This article offers a fresh perspective on the study of the eighteenth-century musical dialogue between China and France, not as an episode of exotic encounter but as an intellectual movement that profoundly shaped how scholars conceived of music and the study of its theories within an increasingly integrated world. Taking Jean-Philippe Rameau's and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's explorations into the origins of music as an example, I foreground the importance of Chinese music in the formation of their influential concepts of the corps sonore and of the unity of music and language respectively. While these two thinkers made two opposing claims about the origins of music, both used Chinese music as key evidence to support their arguments. Moreover, certain Jesuit missionaries, particularly Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot, played a crucial role in the global transmission of musical knowledge that enabled French thinkers like Rameau and Rousseau to incorporate music beyond Western Europe. Ultimately, this article reverses the Eurocentric narrative that tends to trace the influence of ‘Western music’ on other parts of the world by showing how Chinese music exerted a major impact on musical debates in France. Situating the study of eighteenth-century music in a global context, I demonstrate what we commonly recognize as ‘Western music theory’ was shaped by knowledge from the East.

The history of the Spanish musical press in the eighteenth century has usually been interpreted as an ongoing struggle against a narrow and underdeveloped market. Print itself has been seen as a superior technology that helps to secure stability and clarity of the musical text. In this light, José de Torres, prestigious organist and composer, music director of the Spanish Chapel Royal from 1720 and owner of an important musical press, has appeared to be a heroic modernizing figure. This article challenges this received image, underlining the effectiveness of censorship and the control of individual initiatives in the field of music publishing in early eighteenth-century Spain. This is demonstrated by newly discovered documents concerning a lawsuit brought against Torres, who owned a royal printing privilege from 1700 until his death in 1738, by Francisco Díaz de Guitián, who wanted to establish a music press of his own. Several musicians acted as witnesses, giving a detailed view of how the music press worked at the time, notably how the approbations customarily given by established musicians on behalf of music treatises intended for publication were used to promote or block a career. Based on these new insights, a general study of all the known prints by the Imprenta de Música is presented in a broader editorial, political and cultural context.

The outstanding (though still insufficiently recognized) development of Maltese sacred music in the mid-eighteenth century culminated in the works of Benigno Zerafa (1726–1804), a highly talented priest-composer who served as maestro di cappella at the Cathedral of St Paul at Mdina from 1744 to 1786. Zerafa’s entire collection of sacred vocal works, with one exception, was discovered in 1969 by the then-curator of the Archives of Mdina, Mgr Rev John Azzopardi. The collection, comprising, among others, masses, Credo settings, psalms, graduals, offertories, litanies, hymns, sequences, antiphons, Holy Week responsories and motets, was transferred to the archives of the cathedral, where it was professionally catalogued and shelved. One work, a recently discovered Requiem Mass for four voices and organ, is preserved in the Archivio Crypta Sancti Pauli (CSP) at Rabat. The compositions, numbering 148, are divided into two categories – (1) for voices and instruments (104), and (2) for voices and organ (44) – and range, in scoring, from works for eight, five, four, three and two voices, to others for solo voice. This essay aims to provide information on Benigno Zerafa’s life.

This article deals with the circulation of instrumental music between Spain and the New World at the end of the eighteenth century, focusing on Madrid, Mexico City and Lima as main urban centres. By analysing archival documents preserved in these cities, I intend to show that the baroque guitar music composed and copied in Madrid was also intended to be a commercial concern in Latin America (particularly in Mexico City and Lima), and that its cultivation in the New World lasted for a long time, even through to the beginning of the nineteenth century, thus coexisting with music by Johann Christian Bach, Boccherini, Cannabich, Haydn and other ‘modern’ composers. These assertions are reinforced through an examination of two musical manuscripts copied in Lima around 1800, which also shows some of the changes undergone by the repertory during its complex process of reception. I conclude by suggesting that, in the light of all this, a linear and evolutionary view of music history, according to which new repertories replace older ones, should be reconsidered.

