The identification of nearly 6,500 members of the piano industry in the 1881 census of England presents the first ‘snapshot’ of the English workforce of any period in its history. Traditionally, research has focused on high-profile makers whose workmanship survives, but many hundreds of workers, and a far greater body of intellect – and more diverse body of labour – were involved in advancing the piano than that which is suggested by a small number of luminaries working in the capital. Yet hitherto, with few exceptions, this wider body of workers has remained anonymous. Without company documents or extant instruments to mark their contribution, the identity of the majority of the workforce might only be known through the census. Nearly 6,500 men, women and children worked in approximately 400 piano-related occupations across 42 English counties, the majority based in London. But these figures tell only part of the story. A more complex interpretation may be drawn from secondary information not immediately apparent from the data. The social standing, entrepreneurial spirit, family history, success and hardship of the workforce may all be appraised via the census, and their individual and collective careers provide a surprising insight into the piano-making industry in mid-Victorian England.

Verdi was immensely popular in Italy because he brought to the accepted forms and idiom of opera just that touch of dynamic individuality which was needed; but there was a further reason only indirectly connected with the music itself. Italy during the risorgimento (1820–70) was seething with revolution, and Verdi's operas came to play an important part in the patriotic movements of the 1840s and 1850s. Though their scenes and characters ostensibly had no connection with contemporary events, the librettos were filled with conspiracies, political assassinations, appeals to liberty, and exhortations against tyranny, all of which were of course understood in the intended sense by sympathetic audiences.

This list was compiled in connection with a study of amateur music-making in London during the later seventeenth century which forms part of my Ph. D work in the Music Faculty of King's College, London. While attempting to discover just what instruments amateur musicians of that time favoured, and what standard of efficiency they might be likely to reach on them, I made a close study of the extant instrumental tutors for the period. The material proved to be so fascinating that I extended the dates, and the result is the list printed here.

An important feature of German-language general music periodicals during the first half of the twentieth century is the frequency with which the editors made use of special issues, most often called Sonderhefte. Such special issues served to focus the readers' attention by devoting most, if not all, of the article section of an issue to a specific composer or topic. An editor might have decided to publish a special issue for the following reasons: (i) to commemorate the anniversary of the birth or death of a major figure; (ii) to provide intensive coverage of an important topic or new field of interest; (iii) to survey musical life in a given area or country; or (iv) to introduce a group of young composers whose works were to be presented as part of a festival of contemporary music. In addition to these types of special issues, some journals offered, once a year, a Carnival issue consisting of humouristic or satirical texts.

Guillaume De Machaut's Hoquetus David has long been regarded as an exceptional work (for sources, see the bibliography appended to this article). Sections of hocket had been included in motets since the twelfth century (see Sanders 1974), and the technique still played an important part in the isorhythmic structure of Machaut's own motets. Surviving examples of hockets as independent compositions, however, are few. From the thirteenth century there are the seven consecutive pieces in Bamberg 115 (ed. Aubry 1908, nos. 102–8), five of them based on the same chant, together with isolated pieces in Montpellier 196 (ed. Rokseth 1935–9, no. 5) and Paris 11411 (no. 3). On the other hand, the numerous references in theoretical treatises to hocket as an independent form on a par with motets and organa suggest that hockets as separate pieces were not uncommon during the thirteenth century. For the fourteenth century, however, the picture is far less clear. Jacob of Liège, writing around 1330–40, states that modern composers use hocket only in motets, having abandoned the old duplex, contra-duplex, triplex, and quadruplex forms (ed. Bragard 1973, 89); and the fact that the Hoquetus David appears to be the only surviving example supports this.

‘What Song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzling Questions are not beyond all conjecture.’ Across three centuries, this comment by Sir Thomas Browne (ed. Keynes 1964, 1:165) offers a measure of comfort to students of the music of Greek antiquity. The measure is necessarily a modest one: in fixing upon the term ‘conjecture’, he chose better than he knew.

The library of William Boyce is one of the most interesting eighteenth-century collections of music to be sold at auction (by James Christie in April 1779). Though only four copies of the sale catalogue survive, that still in the firm's archives provides both the names of the buyers and prices fetched. Among the items sold were a good many manuscripts and rare printed books whose present whereabouts are known; several of these have lot labels still attached to the original bindings. The main purpose of this article is to make this material readily available not only to musicologists, but also to bibliographers and others concerned with the history of libraries. Prefaced by an introductory essay and a section on the buyers, its central core is a diplomatic transcript of the sale catalogue itself together with copious notes on the contents of each lot. An index of composers and of buyers is also provided.

