It used to be thought that Willaert invented double-choir music, drawing his inspiration from the famous organ galleries in San Marco. That his Salmi spezzati were not unique or even innovatory is now beyond dispute. His predecessors and contemporaries working in other important churches of the Veneto — Albertis in Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo, Ruffino and Passetto in Padua Cathedral and the Basilica del Santo, Santacroce in Treviso Cathedral — contributed to a significant regional repertory of double-choir psalms, many of which are more adventurous in their use of the medium than those of Willaert. Ruffino extended the use of double-choir to the ordinary of the mass.

This paper looks at some aspects of the expansion of the role of the orchestra in the early decades of French operatic history, especially after the death of Lully, and in particular at the orchestra's increasing involvement in, and enhancement of, the spectacular and the dramatic. It focuses on three types of scene, in each of which the orchestra plays a key role in the construction of the scene and in supplying its distinctive musical features. The paper is based on part of a thesis which, for reasons' of manageability, set a terminal date of 1715, but I have where appropriate stepped outside diis self-imposed limit

Although Rameau's amazingly resourceful treatment of the orchestra has been discussed by a number of previous writers,’ there is one important aspect of the subject that has been largely ignored. Little attention has so far been paid to the ways in which thee composer's orchestral practice changed during his fertile thirty-year operatic career. Yet one has only to compare the scoring of his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), with that of his last, Les Baréades (1764), to see that a whole series of changes have come about. This development has been badly obscured by the nature of the composer's Œuvres complètes, still the most easily accessible ‘modern’ source of most of his works. Outwardly, this appears to be a respectable scholarly edition, with lengthy and authoritative prefaces, lists of sources and critical apparatus. Nowhere is it stated, however, that many of the operas have been partly re-orchestrated, some of them quite extensively.

‘Music in 18th-Ccntury Oxford’ perhaps most immediately evokes the names of Handel, Haydn and the Holywell Music Room. But these represent only part of a continuous tradition of music, richly cultivated in Oxford society and established as important in various aspects of Oxford life. The title of this paper might more accurately have been phrased ‘Music in the University of Oxford in the 18th Century’, although in fact, then as now, town and gown appear closely connected from a musical point of view. Music in a university context has received concentrated scholarly attention with regard to an earlier period, but there seems to be no equivalent study of post-Renaissance music from this particular angle. Nor does there appear to be any published survey of music in Oxford. Apparently no one has previously put together information on music in 18th-century Oxford, except, partially but most valuably, the Rev. J. H. Mee in his book on the Holywell Music Room, and Charles Abdy Williams, whose lists of musical degree-holders are complemented by general commentary on university music. In the New Grove article on Oxford, the period up to and including the 17th century, and the 19th and 20th centuries, are, quite rightly, treated to extended discussion; little, however, is said to link the 18th century historically with either of these periods. Yet it was in the 18th century that the outcome of those weekly music meetings which had begun at Oxford during the Commonwealth was seen in the Holywell concerts, and that an interest in early music, again traceable back to origins in the preceding century, developed in Oxford circles; and both of these, and other, aspects of music in Oxford were then taken up into various 19th-century developments.

When we study the rise of the Handelian tradition in eighteenth-century England, we are studying the early history of musical classicism. Here the term ‘classicism’ does not refer to musical style, to the classical style, but rather to a performing repertory of music from the past which is valued as a set of masterpieces, as models for judgment of new works. Before this time musical life had had no classicism of the kind found in literature or the plastic arts. Even if the names of a few composers were passed on as great men, their music was performed only in exceptional circumstances. Rarely did Italian operas appear after the death of the composer; most did not even last ten years. Handel was the first composer a large body of whose works were performed continuously after his death. Most significant of all, his name was the first to be enshrined in the highest reaches of the modern musical Pantheon, to be linked to those of Haydn, Mozart and Beedioven. That such composers as Pergolesi or Corelli also enjoyed English performances after their death for a few of their works, shows how a broad movement toward historical repertory began in the eighteenth century. Handel's music did not persist alone; it was part of a new musical order.

An index reference in Donald Mitchell's study of Mahler's ‘Wunderhorn’ years seems to promise an appraisal of Mahler's debt to Liszt; on the page, however, an assumption precedes an exhortation to ‘serious research and documentation’. The debt is located in Mahler's ‘consistent and brilliant’ use of transformation of themes with particular reference being made to the ‘Faust’ Symphony. Elsewhere, Mitchell cites a trumpet tune from the finale of the ‘Resurrection’ Symphony and its subsequent transformation into a chorale as an example of ‘how closely Mahler had studied Liszt’. The species of transformation demonstrated is common in Liszt, mood and association being altered by radically changing the context while leaving melodic, harmonic and rhythmic contour relatively untouched. All of this, however, Mahler might have learned from Wagner, Smetana, Weber or many another composer of dramatic or programmatic music. Real documentation, in the form of letters or recorded comment, has always taken place in discussion of Mahler's debt to Liszt to the pursuit of technical and aesthetic parallels; Constantin Floras' study in progress is typical in that copious motivic and thematic cross-reference, and extensive documentation with regard to Mahler and Liszt individually far outweigh recorded discussion by Mahler of Liszt's personality and music.

It is ironical that of all centuries of Italian musical history the one that at present seems least known and least understood in this country should be the twentieth. At the beginning of the century, it is true, the later operas of Puccini stand out as almost excessively familiar landmarks; and in the period from the Second World War onwards the works of composers such as Dallapiccola, Nono and especially Berio have become relatively well known ground at least to contemporary music enthusiasts, in the English speaking world as elsewhere. However, vast tracts of the intervening territory currently seem shrouded — where general public awareness in this country is concerned — in a thick fog of ignorance and apathetic prejudice. Here and there the fog may thin a little, to reveal isolated familiar objects such as Respighi's symphonic poems, the guitar music of Castelnuovo-Tedesco, or (at the more radical end of the ideological spectrum) the recently-much-studied futurist experiments of Luigi Russolo. Nevertheless the mists still show little inclination to lift in their entirety, to reveal to British eyes the overall geography of the whole landscape.