Like several of his predecessors, Brahms reintroduces themes from one movement into a later one in several of his instrumental works. Historical circumstances and changing historical consciousness affected a composer's use of thematic recall. For Beethoven (per Elaine Sisman) recalling an earlier theme provided the creative stimulus to move forward to the end of a piece, in accordance with the linear concept of history that defined Beethoven's Enlightenment world view. Brahms's use of inter-movement thematic recall often expresses a more wistful and melancholy view of the past and focuses on the ability of recall to provide a dramatic narrative. In his earliest use of cyclical return, the Op. 5 Piano Sonata (1853), the Andante second movement is echoed and transformed by the ‘Ruckblick’ fourth movement, as Brahms plays on the poetic inscription of the former movement to raise the specter of lost love and mortality. In a more complex web of thematic recall, the op. 78 Violin Sonata (1878) combines allusions to a pre-existing pair of interrelated songs from his Op. 59 with a newly composed, recurring instrumental theme to create a multi-layered, somber character in the piece. Both of those works draw on an earlier, romantic sense of yearning for return. Near the end of his career, however, the quiet emergence and eventual dissipation of opening material at the close of the Op. 115 Clarinet Quintet (1891) reflects Brahms's awareness of his place at the end of an artistic tradition, and thereby conveys a post-Romantic conception of history.

We are living in a great age for sheet music research. After a long period of scholarly apathy, in the last few decades the world has awoken at last to the great historical value that sheet music holds, from its topical texts, to its extraordinary illustrations. Researchers today can discover online sheet music-based exhibits on a huge variety of subjects, from the blockbuster Music for the Nation exhibits and digital collections on the Library of Congress website, which embed detailed articles and essays into curated collections of sheet music resources, to exhibits created by specialized institutions like the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, which brings together songs from the North and South concerning enslaved persons, pacifists and carpetbaggers, complete with historical context and analysis. Many blogs tie sheet music illustrations in with current events: McGill's Marvin Duchow Music Library current exhibit, for instance, Women, Work, and Song, in Nineteenth-Century France (Fig. 1), provides impressive historical context and brief essays in both English and French. Accessed entirely through the lens of sheet music, the McGill exhibit neatly demonstrates the power of the Wayback Machine that sheet music can provide us. All things ‘culture’ can be explored: the economy, religion, gender, LGBTQ issues, consumerism, elements of popular culture such as the figure of the diva, sociological topics, and so on. Sheet music is invaluable for research of all kinds, as it documents trends as they happen in a specific time and place. McGill's music library curators have harnessed just this type of documentary evidence to build an excellent exhibit. But how do researchers find the music for this kind of detailed analysis? This round-up will explore the current landscape of historical sheet music, centred around how we access it online, news about the Sheet Music Consortium (where it has been, and where it is going) and, finally, a brief listing of digitized sheet music collections which are not included in the Consortium.

Antonín Dvořák composed the String Quartet in F major (op. 96, the ‘American’) in June 1893 while visiting the town of Spillville, Iowa, USA. Based on accounts from Dvořák's secretary Josef Kovařík, portions of the quartet's Scherzo movement were inspired by birdsong Dvořák heard in Spillville. Kovařík's account included both Dvořák's visual description of the bird that inspired him and a transcribed fragment of the birdsong Dvořák reportedly used. In 1954, Clapham identified the bird as a scarlet tanager (Piranga olivacea), based mainly on the visual description. This widely accepted identification was questionable because of the poor match of the tanager's song to musical material in the Scherzo. In 2016, Floyd proposed the red-eyed vireo (Vireo olivaceus) as Dvořák's inspiration, based on song rather than appearance. The vireo's song is clearly identifiable in the Scherzo as well in the birdsong fragment recorded by Kovařík. The mismatch between the visual description and the transcribed song fragment could have occurred when Dvořák heard and recorded the persistent singing of a cryptic red-eyed vireo, but misidentified the song's source when he caught sight of a brightly coloured tanager. Correct identification of the birdsong changes the interpretation of the movement. Previously, birdsong has been considered the source of a short secondary motif. But red-eyed vireo songs are highly variable, and a slight variation of Kovařík's song fragment could be the basis of the main theme of the Scherzo. Therefore, Dvořák may have used American birdsong in the movement considerably more than previously appreciated.

The Metropolitan Opera premiere of Richard Wagner's Parsifal in December 1903 stirred what was arguably the first American religious controversy over an artistic event to claim national attention in the twentieth century. Although the outcome was predictable – the protests appeared only to fuel box office success – the significance lies in what this controversy reveals about the music drama's most ardent opponents and supporters at a key moment in American religious history. The 1903 Parsifal controversy unfolded in the midst of a crisis in American Protestantism, as conservative establishment Protestants defended their weakening hold on American culture, and their theologically liberal brethren viewed that same culture as both a source of spiritual inspiration and a cause for redemption. Drawing primarily upon accounts published in the New York press, nationally circulated periodicals (including strongly partisan contributions to the debate by The Musical Courier), and the writings of several prominent Protestant clergy and lay leaders, this reception study argues that the religious controversy surrounding the 1903 Parsifal production was a substantive skirmish in this American Protestant crisis, and brought forward competing interpretations of the music drama which highlighted the cultural implications of what had been, until that point, largely a theological dispute. Conservative response fastened onto elements of the drama found to be sacrilegious, while liberal response was conditioned by its kinship to the nineteenth-century phenomenon of Kunstreligion, and a broad view of redemption that extended beyond the individual soul to the artwork and the artist, and to all of culture.

Pierre Baillot (1771–1842), an eminent French violinist and pedagogue of the early nineteenth century, offers a surprisingly modern role model to musicians in today's fast-changing world of music. First, Baillot's career foreshadows the resilience and versatility required of entrepreneurial musicians today. Baillot lived in turbulent times through the French Revolution, the Napoleonic years, and restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. His life spanned the transition from Classical to Romantic eras of music and he combined a virtuoso performance career with that of teacher, composer, concert entrepreneur, exponent of new music and violin textbook author. Second, as in the case of contemporary creative performers, Baillot sought to extend his art by experimenting with ways to extend the range and expressiveness of the violin. This essay discusses Baillot's embrace of old and new approaches to violin music and practice. Drawing on his textbook, L'Art du Violon (1834), and research literature on music-making of the era, this essay analyses three of Baillot's innovative approaches: harmonic preluding as an improvisation method, his four-string Adagio composition using an extended bowing technique, and his empirical exploration of acoustically enhanced Tartini tones. While Baillot regarded the art of harmonic preluding, for example, as a link to improvisational traditions, he also saw it as integral to creative development and to technical mastery of harmony, the latter sometimes lacking in violinists more accustomed to playing the melodic line. Even today we find Baillot's extended violin techniques surprising.