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The article discusses the "Smith Collection" of Handel manuscripts, which consists of 25 volumes of Handel's works. These volumes were assembled in the second half of the 18th century and are now housed at the British Library. The collection includes Handel's oratorio-style works arranged in chronological order. The article also explores the history and development of the collection, including the addition of new volumes to supplement the earlier "Frederick" collection. The document provides tables and graphs that offer detailed information on payments made for music copying and related activities, as well as information on the specific scores in the collection, including manuscript numbers, payment details, and copyists. ." The text also discusses the contributions of Simpson and Teede to the collection, as well as the identity of "Mr. Teede" and the possibility of multiple copyists with similar handwriting. The author expresses gratitude to those who assisted in the research. [Extracted from the article]

Through the covid -19 pandemic, the choir of St Wulfram's Church, Grantham has approached elaborate Tudor polyphony via digital, virtual and hybrid methods. Remote music production devolves responsibility to individuals within a choir. It reframes trust dynamics among choir members, and between singers and their director. This helped singers to encounter polyphony in a new way while isolated from one another, rethinking repertory and re-evaluating their understanding of this period in music history. Re-creating historical performance factors by new means generated intriguing results. As in-person singing has gradually returned for parish church choirs, members have developed new confidence in singing polyphonic music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the spirit of the Western Early Music movement, Rietzsch tried to reconnect the Africans with their own "original" music by reinventing it on the basis of his knowledge of Western medieval music. Notwithstanding these minor points of criticism, Busse Berger has done a fantastic job of uncovering the fascinating interaction between the musical activities of missionaries, on the one hand, and the early 20th-century scholarship on and performance of medieval and non-European music, on the other. Even Christian missionaries with respect for African music, in which a deep connection with the communal, spiritual and religious was indeed often preserved, found many African rituals involving music and dancing abhorrent. [Extracted from the article]

Mr Baptiste was a musician living in late 17th-century Jamaica who composed music portraying African traditions as they were performed by enslaved musicians on the island. This article argues that Baptiste was probably a free person of colour and perhaps one of the earliest-known Black American composers to have published Western notation. His music was printed in Hans Sloane's 1707 travelogue and natural history of Jamaica. The article also addresses broader issues concerning the underrepresentation of marginalized performers in colonial music histories, with special attention to musical life in the early modern Caribbean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the lenses of magic, witchcraft and superstition, this article explores Veneno es de amor la envidia (Biblioteca Nacional de España, Ms. 19254), a little-known zarzuela by Sebastián Durón and Antonio de Zamora. I consider this zarzuela within its wider cultural context, looking at changing attitudes towards magic and witchcraft in early modern Spain, as well as within the context of Zamora's literary output. I propose that Veneno es de amor la envidia was intended to attract large crowds of theatregoers fascinated with depictions of the supernatural while also helping to debunk beliefs in witchcraft through the use of humour and parody. An examination of this rather intriguing zarzuela contributes to our understanding of an often-overlooked corpus of theatrical music of the Baroque. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A ruler who was knowledgeable on musical matters could use music's power over the emotions to beneficial effect. 'Sounds of power: sonic court rituals in- and outside of Europe in the 15th-17th centuries', Institute of Musicology, University of Bern, 17-19 June 2021 This first international conference at the Institute of Musicology at the University of Bern since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic follows on the heels of two earlier, single-day workshops on a similar theme in September 2020 and February 2021 (the latter reported in the August 2021 issue of I Early Music i ). A good and knowledgeable ruler could therefore choose music carefully to maintain power and to guide his citizens. [Extracted from the article]

A newly discovered source for the text of the aria Fallax mundus (BuxWV 28) by Dieterich Buxtehude has brought to light an important connection between devotional texts, contemplative emblems and musical settings. The series of emblematic engravings Cor Iesv amanti sacrvm by Flemish engraver Antony II Wierix includes a Latin poem from which Buxtehude derived the text for Fallax mundus. Buxtehude’s most likely source was the 1627 devotional book Cor Deo devotum , which contained Wierix’s engravings. The poem shows the influence of Jesuit teachings and spiritual practices, although Buxtehude’s setting may suggest a more Lutheran reading of the text. These discoveries shed new light on Buxtehude’s piety and show that he moved in a milieu open to influences from Catholic piety. Furthermore they suggest new interpretations for his Latin sacred works such as Membra Jesu nostri (BuxWV 75) and Sicut Moses exaltavit serpentem (BuxWV 97) in relation to contemporary devotional images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New manuscripts of viola da gamba music by Carl Friedrich Abel (1723–87) have been found in Poland, in the Library of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, in a collection originating from the Maltzan family palace in Milicz (Poland). Two manuscripts, one of them partly autograph, transmit 29 pieces by Abel, or attributed to him based on unique source criticism and stylistical analysis, including 22 previously unknown. These are valuable sources, as they show previously undocumented practices relating to Abel’s work and its transmission: the use of a fragment from the Drexel Manuscript in another composition with