An overlooked pamphlet of Thomas Pierce's civil-war Latin polemic appends four unascribed English verse-texts dated 1647-9. Pierce's contemporary Anthony Wood ascribed them to him, and named musical setters: William Child, Nicholas Lanier, and Arthur Phillips. Ejected for royalism from Magdalen College, Oxford, Pierce returned as its Restoration President. In 1649, though, why would Lanier, Master of the King's Music, have set a then-ousted don's ‘Funeral Hymn’ for Charles I?

One of the most important and valuable resources available to researchers of eighteenth-century social history are the lists of subscribers that were attached to a wide variety of publications. Yet, the study of this type of source material remains one of the areas most neglected by academics. These lists shed considerable light on the connections that an author or composer had with other like-minded individuals and the support that they received from members of the middle and upper classes. In cases where a single composer published a series of works by subscription, there is an opportunity to gain an insight into the growth of the public's appreciation of the composer and the contacts he or she forged over the course of a lifetime. Charles Avison is one of the best known British composers from the eighteenth century. He issued six works by subscription between 1740 and 1767 and they together provide a unique insight into his growth into one of this country's leading native musicians. Although a respectable number of the associations discussed are already known through other sources, this study not only reinforces the importance of these associations, but additionally gives an insight into those links for which there is no other known evidence. This research ultimately reveals that Avison's location in the North-East of England did not significantly impact on his ability to forge connections across Britain and beyond.

During the 1950s and 1960s in London, in the Royal Festival Hall, an unusual series of concerts took place. These concerts stood apart from the usual offerings in London's post-war musical life. What they offered was early music, principally J.S. Bach's concertos for two, three and four keyboards, played not on the piano, as had hitherto been the case, but on the harpsichord. This article documents, for the first time, the facts, and the implications, of the Royal Festival Hall concert series: how it came about; the repertoire; the performers; and the performances. The article concludes that the Royal Festival Hall concerts were notable in the evolution of the early music movement in the UK, deepening its reach to a broader audience and nurturing an awareness of an issue that was increasingly to gain traction in the later decades of the twentieth century: the idea of historical authenticity in the performance of early music.

In assuming that the violin family of instruments is the staple of Western instrumental art music, Hautboisten, among the most important musicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, constitute a neglected area of research. Hautboisten are known to have been among the major suppliers of musical entertainment in the German-speaking lands in the first half of the eighteenth century. The term Hautboistenbande has often been translated by contemporary scholars as ‘oboe band’. Indeed, these ensembles developed into wind bands known as Harmoniemusik; Hautboisten, however, were originally routinely trained to perform on multiple wind instruments as well as string instruments.

The Lilien Partbooks, which are part of the Sonsfeld Collection (the Sonsfeldsche Musikalien Sammlung; now held in the Bibliotheca Fürstenbergiana in Herdringen; D-HRD Fü 3741a), represent the most comprehensive primary source of music for such an ensemble. A detailed incipit catalogue of the compositions compiled in these partbooks draws together our current knowledge of the Lilien Partbooks and of eighteenth-century Prussian Hautboisten. The extensive catalogue of the works collated in the six partbooks constitutes a valuable aid for future research.

In this review article the author reads Nagmusiek – Stephanus Muller's monumental metafictional biography of South African composer Arnold van Wyk – as an extended allegory on the geopolitics of academic writing. She argues that the book articulates, through its unusual physical apparatus, narratological techniques and metafictional hermeneutic deconcealment, a valuable theory-in-praxis of the aporetics of peripheral writing. In so doing, Muller materializes Walter Mignolo's notion of ‘epistemic delinking’ in radically original and risky ways.