‘Salve, regina, mater misericordiae … ad te clamamus … ad te suspiramus’: when this lovely Marian antiphon is sung, whether by one person or many, it is intoned on behalf of all mankind. ‘Ave sanctissima Maria … libera me ab omni malo; ora pro peccato meo’: when this prayer is said, it is the individual who begs the Virgin's intercession, who pleads for her to free him from evil, who asks her to pray for his sins. Prayers in the first person singular, a direct address on the most personal level, I and thou, are usually private. It would seem surprising to find them set to music for several voices, and yet settings begin to appear towards the end of the fifteenth century. What does it mean to sing one of these prayers? For whom do the singers sing: each for himself? each for all the other singers? for the listeners?

The majority of surviving fifteenth-century polyphonic music is vocal, and a great many upper-voice parts are provided with text in the oldest manuscripts; however, it is not always clear from these sources which notes are meant to be sung to which syllables. Much research has been devoted to helping editors and performers to cope with this situation, principally by providing editorial guidelines for the application of verbal texts to musical lines. This article does not aim to resolve such ambiguities as remain. Rather, it presents new evidence for an informed view of the situation in the sources. This may have implications for the development of editorial guidelines. However, its greater importance is as a contribution to the more general understanding of text-music relations in the period.

Robert Schumann's review of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique has attracted continued intensive scholarly attention since its serialized publication in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1835. There is a marked tendency in that attention to focus on a set of closely related critical themes: to use the review as a key to the German reception of Berlioz; to read it in terms of what it demonstrates about Schumann's own critico-aesthetic position; to see it as a model of music-critical practices in the first half of the nineteenth century; to scrutinize it in terms of the insights it furnishes into music-analytical practices. More recent scholarship has also added to this cluster of scholarly topoi the formal design of the text, its polyvalent texture and, in particular, what Fred Everett Maus terms ‘intersubjectivity’, scrutinizing the text for any clues it might offer as to the manner in which constructions of forms of subjectivity are engaged, sustained, problematized or subverted. Maus's attention to this ‘intersubjectivity’ stands as testament to musicology's (somewhat belated) interest in theories of subjectivity (or subjectivities), and opens Schumann's text to myriad new readings. In particular, Maus begins to tease out the text's potential as an artefact for the study of contemporaneous formations of ‘the composer’ as a cultural ‘type’ in the music-critical idiom.

The recent publication of Heinrich Schenker's Das Meisterwerk in der Musik (1925-30) in a translation by Ian Bent, William Drabkin and others reminds us that in the highest modern traditions textual criticism and exegesis — editing and analysis — are inseparable. Much of Schenker's commentary on Mozart's Symphony in G minor, K.550, is devoted to isolating discrepancies between manuscript and edition, and some of his most fascinating analytical suggestions grow out of just this. Conversely, analytical strategies may have editorial consequences, and decisions taken by editors of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe have been challenged justly on stylistic grounds. If a passage occurs twice in a composition, for instance, does it have to be articulated in the same way on both occasions? And if there are differences in the articulations, what exactly do they tell us? Given the intricacy of the modern analytical debate over Mozart, such questions may not be answered by editors alone. Nor can editions be undertaken without reference to changing social circumstances: for composers in general have shown themselves more than ready to provide their own variants for different performing situations (again, Mozart's re-orchestration of the Symphony in G minor is a case in point). Indeed, in another field, scholars have asked that cultural issues should also influence editorial practice; these issues similarly require learning and sensitivity, and again deserve attention.

Mozart's partial autograph of the duet ‘Nun, liebes Weibchen’, K.625/592a, written for Emanuel Schikaneder's heroic-comic opera Der Stein der Weisen oder die Zauberinsel (Theater auf der Wieden, 11 September 1790) has not yet received the attention it deserves in the secondary literature. Perhaps this is due to the reluctance of scholars to accept Mozart's authorship. Because the initial string parts and all of the vocal lines are in another hand, and because Mozart did not enter the duet in his own handwritten catalogue, Alfred Einstein suggested that Mozart merely orchestrated original material possibly composed by Benedikt Schack, a suggestion that has been repeated as if it were a fact in several prominent studies.

On 29 August 1865, an audience of critics and the general public gathered at the Salle Herz in Paris to witness and pass judgment on the results of an experiment set up three years earlier by the instrument manufacturer Alphonse Sax Jr, who aimed to demonstrate not only that women were capable of playing brass instruments, but that it was in their interests — on moral, health and potentially even career grounds — to do so. Although this concert of brass-band music, with supplementary items for harp and voice, marked the band's third public appearance (they had performed at the Palais d'Industrie in December 1864 and at a brass-band competition in Orbec earlier in August 1865), it was their first appearance at a major concert venue and represented their début in front of the massed Parisian press. When they walked on stage, members of the audience sniggered at the sight of a group of young women carrying brass instruments covering the entire range from the portable cornet to the heavyweights of the bass section. Plainly dressed, with only moderately full skirts, they proceeded to play an arrangement of Partant pour la Syrie, a popular romance set as a quick march, which was then thought to be by Eugénie de Beauharnais, and which under the reign of her son Napoléon III had gained the status of a national hymn. The march had been arranged by the group's conductor, Laure Micheli, who directed the ensemble in two other pieces. To wide acclaim, Émilie Lacroix then played a set of variations for cornet à pistons, arranged by J.-B. Dias, on the tune Le carnaval de Venise. The remaining members of the sextet are shadowy figures: Mlle Dias on second cornet (presumably the sister or daughter of the arranger Dias), Mlle Suzanne Legrand and Mme Neckra in the alto section, and Mlle Marie Legrand (presumably the sister of Suzanne) and Mme Worms playing bass instruments. The supporting artists were all women: the singers Mlle Marcus (also referred to in the press as Mlle Marens or Mlle Marius) and Mme Neulat de Chambon, and the harpist Mlle Waldteufel (a joint first-prize winner at the Paris Conservatoire and former pupil of Antoine Prumier); Suzanne Legrand doubled as accompanist for the singers.

Of what practical use are historical field recordings? This article is a partial response to that question, one which struck me on many occasions while working with ethnographic wax cylinders at the British Library National Sound Archive (NSA). There are, I believe, at least three possible answers to the question. One is that historical recordings can (and indeed should) be returned to the societies from which they originated, for which they serve as valuable cultural documents — documents both of indigenous cultural practices and of the engagement of scholars and other collectors with those practices (often within a colonial context). Another is that they can be used in studies of musical continuity and change, a possibility exploited most extensively by the ethnomusicologist Nazir Jairazbhoy, who retraced the path of his predecessor and mentor Arnold Bake's Indian field trips, comparing his own findings in 1984 with Bake's in 1938. My third answer is that historical recordings, together with the publications based on them, can contribute to studies of the historical development of ethnomusicological method — of the ways in which music has been recorded, transcribed and analysed. This article pursues this last possibility, taking as an example one of the classical works of early twentieth-century comparative musicology, A. H. Fox Strangways's The Music of Hindostan. I consider the author's aims, methods and conclusions, their status in the light of subsequent research, and their significance for music studies today.

On 21 November 1853, Charles Dickens wrote to his wife from Florence, complaining about his friend and travelling-companion, fellow novelist Wilkie Collins: