From 1976, the works of the Venetian composer Luigi Nono (1924–90) are marked by a noticeable change in both his philosophical and his political outlook. What results is a decade (1980–9) of compositions that feature poetry in librettos, live electronics, the spatialization of sound and a prominent use of microtonal pitches. Together these create completely novel soundscapes that are noticeably different from his previous output. This article will examine a particular influence – the philosophy of Martin Heidegger – in the creation of the 1984 piece for large ensemble A Carlo Scarpa. The purpose of this is not only to allow for an insight into the music and structure of A Carlo Scarpa, but also to illuminate how philosophical and political ideas can be represented within the craft of composition, and the new paths of thinking that guided Nono’s artistic output during the 1980s.

This article illustrates, with particular focus on Rolando Chaparro’s rock fusion album Bohemio (2011), the way in which music operates in expressing Paraguayan national, racial and class identity. It first reviews the literature on music and identity generally, as well as more specifically in relation to Paraguay. It then explores expressions of nationalism and paraguayidad (Paraguayanness) in folkloric ‘popular’ musics (música popular) and the concept of raza guaraní (a widespread belief in a common ancestry based on Spanish and Guaraní ethnic identity) in the construction, maintenance and expression of identity. Finally, it examines the Agustín Barrios revivals in Paraguay and people’s class consciousness as it is expressed in Paraguayan guitar music culture.

Between 1963 and 1966, John Cale, Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and a handful of other collaborators rehearsed together on a daily basis. Held since then in the archive at Young and Zazeela’s Church Street apartment in New York City, the tapes of the Theatre of Eternal Music have become obscure objects of fascination and mystery for experimental music fans. They have also been at the centre of disputes over the authorial propriety of the drones that they record. This paper offers a material history of those tapes as they circulate online. By tracking and organizing the available bootlegs, I trace the ensemble’s changing sonic self-conception as it moved from a composer-led ensemble supporting Young’s saxophone improvisations to an egalitarian collective constituted in its dedication to the daily practice of listening from ‘inside the sound’.

The Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan (b. 1959) is a vocal proponent of contemporary sacred music, yet little scholarly analysis looks beyond the surface to explore how theological themes and language influence his work. This article offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between theology and music via an analysis of MacMillan’s characterization of his compositional process as ‘transubstantiation’. Far from being merely an evocative description, transubstantiation is a conceptual metaphor that signifies a distinctively eucharistic logic and practice in music. I trace these implications through MacMillan’s Miserere (2009), which reinscribes past music and rituals as part of refashioning the contemporary imagining of religion.

In this study, I take a critical look at the presence of narcoculture in reggaeton using as a case study the music video of the remix of ‘Somos de calle’. Specifically, I evaluate whether and to what extent reggaeton’s narco-messages and narco-representations – when they converge with other variables – could potentially influence an individual’s modes of thinking and behaviour. The study does not aim to provide a definitive answer to the debate surrounding this issue. More than anything, it strives to analyse the extent to which the claim that such influence may occur has scientific merit, in order to advocate further research on this matter. The article also discusses the highly politicized debate that has surrounded this topic in public discourse, and how this has seemingly affected its critical assessment in academia. For the analysis I rely particularly on social psychology literature concerning violent media content and in the areas of persuasion studies and prejudice studies, but I also consider literature from other fields, including criminology.

In this article I argue that Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony assumes a pivotal role in advancing the romantically tinged narrative in Luchino Visconti’s film Senso (1954) through a politically recoded message. Visconti offers in this film a reflection upon the political climate in Venetia during the Risorgimento through the pre-eminent role of music. In particular, Bruckner’s music emphasizes the condition of the Venetians under Austrian rulers by dominating as an oppressive and overpowering force, not unlike the Austrian supremacy over the north Italians. Bruckner’s music, which relies on a decisively Wagnerian idiom, conveys throughout the film ideas of betrayal, on both the microlevel and the macrolevel. Such betrayals refer to the Christian Democracy, which excluded the Marxist partisans from governing post-war Italy. These events mirror, for Visconti, the failed revolution of the bourgeois-driven Risorgimento in the 19th century due to the idleness of the aristocracy. Interpreted through Visconti’s Marxist ideology, Bruckner is thus an indicator that the hegemony of the elite remained in place, unchanged and unaltered. As the sonic representative of the Austrian monarchy, it opposes the Risorgimento ideal of the bourgeois class and reassures the supremacy of the ruling class.