basso accompaniment; the manuscript records of Six Easy Sonattas (London(?), 1772(?)); the unique example of a second autograph of a work; the gamba version of a cello composition; and the only known duo for two violas da gamba. Besides copies of short, conventional sonatas in the galant style, the Maltzan collection contains some of the most complex, challenging and virtuosic sonatas written by Abel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pierluigi Farnese (1503–47) was the 1st Duke of Parma and Piacenza (r.1545–7). His fortune heavily relied on the political and diplomatic ability of his father, Paul III (1468–1549). Pierluigi took an active and severe attitude towards local feudatories; as a result, he had many enemies and was assassinated in September 1547. While Pierluigi was unsuccessful as a ruler, he was aware of the impact of the arts for his political strategies: he collected artworks and tried to establish a musical household. This article presents previously unknown documents showing Pierluigi’s attempts to recruit musicians for Piacenza, including a travelling band from Brescia; a certain Girolamo Leone, presumably a singer of the Brescian cathedral; the Genoa musician ‘Jacomo tenorista’; and the Roman musician ‘Bolognia’, presumably Galeazzo Baldi, member of Paul III’s musica segreta. Pierluigi enlisted the help of Jean Michel, a French singer active in Ferrara, to look for singers there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interprets the long-recognized, but hitherto unidentified, heraldic description contained in Machaut’s ballade 30 (Pas de tor) against the background of his known authorial practices, spheres of activity and patterns of engagements. It suggests the description is of the arms of Lower Lusatia, which Machaut, as a result of his time in the service of the Bohemian King John of Luxembourg, knew both the geography of and the people involved in settling the status of these disputed lands. It suggests that the song was likely composed in May 1364 and handed to King Peter I of Cyprus as cultural ammunition for the latter’s trip to Prague in search of support for his crusading initiative. The article thus solves a longstanding riddle of Machaut scholarship while presenting the song within a practical, political landscape that far exceeds the composer’s physical residency in Reims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Very little research has been undertaken into guitarmaking and playing in the Netherlands. Neither the 17th century nor the 18th has received much attention, though we know that the playing of guitars and similar instruments was an integral part of cosmopolitan cultural life. This article introduces a number of luthiers and their guitars--wire-strung and gut-strung--made in the Netherlands between c.1750 and 1800, a period when concert life began to flourish. In Amsterdam, Johann Swarts, Gosewijn Spijker and Benoit Joseph Boussu were active, while Johannes Cuijpers had his workshop in The Hague. Brief biographies of these makers are given, together with inventories of known instruments. The most remarkable find is undoubtedly the recently rediscovered large five-course guitar made by Gosewijn Spijker. Finally, there is a discussion of who may have bought these guitars--a Greek merchant's son, a French actress--and how the instruments would have been used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Awakening up, he took her hollow lute,-- / Tumultuous,--and, in chords that tenderest be, / He played an ancient ditty, long since mute ...'. These lines from The Eve of St Agnes, by John Keats, provide a reminder that the Romantic poets were fascinated by the lute. As if in response, around 1800 an instrument called 'lute' or 'modern lute' suddenly became fashionable. Most examples had an egg-shaped body, with ten single strings, and were built in London by craftsmen such as Buchinger, Barry and Harley. At the same time, older lutes from the 16th and 17th centuries were converted into 'modern lutes'. This article contributes to a rediscovery of these forgotten lutes and their music in the Regency period. It presents the first census of the nine extant instruments, surveys the original musical sources, and considers matters of playing technique and contemporary instruction books. A surprisingly rich repertory is revealed, for these lutes played arrangements of contemporary popular tunes and dances, but there were also newly composed sonatas, rondos and lute songs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Bathe's Briefe Introduction to the Skill of Song (c.1596) and Thomas Morley's Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597) describe a solmization system that is fixed and static, replacing the medieval hexachordal system that went back to Guido d'Arezzo. This approach became standard in the 17th century. My research demonstrates that the English shift from traditional hexachords to fixed scales was initiated a generation earlier in The Whole Booke of Psalmes. First printed in 1562, many editions of this psalter, beginning in 1569, featured a music typeface that contained solmization syllables, along with a new preface that explained their use. Thus the earliest documentation of fixed-scale solmization comes from Protestant religious reformers and the English Reformation's hymnal. I explain how The Whole Booke of Psalmes systematized the assignment of solmization syllables to absolute pitches, and I compare this system with continental hexachord theory, Bathe's and Morley's treatises, and four earlier Genevan music books dated 1550-62 which also printed solmization syllables. Finally, I suggest that fixed-scale solmization was a uniquely English Protestant innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The votive antiphon to the Trinity, Potencia patris, survives as a single voice part in the orphan partbook London, British Library, Add. Ms. 34191. Its unusual text shows that it was probably written during Henry VIII's 1513 invasion of France, most likely to celebrate the capture of Tournai in September of that year. Based on stylistic and biographical information it is also possible to attribute the antiphon to William Cornysh 'Junior', Henry's informator choristarum, who accompanied him on campaign in 1513. Cornysh is known to have written an antiphon with the text Altissimi potencia, which survives only as an entry in the index fragment Oxford, Merton College Library (pr. bk.) 62.f.8, and it is likely that this lost work can