The cappella musicale at Santa Maria presso San Celso in Milan, also known as the church of the ‘Madonna of Miracles’, was originally charged with the performance of individual plainchant Masses on specified feasts, Vespers as a choir daily in the summer and on those specified feasts, and Compline as a choir during Lent. In 1535, however, its duties were expanded to include a High Mass and a Vespers service on the first Sunday of each month. With Carlo Borromeo's ascension to the seat of archbishop of Milan in 1560, the cappella's Vespers service became central to public worship, and attracted foreign visitors as well as the Milanese aristocracy. As a result, public worship services featuring the cappella were expanded to include a Compline service on Saturday evenings. Simon Boyleau, the first documented maestro di cappella at Santa Maria presso San Celso, was a madrigalist familiar to the Milanese aristocracy. His compositions for Santa Maria presso San Celso reflect not only Borromeo's attempts to shape the Milanese liturgical style according to Tridentine aims, but also Borromeo's desire to spiritualize and theologically educate the Milanese aristocracy. Boyleau's tenure at Santa Maria presso San Celso, which featured the cultivation of sacred and secular audiences alike, defined the activities of the church's composers for the next 50 years.

Whereas earlier Italian baroque cantatas usually began arias in the key in which the preceding recitative had ended, there was an increasing tendency after 1700 to create a tonal disjunction between recitative and aria and to utilize for affective purposes the harmonic progression linking the last chord of the former to the first chord of the latter. Vivaldi, who almost invariably placed his arias in a contrasting key, was a leading exponent of this technique and employed a surprisingly large variety of key relationships at the recitative–aria interface. For illustration, the article draws on cantatas by Vinaccesi, Albinoni and Vivaldi.

This study presents an attempt to pin down the potential narrative qualities of instrumental, wordless music. Comparing as case-studies two pieces in sonata form–the first movements of Beethoven's ‘Pastoral’ Symphony (as representative of Classical narrative possibilities) and of Mahler's Ninth Symphony (as representative of its composer's idiosyncratic treatment of those in the late nineteenth century) –I propose a ‘narrative’ analysis of their musical features, applying the notions of ‘story’, ‘discourse’ and other concepts from the literary theory of, for example, Genette, Prince and Barthes. An analysis at three semiotic levels (morphological, syntactic and semantic), corresponding to denotative/connotative levels of meaning, shows that Mahler's materials qualify better as narrative ‘events’ on account of their greater number, their individuality and their rich semantic connotations. Through analysis of the ‘discursive techniques’ of the two pieces I show that a weaker degree of narrativity corresponds to music in which the developmental procedures are mostly based on tonal musical syntax (as in the Classical style), whereas a higher degree of narrativity corresponds to music in which, in addition to semantic transformations of the materials, discourse itself relies more on gestural semantic connotations (as in Mahler).

Music theory has increasingly been attempting to find points of conjunction between the analytical methods of Heinrich Schenker and those of Arnold Schoenberg. However, the move toward a reconciliation has encountered obstacles because of the uneven development of the two schools and differences in the philosophical background of their procedures. The present article focuses on these differences through an examination of three standard examples: the first movements of Beethoven's sonatas op. 2 no. 1, op. 10 no. 1 and op. 57. The comparison of Schenker's analyses in Der Tonwille and Der freie Satz with those of Schoenberg, Webern, Rufer and Ratz shows that the disagreement principally concerns musical form and the functions of its components. The differences can finally be traced back to two opposite paradigms: music as nature and music as language.

Television's Ally McBeal revels in soundtrack games, playing as it does with the conventions of several types of musical multimedia while elevating music, especially a particular type of pop music, to the role of central plot and series metaphor–above all in relation to Ally's character. As musically saturated television, Ally McBeal not only provides a window onto music's role in television (and hence a central expression of postmodern culture), it also engages some of pop music's broader social functions dramatically. Drawing on both film and media theory, I examine Ally McBeal's soundtrack from formal and dramatic perspectives. I then go on to situate the features discussed within wider postmodernist discourses and draw out music's contribution to the show's controversial representations of contemporary gender politics.