William Bates, who died in 1778, was a prolific and, in his day, successful composer of stage music and concert songs performed in London in the 1760s and 1770s; but a scarcity of biographical information and uncertainties over his position vis-à-vis the new style introduced in the early 1760s by J. C. Bach and others have tended to disadvantage him in modern commentary. New facts about his life and background together with a recently discovered sale catalogue reveal him to have been a cultivated man of wide interests, with a sympathy for the ‘ancient’ style. His most substantial musical contribution, as regards its potential for modern revival, is a remarkable set of six concertos for strings with oboes, bassoons and horns (plus, in two concertos, trumpets and timpani) published in 1762. These concertos, related in style to contemporary overtures to stage works but making much greater use of concertante writing, form a high point in a peculiarly British tradition of concertos employing French horns. The cult of the horn in Georgian Britain that nourished this tradition is the subject of extended discussion.

During the early eighteenth century, music composed by George Frideric Handel began to circulate in miscellaneous publications of songs and arias. His music appeared in various forms. Some publications, such as four notable pocket collections published in the mid-1720s, preserve the music largely unchanged, although within a new sonic context. Other publications completely transform arias and even overtures into vocal works with new texts, creating layers of musical associations and meanings. Unauthorized appearances of Handel's music in songbook miscellanies and single-sided prints show alternative ways in which consumers may have heard and experienced the composer outside of the opera house or a concert setting. Examining these alternative sources for Handel's music allows for an enriched assessment of which works of the composer were critically and commercially appreciated during the early eighteenth century. Analysing appearances of Handel's music in songbook anthologies also offers insight into how musical miscellanies became ubiquitous forms of the production and reception of his works in the early eighteenth century.

The VI Concertos in Seven Parts published by Benjamin Cooke under Alessandro Scarlatti's name in 1740 have long been suspected of being either arrangements or works by a different composer. Close study of the sources, some of which have only recently come to light, shows them to be arrangements of sonate a quattro, four composed by Alessandro Scarlatti and two by his younger brother Francesco. The unacknowledged compiler and arranger of the set was almost certainly Charles Avison, who in addition made a significant compositional intervention. The publication of the concertos formed part of a pioneering strategy on Cooke's part whereby he acquired, and under the protection of a royal privilege engraved, significant works in manuscript owned (but not composed) by individual musicians within his circle. Among the latter was John Christopher Pepusch, whose role in the first publication of Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas k31–42 is described for the first time.

Hummel’s quoting of music by other composers has been mentioned briefly in a number of studies. While some of these quotations are explicit, others are a good deal more problematic. This article investigates explicit quotations that appear in two of Hummel’s string quartets dating from 1803–1804 and the finale of a piano sonata from 1807. The fourth movement of the String Quartet in G major, Op. 30 No. 2, twice quotes J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, BWV988, the slow movement of Op. 30 No. 3 refers to Handel’s Messiah and the finale of the F minor piano sonata cultivates a complex relationship with the last movement of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony. My objective is to demonstrate the sophistication and subtlety with which Hummel manipulates the quoted material in these three cases.

Hummel’s obvious quotation of Bach and Handel in particular is related to a multi-faceted preoccupation with archaic styles and earlier works that had taken root in the later eighteenth century and that continued to expand into the nineteenth and beyond. Although England was the first nation to develop a performance tradition around the ‘ancient’ musical repertory, it was the accumulation of a didactic tradition around the keyboard works of J. S. Bach in north Germany and its steady migration to centres like Vienna that is of more direct relevance here. And when one surveys the (supposed) quotations by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Clementi of works by Bach and Handel and compares them with Hummel’s, Hummel’s remain outstanding in their exactness and also in their frequent lightheartedness of tone. Whereas many straightforward quotations or instances of modelling appear reverential or seek to exalt the basic idiom, Hummel’s either are humorous or seem calculated to reduce the potency of the original in order to assimilate the earlier idiom into the later one. The three pieces considered here illustrate the spectrum of techniques used by Hummel to manipulate quoted material in his works. The quotations in the two quartets have drawn very little comment; the references to Mozart’s ’Jupiter’ Symphony in the finale of Op. 20 have been remarked on more frequently, but the relationship between the two finales is a good deal more intricate than has previously been shown. The ‘contrapuntal deconstruction’ that takes place late in the third movement of Hummel’s Op. 20, between the most explicit reference to the ‘Jupiter’ finale and the coda, is lighthearted in character – amusing, even – and is in some ways the most ingenious and vibrant episode in the movement.