be identified with Potencia patris. This new identifi- cation has broad implications for our understanding both of Henry VIII's self-fashioning during his invasion of France, and of early Tudor musical style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interpretation of appoggiaturas or grace-notes in Classical and early Romantic music is much discussed and contested. This article concerns the appoggiatura in the music of Fernando Sor (1778-1839), a guitarist whose career unfolded in several countries, above all in France, where almost all his known guitar music was published. Although none of this music survives in autograph manuscripts, there are ample autographs of Sor's compositions for voice, piano or orchestra to examine his musical handwriting in general and the notation of appoggiaturas specifically. Notwithstanding inaccuracies and inconsistencies, the notation indicates that the written length of the appoggiatura is often a useful pointer to its approximate duration in performance. It also shows that Sor seems to have envisaged long appoggiaturas in far more situations than commonly considered today. This practice is supported by descriptions in a great number of method books, both for the guitar and other instruments, published in France during the early decades of the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his short but fascinating book, I Gregorio Ballabene's forty-eight-part Mass for twelve choirs (1772) i , part of the RMA monograph series, Florian Bassani digs deeper into the changing fortunes of such large-scale choral works. While the story Bassani outlines for us is the specific tale of Ballabene's Mass, it is also a story about changing styles and tastes more broadly. No Roman composer had ever essayed more than twelve choirs, and besides Ballabene, only one other composer, Giuseppe Ottavio Pittoni, is known to have composed a Mass for that number (which is now lost). [Extracted from the article]

Published in 1614 in his Sixth Book of madrigals, Monteverdi's setting of Petrarch's sonnet 'Zefiro torna e 'l bel tempo rimena' (Canzoniere 310) has earned a justified reputation as one of his most virtuosic madrigals for five voices. Even in this mature work, Monteverdi was mindful of the tradition from which he had emerged and on which his style was based. Indeed, the striking descending motif that sets the words 'sono un deserto' (are a desert) near the end of the madrigal alludes to the work of another great madrigalist, Luca Marenzio-specifically, the opening of his setting of Petrarch's 'Solo e pensoso i più deserti campi' (Canzoniere 35) in Il nono libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice, 1599). I explore these musical connections and discuss their possible implications, suggesting that Monteverdi's allusion need not have been solely the product of creative emulation or competition between artists. As a musical and literary form, the madrigal was open to intertextual dialogue: thus Monteverdi's madrigal stands as hypertext to Marenzio's, generating a hermeneutic field in which the audience could utilize some, or all, of the correspondences between them to arrive at one or more of several possible readings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monteverdi at the crossroads Fifty years ago, at the time of Monteverdi's quatercentenary in 1967, very little of his music had penetrated the consciousness of European and North American audiences. This began to change dramatically as the 20th century progressed; increasing numbers of performances, recordings and musicological studies in subsequent decades have changed Monteverdi's place in the present-day musical landscape. Musicians today are more than ever at ease with Monteverdi's music, approaching more confidently the composer's often fragmentary scores with a revised understanding of 'historically informed performance'. At the occasion of the composer's 450th anniversary, I take brief stock of current trends in the performance of Monteverdi, and identify the principal challenges faced both by scholars and by performers of the composer's music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a pressing need to document Monteverdi's Venetian period (1613-43) in greater depth. This task has long been impeded, however, by our haphazard grasp of the specific complexities of Venetian socio-cultural and musical contexts. By looking beyond St Mark's Basilica, the present article uncovers brief archival records often overlooked by music historians. These new documents may not add much to the known facts of Monteverdi's biography, but they do cast significant new light on the vast network of social relationships that Monteverdi developed during his Venetian years with fellow musicians and with higher-ranked patrons, not least in secular spheres and in the world of early 'public' opera. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Renaissance music, it is generally understood that in particular contexts, certain notes that are written diatonically are to be performed chromatically, i.e. a semitone higher or lower than written. The rules that govern which notes should be chromatically altered in this manner are relatively well codified and enumerated by contemporary theorists. However, in actual music the application of one rule often results in the violation of another, often iteratively. Josquin's Basies moy provides a particularly difficult case study in this phenomenon. Basies moy was initially published in two versions--one in four voices, and another with two additional lower voices; chromatic alterations that work without problem in one version are often problematic in the other. Furthermore, because the piece is a canon, an alteration that is effective in one place may present problems when it is repeated in the imitating voice. This article attempts to elucidate some challenges that commonly arise when applying chromatic alterations to Renaissance music by studying the challenges in Basies moy in light of work by contemporary theorists, and by presenting possible solutions to these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the history of medieval English music on record in library collections. It discusses importance of preserving old recordings and examples of English medieval music on record. Topics include Tom Moore's "Early Music America", musicology of medieval music and Gustave Reese's "Music in the Middle Ages" and musical piece rota "Sumer is icumen in" and recording of "L'Anthologie sonore".

