One of the main challenges facing early printers and publishers of music was how to distribute their products to a dispersed, niche market. At the start of the seventeenth century there were two principal routes of dissemination in German-speaking lands: the general book trade (including the fairs at Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig) and the composer's own initiatives (whether via presentation copies, or via self-publication as pursued by Michael Praetorius, Johann Hermann Schein and Heinrich Schütz). This article traces the transactions by which music was disseminated, examines the range of music available through the book trade, and asks how booksellers and musicians negotiated the market for printed music.

In 1816, Richard Fitzwilliam died, bequeathing his important music collection to the University of Cambridge. In 1824 the University decided to allow selections from it to be published. The most important outcome was Vincent Novello's five-volume The Fitzwilliam Music (1825–7), containing Latin church music by Italian composers of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, but there was also an edition by Samuel Wesley of three hymn tunes by Handel to words by his father, and Wesley also projected an edition of motets from Byrd's Gradualia which for financial reasons was never published. This article discusses Fitzwilliam's bequest, the involvement of Novello and Wesley, the two publications that resulted in the 1820s, and Wesley's unsuccessful Byrd project.

A model is presented which aims to show how, for listeners familiar with a given style, aesthetic response to music may be related to its ‘structure’ (as defined in relation to ‘zygonic’ theory) and ‘content’ (the particular perceived qualities of sound that pertain to a given musical event). The model combines recent empirical findings from music psychology with other approaches adapted from music theory and philosophy. Intramusical considerations, which form the core of the model, are positioned within a broader socio-cultural, cognitive and physical context. The new framework is used to inform an analysis of Beethoven's Piano Sonata op.110, which examines in particular the notions of teleology in music and narrative metaphor.