The music of The Whole Book of Psalms (first printed in 1562) was not a product of English tradition, but a new congregational system brought home from Geneva. Psalm tunes in Edward VI’s time had been secular, iambic and based on dance rhythms; in so far as Thomas Sternhold’s metrical psalms were sung in church, they were chanted by choirs to Sarum tones. The tunes created for congregational use by

Hans Abrahamsen’s recent music has been the subject of much critical and public acclaim, with his output of the last decade finding a new directness of expression even as it incorporates and develops elements of his musical language that have remained consistent over many years. This article examines the use of compositional processes within a number of these large-scale works – Schnee (2008), Wald

Using a combination of ethnography, empirical measures of microtiming between rhythm-section musicians and ethno/musicological analyses, this article examines and measures groove in three real-world performances of the popular dance tradition of Cuban son and salsa. The findings paint a complex picture of groove that is shaped by rhythmic-harmonic structure, shared concepts of timing, individual preferences

Although royal entries have long been studied by scholars, those undertaken by nobles and other political figures have generally attracted less attention. This is particularly true in musicological literature, a fact undoubtedly attributable to the paucity of surviving documentation on this topic. Yet music often played an important part in these spectacles, both by underlining the dignitary’s status

Naomi André’s Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement is a call for recognition and inclusion. Over the course of nearly 300 pages, André covers a range of subjects, from long-forgotten concert performances, to opera, Broadway and opera film, to contemporary operatic composition and practice. As she does, she moves between the United States and South Africa – a striking way of approaching her material

In the decades spanning the turn of the twentieth century Italian opera singing underwent a profound transformation and became ‘modern’. I explore the formative elements of this modernity and its long-term effects on the way we sing today through the paradigmatic case of the tenor Enrico Caruso. I frame Caruso’s vocal evolution within the rise of verismo opera, comparing selected recordings, reviews

Der Meister von Nürnberg is a silent film adaptation of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg remembered chiefly for the protests it generated on its release in 1927. Several authors refer to it briefly in reception histories of Die Meistersinger, but the film has not yet attracted sustained attention either within Wagner scholarship or within literature on opera and film. Der Meister von Nürnberg

As Emma Hanna notes in the opening line of Sounds of War, ‘In parallel with studies of the poetry of the Great War, Britain’s musical history of the conflict has focused on a small group of elite composers’ (p. 1). Indeed, musical interest in the war has tended to focus on the likes of Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth just as literary enquiry has traditionally centred on

This article explores the politics of performing Wagner outdoors, focusing on the Waldoper in Sopot, Poland, and its operations under the Third Reich. Festival literature suggests that the Reich combined climatic deterministic logic with established open-air theatrical practice to implicate experiencing Wagnerian sounds outdoors as inculcating völkisch character in Poles, positioning the festival within

This article argues that songwriting can be an autobiographical activity. I trace a long-standing mistrust of self-expression in popular music through a branch of scholarship fixated with performance and personification, demonstrating its underlying affinities with post-structuralism and modernist dreams of impersonality. What we have lost as a result of this undue insistence on mediation is an awareness

This article argues that songwriting can be an autobiographical activity. I trace a long-standing mistrust of self-expression in popular music through a branch of scholarship fixated with performance and personification, demonstrating its underlying affinities with post-structuralism and modernist dreams of impersonality. What we have lost as a result of this undue insistence on mediation is an awareness

This article explores the politics of performing Wagner outdoors, focusing on the Waldoper in Sopot, Poland, and its operations under the Third Reich. Festival literature suggests that the Reich combined climatic deterministic logic with established open-air theatrical practice to implicate experiencing Wagnerian sounds outdoors as inculcating völkisch character in Poles, positioning the festival within

In 1863, Alexander Dargomyzhsky hatched plans for a gallery of humorous fantasias that would depict nationalities residing on the western border of the Russian Empire, including Baltic Germans, Poles, Ukrainians and Finns. On the one hand, this gallery of satirical portraits was an effective way of capturing the attention of domestic audiences, since the western borderlands were at the forefront of

