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This thesis aims to contribute to the understanding of Witold Lutoslawski's concept of akcja ('action' or 'plot'). After an Introduction outlining the study's motivations and presenting a critical survey of the Lutoslawski literature on akcja and related topics, its investigation proceeds through three broad phases which seek to make independently valuable contributions to their respective areas while building towards an elucidation of akcja. First, unpublished Lutoslawski lectures from the 1960s that reveal traces of his poetics of plot are examined against the backdrop of his polemical views and the influences on his creative approach. Second, theories of plot, narrative and musical narrativity are utilized to devise a strategy for the analysis of instances of akcja as part of this process, ideas on musical narrativity are developed in relation to such issues as plot and emplotment, story and discourse, meaning and metaphor, and narrativity in twentieth-century music. Third, that strategy is applied in an analysis of Lutoslawski's 1968 composition Livre pour orchestre, a piece - part symphony, part modernist 'Livre' - in which the issue of narrativity itself becomes an aspect of the musical narrative. The study's Afterword then presents a sketch for a new theory of musical narrativity, plus analyses of passages from Lutoslawski pieces composed during different periods in his career, thereby demonstrating the centrality of akcja to his music and, in turn, to the development of an enhanced appreciation of Lutoslawski's creative achievements.

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This thesis surveys the surviving manuscript sources of Antonio Lotti’s works to produce a complete catalogue of his extant sacred music. It also collates the known biographical details of Lotti (including proof of his birth in Venice) and those of his wife, Santa Stella. It defines the extent to which Lotti’s compositions can be dated and the extent to which institutions for which they were written can be identified. It documents idiomatic patterns in his compositions, in terms of structure, scoring, rhythmic, melodic and harmonic devices and the reuse of material. Having identified key components of Lotti’s style, it argues that the attribution of some works to Lotti is spurious. The thesis goes on to investigate the shared musical heritage of Lotti’s contemporaries, such as Vivaldi, Biffi and Caldara, and the ways in which their music differs. It also accounts for Lotti’s influence on Handel, Bach, Vivaldi and his own students, such as Galuppi, Saratelli and Alberti. Particularly, it argues that Lotti’s setting of Dixit Dominus in A was the model for Handel’s setting of the same text; it also suggests some influence from Lotti’s works on Bach, principally in his setting of the B minor mass. Above all, this thesis aims to address the dearth of scholarship on this composer, and to provide evidence for his inclusion in the ranks of significant musical figures of his day.

Based on historical and musicological texts and acts from the nineteenth to twenty-first century, this thesis proposes the concept of plastic resistance as an epistemological method to analyse the psychical and political perceptions of Beethoven’s life and music. Relying on the philosophy of Fichte and Lacan, I contend that the psychopolitics of this reception/resistance history is predicated critically on the musicians’ and listeners’ ability and affect to posit musical semantics unconsciously. I further argue that, during the negotiation of mastery, autonomy and subjectivity, the musical acts of composing, analysing and performing are influenced by psychical and political aesthetics. These affective resistances are buttressed by the psychoanalytical structures of neurosis, psychosis and perversion. The thesis is divided into five chapters with the first two chapters setting the historical and theoretical backgrounds to various subjective actions and reactions that have created or destroyed musical meaning. The rest of the thesis place specific focus on more recent approaches to Beethoven’s piano sonatas and string quartets, as well as the plastic properties of their material resistance. In the first chapter, I trace a macrohistory of Beethoven reception in Western Europe and the United States from the nineteenth century to the present day. After an explication of the theoretical constitutions of the psychical resistance and the musical unconscious, I apply the ideas of inclusive and extractive resistances to show how the different attitudes towards Beethoven’s music result in creative and destructive institutions of musical hermeneutics. I reinforce the thesis of plastic resistance in the subsequent three chapters. First, the act of notation as embodied in sketch processes traverses the imaginary, fantasmatic and hysterical phases, but only a mode of critical mastery can direct listeners towards sound musical knowledge. Second, the dialectical nature of musical meaning readily predetermines the psychotic capacity of the analytic act; analysts arguably become occupied with negotiating their semantic uncertainty with chance operations. Finally, musicians embody a form of performative perversion by externalising their plastic intimacy through affective gestures and subjective speech acts during rehearsals, interpretations, and performances. In conclusion, plastic resistance has exerted a significant psychopolitical force and transformed the epistemologies of Beethoven historiography.

This dissertation reassesses the Mozarts' stay in London, from April 1764 until July 1765. It explores the family's professional, social and intellectual networks, considering how they were formed, how they functioned, and the interrelationships between them to ascertain the extent of the Mozarts' engagement with both musical and wider cultural life. The first chapter lays out the broad range of primary sources available for studying the Mozarts in London. It includes the first fully annotated edition of Leopold Mozart's London Reisenotizen, highlighting several pre-existing networks that the Mozarts engaged with. The four remaining chapters use these networks as a point of departure to provide a fresh perspective on the fifteen months. Chapter 2 explores the Mozarts' navigation of Westminster's musical scene, focusing on public concert life, subscription concerts and private concerts. Chapter 3 examines Leopold's engagement with the knowledge of his patrons, furthering his interests in science and technology. It then situates the Mozart children as part of London's scientific culture, themselves an object of curiosity. Chapter 4 considers Leopold's contact with merchants and traders based in the City of London as relationships with potential patrons, offering a revised context for the Swan and Hoop Tavern appearances. Chapter 5 documents the Mozarts' exposure to London's musical club cultures, music by English composers, and the memory of Handel. The number of musicians and patrons whose interests traversed different musical spheres suggests greater degrees of fluidity among London's musical cultures than is typically allowed. This dissertation positions the Mozarts' stay in London as an educational journey for the whole family, of which music was a significant but not the sole focus. Its approach challenges existing narratives of the family's London period and childhood travels, and has implications for understandings of eighteenth-century London's musical life as well as wider Mozart biography.

Hubert Parry (1848-1918) is known by music listeners today as a composer rather than as a music scholar, yet his contemporaries recognised him as a highly prolific and influential educator and an accomplished writer on musical subjects. This thesis is the first in-depth investigation of its kind into this lesser-known side of Parry’s career, using his literary works as a vantage point from which to evaluate his highly complex persona. Through a close examination of available primary and secondary materials, the thesis aims to develop a biographically and historically consistent view of his writings, while also addressing serious discrepancies in current estimates of his philosophical opinions. Parry’s formative influences, his interests in science, his moral and socially conscious view of art, his views on religion, and his response to Nietzschean philosophy constitute the focus of this study. An attempt is also made towards the end to reconcile these findings with his music, through a contextual examination of the six ‘ethical cantatas’. This research opens new perspectives for Parry scholarship and lays the groundwork for a better understanding of the composer’s unique role in the development of music and musical scholarship in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain.