This article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of ‘the contemporary’ along with formal differences between contemporary music and contemporary art. Contemporary art emerges from the radical transformations of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that have led to post-conceptual art – a generic art beyond specific mediums that prioritizes discursive meaning and social process – while

Drawing upon Rancière's argument that aesthetics instigates politics, Latour's rethinking of agency as relational, and Ortiz's work on Afro-Cuban music aesthetics, this article explores how the experience of aesthetic pleasure in Cuban timba grooves makes politics audible and affective in novel ways. Through a combination of ethnographic and musical analyses of Havana D'Primera's performance of ‘Pasaporte’

One dominant issue in the writing of music histories is the question of how (or indeed whether) a musician's life and work can be interwoven convincingly. In recent years, music biographers have begun to reassess the historical legacies of many significant musicians with this issue in mind, but their critical reflections have for the most part focused on composers. This article seeks to transfer some

This article addresses an emerging phenomenon in which Brazilian popular musicians have begun to depart from popular song (canção popular) in favour of free improvisation in response to rising authoritarianism. As a case study, I examine the creative project Carta Branca, which brings together popular and experimental musicians from styles such as MPB and hip-hop to perform freely improvised concerts

In the foreword to the first issue of Popular Music and Society, published in 1971, Ray B. Browne wrote that, ‘until very recently … academics, with a few notable exceptions, were by and large indifferent to the role of popular music in their world’; he then recounted a rejection he had received from an academic journal, whose editor had written that, ‘although this might be interesting, we both had

Inspired by Brittany Howard's solo album Jaime (2019), this contribution creates a conversation between music studies, queer studies, African American Literature, and memoir to think about lived ways of understanding, performing, and participating in music to create a future of inclusion. I argue that Black queer strategies of listening and musicking contributes to a new layer of music, the dream space

This contribution reflects on the historical and present condition of the academic field of popular music studies' relationship to the non-academic public, particularly within the context of increased institutional demands for scholarly ‘public engagement'. I begin by discussing various reasons why a continued, sustained engagement with non-academic voices and communities should remain a central priority

The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic rise in dissertations, theses, and other academic publications exploring hip-hop music, while college courses on hip-hop history have become commonplace. The growing prominence of hip-hop music in our curricular and research agendas, however, does not necessarily make the study of music at colleges and universities more inclusive. In fact, the increasing

This Afterward reflects upon the three articles of the symposium by Francesca Royster, Jack Hamilton, and Loren Kajiwaka. The author considers the contemporary ramifications of popular music studies being overlooked by the field of musicology at large in the United States.

If the ideal artistic collaboration is one of shared vision, open communication, and exquisite professionalism then Martha Graham and Carlos Chávez strayed far from it in the making of Dark Meadow (1946). As this article documents, their relationship was full of antagonism, misunderstanding, disdainful gossip, and regret on both sides. Three sources of conflict are examined: 1) a misunderstanding between

The textbook historical account of post-war New Music describes a logical and radical succession from Schoenberg to Webern to the Darmstadt School. Against this narrative of inevitability, I provide a more contingent account of the institutionalization of a particular discourse of New Music in the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe. What is contingent here is not so much why or how certain

Often described as a social pathology, populism currently finds virulent expression in political movements across the world. Unlike the recognition that involves mutuality and respect, populism is typically founded on misrecognition; it pursues alterity, essentializes identity, offers ‘protection’ against the threat of hostile ‘others’. Often the social consequences are tragic. Music, however, can

This article focuses on the collaboration between Colombian black accordionist Carmelo Torres, the most renown performer of accordion cumbia, and Bogota-based band Los Toscos, a group of academically trained white-mestizo musicians. Considering Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos as representative of the current state of cumbia's global circulation and in dialogue with the growing corpus of scholarly works

In 1965, the Australian government and Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT) debated which performing arts ensembles should represent Australia at the London Commonwealth Arts Festival. The AETT proposed the newly formed Aboriginal Theatre , comprising songmakers, musicians, and dancers from the Tiwi Islands, northeast Arnhem Land and the Daly River. The government declined, and instead sent