In the 1890s, two musicians travelled between Britain and South Africa. One was the first examiner to travel abroad to examine for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, Franklin Taylor. At the same time as Taylor’s arrival in the Cape in 1894, a black South African composer, John Knox Bokwe, prepared to republish a tonic sol-fa hymnal containing many hymns that eventually became popular

This article examines Mahler’s Fourth Symphony and its role in what the composer called his ‘perfectly self-contained tetralogy’. Previous explanations for this phrase include the first four symphonies’ shared song quotations and ideological content, but the dramas of ancient Dionysian festivals present a better model: three serious tragedies and a comic satyr play, a performance grouping also known

The Regordosa-Turull wax cylinder collection, held at the Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona, is unique among early recording collections. It contains 358 cylinders recorded by the textile industrialist Ruperto Regordosa, mostly at his Barcelona home, featuring prominent Spanish and non-Spanish singers of opera and zarzuela, as well as the composer Isaac Albéniz. This article aims to establish the

Sibelius’s only balletic pantomime, Scaramouche, composed in 1913, remains one of his least-known works, even though it is one of his longest dramatic scores and belongs to his period of compositional re-evaluation. This article explores the pantomime in the context of its first production, performed in 1922 in Denmark and 1924 in Sweden. It argues that the pantomime’s reception both illuminates the

Cornelius Cardew named his monumental graphic score Treatise after Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early philosophical masterpiece Tractatus logico-philosophicus, and this well-known fact has engendered speculation about whether there might be other connections between Cardew’s composition and Wittgenstein’s book. Previous commentaries have focused on possible allusions to the Tractatus in the visual imagery

Umkhosi wokukhahlela is an annual ceremony in the KwaBhaca Great Kingdom (Eastern Cape, South Africa) that celebrates virginity among young women and girls. Not regularly practiced for decades, it has recently made a comeback, having been strategically adopted by King Madzikane II as a tool of empowerment in the fight against the HIV pandemic, the rise in teen pregnancies, rape and school dropouts

This article takes a site-specific, interactive sound installation called Pleasure Garden as a space for thinking about contemporary forms of musical experience. I develop a relational account of the ‘coreception’ of Pleasure Garden, centred not on listening subjects, but distributed across audience members, artists, researchers and the more-than-human assemblage of the installation itself. I also

ABSTRACT The ubiquity and diversity of notational practices in music suggest that notation is a significant part of human beings’ musicking behaviour. However, it is difficult to address its function since the usual conception of notation in music scholarship is at odds with studying performance in the first place. This article presents a methodological outline for an ethnomusicology of music notation

On 16 October 1955, in the final concert in that year’s Donaueschinger Musiktage (the sixth festival since it had been relaunched by the head of music at the radio station Südwestfunk (SWF), Heinrich Strobel), the SWF orchestra, conducted by Hans Rosbaud, gave the world première of Iannis Xenakis’s Metastaseis (1953–4).1 The work embodied a revolutionary approach to composition, arguably anticipated

ABSTRACT The voice of Berg’s Wozzeck has been characterized by his Sprechgesang, heard as manifestation of his abnormality or even ‘hysteria’. However, Wozzeck often sounds more lyrical and emotive in relation to his oppressors, whose sense of authority is undermined by their caricatured vocal lines and vocal types. Rather than representing a ‘broken’ voice, Wozzeck’s Sprechgesang is reserved for moments

ABSTRACT Geraldine Farrar’s performances in Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Zazà (1900) at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House in the early 1920s were widely acclaimed as an unexpected triumph for the soprano. This article examines Farrar’s Zazà in the context of New York’s post-war operatic crisis, the concurrent emergence of Hollywood cinema and Farrar’s own highly prominent movements between operatic and