The article discusses the benefits and risks of the internet age, emphasizing the importance of asking questions and acknowledging complexity in research and teaching. It highlights the journal Early Music as a platform for scholars to ask generous and generative questions. The author expresses their excitement about joining the journal's editorial board and shares their interests in music-historical research, including music's relationship to technologies, untold stories of women in music history, and intercultural connections. The article also provides a summary of the current issue of Early Music, which features essays on various topics of interest in the field. [Extracted from the article]

The article talks about the Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music that was held at the Canterbury Christ Church University in England from July 13 to 17, 2016. Topics discussed include scholarship presented at the conference, the English Baroque, and the dating of Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas.

The article examines evidences on the use of violin mutes from the late 17th century to the 18th century. The changes in the manufacturing of violin mutes in the 18th century are discussed as well as the principles that underline their use and public opinion on muted violins. Also explored are the development of musical vocabulary, the preservation of 18th century violin mutes, the materials used for violin mutes, and the scoring for muted violins.

Thomas Tallis's Gaude gloriosa Dei mater is one of the finest large-scale Tudor votive antiphons. It has long been regarded as a celebration of the short-lived return to Catholicism under Queen Mary and as a tribute to the Henrician masterpieces of the pre-Reformation years. All of the sources are Elizabethan, but one: the incomplete fragments of the Contratenor part with a hitherto unidentified English text, discovered in 1978 during building renovations at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. The author of that text has now been identified as Henry VIII's sixth and last queen, Katherine Parr. Less than a year after her marriage to Henry, Katherine produced her first publication, Psalmes or Prayers (1544). These included 15 psalmcollages (or psalm 'centos') translated into English from Fisher's Psalmi seu precationes, originally published in 1525. Katherine's translations are followed by a prayer for the king, and another 'for men to saie entryng into battaile'. England was at war with Scotland and France. The Ninth Psalm, 'Se lorde and behold', headed 'against ennemies' was set to an earlier version of Tallis's Gaude gloriosa. This discovery sheds light on the circumstances behind the production of this most extraordinary English contrafactum. It is here argued that the adaptation was not only intimately bound with Psalmes or prayers but also with Cranmer's Exhortation unto prayer and English Litany, and part of a flurry of activity leading to its first use at St Paul's Cathedral on Friday, 23 May. It would have been a unique and short-lived event quite new to the liturgical stage including as its centrepiece an English version with stirring themes of war of the most complex early Tudor votive antiphons. More personally, the exercise seems aptly to demonstrate Katherine's passion for reform and Henry's growing conservatism in the final years of his reign: an elaborate meld of a hotly topical vernacular text with an established stylistic idiom. The earlier Henrician origins of Gaude gloriosa are also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tallis's anthem O Lord give thy Holy Spirit is demonstrably a late work. Its text originated in the 1550s as a personal prayer associated with John Ledley, a religious radical and 'Freewiller' active in London. The text was heavily edited and revised multiple times, not reaching the form set by Tallis until the mid-1560s. The late date of this piece shows that Tallis in his mature years could still produce a syllabic four-voice English anthem on a modest scale. Like his 16th-century contemporaries in the visual and literary arts, he was capable of working in multiple stylistic registers at the same time. He did not abandon 'plain style' as soon as the Edwardian project of radical reform was over. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study opens with a bold claim: that one of Thomas Tallis's best-known works, the 'third tune' from Matthew Parker's metrical psalter of 1567, made famous through its use in Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis, may have been mistranscribed and misrepresented by all modern editors and performers, including Vaughan Williams. This claim then fuels a suspicion that might in any case have arisen from other factors-namely, that Tallis need not have had any direct involvement with the creation, printing and publication of Parker's psalter. Usually it is assumed that Tallis composed his 'tunes' at Parker's request, perhaps specifically for inclusion in the 1567 edition, but this is indeed an assumption based on no solid evidence, and other scenarios might now equally be proposed. Among them is the possibility that either Parker or an editor acting on his behalf took existing works by Tallis and adapted them to serve this new purpose, not necessarily with Tallis's agreement or even his knowledge. If so, then we lose one of the very few seemingly secure datings for any of Tallis's works, and instead we gain a new enigma. If Tallis did not compose his nine 'tunes' expressly for Parker's psalter, then what function might these works originally have served, and what words did they set? