The music theory of the Middle Ages had its origins in the music theory of late antiquity. As Markovits observes, ‘The fundamental structure of ancient music theory is the tetrachord’; in turn, the medieval gamut had its origin in the Greater Perfect System, and was similarly constructed from conjunct and disjunct tetrachords. The chromatic and enharmonic genera disappeared, but the tetrachord synemmenon remained as the source of the only sanctioned medieval altered note, the B♭.

The ‘rhetorical’ character of Renaissance music – or, more precisely, of the vocal music of that period – is generally well known. Briefly: the musical segmentation of every vocal composition of that period is determined by the syntactic division of its text; each individual word that is suited to musical ‘translation’ not only renders this quasi-allegorical representation possible, but absolutely requires it; and the ability to discover such ‘allegories’, to apply them appropriately and thus to enrich the expressive vocabulary of music was regarded as the chief measure of the competence of a composer.

In classifying primary musical documents from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we are dependent upon a variety of techniques of music-historical research – analysis of watermarks, repertory, concordances, the cultural and historical contexts – which furnish the means for evaluating the authority of the sources, ‘the degree of presumptive similarity to the lost … autograph’. One of the principal points in attempting to establish the credentials of the primary sources for the Josquin motets is that they contain alternative readings that condition our perception of the pieces. The choice of readings will inevitably depend on our ability to identify those sources that preserve more authoritative redactions for a given work. A number of techniques are ordinarily used for assessing these sources: (1) that a source is taken prima facie as representing the best tradition that we can discern is an assumption based on its time and place of origin; (2) details of filiation as documented in the variants themselves can suggest lines of transmission and the relative plausibility of sets of readings; and (3) some sources may assume greater importance because they preserve redactions that conform to convictions about Josquin's style. While each of these techniques has something to recommend it, the last assumes considerably more refined criteria than we now possess for describing Josquin's compositional practices, and a considerably broader and deeper knowledge of his whole oeuvre than most of us possess. For, as has been pointed out, ‘the textual critic must often choose, on the basis of his knowledge of such things as the style of the author or the scribal practices of the period, those variants upon which he wishes to base his stemma. Classical philologists have centuries of experience and a multitude of examples to draw upon when confronted with choices between anomalous readings; music historians have no such storehouse of knowledge.‘ Since many of the variant readings in question are equally plausible, very often the choices are not between versions that are manifestly erroneous, on the one hand, and those that are not, on the other, but between equally acceptable versions, each of which is musically permissible. The first two of the techniques referred to above afford a more systematic and objective means at this time for ranking the primary source material, and a basis on which to advance tentative hypotheses of plausible content that suggest ways of determining what an authoritative version of a piece would look like.

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.

Many practitioners of the magical arts in English Renaissance drama rely on music to achieve their occult goals. Indeed, music often comes to represent the audible sound of arcane forces at work, for to the Renaissance music itself was a dual art with both obvious and hidden properties. On one hand, music was a delightful, practical science concerned with the production of ordered sound by the human voice or artificial instruments. On the other hand, music, like magic, was a powerful numerical art capable of unlocking the obvious and hidden aspects of all creation. As Thomas Morley carefully reminds his readers in the most famous contemporary English treatise on music theory,

The precious collection of manuscript scores and printed libretti dating from the late seventeenth century and housed today in the Biblioteca Estense at Modena is ample proof that Duke Francesco II d'Este (1660–94) was one of Italy's most generous patrons of music. Indeed his library, which good fortune has preserved almost intact, is an indispensable resource for the study of oratorio, opera and instrumental music in northern Italy in the last quarter of the century. Its contents show him to have been a man of catholic and modern taste, acquiring and promoting works by living composers active in Rome, Florence, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice and, of course, Modena. On the evidence of the Este music collection, historians have been consistent in applauding the cultural achievements of Francesco II's reign and yet, surprisingly, there have been no detailed studies of the way in which the duke exercised his patronage.

The concept of music as science, still a vital part of the natural philosophy of the seventeenth century, found a strong advocate in the early Royal Society, whose agenda frequently embraced musical topics. From the organization's inception in 1660 to the early eighteenth century the Society's minutes recount acoustical experiments performed at meetings and describe papers on topics ranging from string vibrations to music's medicinal powers.

Alfred, Dvořåk's first opera, has long hovered at the edge of our awareness of the composer. If there are signs of a growing realization that opera was to Dvořåk quite as important as other areas of his output, the detail needed to flesh out the picture of ‘Dvořåk the opera composer’ is to a large extent lacking. In the case of the composer's first six operas the inaccessibility of material has meant that an assessment of his early work in the area is still very much the province of specialist scholars. Published vocal scores exist for only three of these early operas, and none of them are in any sense scholarly editions; in the case of Krål a uhlíř (King and Charcoal-Burner) the available edition is of a revision of the score made 13 years after the work was composed, with an entirely recomposed final act. Vanda, the fascinating first version of Krål a uhlíř, and Alfred remain unpublished, although a vocal score of Krål a uhlíř has been submitted to the Czech publishing house Artia.

The singing of metrical psalms, canticles, some anthems and a few hymns in the ‘old way’ constituted almost the sole musical activity in English parish church services after the Restoration. By the start of the eighteenth century a reform was under way. Parish clerks ceased to line out the psalms for the benefit of congregations. As the clergy and gentry generally disdained to assist the improvement of music and only the wealthiest urban churches could afford organs, congregations took their lead from choirs trained by itinerant singing-masters. Church music became divided between the art music of cathedrals, chapels and rich parishes and the popular psalmody performed elsewhere.

The question of musical narrativity, while by no means new, is making a comeback as the order of the day in the field of musicological thought. In May 1988 a conference on the theme ‘Music and the Verbal Arts: Interactions’ was held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. A fortnight later, a group of musicologists and literary theorists was invited to the Universities of Berkeley and Stanford to assess, in the course of four intense round-table discussions, whether it is legitimate to recognize a narrative dimension in music. In November of the same year, the annual conference of the American Musicological Society in Baltimore presented a session entitled ‘Text and Narrative’, chaired by Carolyn Abbate, and, at the instigation of Joseph Kerman, a session devoted to Edward T. Cone's The Composer's Voice. A number of articles deal with the subject in our specialized periodicals: I am thinking in particular of the studies published in 19th-Century Music by Anthony Newcomb – ‘Once More “Between Absolute and Programme Music”: Schumann's Second Symphony’ and ‘Schumann and Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies’ – or, on the French-speaking side of musicology, of Marta Grabocz's article ‘La sonate en si mineur de Liszt: une stratégie narrative complexe’ and the essays of the Finnish semiologist Eero Tarasti. No doubt a good many articles will emerge from the above conferences. And we are awaiting the appearance of Carolyn Abbate's book Unsung Voices: Narrative in Nineteenth-Century Music.