed, the Sixth Sonata shows Scriabin experimenting with the octatonic at its most rigid and is unique in containing long spans of pure octatonic writing where not a single extraneous note is invoked. In contrast to the Fifth Sonata, op. 53 (1907), which is closely associated with the Poem of Ecstasy, op. 54 (1905–8), the Sixth Sonata has only loose ties with Prometheus.

Joseph Kerman has suggested a distinction crucial in defining the meaning of ‘canon’ in musical culture: repertory, he argues, was simply the performance of old works; canon, by contrast, is their reverence on a critical plane and in a literary context. The distinction is a fertile one, for it challenges us to define when works were not just offered by convention, but when they functioned as models for musical taste critically and aesthetically. The distinction can be extremely fruitful in tracing the early history of the canon – its origins in repertory and gradual evolution into its modern form. What I would like to show here is how repertories grew up originally without true status as canon; before canon there was repertory, and that is where the whole tradition began. In inquiring just where the modern practice of performing old music regularly came about we can look into some of the most fundamental social and intellectual bases upon which the tradition was established.

The giving of gifts or ‘bribes’ in return for official favours was an immutable fact of life in oriental society that Europeans who travelled to the East in the service of religious or commercial interests had no choice but to accept. Permission to open a trading station or a mission would rarely be granted unless the request were accompanied by a present of some substance. The initial gift, moreover, would inevitably inspire many demands for similar treatment by subordinate officials in whose hands lay considerable power to disrupt the ordered patterns of daily life. The choice of suitable objects for presentation was thus an abiding concern of every European organization with interests in the East. There was general agreement that cheap trinkets which might be used to good effect to buy off an African chief would be regarded as an insult in any of the great oriental courts. To appear before the Sultan or the Great Mughal with a feeble or even a mildly inadequate offering was to put at risk the very interests in which the gifts were given. Failure to please could be doubly damaging if a rival European organization were able to make good the disappointment. A balance had therefore to be struck between the need for goods that displayed the best aspects of European artistry, craftsmanship and mechanical ingenuity and the need to keep costs to a reasonable level. The musical gift which most closely matched these requirements was a keyboard instrument of some kind: a harpsichord, for instance, could be painted attractively and displayed as an objet d'art; with its method of sound reproduction, it could also be presented as a mechanical device; it was certain to be regarded as a novelty; and, most important of all, the costs of its manufacture and transportation and the wages of the single musician hired to accompany it would not be prohibitive. For all these reasons, organs, harpsichords and virginals occupy a very significant place in the history of Renaissance oriental diplomacy, especially during the period from c. 1575 to c. 1625 when the old Portuguese empire began its decline in the face of fierce competition from the commercial interests of the Dutch and English nations.

The contribution of Lionel Power to European sacred music during the first half of the 15th century has long been appreciated, and the current publication of a complete edition of his surviving work has long been overdue. The purpose of this article is to present such few details as are known of his career, and to sketch enough of their background to permit some approximation to a coherent picture of the circles in which he lived and worked.

‘Salve, regina, mater misericordiae … ad te clamamus … ad te suspiramus’: when this lovely Marian antiphon is sung, whether by one person or many, it is intoned on behalf of all mankind. ‘Ave sanctissima Maria … libera me ab omni malo; ora pro peccato meo’: when this prayer is said, it is the individual who begs the Virgin's intercession, who pleads for her to free him from evil, who asks her to pray for his sins. Prayers in the first person singular, a direct address on the most personal level, I and thou, are usually private. It would seem surprising to find them set to music for several voices, and yet settings begin to appear towards the end of the fifteenth century. What does it mean to sing one of these prayers? For whom do the singers sing: each for himself? each for all the other singers? for the listeners?

The repeated use of the ‘Goldberg’ Variations in the Hannibal Lecter saga offers a route into the complexities of cinema's appropriation of Western art music. To an extent, the affiliation of Bach with a cannibalistic serial killer rehearses the notion of ‘classical music’ as socially and culturally other. Yet at the same time, from its first appearance in a memorable scene in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the music is tied to the workings of a mass-media phenomenon. This becomes evident in the sequel, Hannibal (2001), where the ‘Goldberg’ Aria, used as title song, crossing in and out of the diegesis and mixed with sound effects, becomes part of the development of the character into a media franchise, of the romanticizing of his masculinity and the spectacularization of his violence. Thus, in the process of capitalizing on Lecter's success, the saga at once insists on classical music's otherness and blurs its difference from film music.

Despite the many negative aspects of European colonization endured by indigenous peoples throughout North America, music served as a powerful and positive force. This study demonstrates that musical life in the Franciscan and Jesuit missions throughout Spanish North America was fully developed, was a most important part of the evangelization process, and involved music similar to that performed in other mission areas in Spanish America. Musical life in New France and Louisiana is summarized here to show that the French operated a parallel system of musical evangelization and that the establishment of French settlements in North America corresponded in certain ways to Spanish practices.

The avowed inability of nineteenth-century Parisian critics to express in words their impressions of music (whether instrumental or lyric) doubtless has something to do with a more or less general lack of training, but in the case of the works of Meyerbeer it also points to a particular idea of opera. An intense interest in orchestration (outlined here in reviews of Robert le diable, Les Huguenots, Le prophète and L'Africaine; also in Berlioz's Grand traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration modernes) is articulated in enthusiastic examination of the instruments themselves, and in striking metaphors of science, technology and manufacture. The presence of this gloss on Meyerbeer in otherwise Romantic appreciations (for example Balzac's Gambara) suggests a way of reading opera reception in tune with the urban culture of the period.