To those of us who are not professional musicologists, music seems not just an inherently interdisciplinary topic, but a domain that, because it presents distinct challenges, has the capacity to help scholars think afresh about key issues. Music seems positively to demand interdisciplinary responses, because, for example, it insinuates itself into so much of human life. It involves a notable range of intricate, specialized skills, objects and social relationships. Music is highly technical, and not just in the obvious ways. Instrument making, like the dissemination of music in written form and the design of performance spaces, is ‘technical’ in requiring a range of technologies, occupations and techniques. Yet, however specialized the study of music has become, however much its study demands skills that are not widely dispersed, even in universities, ‘music’ appears as a fount of questions that are exceptionally wide-ranging. I use inverted commas to signal that this seemingly innocent term has to cover so much that containing it is as difficult as defining it.

Twentieth-century accounts of the life and musical activities of Ann Ford, later Mrs Thicknesse (1737–1824), have largely relied on the entry for her in the Victorian Dictionary of National Biography. The rediscovery of a fifty-four-page article on her in Public Characters (London, 1806) has led to a re-evaluation of other sources of information, including her semi-autobiographical novel The School for Fashion (London, 1800), the pamphlets published in the course of her dispute with the Earl of Jersey and her treatises on playing the English guitar and the musical glasses. These throw new light on her musical activities and help us to understand the context and significance of her public concerts in 1760 and 1761. Her public persona and her preference for soft, exotic instruments such as the viola da gamba, the archlute and the guitar are seen as embodying the cult of sensibility, at its height during her period of fame around 1760.

Louis-Guillaume Pecour’s couple-dance called L’Allemande introduced in 1702 a mode of dancing that in some respects was different to anything that had been seen before on stage or at court in France, and that was to influence a number of dances for the theatre and ballroom in the following years. Particular characteristics of Pecour’s dance were its unusual arm positions, which seem to have indicated a specifically ‘Germanic’ character, and some sequences of steps which, although also occurring in other dances of the time, nevertheless seemed to reinforce some notion of ‘Germanic’ dancing. Some of these characteristics also appeared in dances devised in London after 1714 for the Hanoverian royal family, perhaps as a deliberate allusion to their German ancestry. This article examines the structure and form of Pecour’s L’Allemande, and the extent to which it, and some of the dances it influenced, may have represented a stereotype of ‘Germanic’ culture as something outlandish or uncultivated unless redeemed by an overlay of French choreographic sophistication.

Much recent writing concerning the early eighteenth-century sonata has focused on a subgenre that appropriates stylistic elements from more fully scored works. Thus several of J. S. Bach’s solo and trio sonatas signify the concerto in certain movements by adopting ritornello form and establishing instrumental roles of ‘soloist’ and ‘orchestra’, only to undermine the integrity of these roles during the course of a movement. These Sonaten auf Concertenart, and a number of similar examples by Bach’s German contemporaries, have been viewed as responses to Vivaldi’s solo concertos and especially his so-called ‘chamber concertos’, which feature similar kinds of role playing. This study, by re-examining the phenomenon of the sonata in concerto style from a number of perspectives, shows that the genre was more widespread and its origins and meanings more complex than previously recognized. Evidence for this revised view takes the form of generic titles on manuscripts and prints; music by German, Italian and French composers spanning much of the eighteenth century, from Molter to Mondonville to Mozart; some three dozen sonatas by Telemann, who exhaustively explored the genre over several decades and was perhaps its originator in Germany; and literary amalgamations of genre indicative of a broader eighteenth-century fascination with mixed types.

The Parisian premiere of Paisiello’s Nina, o sia la pazza d’amore on 3 September 1791 triggered a hostile reaction from French librettists and composers. Since the opéra comique on which Paisiello had based his opera remained in the active repertory of the Comédie-Italienne, Nina was considered an infringement of copyright legislation recently passed by the National Assembly. In the controversy that followed, matters involving intellectual property and opera aesthetics were linked to revolutionary struggle. At a time when clarity and transparency were identified as republican virtues in France, the carefully wrought balance between music and text that was associated with French operatic genres acquired new political resonance. Simultaneously, the perceived emphasis on sensual musical pleasure – at the expense of a coherent libretto – in Italian operas like Nina was eyed with suspicion, deemed a potential symptom of counterrevolution. In this way, the relative merits of French and Italian opera were superimposed on issues of revolution, reaction and national identity.

Mozart’s Milan concert on 12 March 1770 secured for him his first commission to write an opera seria for Italy. The works usually thought to have been performed on this occasion are Fra cento affanni, k88, Misero tu, k73A, and Misero me . . . misero pargoletto, k77. This article offers new evidence for redating Fra cento affanni and argues that neither it nor Misero tu was performed at the event. Instead, the case is made for a programme consisting solely of concert arias with texts from the libretto of Metastasio’s Demofoönte, presented together as a kind of truncated ‘opera in aria’. In support of this hypothesis, the compositional circumstances surrounding Se tutti i mali miei, k83, and Ah più tremar, k71, are reassessed and possible performances by the singers Giuseppe Aprile, Antonia Bernasconi, Guglielmo d’Ettore, Lucrezia Agujari and Carlo Niccolini discussed.

Haydn composed his ‘Paris’ Symphonies, Nos 82–87, in 1785–1786 on commission from the Concert de la Société Olympique, whose orchestra gave the first performances, probably in 1787. This essay considers aspects of these first performances – the audience, the venue and the performers, about which there is all too little information and a certain amount of confusion.

In two earlier articles I have written of finding identical or very similar themes in two different compositions, either in two works of the same composer or in the work of two different composers. The conclusion presented was that such events are rarely meaningful, that citing a particular melodic affinity to assert some kind of relationship between the two compositions is almost always misguided. The amount of melodic duplication that may be found when comparing any two pieces (by any two composers from any two eras) is so considerable that one might conclude it is largely meaningless and accidental.