Employing the term ‘point of audition’ to describe the spatial position musical works imply for their listeners, this article examines the use of technologies for extending the senses to define new points of audition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Popular literature on natural philosophy promoted magnifying instruments as windows onto distant or hidden realms and as tools for acquiring knowledge. On the operatic stage and in writers' metaphorical musings, kindred sensory extensions were imagined for hearing. These contexts connected (magic) mirrors and magnifying instruments to their musical analogues: muted tone and keyboard fantasizing. The development of these associations in opera and literature made it possible for instrumental music to position listeners as eavesdroppers upon unknown realms. Such a point of audition is shown to be implied by the Adagio un poco mosso of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto. By examining material practices and discourses surrounding sensory extension, this article demonstrates the relevance of technologically mediated observation to musical culture at the turn of the nineteenth century, and its contribution to the otherworldly orientation characteristic of romantic listening.

The history of the Spanish musical press in the eighteenth century has usually been interpreted as an ongoing struggle against a narrow and underdeveloped market. Print itself has been seen as a superior technology that helps to secure stability and clarity of the musical text. In this light, José de Torres, prestigious organist and composer, music director of the Spanish Chapel Royal from 1720 and owner of an important musical press, has appeared to be a heroic modernizing figure. This article challenges this received image, underlining the effectiveness of censorship and the control of individual initiatives in the field of music publishing in early eighteenth-century Spain. This is demonstrated by newly discovered documents concerning a lawsuit brought against Torres, who owned a royal printing privilege from 1700 until his death in 1738, by Francisco Díaz de Guitián, who wanted to establish a music press of his own. Several musicians acted as witnesses, giving a detailed view of how the music press worked at the time, notably how the approbations customarily given by established musicians on behalf of music treatises intended for publication were used to promote or block a career. Based on these new insights, a general study of all the known prints by the Imprenta de Música is presented in a broader editorial, political and cultural context.

The moral and political propriety of musical pleasure constituted one of Charles Burney's continuous lines of thought from the 1770s to the 1790s. As a public figure, the music historian found himself called upon to state why music matters – in a preface, a dedication or an essay. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Burney read in musical performances symptoms of contemporary society and politics, but, unlike Rousseau, he perceived in modern music signs of civilization's progress. Musical excellence, according to Burney, required both freedom and affluence; thus while Burney rejected absolutist monarchy, he nevertheless praised the achievements of court culture. Indeed, his advocacy of music as an ‘innocent luxury’ reads as an addendum to eighteenth-century disputes on the morality and benefits of luxury. The social implications of this definition of music, however, are problematic: while Burney acknowledged the right of each individual to feel as they please, he also claimed for the music critic the exclusive authority to speak publicly about music. This essay explores these aspects of Burney's political philosophy of music in relation to the works of Rousseau, Montesquieu, Avison, Wollstonecraft and Hume.

Vienna, 21 August 1773: Mozart signs off a letter to his sister Nannerl in his usual jocular manner: ‘oidda – gnagflow Trazom neiw ned 12 tsugua 3771’. This ‘arseways’ spelling of his signature is an early example of Mozart's well-known fondness for jesting and playing with patterns – spatial, arithmetical, linguistic and musical. Mozart appears to have been especially committed to such games in the 1770s. This was a period when he was also involved with the more serious matter of advancing his career, in which the composition of the first six so-called ‘difficult’ yet also ‘popular’ keyboard sonatas, k279–284, played an integral part. This article reads certain inexplicable gestures in the first sonata, k279, as reflecting Mozart's preoccupation with witty expressions at this time, seemingly as part of his attempt to gain the favour of prospective patrons, publishers and employers. The idiosyncrasies of the sonata result from an intersection of the syntax of phrase-level patterning and large-scale form with the semiosis of musical topics, eliciting laughter or simply a smile. Mozart's communicative strategy is situated in a broader context of the compositional play, wit and humour discussed in late eighteenth-century theory and aesthetics. It also allows us to revisit several implications arising from Danuta Mirka and Kofi Agawu's Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music of 2008, including the importance of ‘context’ for successful communication, the susceptibility of eighteenth-century artefacts to present-day misreading and the problem of Kenner, Liebhaber and audiences in general.