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The earliest documented polyphonic settings of a liturgical text in the English vernacular were a small group of unidentified Litanies, one of which, stated to have been for five voices, was published on 26 June 1544. Not one printed copy of that Litany is now known to be extant, the records of its issue have received but patchy notice in the historiography of English Reformation music, and beyond the odd passing reference no attention has been given to the all-too-obvious possibility that the setting contained in the lost print was none other than the celebrated five-part Litany by Thomas Tallis. Though no prints or manuscripts of Tallis's Litany survive from earlier than the 1630s, a textcritical study of the extant sources strongly suggests that their common original source was a printed one, while the make-up of Tallis's cantus firmus and a small but significant anomaly of liturgical structure imply that his setting predates not only the well-known monophonic setting issued on or before 16 June 1544 (STC 10621.5, 10621.7 and 10622), but also the first publication of the vernacular text on 27 May (STC 10620 and 10621). Given Tallis's pre-eminence among court musicians, and the absence from the sources of any other contemporary settings demonstrably in five parts, the chances seem slight indeed that the polyphonic setting printed in 1544 was the work of any other composer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The earliest-known employment of Thomas Tallis was as ioculator organorum (organ-player) of the Benedictine monastery of Dover Priory, 1530-31. The account that records his engagement there discloses also some indication of the musical resources, in terms of an organ and five or six singingboys, that were placed at his disposal in this appointment, while study of the contracts of employment of other musicians holding similar posts elsewhere suggests some appreciation of the duties expected of him. This position emerges as relatively humble, and appears to have been best suited to discharge by some talented but still youthful musician at the very start of his adult career. Meanwhile, the appearance of his antiphon Salve intemerata Dei mater in London, British Library, Ms. Harley 1709 shows that even before his appointment to Dover Tallis was already a composer of some considerable accomplishment. The association of Dover Priory with the chapel of the household of its then patron, William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, may suggest both a locale for Tallis's earliest training as a youth, and an identification for the source of the patronage which secured him this employment at Dover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the project A Big Data History of Music, which set out to unlock the bibliographical data held by research libraries in order to create new research opportunities for musicologists. The project cleaned and enhanced aspects of the British Library catalogues of printed and manuscript music, which are now available as open data. It also experimented with the analysis and visualization of the British Library datasets and the RISM inventories of printed and manuscript music. The article shows how quantitative analysis of these datasets can expose long-term historical trends, such as the rise and fall of music printing in 16th- and 17th-century Europe. Data analysis and visualization also facilitates research on the dissemination and canonization of specific composers (as shown by case-studies on Palestrina and Purcell) and on changing trends in genres, scoring and ethnic colourings in music (as shown by a case-study on 'Scottish' music). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the discovery of a new fragment of polyphonic music now in the Benedictine monastery of Muri-Gries in Bolzano/Bozen (South Tyrol, Italy), and provides some preliminary musi-cological and codicological observations. The musical fragment consists of ten folios written in white mensural notation that were reused in the binding of an Urbarium (register of fief ownership) dated 1507, from the old parish church in Gries near Bolzano. The folios can be dated to the mid-15th century and belonged originally in various fascicles; together they contain 17 pieces of sacred polyphonic music. Most of the compositions are also transmitted in the famous Trent Codices and are attributable to English composers such as John Bedyngham and John Forest. The fragment is closely related to the Trent Codices in terms of script and watermarks too, and particularly to Tr93. It is noteworthy that the place where the fragment survived, the city of Bolzano, is the birthplace of Johannes Lupi, one of the main scribes of the Trent manuscripts. Therefore we cannot exclude the possibility that both the fragment and Tr93 may have been written in Bolzano. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Textual scholars studying the transmission history of literary texts increasingly make use of ‘phylogenetic’ computer programs from evolutionary biology, which are conventionally used for inferring the evolutionary relationships among organisms from DNA sequence data. However, very little use has been made of phylogenetic methods in studying musical traditions. We have tested the use of the methods in analysing the transmission history of 16 extant sources of the Prelude in G by Orlando Gibbons. Variations in features such as pitch, rhythm and note pattern were recorded as a ‘Nexus file’, which was analysed using the phylogenetic methods of Maximum Parsimony and NeighborNet. Statistical confidence was tested using bootstrapping. The Maximum Parsimony analysis placed the sources into four groups with strong statistical support and the NeighborNet analysis gave similar results, while indicating a linkage between members of two of the major groups. Separate analyses of passages of running semiquavers and the chordal accompaniment showed that the latter was responsible for most of the phylogenetic structure, consistent with traditional scholarship. The analysis also showed a more fundamental division into two groups, with one containing mostly early to mid-17th century sources and the other containing only more recent ones. The study shows that phylogenetic methods can be used to infer robust conclusions on the transmission history of this tradition that are consistent with conventional scholarship. These novel methods are likely to be of general applicability as a tool for music scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstracts are presented for articles in the issue on topics including phylogenetic analysis of variant texts of "Prelude in G" by Orlando Gibbons, the use of optical music recognition software with chant manuscripts, and peer review in early music digital scholarship.