Abstract Taking its theoretical orientation from Sherry Ortner's distinction between ‘power’ and ‘projects’, this article considers the relationship between local artistic projects and the cultures in which they participate. I focus on Pleasure Garden , a collaborative project that spans site-specific installations, concerts and an album. Exploring a wide range of issues at stake in the creative process

I take an intensive look in this article at localised cultural change that nevertheless serves as an applied instance of broader late-twentieth changes. Focusing mostly on British, white, and male musicians and music writers active in the improvised and experimental music scenes of the UK (and, to a lesser extent, US and Europe) across the 1970s and early-1980s, I identify clear shifts in taste, attitude

For Dmitri Shostakovich, reaching the heights of the Soviet musical establishment proved easier than staying there. He triumphed with his Fifth Symphony of 1937, which marked the composer's return to official favour after the denunciation of his second opera and third ballet. Following that success, Shostakovich faced the problem of the sequel: whether or not, in the Sixth Symphony, to repeat, refute

Despite Nono's and Carter's opposing views, divergent compositional aesthetic, and applicability of twelve-tone music, the two composers shared their admiration for the works of the Second Viennese School. In this article, I examine Carter's 1957 and Nono's 1956 analyses of Schoenberg's pivotal twelve-tone work: Variations for Orchestra , Op. 31 (1926–28). The study offers a rare opportunity to look

This article demonstrates how migration formed a process of memory construction in the work and thought of Russian emigre composer Arthur Lourie (1891–1966). It analyses Lourie’s song cycle Recollection of Petersburg , composed over two decades and across four countries, providing close readings of music and poetry and exploring the network of intertextual connections the cycle activates. Lourie has

In order to assess Helmut Lachenmann's characterization of (his) music as an ‘existential experience’ this article focuses on a specific aspect of many of his compositions: stretches of near-silence and minimized musical activity such as reduced dynamics and gestures which contrasts the surrounding material. I argue that in the case of his early vocal compositions Consolation I and II (1967 and 1968)

We are now reaching the last flurry of half-century commemorations of the 1960s. What is striking in these backwards glances – most recently, fifty years since 1967’s Summer of Love, and fifty years since ‘1968’ – is the truncation of events, the conflation of ideas, the simplification of meaning. Years and eras are impossible to encapsulate in sound bites or longer narratives of public memorialization

In 2013, trucks and vans were driving across London, bearing the message ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.’ These mobile billboards declared the number of arrests that had taken place ‘in your area’ in the previous week and provided a number to which people could text the message ‘HOME’ to initiate voluntary repatriation. In 2016, Theresa May, who had organised this scheme as home secretary

This article explores how human curation and algorithmic recommendation are figured in cloud-based streaming platforms. In promoting their services as alternatives to illicit file-sharing, platforms such as Spotify, Deezer, and Apple Music have long touted the access they provide to a massive database of music. Yet the effectiveness of appeals to musical plenitude have been thrown into doubt, as high

Work on this article began as a contribution to a wider discussion of twentieth-century music theatre, and in particular a genre in the category of twentieth-century musical monodramas – one-act staged monologues with, or in music for, one performer.1 My current research focuses on the genesis and performance tradition of works composed for solo female singer, and raises questions about the creative

With the appearance of opera videos in 2013 (DVD) and 2015 (YouTube), Paul Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1907) has been revived for twenty-first-century audiences. Not only has this formerly obscure work migrated to a mass-media landscape of personalized digital consumption, but its cultural recontextualization has also been extended to the interpretations staged in those opera videos. Both challenge

This article investigates music in the modern transmedial franchise. Popular culture franchises flow across different forms of media, taking the audience, and often the music, with them. Music plays an important role in articulating and developing textual relationships, while adapting to the possibilities of each particular medium. To focus on the role of music, a case study that emphasizes audio is

Wolfgang Rihm's is one of the more radical – which is to say ‘deep’ and ‘rooted’ – relationships towards tonality among all post-war composers. In this article, I concentrate on the role psychosis plays in this relationship, arguing that tonality for Rihm often assumes the operations of what Jacques Lacan called a symbolic order: a network of laws and codes which sustain the world of subjects and others