ABSTRACT The venerable founder of Soviet musicology Boris Asafiev aroused widespread dismay by his actions in 1948 after the promulgation of a Central Committee resolution condemning the USSR’s leading composers: he not only acquiesced in his appointment as chairman of the Composers’ Union, but agreed to give a keynote address endorsing the resolution at its first national congress. His admirers have

ABSTRACT In studies of memory politics in post-war Germany, the role that music played in responding to the Allied bombing of Dresden on 13–14 February 1945 has been overlooked. This article examines one of the first musical reactions to this traumatic event: Rudolf Mauersberger’s mourning motet Wie liegt die Stadt so wüst (How Deserted Lies the City, 1945). I argue that Mauersberger, who served as

ABSTRACT This article examines ongoing efforts to associate the decline of the modernist electroacoustic music tradition with the rise of digital technologies. Illustrative material is drawn from ethnographic and archival fieldwork conducted in 2011 and 2012 in the Canadian city of Montreal. The author surveys examples of institutions, careers, performances and works showing how the digital is brought

Amid the storeys of closed stacks on Paris’s rue de Louvois sits a short, stubby stick, tenderly ensconced in a box. A souvenir of a trip to Assisi, it bears the handwritten label: ‘exact colour of the Franciscans’ robes!’1 The stick, along with the rest of the Fonds Olivier Messiaen–Yvonne Loriod (150 linear metres of manuscripts and notebooks, photographs and letters, books and posters, the accumulated

ABSTRACT In fin-de-siècle Vienna frustrations with ‘lifelessness’ began to boil over. Unlike previous generations of opera-goers, however, the Viennese did not so much fear singers becoming automata as desire dramatic performance that foregrounded humanness and subjectivity. Critics increasingly fetishized vitality – manifested in characters with dramatic integrity and singers capable of nestling themselves

These two collections are a welcome addition to the growing literature which explores how musicians, repertories, practices and ideas have gained their places in the world. The individual essays explore a complex and evolving network of technologies (principally, but not exclusively, print culture), intermediaries (such as publishers) and processes (advertising, marketing and performance). Emily H

ABSTRACT A previously unnoticed concerto for two horns and strings published anonymously in London probably in late 1757 or 1758 is attributable to Richard Mudge (1718–63), a clergyman-composer best known for his Six Concertos in Seven Parts. The print names it A Concerto Principally Form’d upon Subjects Taken from Three Country Dances, and there is evidence to suggest that it is identical to the Medley

ABSTRACT Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus (1888–1964) was one of the Soviet era’s most iconic musicians. Settling in Russia reluctantly, he was dismayed by the policies of the Soviet state and unable to engage with contemporary narratives of selfhood in the wake of the Revolution. In creating a new aesthetic field that defined him as Russian rather than Soviet, Neuhaus embodied an ambiguous territory whereby

ABSTRACT Composers’ increasing and increasingly evocative use of chromatic mediants during the first few decades of the nineteenth century is arguably a hallmark of early Romantic harmony. The apparent association in Schubert’s songs between ♭VI and the representation of utopia, fantasy, reverie, dreams and other positive, other-worldly states has been noted by many scholars. However, the fact that

ABSTRACT This study addresses listening as a hinge between therapeutic and musical contexts. In the first two sections I examine the productive confluence of Jean-Luc Nancy’s thought and Moshe Feldenkrais’s somatic practice. I show that the ‘subject’ is configured as both embodied and enactivist. Drawing on Nancy’s work, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud and educational and developmental child psychology

It is no surprise to anyone that The Simpsons, the longest-running series on television, has made history. But they truly made music history in the episode ‘Lost Our Lisa’ from Season 9 (first aired in 1998). Lisa Simpson, the intellectual in the family, and her ne’er-do-well father, Homer, have broken into the Springsonian Museum at night and are exploring the Egyptian exhibition. They stop in front

