While the furrows of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious writing on music have been deeply ploughed, eighteenth-century English sermons about music have received relatively slight scholarly attention. This article demonstrates that the ideas of sympathy and sensibility characteristic of so much eighteenth-century thought are vital to understanding these sermons. There is an evolution in this literature of the notion of sympathy and its link to musical morality, a development in the attitude towards music among clergy, with this art of sympathetic vibrations receiving ever higher approbation during the century's middle decades. By the time that Adam Smith was articulating his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Handel's oratorios stood as a fixture of English musical life, religious thinkers had cast off old concerns about music's sensuality. They came to embrace a philosophy that accepted music as moral simply because it made humankind feel, and in turn accepted feeling as the root of all sociable experience. This understanding places the music sermon of the eighteenth century within the context of some of the most discussed philosophical, social, literary, musical and moral-aesthetic concepts of the time.

Alexander Malcolm (1685–1763) published his monumental Treatise of Musick in Edinburgh in 1721, one year before Rameau published his Traité de l'harmonie. Malcolm's was the first important work on music theory published in Scotland, and it established his musical reputation, influencing theorists and historians for almost a hundred years, both in Europe and in the American colonies. Sir John Hawkins deemed it ‘one of the most valuable treatises on the subject of theoretical and practical music to be found in any of the modern languages’. Malcolm's chapter 13 is often cited by music theorists for anticipating the writings of Rameau. However, Malcolm's Introduction states that the thirteenth chapter was communicated to him by a ‘modest’ friend. Identifying this friend necessitated first determining the author(s) of two rare anonymous contemporaneous treatises, remarkably similar to each other, and one nearly identical to Malcolm's chapter 13. Several writers have speculated on possible authors – two in particular, Alexander Baillie and Alexander Bayne – but none has provided actual evidence. This study identifies the author of these two hitherto anonymous treatises: Malcolm's modest friend.

This article outlines a number of potential contributions that a consideration of early eighteenth-century conceptions of musical expressivity might make to certain present-day philosophical and psychological accounts of musical emotions and their expression. Taking as its central case study a performance by Christian Gerhaher in Peter Sellars's 2014 staging of J. S. Bach's St John Passion, the article calls for closer attention to both the historical specifics of music's expressive capacities and the corporeal dimension of performance (past and present). It argues that a more sustained engagement with these domains can productively complicate some fundamental assumptions that underpin current approaches to musical expression.

Recently, as I was doing research for a project on eighteenth-century dances, I came across the following entry in Charles Compan's Dictionnaire de danse (1787):

The career of William Babell (1688–1723), an English composer of German birth, has recently been reassessed by me following identification of a manuscript source in Bergamo, which appears to be a collection of his harpsichord music. The manuscript shows he was an important keyboard composer active in Britain immediately prior to the publication of Handel's Suites de Pieces pour le Clavecin (1720), and it has provided insights into his working methods. The major items – eleven substantial toccatas mostly in prelude–fugue form together with two suites – are replete with the cadenza-like passagework familiar from his arrangements of arias from operas produced at the Haymarket Theatre between 1706 and 1714, which were published in three collections in his lifetime (in 1709, 1711 and 1717). They also reveal the range of influences on his keyboard style, illustrating how he adapted material from music by French, Italian, German and English composers. Though the source is not an autograph, it was copied towards the end of Babell's life by an individual close to him, to judge from the large number of pencil corrections that appear to be the composer's own. The manuscript therefore has biographical implications, suggesting that there was a composer-supervised project to bring together his keyboard music, perhaps in order to prepare some of it for publication, which never saw completion.