During the nineteenth century, major composers—such as Schubert, Schumann, Wieck Schumann, Mendelssohn, Mendelssohn Hensel, Liszt, and Chopin—contributed musical compositions to a kind of volume known as a friendship album (also keepsake album, album amicorum , or Stammbüch ). Album inscriptions penned by Fryderyk Chopin provide a lens through which we can study these compositions, thereby gaining an understanding of the ways in which musical meaning, genre, and text were governed by conventions of gift exchange. Complete compositions, musical fragments, and performative flourishes left in albums by music lovers as well as professional composers and performers took on the function of secular relics that were understood to preserve metaphysical traces of the inscribers, while handwriting was believed to represent the writer's character or momentary state of mind. These ideas intersect with a broader Romantic culture of collectorship. To invoke experiences and memories shared by the inscriber and the dedicatee, some composers engaged in dialogic relationships with mementos inscribed by others or employed intertextual references. An examination of these forms of interplay adds to our knowledge of the way context can shape the use and meaning of musical borrowing and allusion. The authors of inscriptions also employed intrinsically musical vocabulary to impart the sense distortions that neuroscientists and scholars of memory describe as typical of a recalled experience. Moreover, albums provided a censorship-free private venue for political and national discourses. These musical texts constitute a separate class of presentation manuscripts that serve a specific social function and audience.

Giuseppe Sarti's opera Fra i due litiganti , premiered in Milan in 1782, was the first great success of the reconstituted Italian opera company in Vienna in 1783. The opera sustained its enormous Viennese popularity for years, while also being performed in over one hundred other European cities by 1800. Mozart's quotation of the work in Don Giovanni testifies to its continuing appeal. But the version of the opera that was so successful in many parts of Europe differed substantially from the Milanese original. The surviving manuscript scores and printed librettos reveal that a standardized Viennese version of Fra i due litiganti , in which more than a third of the original arias were replaced, became the basis for productions across much of Europe. This unexpected standardization may reflect the prestige of Vienna and its role as a distribution point for opera scores, especially since many of the manuscripts were produced by Wenzel Sukowaty, the copyist for the Viennese court theaters. The Viennese changes surprisingly include arias for Nancy Storace and Francesco Benucci—later Mozart's Susanna and Figaro—who had themselves created the same roles in Milan. (Normally arias would be substituted to suit the preferences of new singers.) These alterations not only changed the profiles of the characters, but allowed Storace and Benucci to define themselves for the Viennese public, establishing the musical and dramatic personae that quickly made them the beloved favorites of Viennese audiences.

This article investigates three voci pari settings by Gioseffo Zarlino, the lectiones pro mortuis that appeared in the Motetta D. Cipriani de Rore et aliorum auctorum (Venice: Girolamo Scotto, 1563). Although this collection contains motets, we argue that Zarlino's lectiones were intended as liturgical items for an Office for the Dead, celebrated as part of exequial rites. As such, they represent the first printed liturgical settings for the Office for the Dead in the Italian-speaking area. By analyzing liturgical sources as well as chronicles, we show that there was no tradition of setting the lessons pro mortuis in Italy, and that Zarlino's lectiones must have been a somewhat isolated musical experiment. We contextualize the settings within Zarlino's oeuvre, while also highlighting their relation to the contemporary repertoire of polyphonic lessons for penitential liturgies, most importantly lamentations—a genre that was published widely in the 1560s. In an attempt to reconstruct the social and institutional networks that might constitute the background to Zarlino's lectiones , we urge considering their author not only as a theorist and composer, but also as a polymath, a priest, and, ultimately, a devout Christian.

A set of thirteenth-century parchment fragments, including the remnants of two rolls and one manuscript codex, preserves a largely unstudied repertoire unique to medieval England. In addition to a single motet and a setting of a responsory verse, the Rawlinson Fragments preserve twelve three-voice Alleluya settings. While polyphonic Alleluyas are well known from the continental Magnus liber repertoire, these insular Alleluya settings are quite different. Most significantly, while composed on the text and pitches of plainchant, they include newly composed texts in at least one voice—that is, they are polytextual chant settings. Aspects of their musical style certainly draw on other polyphonic genres—organum, conductus, and motet. This article presents the paleographical and codicological evidence that corroborates an early date for these fragments (in the 1240s), confirms their connection to Reading Abbey, and situates their repertoire within a broader context. My analysis points to intriguing points of overlap with both the plainchant prosula tradition and the Magnus liber organa and motets. It reopens broader questions about the copying and performance practices of liturgical polyphony, including previous suggestions that motet texts may have been sung within the performance of the Magnus liber organa, regardless of the scribal copying conventions that separated organum and motet in the surviving Magnus liber manuscripts. The article also considers the role of the Rawlinson Fragments’ main scribe, Benedictine monk W. de Wicumbe, who was active within the monastic communities of Leominster and Reading as a composer of plainchant and polyphony, and as precentor, most likely in charge of his community's musical life.

This article gives a close reading of the “avvisi di Roma”—unpublished archival documents reporting on daily life in the city—that record the arrest in 1645 of famous Roman courtesan singer Nina Barcarola. Organized by the political enemies of Nina's main protector, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, the arrest was orchestrated so as to compromise the public honor of both. The reports of the arrest reflect a growing elite interest in female vocal performance in Rome, and attest to a rise in the social value of courtesan singers. Examining details provided in these reports, the article explores various aspects of Nina's life and courtesan singing culture more generally: the public honor and social practices of courtesan singers; the positive effect of singing on courtesan honor; the types of gatherings hosted by Nina; and her politically satirical public performances. It also analyzes Nina's relationship to various areas of contemporary politics—social, state, familial, and gender. The reports reveal that, in the public sphere, Nina, like Barberini's male dependents, served as a symbolic extension of the cardinal. By introducing courtesan singers—a significant, marginalized population—into musicological discourse on seventeenth-century Rome, the article broadens our understanding of Roman singing culture in this period.