The music of the twelfth-century song Dulcis Jesu memoria has been almost entirely neglected in modern scholarship, though its text (or rather a version of it) is well known in settings by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century composers. This article presents a new edition and translation of the song, and seeks to interpret its music and text as partners in an exegetical whole. The song's complicated relationship with the sequence genre proves a fruitful backdrop against which to interpret both text and melody, and analysis of the song's only notated manuscript source leads to new conclusions about the purpose to which the song may have been put by the manuscript's first readers.

As well over a century of reception history attests, qualities of memory, reminiscence and nostalgia seem to constitute some of the most characteristic attributes of Schubert's music. Yet despite the undoubted allure of this subject and its popularity in recent years, the means by which music may suggest the actions of memory and temporal consciousness are often unclear or under-theorized in scholarship. This article examines how such nostalgic subjectivities are constructed in Schubert's music and the language used to describe it. Rather than overturning the now habitual associations between Schubert and memory, the article seeks to question more deeply how they are, and indeed might better be, supported. It looks principally at the String Quartet in A minor, D.804 (‘Rosamunde’), and draws further on such staples of the Schubertian memory discourse as the Quartet in G, D.887, and the Piano Sonata in B♭, D.960.

This article explores the music of Yiddish theatre in early twentieth-century New York by considering multiple adaptations of Russian Jewish author Sholem Aleichem's 1888 novel Stempenyu, about a klezmer violinist, which was transformed into two theatrical productions in 1907 and 1929, and finally inspired a three-movement recital work for accompanied violin by Joseph Achron. The multiple versions of Stempenyu present the eponymous musician as an allegory for the ambivalent role of the shtetl – the predominantly Jewish small town of Eastern Europe – in defining diasporic Jewish life in Europe and America, and as a medium for the sonic representation of shtetl culture as it was reformulated in the memories of the first generations of Jewish immigrants. The variations in the evocations of Eastern European klezmer in these renderings of Stempenyu indicate complex changes in the ways Jewish immigrants and their children conceived of their connection to Eastern Europe over four decades. The paper concludes by viewing changes in the symbolic character type of the shtetl fiddler in its most famous and recent manifestation, in the stage and screen musical Fiddler on the Roof.

While biographical studies of British composers' experiences in the Second World War abound, little attention has been paid to how the demands of ‘total’ war impacted on music's ideological status. This article sheds new light on how composers and critics negotiated the problematic relationship between art music and politics in this period. John Ireland's Epic March – a BBC commission that caused the composer considerable anxiety – provides a case study. Drawing first on the correspondence charting the lengthy genesis of the work, and then on the work's critical reception, I consider how Ireland and his audiences sought to reconcile the conflicting political and aesthetic demands of this commission. With its conventional musical style, Epic March offers an example of a ‘middlebrow’ attempt to bridge the gap between art and politics.