A little-known list of some 80 Elizabethan tune titles, probably copied during the 1590s at Lleweni Hall, near Denbigh in north Wales, is preserved in the library archive of the University of Wales, Bangor: MS Gwyneddon 4, a composite volume of late medieval Welsh poetry (p. 130 / f. 71v; see Illustration 1 and Figure 1 for parallel transcription). The list has neither heading nor notation, and was apparently written out at speed in random order. It has received little attention to date, although a transcription was published by Ifor Williams in 1937, and John Ward noted concordances with some of the items in the ‘Giles Lodge’ lute book in 1992. The list warrants closer scrutiny for several reasons: the number of ‘lost’ titles unique to this source; the theatrical associations of some of the tunes; reference to named individuals (among them ‘alen’, ‘mistres shandoes’, and the ‘countese of lester‘); and the implications of the unusual Welsh provenance. Taken as a whole, the list not only gives a flavour of the musical repertory associated with one wealthy Elizabethan household at the end of the sixteenth century, but also demonstrates how such a repertory was shaped by family tastes and connections. Part I of this article discusses the various contexts for the list with particular reference to its social and dramatic associations, while Part II comprises a catalogue of the tunes and their main concordances. Some of the most significant information is summarized in tabular form. Table 1 presents an alphabetical index of the tunes; Table 2, tunes known to survive with music and their earliest associated source; Table 3, tunes set as lute or consort items; Table 4, tunes associated with the actor Richard Tarlton (d. 1588); Table 5, Tarlton's ballads and other texts; Table 6, tunes prescribed in the ballad collection A Handefull of Pleasant Delites (1584); Table 7, tunes found in Playford's English Dancing Master; and Table 8, tunes cited in Elizabethan stage works.

Hitherto there have only been glimpses into the musical activities of William, James and Granville Sharp in London during the second half of the eighteenth century. These have been afforded by Prince Hoare's Memoirs of Granville Sharp, William Shield's anecdotal review of Granville's A Short Introduction to Vocal Music, the brothers' own catalogue of their music and the Leigh and Sotheby Sale Catalogue of 1814 which marked that music's dispersal, and, more recently, by the publication of the memoirs of R.J.S. Stevens who sang as a treble at the Sharps' concerts in 1772. From these sources it transpired that the three Sharps were capable amateur musicians who hosted private concerts of sacred music in their homes, and that at different times many of the leading professional musicians of the period either played or sang on one of Sharps' vessels on the Thames. These shadowy images gained bodily form in 1978 when the National Portrait Gallery acquired on indefinite loan ‘The Sharp Family’ by Johann Zoffany, a portrait which revealed that the three brothers were but part of a larger musical family.

Lambeth Palace Library MS 1040 has received less attention than a companion volume, MS 1041 (inscribed ‘The Lady Ann Blount’ on the first leaf). Although there appears to be no musical connection between the two manuscripts, they have been together for a long time. The Library's old catalogues do not allow the volumes to be identified with certainty, but if ‘Two Musick Books’ refers to them they have been in the collection since at least the mid-eighteenth century.

Christ Church, Oxford, Mus 739–43, 750–3 and 1074–7 are interconnected manuscript vocal partbooks of contrafacta from London of the 1620s that employ Puritan texts. The chief compiler was John Browne, Clerk of the Parliaments (1608–91) whose instrumental music has been much discussed. His family background gives clues for identifying another copyist in these sets as his guardian uncle, and for giving them a context in an era with little other documentation for musical family piety of radical sorts.

The Chapel Royal was Elizabeth's own private choir. It did not sing in one place only, but accompanied her whenever she was in residence at any of her palaces in or near London, except Windsor Castle, where the chapel ranked as a royal peculiar and had its own choir.

Information on old Spanish keyboard instruments (excluding the organ) is scanty owing to the small number of surviving examples and the paucity of first-hand documentation. Secondary sources can thus provide useful data to fill in some gaps. This article is based on a study of the sales and wants advertisements appearing in the Madrid daily newspaper from February 1758 to December 1799.

Beginning in 1750, Handel gave annual performances of Messiah in the Chapel of the Foundling Hospital in London, and the series was continued by others after his death, until 1777. The Hospital's archives include complete itemised lists of performers for many of these events, and provide information about income and expenditure relating to all of the performances. The performers’ lists from 1754, 1758 and 1759 are well known, since they provide the only detailed contemporary record of singers and players for Handel's oratorio performances. However, the complete run of surviving lists enables us to track individual performers in London over a longer period, as well as revealing changes in the management, composition and remuneration of the ensembles. Transcriptions of the lists are here accompanied by an index of names and a summary analysis of the financial accounts for each performance.