ABSTRACT The ‘réalisme’ of Massenet’s La Navarraise divided critics at its belated Parisian première on 3 October 1895. While the opera has typically been read as a straightforward attempt at French verismo, this article suggests a more complex set of ways in which modernity and the modern world shaped critical perceptions of and responses to realism. Placing La Navarraise within its wider cultural

In the summer of 2017, an opinion piece in The Guardian by the writer and theatre-maker Stella Duffy attracted an unusual degree of interest among British musicians and musicologists.1 Duffy’s piece was prompted by the publication of a new report, ‘Towards Cultural Democracy’, the outcome of a research project at King’s College London.2 Noting the report’s starting point in ‘the deep and widespread

ABSTRACT This article seeks to determine the extent to which timbral and textural concerns inform the musical substance of Debussy’s Jeux. Of particular interest are passages in which foreground detail effaces itself in the interests of orchestral qualities, those where an overabundance of surface detail is preconfigured so as to maximize orchestral efficacy, and sections where a more traditional distinction

Abstract In 1850, after five years of planning, Liszt began composing music for his Italian opera, Sardanapalo, after Byron. It was central to his ambition to attain status as a European composer, but he abandoned the project halfway through. La Mara (1911), Humphrey Searle (1954) and others declared the manuscript fragmentary and partially illegible, but in 2016 this verdict was categorically overturned

Abstract As lyrical refrain forms flourished beginning in the twelfth century and increased attention was paid to the mise en page of song in manuscript sources, scribes faced the dilemma of how to cue frequent repetition of poetry and music. Owing to a lack of shared conventions among these scribes, the signalling of repetition varied greatly among sources, the resulting inconsistencies furnishing

ABSTRACT ‘Che soave zeffiretto’, the letter duettino sung by the Countess and Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro, has achieved iconic status as a perfect example of the transcendental beauty of Mozart’s music. An examination of the extant sources suggests that the composer and his librettist regarded it as a key moment in the opera: the crux of a developing relationship between the two women. A late change

Edward Klorman’s excellent study Mozart’s Music of Friends is a wide-ranging interpretation of Mozart’s chamber music that draws together many strands of scholarship primarily in order to nuance our understanding of these works as they may exist in performance. Klorman offers much food for thought here, to both scholars and performers. I hope his contribution will be digested and applied especially

I published my first article in an academic journal in 2004, while working on my Ph.D. dissertation in media studies. The article was entitled ‘I Can See Tomorrow in Your Dance: A Study of Dance Dance Revolution and Music Video Games’.1 I was interested in how ‘DDR’ fan culture revealed some of the cultural and technological possibilities that emerged when music and dance became the means of interaction

Abstract This article discusses the function of Vincenzo Albrici and Charles II’s Italian ensemble at the English Restoration court. The article cites newly discovered archival evidence to suggest that Albrici arrived at the English court in 1664 to become the leader of an exclusive ensemble performing Italian chamber music. The employment of the Italian ensemble imitated Mazarin’s patronage of Italian

Why did a tradition of learned instrumental polyphony emerge in Europe and not, for example, in Mesoamerica? Similarly, why has the music of Bach earned a status unrivalled within the context of global musical cultures while, for example, Aboriginal and other indigenous musical traditions worldwide face the possibility of extinction?1 Kindred questions were central to academic musical thought around

Writing on the hundredth anniversary of Howells’s birth in 1892 and barely a decade after his death in 1983, the critic Michael White identified an issue familiar in twentieth-century music (and to a lesser extent in the other arts), and one which has been particularly acute for British music of this period. While much of the most conspicuously innovative and mould-breaking art music of the first half

A perception of a crisis within the humanities is far from new. At least since the late 1960s, higher-education institutions in Britain and America have struggled against a recurrent ‘crisis of legitimation’.2 Although the contours of the wider political, economic and social landscapes have changed significantly in the intervening decades, the underlying source of anxiety has remained fairly consistent:

ABSTRACT Giulio Rospigliosi and Stefano Landi’s 1634 revisions of Il Sant’Alessio for the Barberini stage expanded the role of comedy within the opera. These revisions reveal an important juncture in the history of religious comedy and lay the foundation for the development of a comic rubric for the still-developing operatic genre. This article examines the legend of St Alexis and its potential for

Abstract British music-theatre works of the 1960s and early 1970s largely avoided direct engagement with contemporary political topics. Intriguing in this light is Michael Hall’s recent proposition that Brecht’s music theatre set the terms for younger British composers’ experiments with the genre. Brecht proved a complicated model, however, because of composers’ anxieties about music’s capability to

ABSTRACT Focusing on two influential broadcasts staged for British television in 1963–4, this article traces transatlantic attitudes towards blues music in order to explore the constitutive relationship between race, spectatorship and performativity. During these programmes, I claim, a form of mythic history is translated into racial nature. Ultimately, I argue that blues revivalism coerced African

ABSTRACT The elevated status of Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers over the last century provides the starting point for an enquiry into which factors render it so durable. In going against the grain of recent attempts to discern the possible liturgical context for its original performance, this study claims that the collection as a whole (components of which undoubtedly had liturgical origins) can only be

ABSTRACT The article discusses various historiographical problems created by Soviet music and, more broadly, music under the so-called ‘totalitarian’ regimes for the conventional modernism-driven narrative of the twentieth century. It reviews a number of existing challenges to the dominant narrative within musicology and related fields such as art and architectural history, and it proposes ways in

ABSTRACT This article explores the content, scope and impact of an annual contemporary music festival in South Africa, the first of which was presented in 2000 by New Music South Africa (NMSA), the South African chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). It explores the New Music Indabas of 2000–02 against the background of the political and cultural transformations that characterized

From the late sixteenth century to our own time, depictions of Queen Elizabeth I and her court have granted a prominent place to music. On film, stage and audio recordings as well as in documentary accounts, music has been woven into the pageantry of Elizabethan court life and showcased the queen’s and leading court figures’ refined taste and participation in the legendary native flowering of the arts

In 1826, the violinist Karl Holz declared that op. 130 was his favourite work in Beethoven’s set of Galitzin quartets. Beethoven rejected the premises of this judgment: ‘Each in its own way! Art does not permit us to stand still. You will notice a new type of part writing, and there is no less imagination than ever before, thank God.’1 This remark is usually interpreted in terms of Beethoven’s quest

ABSTRACT One of the less studied aspects of post-war musical life is private sponsorship of American modernist composers, such as that by the Fromm Music Foundation (FMF) established in 1952. Using unpublished letters and documents from the FMF archives at Harvard and interviews with people who worked with the founder, Paul Fromm, this article discusses how Fromm's involvement in his foundation led

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of music in nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts of medieval Italian literature and its relation to the construction of Italian national identity both during and long after the Risorgimento. Tracing music's role in the writings of Giosuè Carducci, Vincenzo De Bartholomaeis and Aurelio Roncaglia, it argues that music somewhat paradoxically became entangled

ABSTRACT Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy arrived at a crucial moment for new opera. It premièred in 1968 at the Aldeburgh Festival, the home of a vision of British opera that Punch and Judy seemed actively to confront. However, Punch and Judy also engaged closely with operatic traditions and institutions, and while its Aldeburgh première is remembered as a scandalous provocation, a closer look at this

ABSTRACT Although philosophical and biographical accounts of Nietzsche and Wagner abound, the musical issues at stake in the late text Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner, 1888) have rarely been addressed within their wider cultural context. This article explores the nineteenth-century concepts of decadence and degeneration as relevant for understanding the ambivalence of Nietzsche’s late critique

ABSTRACT The question of what happens when a composer alters a poet’s poetic cycle haunts examinations of many song cycles and has proven especially problematic for Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe. The long-held view that Schumann crafted a clear plot from Heine’s non-narrative Lyrisches Intermezzo has recently been questioned in favour of a view of the cycle as an incoherent fragment. Using the tools