Soon after Debussy's death in March 2018, Stravinsky began work on a memorial, the Symphonies d'instruments a vent (1920). This piece was to become iconic both for music-theoretical reflection on modern approaches to musical time and for musicological archaeologies of Stravinsky's debts to ‘Russian traditions’. Along both avenues, particular emphasis has long been given to the work's closing chorale

It is tolerably well known that Gerard Grisey's first instrument was the accordion, but little has been written about the influence the pioneering spectral composer's main instrument had on his compositional language. The decade of the 1960s was marked by the centrality of the accordion and saw the completion of his first youthful compositional essays, most of which were scored for the accordion. It

Following the aesthetics of pure continuity in the late 1970s, Grisey moved on to compose for unpitched percussion in Tempus ex Machina, focusing on pure rhythm. Shortly afterwards he elaborated on his theory of temporality in a talk and article of the same title; one decade later, he included Tempus as the first movement of Le Noir de l’Etoile. Grisey insisted on the significance of the perception

Can we any longer usefully speak of spectral music, beyond a very particular moment in Paris in the 1970s? Though the label still has a currency, the validity of the term has long been disputed even by its key practitioners. Gérard Grisey preferred to speak of liminal music, music on a threshold, and of spectralism as an attitude rather than a set of techniques. Yet a shared curiosity about the inner

What do we mean by ‘twentieth-century music’? And how are we to square this with the musics of a twenty-first century that is now nearing the end of its second decade? These and other questions are salient for a journal that identifies the former century in its title yet regards the latter as equally within its remit. Just how are we to think the two centuries together? Should we consider the music

When discussing the relationship between popular music and social-political change in the long 1960s, historians and critics have tended to fluctuate between two opposing poles. On the one hand, there is Arthur Marwick's approach, echoed in Jon Savage's recent book 1966 : The Year the Decade Exploded. In Marwick's cross-national survey, he examines social change in the West during the ‘Long Sixties’

For over ten years, Los Angeles arts patron Betty Freeman (1921–2009) welcomed composers, performers, scholars, patrons, and invited guests into her home for a series of monthly musicales that were known as ‘Salotto’. In this article, I analyse Freeman’s musicales within a sociological framework of gender and what Randall Collins calls ‘interaction rituals’. I contextualize these events, which took

This article considers several prominent pieces of minimalism in their movement from primary sound recording to secondary transcription. In place of the score-based formalism of much musicological scholarship on minimalism, I draw on my own archival work and interviews to consider the frequency of transcriptions of minimalism, as well as the politico-historical aspects of minimalism's development that

Elisabeth Lutyens's music of the 1940s and 1950s provides one important, but frequently overlooked, link between British music and modernism before the so-called Manchester School. I argue that the main reason that the composer and her music have not yet received much attention is that early twentieth-century modernism, as it is commonly understood, has been gendered masculine. This article engages

Popular music and society had been thought inseparable long before the union was made official, at first in the title of pop's original academic journal (1971), later in that of a much-taught textbook (1995). In many minds at late century, sociologies of music were sociologies of pop: Western art music's true believers could still easily imagine that repertoire existing on another plane – the historical

By the outbreak of the Second World War in Britain, critics had spent several decades negotiating the supposed distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, as recent scholarship has shown. What has received comparatively little attention is how the demands of wartime living changed the stakes of the debate. This article addresses this lacuna, exploring how war invited a reassessment of the relative

In the liner notes to his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), Brian Eno (1948–) defined Ambient music in contradistinction to Muzak's ‘derivative’ instrumental pop arrangements. Ambient music's historians and critics have often followed Eno by describing Ambient music as an alternative to conventional ‘background’ or ‘programmed’ music for commercial spaces. Such descriptions can be misleading

Reel-to-reel recordings and 15 kilocycle telelinks converge in Maryanne Amacher's telematic installation series City-Links (1967–81). As long-duration recordings of urban sites, City-Links queries the musicality of ambient sound on tape, a question of critical importance to many composers of the period. But as expressly telematic tape, City-Links embeds these recordings within a transforming US telecommunications

