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.

This article engages with issues of musical historiography and politics – mainly in the 1930s and 1940s – through the example of Edward J. Dent, a towering figure of international musical and musicological life during that period. Dent's career was tightly interwoven with musical and musicological practice both in Britain and in the wider Western world. It offers a fascinating access point to European musical modernism on the one hand, and to mid-century concerns with the uses of music history on the other. In this article, I focus on these aspects of Dent's career and their intersections by exploring first Dent's involvement with the International Society for Contemporary Music, before turning to two further and closely related issues: Dent's scholarly work of that period – especially his turn to Handel – and his involvement in international cultural politics during the 1930s and 1940s.

Spain was a latecomer to the cyclic Mass, which began to develop there in the 1490s or late 1480s. A number of different strands in this process – free single movements, mix-and-match Masses, ferial Masses, imports, three-voice Masses, Missae sine nomine and the six cycles of Francisco de Peñalosa – can usefully be separated and laid at least tentatively onto a chronological framework on the basis of manuscript date and composer biography. The surviving evidence seems to show a tradition that arose with particular energy in the decade or so after 1500 and reached maturity within a single generation.

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.

The years 1886–91 saw Gabriel Fauré developing a new boldness and intensity in his composition of mélodies, prompted in part by the discovery of new poets (notably including Villiers de l'Isle Adam and Verlaine), and arguably also by his acquaintance with the excellent tenor Maurice Bagès. In particular, the songs of this period (spanning the opus groups 43–58) reveal an intriguingly exploratory approach to transposition, tessitura, timbre and texture. These songs are also remarkable for the seriousness and complexity of their pre- and post-publication revisions. The present study considers these revisions in relation to what is known of Fauré's habits and performing preferences, and in the light of his relationship with Bagès. It explores the practical and conceptual challenges the songs pose for the critical editor: how do we balance the logical principle of Fassung letzter Hand against the occasional musical compromise that appears to have ensued?

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.

The critical reception of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) often circles around two related questions: its relationship to Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel and the implications of its classical ‘compilation’ soundtrack. Revisiting both, this article challenges the pervasive emphasis in existing musicological literature on the film's use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by offering a formal analysis of its excerpts by (among others) Rossini, Elgar and Purcell. A fresh look at Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary (1695) serves to open a dramatic lineage leading back to the seventeenth-century ‘Don Juan’ archetype, which brings in tow the vast musicological literature on Don Giovanni along with philosophical accounts from Kierkegaard through Bernard Williams. The film's notorious references to Gene Kelly's dance routine in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) add to its confrontation with individual and collective ideals of ‘liberty’ a cinematic reflexivity that can serve (with some help from Marshall McLuhan's influential 1964 study Understanding Media) to shed new light on Luis Buñuel's assertion that this is ‘the only movie about what the modern world really means’.

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.