As is well known, the Nanki Music Library, Tokyo, contains numerous prints and manuscripts of Purcell's music, not least an important copy of Dido and Aeneas. Once belonging to the Purcell scholar William H. Cummings (1831–1915), these were acquired at auction in 1917 by the Marquis Yorisada Tokugawa, who intended them to form part of a music foundation (including a concert hall destroyed in the earthquake of 1923). On Tokugawa's ‘economic failure’ in 1931 ownership passed to Mr Kyubei Ohki, and, since 1996, to his successor Mr Itaru Ohki. Between 1970 and 1979 the material was accessible to the public through the Tokyo Music Culture Centre, and some of the collection was put on microfilm (now held by the Kunitachi College of Music). The manuscripts, however, are still unavailable to scholars, other than on microfilm.

With a population of some 140,000 in 1760, Dublin was the second largest city in the British Isles. Although small in comparison to London, it had a thriving musical community which attracted the likes of George Frideric Handel (1685–1759), Thomas Arne (1710–1778), Niccolo Pasquali (c. 1718–1757) and the oboist Johann Fischer (1733–1800). Concerts took place at various venues across the city including Dublin Castle, Christ Church Cathedral and Fishamble Street Musick Hall. In addition, societies such as the Musical Academy (an aristocratic music society founded by the Earl of Mornington in 1757) supported charitable concerts such as those at the Rotunda, the concert venue attached to the Lying-in Hospital. Although instruments were imported from London throughout the century (John Snetzler, for example, supplied the organ for the Rotunda in 1767), there was a knot of local instrument builders working in the vicinity of Trinity College. However, in contrast to the concentration of keyboard instrument builders in the Soho area of London in the eighteenth century, the distribution of harpsichord makers in Dublin was more diffuse.

Among sixteenth-century musical correspondents, Striggio stands out both for the number of letters he wrote that have survived and for the interest of the subjects he raised. Only Lasso among his exact contemporaries bequeathed more letters to posterity; and Striggio's, taken together, offer an exceptional view of the life of a court musician—one especially privileged by his social position as a member of the nobility—and of certain kinds of music cultivated in the late sixteenth century. The present edition brings together for the first time his complete surviving correspondence, with English translation and commentary.

These extracts on music from the correspondence between Charles Jennens (1700–73) and Edward Holdsworth (1684–1746) reflect the authors' shared interests and (prohibited) political views. Though commonly known as the librettist of Messiah, Jennens was also a collector of music and art, and as such capitalized on Holdworth's travels as a tutor of young gentlemen on the Grand Tour. Many of the letters detail musical commissions and their fulfilment by a willing Holdsworth. In return, Jennens acted as Holdsworth's financial advisor, editorial consultant and publication adviser. Other discussions centre around the public and personal rating of singers and operas, in London and abroad, and include discussions of Handel's fortunes, his borrowing of music from Jennens's collection and his health. Mentions of personnel are not restricted to musicians but also encompass members of Jennens's family and of his and Holdsworth's social circles, many of whom were supporters of Handel.

The so-called ‘Hamond’ partbooks (British Library, Add. MSS 30480-4) were copied over a period of c.40 years by multiple groups of collaborating scribes, resulting in a miscellaneous combination of service music, sacred songs, Latin motets, chansons, madrigals, an In nomine, and even Mass extracts. These partbooks are the only complete manuscript source of Protestant service music from the first decades of Elizabeth's reign. This first holistic study of this set of partbooks re-evaluates the stages of compilation and the copying practices of the scribes to offer new interpretations of the manuscripts’ history and contexts. The article argues that the partbooks began life as a liturgical and educational collection for the training of choirboys. These partbooks therefore offer a unique insight into the repertory and practices of one Protestant institution, highlighting the continued reliance on Edwardian repertories over a decade into Elizabeth's reign, as well as the growing availability of continental printed music. The transmission of these partbooks is then traced to a more domestic and recreational setting, exploring their relationship to the Hamond family. While Thomas Hamond of Hawkedon in Suffolk inscribed his ownership inside the covers in 1615, the re-evaluation of the compilation and history of these partbooks reveals that the books were in the possession of the Hamond family from at least the late 1580s/early 1590s. This family added new pieces, made repairs and engaged with the music copied by previous owners. Ultimately their preservation was assured by the younger Thomas Hamond's interest in older music, and they continued to be a source of historical interest for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music antiquarians.