This article explores music’s role in radio drama. While musical aspects of early experimental radio dramas have often been explored, the music that figures in the Anglo-American radio play tradition has remained under-theorized. Borrowing interpretative tools from audiovisual discourses can help to elucidate some of the subtleties of the medium, but methodological inadequacies soon become apparent. As exemplars of modern radio dramatic technique, the BBC’s complete adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories (1989–98) are explored, their music interwoven into the drama with consistent levels of subtlety. I draw primarily from Michel Chion’s application of the ‘acousmatic’, showing how the ambiguity concerning the location of the enveloping solo violin music – Holmes’s instrument – offers twists and turns to the agency of the unfolding narrative. I examine further how a sustained technique of intertextual allusion creates what I call a paradiegetic space, in which pre-existing music, heard within the dramas, provides a parenthetical narrative that unravels in parallel with the primary narrative, reflecting back on its themes, changing its meanings and moreover challenging our preconceptions about radio’s particular acousmatic zone.

‘Austrofascist’ has again become an accepted term to describe the Austrian regime from 1933 to 1938. This article contributes to this re-emergence using the example of the Wiener Symphoniker, and by seeking long-term ‘fascistization’ processes surrounding the orchestra rather than blunt comparisons against developments in neighbouring regimes. The account hinges on the Austrian radio service (RAVAG), through which, during the economic crises of the 1920s, the state exerted alignment pressure on many cultural institutions. As Chancellor Dollfuss declared the ‘depoliticization’ of Austria (the banning of political parties) in 1933, RAVAG used its leverage to break the orchestra’s union alliances and dictate personnel selection according to politics. On this foundation, new radio series like Stunde österreichischer Komponisten der Gegenwart (‘Austrian Composers of the Present’) extolled ‘pan-Germanism’: a nationalist ideology that proclaimed the European supremacy of German Austrians and attempted to forge an Austrofascist community – even as it simultaneously created exploitable overlap with National Socialism.

Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils is a shocking historical drama which, eclipsed by its own battle against censorship, has only recently had a critical revival. A landmark musical collaboration central to that film remains unexplored: Peter Maxwell Davies wrote the score, which is heard in tandem with ‘period’ performances from David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London. Though ostensibly historical, the film’s disruptive atemporal style is elevated through an art of stylized anachronism. This collaboration mirrors Davies’s opera Taverner (premièred in 1972), not only because that too featured Munrow and his consort but also because Russell was supposed to direct its première. This article posits Davies’s film score as a compelling work combining historicist compositional interests and a challenging aesthetic of excess within the popular context of mass cinematic spectacle. Informed by the close study of Davies’s own manuscripts, it argues for new ways of understanding the role of a persistent past in the music of a resolutely modernist present.

Gregorian chant exerted a pivotal influence on Olivier Messiaen’s spiritual and musical universe. Scholars have noted his theological preference for this repertoire and its central role in his organ playing, and have observed how some of Messiaen’s melodies contain obvious traces from chants. Recent analytical work has ventured further and shown how plainchant in fact served as a melodic and formal matrix behind the composer’s musical language. This article raises the additional claim that Messiaen’s employment of plainchant rested upon an idiosyncratic and questionable – but largely coherent – theory of neumes as a more or less universal feature in music. A quasi-archaeological reconstruction proves necessary to reconstruct this conception from the composer’s fragmentary and enigmatic statements. The article investigates Messiaen’s readings of Vincent d’Indy and Dom André Mocquereau, including ideas from Hugo Riemann, showing that rhythm is a most central element in their similar connections between chant and freedom of expressivity in contemporary music. All in all, chant theory is highlighted as a vital element in analyses of Messiaen’s own music, as well as a theoretical framework that explains many of the composer’s seemingly eclectic connections between different repertoires.

Incidental music of the early twentieth-century has received little musicological attention, despite its widespread use during this period of history. Theatres were a popular means by which audiences could interact with new music, and composers could experiment with new ideas and build collaborative relationships. Using a 1926 Swedish production of August Strindberg’s Till Damaskus (III), directed by Per Lindberg with music by Ture Rangström, this article argues for the importance of analysing incidental music as collaborative performance. It explores the use of ‘reflexive performance’ as a method of analysis, combined with semiotic and intermedial approaches.

Wanda Landowska and Joaquín Nin were, in the context of the Parisian Schola Cantorum during the first decade of the twentieth century, two of the leading artists performing the harpsichord repertoire. This established them as pioneers of its concert practice, but their irreconcilable attitudes to performance – Landowska’s supposedly historical/reconstructive (employing the harpsichord) and Nin’s updated (employing the modern piano) – embroiled them in a fierce controversy conducted in French and Spanish journals between November 1911 and October 1912. This article examines a large quantity of unedited correspondence together with the relevant press articles in the context of the two performers’ agendas. The results suggest that this controversy was an unprecedented marketing strategy orchestrated by Nin against, but reliant upon, Landowska’s success at the time when he was about to make his début in Spain. However, the unforeseen and long-lasting consequences of this controversy brought priceless publicity for Landowska’s cause: the revival of the harpsichord.

