This article examines the links between the music of Anglo-Jamaican organist and composer Samuel Felsted (1743–1802) and his environment of late eighteenth-century Kingston, building on research published since the 1980s. Although Felsted, a person of English-American heritage who was born in Jamaica, was part of the island's European-origin community, most of his local contemporaries were people of African descent. Like many of his friends, family members and acquaintances, Felsted was a slave owner, and, as I argue here, his various literary and artistic outputs demonstrate how he was influenced by the kinds of issues – such as slavery, servitude, sovereignty and nationhood – that surfaced in the public and private discourses of his time. Considering what Felsted's cultural legacy might mean today, I turn to his undated and virtually unknown oratorio The Dedication, for which he wrote both the text and the music. The Dedication contains literary themes that allow its connections to Felsted's world and its setting of ancient Babylon to be explored. I also suggest the early 1790s as a possible time of composition for this work.

This article examines how French vaudeville tunes circulated in England through both theatrical performances and French-language textbooks (or ‘grammars’). My central concern is to consider how audiences in London – who had little exposure to the rich satirical and cultural connotations that these tunes had acquired over years of performance in Paris – might have been able to grasp their significance within staged works performed by visiting Parisian troupes between the years 1718 and 1735. I suggest that in tracing the transmission of tunes from France to England, scholars should consider a wider range of print sources, since vaudevilles had a social life extending beyond the plays in which they were performed. To this end, I focus on analysing vaudevilles found in French ‘grammars’. The pedagogical nature of these sources explicitly puts on display how French culture was translated for an English readership. By comparing the tunes found in grammars with plays that used the same tunes, I reveal both how Londoners could have become acquainted with the Parisian understanding of French tunes and how the grammar books could have shifted the meanings of these tunes for English readers and audiences. Ultimately, the circulation of French tunes abroad through grammars directs our attention to the material and cultural practices undergirding the mobility of eighteenth-century musical culture.

This article shares the exciting discovery of previously unidentified arias within the music amassed by the eighteenth-century English poet Thomas Gray. His ten-volume collection, now held at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, contains some of the only surviving copies of important arias dating back as far as 1690 and bears many annotations by Gray listing performance venues, composers, opera roles and singers. One volume of the collection contains many unattributed works, among which I identify a number of arias. Five of them match the libretto to La caduta del regno dell'Amazzoni (1690) and another corresponds to Il Colombo overo l'India scoperta (1691), both operas originally set by Bernardo Pasquini. The texts of the two ensuing arias align with Carlo Sigismondo Capeci's libretto for Ifigenia in Tauri (1713), the opera he wrote with Domenico Scarlatti for their patroness, Maria Kazimiera Sobieska. In addition, in the first pages of the assemblage, instructions in Gray's hand on how to execute a basso-continuo accompaniment continue from another volume, where he entitled these ‘Regole per l'Accompagnamento’ and interwove them with a ‘Toccata per il Cembalo’. This article seeks to describe the newfound works and stimulate study into the full contents of Gray's music collection, but its main focus is on the two excerpts from Ifigenia in Tauri and their possible attribution to Domenico Scarlatti. Salient characteristics of these scores are presented, as is an evaluation of their concordance with Capeci's libretto. Further, I underline features that these numbers share with other Ifigenia in Tauri arias known to be by Domenico Scarlatti and provide comprehensive tables detailing equivalent structural proportions.

First-hand accounts explaining how a young British virtuosa went about establishing an international career in the later eighteenth century are scant. However, a previously unstudied handwritten page contained within the Rackett Family of Spettisbury Archive at the Dorset History Centre provides new insights into this underexplored area. In this article, I examine an anonymous 1769 document entitled ‘a Vienne’ from which the guiding voices of eminent musicians at the Vienna court, including Johann Adolf Hasse, Faustina Bordoni, Marianna Martines and their circle, emerge. I argue that this item is in fact an aide-mémoire memorializing intimate glimpses of private conversations, career-shaping advice and impressions that helped mould its author into a virtuosa. Further, by means of palaeographical and biographical evidence I identify the author as the young British glass-armonica player Marianne Davies and assert that her recollections, preserved in this hitherto overlooked piece of ephemera, reconstruct how the educational process of becoming a virtuosa took place.

During the early eighteenth century, music composed by George Frideric Handel began to circulate in miscellaneous publications of songs and arias. His music appeared in various forms. Some publications, such as four notable pocket collections published in the mid-1720s, preserve the music largely unchanged, although within a new sonic context. Other publications completely transform arias and even overtures into vocal works with new texts, creating layers of musical associations and meanings. Unauthorized appearances of Handel's music in songbook miscellanies and single-sided prints show alternative ways in which consumers may have heard and experienced the composer outside of the opera house or a concert setting. Examining these alternative sources for Handel's music allows for an enriched assessment of which works of the composer were critically and commercially appreciated during the early eighteenth century. Analysing appearances of Handel's music in songbook anthologies also offers insight into how musical miscellanies became ubiquitous forms of the production and reception of his works in the early eighteenth century.