This article uses Mozart's unfinished singspiel Zaide (k336b, 1780) and its source singspiel Das Serail to reconsider the eighteenth-century Kindertruppen: wandering troupes of young singers, actors and dancers who performed in the court and commercial theatres of Europe. These troupes' repertoire often self-consciously addressed the blend of charm and impropriety that lay behind their controversial appeal. I consider the subgenre of seraglio opera – popular with both youth and adult troupes – and in particular the motifs of the audition scene and the captive's lament as metatheatrical commentaries on the cultural politics of operatic spectatorship. When young actors inhabited the fictional seraglio, their display offered compelling corroboration of contemporary discourse about propriety, naturalness and absorption in the theatre, as well as the new sense of urgency regarding the sheltering of youthful virtue.

Bach's vocal oeuvre contains a significant number of movements (about thirty-five), including but not limited to those in modified da capo form, with a concluding reprise of opening thematic material in the subdominant key. Some of these ‘subdominant returns’ involve strict parallelism, whereby the entire A section returns at the new pitch, thus transforming the original ‘departing’ modulation from I to V into a ‘returning’ modulation from IV to I. Many subdominant returns, however, occur in a range of contexts, which resist straightforward formal categorization. One example is the opening chorus from the St Matthew Passion. While the unusual da capo in this movement has elicited provocative commentary by Karol Berger and others in recent years, the significance of the subdominant return (here and elsewhere) has not been examined in depth. This study begins with a comprehensive survey of subdominant returns in Bach's vocal oeuvre, and then examines cyclic and linear aspects of form through detailed analysis of six movements that exhibit this procedure.

This article discusses and places in historical context a newly discovered set of letters between Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni and his agent in Naples during the visit of King Philip V of Spain to the city in 1702. These letters, in part transcribed in an Appendix, clarify several details concerning Corelli's visit to the city and confirm that he was accompanied by the violinist Matteo Fornari as well as by a third musician, the cellist Pippo Amadei, instead of G. L. Lulier, as hitherto supposed. With new facts that augment information already known from other sources, such as the correspondence of Cardinal Francesco Maria de' Medici, the article sheds new light on disputes that occurred at this time between other musicians and their patrons, such as those involving G. B. Stuck and the Giudice family. Considering these facts in the wider context of the War of the Spanish Succession, I argue that Corelli's visit was the subject of significant political calculations on the part of Cardinal Ottoboni and members of the Spanish and Neapolitan nobility.

1770s Berlin saw the birth of a new theory of rhythm, first stated in Johann Georg Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–1774), and later labelled the Akzenttheorie (theory of accents). Whereas previous eighteenth-century theories had seen rhythm as built up from the combination of distinct units, the Akzenttheorie saw it as formed from the breaking down of a continual flow, achieved through the placing of accents on particular notes. In his Philosophie der Kunst (1802–1803) the philosopher Friedrich Schelling used Sulzer's definition of rhythm to suggest, astonishingly, that music can facilitate knowledge of the absolute, a philosophical concept denoting the ultimate ground of all reality. In this article I show how Schelling could come to interpret the Akzenttheorie in such extravagant terms by examining three theories of time and their relationships to rhythm: that of Sulzer and his predecessor Isaac Newton, that of Immanuel Kant and that of Schelling. I conclude by arguing that in Schelling's case – an important one, since his is the earliest systematic presentation of a view of music that came to predominate in the decades after 1800 – his view of music was driven neither by developments in contemporary music nor by changes in the philosophy of art as a discrete intellectual enterprise, but by revolutions in philosophy by and large unconcerned even with art in general.