Susan Rogers has lived many musical lives. As a faculty member at Berklee College of Music, she directs the Berklee Music Cognition and Cognition Laboratory, expanding her research in auditory memory, which she began during her doctoral studies with Daniel Levitin at McGill University. She also teaches analogue studio production, drawing on two decades of experience in recording studios. She is especially

Magnetic tape follows the contours of the twentieth century in striking ways, from the overtly sonic and musical to less obvious political and social transformations. This introductory article sets the tone for this special issue, an effort to connect discrete histories of tape through a focus on its materialities. We posit the existence of a phonographic regime that coheres around a loose set of assumptions

Sonic traces of the Third Reich have held significant memorial power in post-war Germany. This article traces three works that sample one of the most well-known recordings from the Nazi period: Joseph Goebbels's declaration of Total War, delivered on 18 February 1943, and broadcast on newsreel and radio the following week. In both message and material, this recording epitomizes Friedrich Kittler's

Listeners of a certain age tend to think that the cassette tape fell out of favour sometime during the 1990s, but is experiencing a revival of sorts as curious Millennials discover the pleasures of mixtapes and decaying media. But cassette tapes have been in constant use since their invention in 1963. Outside of North America and Western Europe, the tape is still the predominant phonographic medium

The early history of tape can be and has been told in a number of ways: as a byproduct of fascism; as a serendipitous outcome of signals intelligence and the spoils of the Second World War; or as a synergistic result of American capitalism at the hands of Bing Crosby and engineer John Mullin. Instead, I consider how Fritz Pfleumer's ‘sounding paper’ – inspired by his work in cigarette manufacturing

The score of Steve Reich's Violin Phase specifies that the performer is to recapitulate aspects of the composer's creative process in the studio. Working with a four-channel tape recorder, the violinist and a sound engineer are given detailed directions for creating the basic tape loop that generates the performance tape used in live performance. And yet – no doubt due to the scarcity of appropriate

In his ethnomusicological writings and lectures, Bela Bartok describes folk music as ‘a natural product, just like the various forms of animal and vegetable life’ and elaborates this view, going on to describe a collection of developmental processes modelled explicitly on biological evolution. In this article, I characterize Bartok's evolutionary model by laying bare the taxonomies and genealogies

Until the present article, Massenet's influence upon the music of Olivier Messiaen has remained entirely unexplored. During the 1930 and 1940s, Messiaen professed his love for the music of Massenet and regularly used Massenet as a model in his teaching materials. Several examples of the way in which Messiaen selects and transforms passages from Massenet's Werther and Manon are considered. The inclusion

In the last few decades, established narratives of twentieth-century music – with Schoenberg and his disciples at the centre and others on the periphery – have come under considerable fire: some have denounced the modernist canon itself as narrow and esoteric, while others have sought to restore marginalized ‘minor’ composers to a supposedly rightful centrality. In this article, I revisit the mid-century

The musical comedy film was perhaps a surprising genre to appear and flourish in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, a decade traditionally associated with the grimmer realities of Stalin's ruthless consolidation of power, show trials, and purges. Despite (and in many ways because of) this, the musical comedy became quite popular, with audiences and officials alike. Its creation did not, however, proceed

This article considers three science fiction films, released in 2013–14, featuring Scarlett Johansson: Her (dir. Spike Jonze), Lucy (dir. Luc Besson), and Under the Skin (dir. Jonathan Glazer). It suggests that to engage with the phenomenon of voice in imaginative and productive ways it is necessary to slide over a disciplinary divide and address more explicitly the musicality of speech. In my main

This article examines constructions of national musical identity in early twentieth-century Britain by exploring and contextualizing hitherto neglected discourses and practices concerning the production of an ‘English’ singing voice. Tracing the origins and development of ideas surrounding native vocal performance and pedagogy, I reconstruct a culture of English singing as a backdrop against which

Van Morrison's live version of his song ‘Cyprus Avenue’ on the 1974 album It's Too Late to Stop Now provides an example of the authority of the singer's voice and of how it leads and demands submission from musicians, songs, and audience. Morrison's voice constantly suggests that it is reflecting important experience and can be understood both as an attempt to capture something and as a post-hoc witnessing