Muted violins from Lully to Haydn

To describe the effect of muted violins, modern commentators often default to such terms as 'ethereal', 'otherworldly', or similarly magical and disembodied images. But in the 18th century, musicians had different ways of understanding the effect and meaning of muted violin tone. This article identifies conditions and principles that underpinned the usage and perception of muted violins from their beginnings to the 18th century, as well as significant shifts that took place during this time. For most of this period, musicians preferred metal to wooden violin mutes. Whether the accessory fundamentally altered the tone-quality of the instrument, or simply made it quieter, was up for debate, the question complicated both by regional differences in violins, and the fact that 'timbre modification' was not yet a familiar concept. And while otherworldly associations are sometimes apropos, more often the idea was to hear murmuring water, a mournful character, or some other effect—magical or mundane—cued by the particular context.

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The giant Handel edifice

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Printing, politics and 'a well-regulated church music: a new perspective on J. S. Bachs Mühlhausen cantatas

Johann Sebastian Bach's earliest cantatas, composed during his tenure in the Thuringian city of Mühlhausen, are often seen as being part of his larger project of composing cantatas for the Lutheran liturgy. The article shows that such a view is misplaced. The composition and publication of music in Mühlhausen in the late 17th and early 18th centuries was embedded in a complex social framework. This can be traced back to Bach's predecessors Johann Rudolph and Johann Georg Ahle. Most of Bach's pieces from 1707–8 were not liturgical in nature but rather served a function in the public and political culture of this imperial city.

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Beethovens symphonies reintroduced

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Roger Longs gut-strung keyboard instruments and Thomas Bartons harpsichord stringing

In 1720 Pepusch signed an inventory of the Duke of Chandos's instruments that included a gut-strung harpsichord by a 'Mr Longfellow of Pembroke Hall in Cambridge'. The maker was in fact Roger Long, Fellow and later Master of Pembroke Hall (now Pembroke College), Lowndes Professor of Astronomy, but also a keen musician and maker of astronomical, musical and other instruments. Long's commonplace book in Pembroke's library contains valuable information about gut and wire harpsichord stringing from the first decade of the 18th century, some of which he was given by the harpsichord-maker Thomas Barton. The article examines this extremely rare information (only one other brief reference is known to a gut-strung harpsichord in 17th- or 18th-century England) as well as comparing the information about wire-strung instruments to Barton's only surviving harpsichord. Accounts from other sources also exist of Long's construction of a lyrichord, which he presented to the king and queen, and which he probably modelled on Plenius's design. A further instrument of Long's invention, a gut-strung travelling 'harpsichord' is also described. All of this information is set in the context of earlier studies of European gut-strung keyboard instruments. Clearly, throughout his life Long was committed to making keyboard instruments whose gut stringing produced a more subtle and gentler tone than their wire-strung counterparts. The fact that Long probably received information about gut stringing from a London maker also suggests that there was more interest in this sort of instrument than has hitherto been acknowledged.

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French fancies from the Renaissance and early Baroque

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National saints

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