The first guitar and mandolin bands were founded in Italy in the early 1880s. The fashion soon spread to Britain, initially amongst the aristocracy. Victorian social morals did not permit ‘respectable’ British women to play conventional orchestral music in public, but approved of exclusively female guitar and mandolin bands performing for charitable purposes. In 1886, Lady Mary Hervey and Miss Augusta Hervey formed the first British ladies’ band, which for more than two decades gave regular performances of serious classical music in London’s major concert venues, and was conducted by Europe’s leading mandolin virtuosos: Ferdinando de Cristofaro, Leopoldo Francia, Enrico Marucelli and Edouardo Mezzacapo.During the 1890s, hundreds of similar ladies’ bands were formed across Britain, mostly by middle-class women. The quality of musicianship varied widely, but some were undoubtedly of a high musical standard. The Clifton ladies’ band, led by Mabel Downing, maintained a considerable reputation in the Bristol area, while Clara Ross’s band was highly regarded by fashionable London society. Clara composed most of her band’s music, and became one of Britain’s most popular composers for mandolin. She subsequently emigrated to the USA where, as Clara Ross-Ricci, she became a noted singing teacher and composer for women’s voices. By the late 1890s, as British society was becoming more liberal, more mixed-gender ensembles appeared, although most bands were still overwhelmingly female. The largest was the Polytechnic Mandoline and Guitar Band, founded in London in 1891, which regularly gave concerts with as many as 200 performers and continued performing into the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Catalan Fernando Sor (1778–1839) has been unevenly served by posterity. A gifted and versatile musician, he is principally remembered today for the works he composed for the Spanish guitar. Indeed, it is now universally recognized that Sor was an exceptional creator of music for that instrument and a performer of the highest ability. Sor was in England, mostly in London, between the spring of 1815 and late 1822 (or just possibly very early 1823). The guitar culture in England that Sor came to exploit has often been misunderstood, for there is a common view that Britain was mostly ‘a land without Spanish guitars’ in the 18th and early 19th centuries. New documents, including unpublished correspondence, help to correct that mistaken impression and shed light on Sor’s years in England. They reveal a royal concert hitherto unknown, in an opulent London palace, uncover the extent of royal patronage of the guitar, and show that Sor’s famous tutor for the guitar—commonly regarded as the finest ever compiled for the instrument—was already well underway, and may even have been completed, while he was resident in the English capital. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Josquin’s three-voice chanson Quant je vous voy survives with many musical variants and an incomplete text in two independent sources: London, British Library, Add. Ms.35087 and Antico’s La couronne et fleur des chansons a troys of 1536. It was published in vol.27 of the New Josquin Edition after the London manuscript, in a slightly emended version. However, it would seem that it is possible to make several other improvements, in particular to the text, by taking into account a ‘contrafactum’ in the Diversche liedekens of the Flemish poet Matthijs Castelein, posthumously published in Ghent in 1574 but not noted by the NJE editors. We propose a revised edition in which two new lines of text provide a more logical formal outline of the ‘rondeau’, pointing also to a possible relation to the popular medieval dance form of the carole. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the early 19th century the guitar knew a degree of popularity that has prompted the belief that this was one of the most successful periods in its history. However, despite the apparent success of some individual players, the position of the guitar was uniquely controversial and conflicted. This article examines the guitar’s reception in the specialist music press in Germany, France and England during that period, and the motives behind the frequently negative assessments. Two dominating musical and ideological forces appear to have been particularly influential: the notion of gender-specific instruments and the rise of musical idealism.In 1783 the theorist of bourgeois decorum, Carl Ludwig Junker, described in detail which instruments befitted the respectable bourgeois woman. Such gendering of instruments had massive influence all over Europe, and it placed the guitar in the role of a domestic amateur instrument, first and foremost for women. Being contrary to the demands of the new musical idealism, this was detrimental to the prospect of the guitar finding a permanent place in professional musical life. Thus critics, almost unanimously and irrespectively of national background, took a negative, often outright hostile, stand towards the guitar, in particular when it assumed the role of a concert instrument. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article seeks to demonstrate that in the period 1800–40 in France, guitarists were mostly occupied with accompanying songs and not with playing solo repertory, as is generally assumed. A selection of periodicals, bibliographies and guitar methods from the time are examined, with the dual purpose of finding out the ratio of solo instrumental to song repertory and of learning more about the opinions of contemporary guitarists and other authors on the subject of song accompaniment. After that, a survey is made of the different genres of guitar-accompanied song that were available, from the serious to the frivolous. Some attention is given in passing to unknown aspects of guitar song performance practice, such as singing to one’s own accompaniment, strumming, the flexible use of pitches and the arranging of material from operas for voice and guitar. