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Some of the most interesting and puzzling early guitar sources are held in Portugal, at Lisbon's Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and at Coimbra University Library. Notated in tablature, they display a large number of pieces of supposed African origin, along with many Iberian dances and instrumental items. While the African influence is suggested by the titles, literary sources, historical context and musical features, dances such as the arromba, cãozinho, cubanco, gandu, sarambeque, cumbé and paracumbé also reveal a strong connection with Iberian forms from the period, such as the canario, villano and jácaras. Its ultimate place of origin—Africa, Iberia or America—does not seem as relevant as the interaction process itself, with all the economic, social, racial and political implications: most of that repertory was shared by musicians in different places of the Iberian dominions in Europe, Africa and the Americas, be they white or black, slaves or free artists. The article contextualizes that repertory historically, relying mostly on the works by Brazilian poet Gregório de Mattos (1636–96), a source of information on the music heard in the streets, homes, convents and brothels of 17th-century Brazil. Many of his descriptions and opinions deal with the music of slaves, free blacks and mulattos; they include many of the titles found in Portuguese guitar tablatures. The analysis of this musical material raises important questions that are addressed in the article: was this music created by black guitar players who assimilated Iberian materials and playing techniques? Or was it composed by white Iberian musicians, maybe as exotic depictions, or caricatures? What is African and what is Iberian in such music, and on what terms did such interaction take place? The article finishes with historical data on Brazilian mulatto musicians—guitar players, singers and poets—who lived in Lisbon and enjoyed some success during the second half of the 18th century.
The origins of the infamous 'Agincourt Carol', celebrating Henry v's military campaign of 1415, have often been the subject of fanciful speculation, but very little concrete evidence has so far been discovered. This article reports the new discovery that the carol's text relates closely to other poems celebrating the event, and may have been their source. It explores in more detail the surviving accounts of the victory pageant mounted in London on the king's return, during which the carol may have been performed. New evidence concerning the carol's earliest musical source has allowed a more precise dating and possible provenance to be established, elucidating the musical and literary worlds in which this most intriguing of medieval songs was composed.
The 17th-century vogue for lampooning has left us with thousands of libellous personal satires, many of which were written to broadside ballad and dance tunes and intended for singing. Mostly preserved in manuscript sources, they constitute a largely unstudied extension of the repertory catalogued in Claude Simpson's The British broadside ballad and its music. One tune, 'Amarillis', was particularly associated with lampooning. Originally composed by John Banister the elder for a dance-song in Thomas Porter's tragedy The Villain (1662), it is cited as the tune for a lampoon text in a later play, Thomas Rawlins's Tunbridge Wells: or a Day's Courtship (1678). Its distinctive melodic contour also allows it to be linked to other scribally transmitted lampoons from 1663 onward. Its popularity for this purpose seems to have arisen from the ease with which it could be used for the social improvisation of mocking songs in which the singer, having given out a first line, had to invent a second to rhyme with it. The melody's popularity is confirmed by appearances in Playford's Dancing Master and Musick's Delight on the Cithren and in an arrangement for flageolet by Thomas Greeting.
For some 200 years the position of the bridge on the violin has been standardized, but where was it placed on the early Italian violin? In his late 18th-century treatise Giovanni Marchi writes that many of the violins he has seen have bridge imprints in the belly because the bridge feet were carved incorrectly; he also observes that placing the bridge somewhere other than between the f-holes can improve the instrument's tone. To follow up on Marchi's comment a detailed evaluation is made of surviving early Italian violins at The Shrine to Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota.
David Boyden has commented that most early paintings which include a violin show the bridge located closer to the tailpiece than between the f-holes. The article goes on to examine a corpus of Italian paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries to find what light they shed on the issue. Some care is taken to determine the extent to which we can trust these as evidence on violin construction: which painters used artistic licence, which were accurate reporters?
The evidence of both surviving instruments and iconography suggests that the position of the bridge on the early violin was not standardized.
The work of Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) with the recorder was crucial to the subsequent mass revival of the instrument in England. This article discusses in particular two newly discovered recorder programmes of his, dated 1900; it examines the significance of these and some of his later programmes in terms of overall instrumentation and repertory, and questions some long-held beliefs about the nature of Dolmetsch's work with the recorder. The instrument's renaissance in England is placed within its broader musical and cultural context. From the late Victorian era the recorder developed alongside and sometimes in conjunction with the revival of Shakespeare's plays; there was a clear relationship between the attempts to understand and re-create the English musical successes of the 16th and 17th centuries and the efforts made by the establishment to rejuvenate the nation's culture in terms of new composition. Using Dolmetsch's recorder programmes as a starting-point, it is suggested that the chief figures of the English musical renaissance were more conscious of and indebted to the contemporaneous revival of early music than has hitherto been acknowledged.
This article constructs a more complete and up-to-date picture of the lives and instrumental compositions of the oboist-composers Juan and José Pla than has hitherto been available. It traces their wanderings from Spain to royal courts and public performance venues throughout Europe—including Lisbon, Paris, London, Stuttgart, Padua and possibly the Netherlands. Such a broad itinerary suggests that the brothers' virtuoso abilities on the oboe (as well as their compositions) not only reached, but also influenced the ideas and works of contemporary and later composers perhaps more than had been suspected. There is a brief discussion of the only catalogue of the Plas' works, the paucity of pieces that have been analysed to date, and issues surrounding the manuscript sources of their known instrumental compositions. The concluding remarks provide several points of departure for further research on the Plas.
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