In Des Canyons aux étoiles. . ., a work commissioned to celebrate the American bicentennial, Olivier Messiaen defines the United States through representations of Utah's birds and canyons. Focusing on the phenomenological power rather than the pictorial intentions of Messiaen's music, this article examines ways that Messiaen uses textural saturation and varied repetition to draw the listener into a musically mediated Bryce Canyon. The music challenges a stable subject/object relationship for the listener by promoting humility and awe within the landscape over more visually oriented touristic encounters. Simulations of immersion serve implicit political and evangelistic goals as city-dwelling listeners are invited to embrace dwelling in the natural environment as a means of revaluing faith and breaking free from what Messiaen perceived as the twin hindrances of mechanized civilization and secularism.

Composer Udo Kasemets (1919–2014) emigrated to Canada in 1951 from Estonia following the Second World War, and during the 1960s undertook a number of initiatives to mobilize experimental music in Toronto. This article investigates Canavangard, Kasemets's publication series of graphic scores which appeared between 1967 and 1970. Influenced by Marshall McLuhan's spatial theory of media, Kasemets saw the transformative potential of non-standard notational practices to recalibrate the relationships between composer, performer, and listener. Kasemets's 1963 composition Trigon, which was frequently performed by his ensemble during the decade, illuminates the connections between McLuhan and experimental music. In my analysis of the work, I argue that Trigon manifestly puts into performance many of the rhetorical strategies used by McLuhan to describe the immersive, intersensory environments of post-typographic media ecologies. Kasemets believed that abandoning standard notation would have extraordinary ramifications for musical practice going forward in the twentieth century, similar to how McLuhan saw the messianic power of electronic media to destabilize the typographic universe. Canavangard, as much more than a short-lived publication series of graphic scores, maps the convergences of music, culture, and technology in post-war Canada.

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 merits of art and popular music. Perhaps the most iconic British singer of the period, Vera Lynn provides a case study. Focusing on her first film vehicle, We'll Meet Again (1942), I explore how Lynn's character mediated the highbrow/lowbrow conflict – for example, by presenting popular music as a site of community, while disparaging art music for its minority appeal. In so doing, I argue, the film not only promoted Lynn's star persona, but also intervened in a broader debate about the value of entertainment for a nation at war.

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 with the composition, texts, and reception of Lutyens's 1946 cantata O saisons, ô châteaux! in the context of other Lutyens pieces in order to argue that the composer sought to transcend what she perceived as a complex of disadvantages in the reception of her music (both regarding her gender and composition technique): the Cantata is an essentially melodic piece of ‘magical serialism’. Rather than ‘taming’ or ‘feminizing’ her serial music, Lutyens thus carves out a place for herself as Arthur Rimbaud's magician, reflecting on the set text of O saisons, ô châteaux! and anticipating her later ‘credo’, in which she declares her music's allegiance with secret science rather than note counting or personal branding.

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, however, given that Ambient music's dominant mode of reception is selective personal consumption, not public administration. This article investigates the aesthetics of Eno's Airports, and elucidates the organizing role of the Ambient genre, within their primary reception context of personal recorded music listening. A comparison with The Black Dog's Music for Real Airports (2010) shows how Ambient music then and now reflexively affords atmospheric use by translating a sense of physical dwelling and passage into mixed musical moods. By expressing ambivalence about the reality of airports and air travel, these Ambient records characteristically convey apprehension about the technological administration of human experience – a phenomenon that includes personal recorded music listening.

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 literature was devoted to the minute detailing of its mucky creative contexts, but that didn't have to matter – and critically minded, social science-trained pop scholars usually didn't care enough to argue. Yet music sociology's first, halting steps had actually been taken in approaching the classical canon, and the movement of the 1980s and 1990s that was the New Musicology seemed radical precisely because it opened so many doors onto the social. That, then, was the situation twenty years ago, at least in the Anglophone countries: a popular music studies reaching maturity but still largely embedded in sociology and media/communications departments, and a musicology gradually transforming into a discipline in which music was much more openly reconciled with the worlds of its making.