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 Concerto listed elsewhere under Mudge's name. The concerto can in turn be linked to so-called ‘Medley Concerts’ that took place in London in 1757. The country dances, on whose material Mudge draws with obvious respect for the originals, are all Scottish tunes found in James Oswald's slightly earlier collections. Mudge's original and attractive work testifies to the great interest in Scottish, in particular ‘Highland’, music in mid-eighteenth-century London, prompting reflection on the many-sided and surprisingly intimate relationship that then existed between traditional music and art music.

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 and technological contexts, I argue that the critics’ ambivalence to its realism provides insight into the changing and contested nature of critical perception and subjectivity in Paris in the final years of the nineteenth century.

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 he also occasionally employed ♭VI to portray darker sentiments is rarely commented on and questions the degree to which the ♭VI harmony itself acts as a positive, other-worldly signifier. This article accounts for these various opposing uses and proposes that surface voice-leading details (ones that are often overlooked by Schenkerian and neo-Riemannian approaches) are key to understanding the musico-poetics of ♭VI in Schubert's songs.

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 in their roles – and by 1910 wanted singers to communicate their own interiority and ‘wilfulness’ as well. This article uses the reception of the soprano Marie Gutheil-Schoder (1874–1935) to demonstrate the growing currency of these imperatives. A controversial hire for the Hofoper, she was initially disparaged by critics as vocally ‘weak’, but the Viennese gradually ‘learnt to love this voice’ for the way in which it could be pressed into the service of the drama and her will. I explain her changing fortunes, arguing that opera-goers valued certain voices in accordance with evolving conceptions of characterization, acting technique and human subjectivity.

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 cinematic media throughout the 1910s. While Leoncavallo's opera raised a number of pressing difficulties for New York critics, Farrar's critical and popular success in Zazà points to new understandings of operatic performance at the dawn of the cinematic age.

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 shared with his fellow low-ranking comrades, suggesting that it served as a voice of solidarity and empathy. In this article, I historicize the première of the opera at the Berlin State Opera; indeed, a glance at the singers who played the central roles suggests how the characters were perceived. It reveals an intertextual web of suffering shared between Berg's traumatized soldiers, and the perverse exercise of authority. Wozzeck therefore opens up questions about the expression of ideals in post-First World War Germany: the ideal of a stoic man demanded by the army, and the ideal of a voice.

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 cantor of the world-famous Kreuzchor from 1930 until his death in 1971, used allegory rather than testimony to formulate a response to the firebombing that resonated with historical customs familiar to the city's residents. When premièred in the bombed-out Kreuzkirche, Mauersberger's music provided a communal setting to confront the effects of the air war, transforming a space of destruction into one of contemplation and mourning. Both his compositional process and the performance transformed rubble (the material aftermath of the attack) into a ruin (an aesthetic object).

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 his views both resonated with and challenged aspects of Soviet-era culture. This article traces how Neuhaus adopted the idea of self-reflective or ‘autobiographical’ art through an interdisciplinary melding of ideas from Boris Pasternak, Alexander Blok and Mikhail Vrubel. In exposing the resulting tension between his understanding of Russian and Soviet selfhood, it nuances our understanding of the cultural identities within this era. Finally, discussing this tension in relation to Neuhaus's contextualization of the artistic persona of Shostakovich, it contributes to a long-needed reappraisal of his relationship with the composer.

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 claimed that he must have been coerced into collaboration and that his address did not reflect his real views. The present essay re-examines the circumstances, arguing that the evidence of Asafiev's willing complicity is overwhelming. A close analysis of his keynote address reveals its contents to be wholly consistent with views that he had regularly expressed throughout his career, as one of the principal progenitors of an anti-modernist, ethnic nationalist and xenophobic strain in Soviet writing on music that was given forceful expression in the 1948 resolution.

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 into the ideological service of existing musical orders and power structures by musicians, policy-makers and other intermediaries. Drawing upon the social theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Georgina Born, as well as on contemporary media theory, the author argues that accounts of the disruptive agency of digital mediation are incomplete without a corresponding attention to the complex cultural mechanisms by which it is kept under control. What is at stake in the transformation of Montreal's electroacoustic tradition is not a collapse so much as a further remediation of modernist social and aesthetic principles.

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, I position the listening subject on a fulcrum of balance and imbalance essential to learning and musical practice. In the third part of this study, I concretize Feldenkrais's ideals of correct action and listening in musical practice. Using Glenn Gould and empirical work on musical practice, I explore the significance of listening between acts of playing. Listening is proposed not merely as a phenomenological form of making sense (Nancy), but as a form of self-negotiation and an enactivist and imaginative space that leads to new possibilities of thought and refinement of action.

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 by investigating the musicality of notation not in terms of its representation of musical structures, but in terms of its mediation of the social and creative agency of musicians. It is suggested that, rather than detracting from musical reality, notation composes musical cultures. This constructive work is simultaneously ontological and ethical. It is described in terms of three distinct processes, namely mobilization, entextualization and remediation. In doing so, this article presents an interdisciplinary approach to a topic that has traditionally defined the disciplinary centre of music scholarship.