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Neither scholarship nor popular interest has neglected Arcangelo Corelli. His music is a favourite of many performers; references to his sonatas and concertos are ubiquitous across a wide spectrum of musicological literature. The rise of serious Corellian research on an international scale since the 1970s has given new breadth to several areas of enquiry, including sources, archival documents, reception and performance studies. And yet, despite the advances of modern Corellian scholarship, a number of historical and critical issues are still to be investigated. Especially important for our understanding of the Corelli phenomenon is to determine the nature of the original social and cultural conditions that made it possible. Recent writings have shown that posthumous interpretations of Corelli depended mainly on processes peculiar to 18th- rather than 17th-century musical cultures. This article reconsiders the wealth of evidence unearthed by historical research to pinpoint the geographical, political and economic locus of Corelli’s work. It argues that, notwithstanding his international success as a published composer and his later reputation as a standard-bearer for Italian music outside Italy, Corelli was in fact the product of a rather restricted though distinctive milieu in the Rome of his time. By sketching the specific events that led to Corelli’s extraordinary career as a specialized instrumentalist, the article shifts attention away from the composer’s position within vast schemes of music history and restores it instead to the original environment in which his musical activities took place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There are numerous modern discussions of keyboard temperament, but this article considers just one national style, that of France, and the relationship between the known tunings in use and the music that used them. Technical descriptions of five kinds of 17th- and 18th-century French keyboard temperament are provided, and the significance of these historically successive styles of tuning in relation to the development of harmonic style in French harpsichord music is illustrated in detail through works by Jacques Champion de Chambonnières, Louis Couperin, Jean-Henri D’Anglebert, François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau. This is supported by substantial citations from relevant writings by Marin Mersenne (1636), Jacques Ozanam (1691), Marc-Antoine Charpentier (mid-1690s), Charles Masson (1697), Etienne Loulié (1698), Joseph Sauveur (1701, 1707, 1711), an anonymous writer for the Mémoires de Trevoux (1718), Rameau (1726, 1737), Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1752) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1743, 1752). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

John Dowland’s music, instrumental and vocal, has a ‘graphic’ quality that goes deep into the alert listener’s mind. This article explores the 16th-century love of creating emblems from aspects of human experience and awareness—passions, pleasures, subjects that contain a ‘teaching’, moral philosophy—all explored in graphic symbolism and in verbal form, both poetry and prosody, and always epigrammatically. When this lively tradition is applied to Dowland’s works it seems that the ‘emblematic’ way of relating to musical phrases is a conscious aspect of his composing; this in turn opens a new awareness of how to perform the repertory, thereby benefitting a modern audience not schooled in the emblem tradition. Much remains to be explored, but a new and valuable view on late 16th-century music and lyrics is established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an index for volume 40 of the journal "Early Music."

This article examines a painting by Alessandro Piazza long taken as a document of performance practice in San Marco c.1690, with special emphasis on two balconies for performers in addition to those added by Jacopo Sansovino in his refashioning of the chancel of the chapel in the mid-16th century. Closer examination of the picture (and a currently untraceable variant) suggests that it may not be a reliable document of a particular occasion but rather a composite, in line with at least one other musical depiction by Piazza. The question of the date of the addition of the secondary balconies and their removal is also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Only two known 16th-century music books printed in the Iberian world were dedicated to women: El arte Tripharia (1550) by Juan Bermudo (c.1510–after 1559) and Arte de canto llano (1594) by Francisco de Montanos (c.1528–after 1595). The first one, dedicated to Isabel Pacheco, Abbess of the Santa Clara convent in Montilla (Córdoba), was addressed to her nuns. The second, dedicated to the noblewoman Catalina de Zúñiga y Sandoval (1555–1628), was a plainsong handbook consisting of only the first section of a previous work by Montanos, Arte de musica theorica y pratica (1592), which had been dedicated to Catalina’s husband, Fernando Ruiz de Castro, 6th Count of Lemos. El arte Tripharia has usually been taken as evidence to claim that Renaissance Iberian music treatises considered women as intellectually inferior learners, to be taught passively only the practical side of music. This article, in addition to questioning received opinion about El arte Tripharia, focuses on the connections (generally overlooked) between Montanos’s Arte de canto llano and Catalina de Zúñiga. Both the dedication by Montanos and the prefatory material of other books dedicated to Catalina de Zúñiga support the hypothesis that this noblewoman was not a passive receptor or a prospective user of Montanos’s book, but might in fact have commissioned the publication of this work to serve her own agenda as a religious patroness. I will argue that these two music handbooks dedicated to Isabel Pacheco and Catalina de Zúñiga were not conceived nor regarded at that time as books for ‘women’ as a category, relating these two cases to the wider debates about the role of women in the creation and transmission of culture and the representation of women in literature and art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article we bring together historical research and the experience of performance to untangle problems regarding text underlay in the period around 1500. Although much has been written on the subject of underlay, the principal criterion we use for making decisions has not been discussed. We rely on internal musical evidence, principally motivic repetition. Our case study is Pierre de la Rue’s Salve Regina II, performed by Peter Schubert’s choir VivaVoce on their 2007 Naxos recording. We discuss how particular decisions about text underlay were taken, and their consequences. The new imitative style that developed in the late 15th century is characterized by an emphasis on obvious, literal repetition of musical material. Many pieces with relatively little text for extended sections of music feature extensive repetition of musical motifs after the opening of the point of imitation. In later sources we would expect to find these motifs texted. Based on comparison of sources and a study of developments in musical style, we propose that around 1500 singers were already repeating words and phrases of text in order to bring out the repetition of musical motifs--that, seeing musical repetition, they improvised an appropriate underlay ‘on the fly’. Our approach to text underlay reveals the connection between imitative