On 1 January 1700, Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713) published his Sonate a violino e violone o cimbalo, op. 5, in Rome. The collection stood as a landmark for violinist–composers of his time and well after, and further enhanced Corelli’s international fame, which had been established by four earlier collections of trio-sonatas published during the 1680s and 1690s. Together with Giuseppe Torelli (1658–1709) and Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741), Corelli would also establish the concerto as a genre of lasting importance. Their success represents the apogee of Italianate instrumental genres of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which had spread through northern Europe to German provinces, England and even, by the 1690s, to France.

Contemporary comment reveals not just how popular such instrumental genres were to their admirers, but also how vividly expressive. In 1656 the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher described hearing at an accademia a small ensemble of two violinists (Salvatore Mazzella and Michelangelo Rossi) and a theorbo player (Lelio Colista, whose compositions Kircher admired):

Otherwise known as the Age of Reason for the scientific undertakings and discoveries it witnessed, the seventeenth century is frequently seen as a period of uncertainty and confusion in the context of musical thought. From our own present perspective, musical thought of this period is overshadowed both by what precedes it and by what follows: the opposing poles of Renaissance modal theory and eighteenth-century harmonic tonality each seem more intelligible than that which we perceive as the transition between the two. Indeed, much of what we find in seventeenth-century theory appears to present a puzzling mix: ideas that accord strikingly well with the precepts of major-minor tonality appear to mingle freely with the teachings and terminology of modal theory. Added to this seeming paradox is the darkened mood of the theorists themselves, many of whom lament the confusion of their age.

And yet, seventeenth-century music treatises paint a clear, if richly detailed, picture of musical thought if we keep in mind that they address widely different purposes: to serve the church singer in a long-standing and relatively stable practice of liturgical chant; to train keyboardists and other chord-playing instrumentalists in the art of extemporizing harmonies over a bass; to educate the well-rounded musician in the established traditions of counterpoint and modal theory; to instruct the rational mind in the scientific bases of tuning systems; and finally, to enlighten the curious on more speculative and imaginative musical topics, such as Pythagoras’s fabled discovery of harmony in the sound of hammers at the forge, the Boethian harmonic strata, and the legendary origins of music itself.

The states that comprise the Gulf Cooperation Council - Oman, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia - are not a security community. Nor do we anticipate their becoming a security community in the near future. Indeed, for most of its history the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) demands a realist reading and little else. The proximate causes of the formation of the GCC are to be found not in deep social structural factors pushing toward integration but in immediate regime security needs; specifically, the GCC was born in the circumstances of Iranian Revolution and the ongoing and escalating Iraq-Iran War, suggesting little more than a classic security alliance. The fifteen years since its birth also favor a strict and secular realism. As the Iran-Iraq War progressed the GCC states experimented with some modest, but for all practical purposes inconsequential, military cooperation. The end of the Iran-Iraq War abruptly halted such experimentation. The 1990–91 Gulf War produced a shortterm upswing in group cohesion but the post-war period was characterized by increasing rivalries, a halt to any meaningful militarycoordination and a return of border disputes among the GCC states. The GCC's trajectory seems consistent with alliance formation - formed in response to specific security threats, enduring as those threats endure, and fraying as those threats recede. In general, statism and realism mark the history of the GCC states.