In this paper we offer a preliminary framework that highlights the relational nature of solo music-making, and its associated capacity to influence the constellation of habits and experiences one develops through acts of musicking. To do so, we introduce the notion of extended musical historicity and suggest that when novice and expert performers engage in individual musical practices, they often rely on an extended sense of agency which permeates their musical experience and shapes their creative outcomes. To support this view, we report on an exploratory, qualitative study conducted with novice and expert music performers. This was designed to elicit a range of responses, beliefs, experiences and meanings concerning the main categories of agency and creativity. Our data provide rich descriptions of solitary musical practices by both novice and expert performers, and reveal ways in which these experiences involve social contingencies that appear to generate or transform creative musical activity. We argue that recognition of the interactive components of individual musicking may shed new light on the cognition of solo and joint music performance, and should inspire the development of novel conceptual and empirical tools for future research and theory.

In the genesis of Mahler’s Third Symphony, the composition of the first movement occupies a particularly interesting and important position. The first in the symphony but the last to be composed, this movement had a complex structural development from the mere introduction that it was originally supposed to be to the gigantic and extraordinary construction that we know today. As it is, every new piece of evidence that surfaces sheds more light on this fascinating process. This article examines one such item: an original manuscript source in a private collection which gives a fresh take on the creative mechanism behind the composition of this movement and is directly connected to a well-known manuscript housed in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna.

Historians have viewed nineteenth-century music salons in Paris as concert-like environments where performers and audience gathered in a designated music room. Architectural studies and first-hand accounts, however, show that the music salon incorporated multiple reception rooms, and that guests frequently listened to musical performances from adjoining spaces. While conceptual space has been a subject central to salon studies, this project analyses material space, re-evaluating how the architecture of the salon influenced audience structure, listening modes and compositional practices. This architecture was ultimately central to the development of salon opera, which flourished between 1850 and the 1870s and was epitomized by Gustave Nadaud’s Le docteur Vieuxtemps (1854).

This round table grew out of two gatherings in 2018–19 that endeavoured to bring musicologists into dialogue with recent revisions in the history of international relations.1 Our specific focus was the interwar period, more often discussed in terms of nationalism – or perhaps at best transnationalism – than within the context of internationalism, a principle that lay behind the foundation of elite governmental organizations such as the League of Nations, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Labour Organization and others. As the historians Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin have shown, the construction of objects of global governance by these organizations ran alongside a broader sweep of non-governmental groupings that forwarded the interests of indigenous, working-class, anti-colonialist, anti-slavery and feminist causes.2 What role or roles did music play in these contexts? The case studies that follow illustrate the far-reaching implications of internationalist policies for musical institutions, groups and individuals.

After the First World War, some musicians embraced ‘international’ identities in novel ways, requiring novel strategies.6 During the 1920s, internationalist initiatives were launched in musicology, music education, folk music and more, joining a more general proliferation of institutions devoted to cultural internationalism.7 In the domain of Western art music, the most high-profile internationalist organization of the era was the ISCM, founded in Salzburg in 1922.8 The ISCM’s principal activity during the interwar period was to organize an annual contemporary music festival. This peripatetic event, hosted in a different European city each year, served two intertwined ambitions: to promote contemporary music and to further international cooperation. The latter aspiration gave rise to an unofficial nickname – the ‘musical League of Nations’ – encapsulating the ISCM’s perceived affinities with other, heftier internationalist endeavours.9 A ‘musical League of Nations’ was, however, an ambivalent and precarious project: the moniker recognized, through analogy, a necessary proximity to the era’s chief prototype of an international structure; but it clung, by way of its adjective, to a degree of detachment from the treacherous waters of politics and diplomacy.

At the height of the strikes and factory occupations that marked Turin’s biennio rosso (‘two red years’, 1919–20) a series of songs circulated among the workers. I will focus on two of these songs – La guardia rossa and Miśeria, miśeria – to listen to the particular stories they tell about the experiences of the city’s labouring classes: the ways in which the songs functioned as vehicles of political expression and solidarity, and as loci of memories of past labour and strife. Both songs survived in the memories of workers and their families long after the biennio rosso, as oral and written testaments to a moment when it seemed that revolution might be possible. The crucial point, however, is that while both were expressions of a local political milieu and neighbourhood-specific, working-class sentiment, they also gestured to a broader network of internationalist solidarity. It is the tensions and convergences between localism and internationalism that I want to explore further – a ‘local internationalism’, perhaps, that prompts us to pay attention to the broader political potential of small-scale communities, as well as to the situatedness of political ideologies during a period often framed in terms of national retrenchment and transnational exchange.60