style c.1500 and the expanded points of imitation with multiple entries of the soggetto typical of mid- and late 16th-century music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In adapting Rinuccini’s Dafne, German poet Martin Opitz (1597–1639) sought to establish a degree of cultural independence from his Italian model, both by developing a prosodic approach uniquely fitted to the German language and by subtly imbuing his text with a German moralistic hue. The later adaptation of Opitz’s libretto by two 17th-century Italians—Giovanni Andrea Bontempi and Marco Gioseppe Peranda—for the same Dresden court (though for a different Elector) that witnessed the 1627 premiere of Opitz and Heinrich Schütz’s Dafne thus offers important insights into both the desire for German cultural independence and the power of Italian influence to moderate such a desire. This article attempts to draw out some of the distinctive features of Opitz’s adaptation and then examine what Bontempi and Peranda retained, added and altered with respect to Opitz’s aims. Their opera points to changing tastes at the Dresden court under Johann Georg II, and, as a stylistic hybrid, also stands as an early exemplar of a particular line of development in the broader history of German opera. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Musical skill was so fashionable in Tudor England that the music tutoring business flourished. But music tutors themselves have remained an entirely shadowy group, largely ignored even by musicologists due to a dearth of source material. This article attempts to shed light on an unknown group through fresh readings of new and old sources. The manuscript autobiography of Thomas Whythorne, a Tudor musician and sometime private music tutor, is rich with self-exploration, social commentary and intimate storytelling. Whythorne’s observations of his own status among servants, his relationships with the women of the household, even his attempts to woo his own pupils, all add life to our present skeletal body of knowledge of music tutors. By comparing his narrative to the revealing printed songs of contemporary music tutors, we find a rare window into the lives of these hidden figures of Tudor history. The article concludes that although static models of hierarchy and deference like the Great Chain of Being are attractive, the household arena wherein the music tutor operated was not so simple a polity. Music tutors were something quite distinct from court musicians. There was no designated place for the music tutor, so he dangerously manoeuvred, making his own place in the world. Power, sex, love and intrigue combined with music’s power to arouse passions in the sometimes isolated music room, creating the setting for a romantic gamble that could result in triumph or despair. A tutor could circumnavigate the accepted forms of courtship and go straight for his mistress’s heart, and perhaps even her marriage bed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Missa de Sancto Johanne Baptista, now credited to Jacob Obrecht, was long considered to be an anonymous Mass for the early 16th-century papal chapel, owing to its lack of attribution and its survival in only one Vatican source (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms. Cappella Sistina 160). As is well known, this Mass takes Busnoys’s Missa L’homme armé as its model, lifting many structural elements of the pre-existent work, though significantly replacing the cantus firmus with eight antiphons from the nativity feast of John the Baptist. While these antiphons heavily project the name ‘John’ in key structural moments across the work, no patron or dedicatee named John has been definitively connected with this Mass. For all of the attention focusing on the origins of Obrecht’s Mass, little has been said about its reception history, specifically in the context of another ‘John’—Pope Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici). This important recipient of the only source of the Missa de Sancto Johanne Baptista was considered a kind of precursor himself. Further, the preservation of two peculiar elements from Busnoys’s model—the descent of the cantus firmus to the bassus in the Agnus Dei and the durational ground plan—subtly reflect the figure of John the Baptist in the design of the Mass. These musical parameters combine to place a distinctly ‘Johannine’ stamp on the L’homme armé template. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Claudio Monteverdi was commissioned by Alessandro Striggio in December 1616 to set to music a theatrical text by Scipione Agnelli, Le nozze di Tetide, the composer made trenchant criticisms of it on the grounds of its problematic staging, its unmusical qualities and its failure to rise to the dramatic level of his operas Orfeo (1607) and Arianna (1608). This much is well known. However, we have failed to understand the place of Le nozze di Tetide in the context of a single evening’s entertainment (a veglia) intended to mark the entrance into Mantua of Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga’s new bride, Caterina de’ Medici (they were married in Florence in February 1617), and the circumstances that eventually led to it being dropped in favour of Santi Orlandi’s Gli amori di Aci e Galatea (performed in Mantua on 13 March). The Tetide affair also reveals Monteverdi’s use of high-level intermediariescum-brokers in his relations with Mantua, and his ongoing ties with the Gonzagas even after his dismissal from court service in the summer of 1612 and his subsequent move to St Mark’s, Venice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zelo tui langueo / T. [Omnes de Saba] / Reor nescia has been discussed more widely than many other English motets on account of a number of puzzling elements of its content and provenance. Two manuscript copies of the motet survive; in addition, two images of clerics performing the motet are preserved in psalters of the early 14th century, roughly contemporary with the musical sources. The feminine poetic voice used in one of the motet’s texted lines has invited speculation that Zelo tui langueo may have been composed or performed by women. The provenance of one musical source (York Minster, Ms. xvi.n.3) offers corroboration, linking the music to a community of monks and nuns from a Gilbertine double house in Shouldham, Norfolk, but this origin was rejected after palaeographical studies undertaken in the last decades of the 20th century. This article examines the motet within a network of various documents, and relocates it musically, textually and socially within devotional life in East Anglia. In addition, it explores elements of the historiography of female music-making in late medieval England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]