Difference is among the twentieth century’s most volatile legacies to the twenty-first. Over this period it has increasingly lodged itself in our cultural consciousness, as both theoretical concept and lived experience. Its workings are refracted through culture (through phenomena such as music) and the way we contemplate and study it (through a journal such as this). A Brief History of Difference, at least the chapter relevant to the present story, might start in the early part of the last century with Ferdinand de Saussure’s courses on linguistics. Not only language, but potentially all signifying phenomena, Saussure argued, articulate the world for us by cutting it into units (e.g. phonemes, concepts, words, signs) that carry meaning precisely through being differentiated from one another: reality is rendered as a system of mutually conditioning differences. By mid-century these ideas had become decisive for literary and cultural theory under the banner of structuralism and semiotics, in which even a cultural practice such as fashion could be seen to signify as a system of difference. With the rise of poststructuralism and deconstruction, difference (or différance) was again seminal in debates about the very nature of meaning, which in turn informed later twentieth-century cultural politics of class and society, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity. (As we know, all these movements would also in the end, and no less contentiously, make their mark on musicology.) Most recently – in terms far from academic – cultural difference has moved into the foreground of global consciousness with the literally shattering and explosive events of our new century.

There is currently a backlash against modernism in English-language music studies. While this vogue of ‘modernism bashing’ is ostensibly based on progressive ideologies, it is dependent on a one-sided perception of musical modernism which it shares with earlier conservative disparagements. Of central importance in this respect is the ‘othering’ of musical modernism as an essentially continental European phenomenon in the ‘Anglosphere’, where it is consistently suspected of being a ‘foreign import’ – by conservative commentators in the first part of the twentieth century, just as by their ‘new-musicological’ successors at the turn of the twenty-first.

The example of the Anglo-American reception of the so-called Darmstadt school, usually regarded as quintessentially modernist, demonstrates how certain partial understandings and downright prejudices are handed down. For instance, the critical commonplace of Darmstadt’s presumed obsession with such values as technical innovation, structural coherence, and a scientistic rationalization of composition says more about those who coined it – mostly American critics who were uncomfortable with the aesthetic as well as the political radicalism of Darmstadt – than about the music itself. It is often precisely this depoliticized, sanitized construction of modernism that present-day critics have attacked, apparently unaware that this has always been a misrepresentation. By thus tracing some common misapprehensions in the Anglo-American reception of musical modernism, I want to argue for a fuller recognition of modernism’s essentially dialectical nature.

To start with the obvious: journals come into being for specific reasons. And if one regards the most influential titles born during the last thirty years or so, it seems that one of the principal motivating factors has been interventionist – an attempt to kick-start a particular subdiscipline, or to promote a hitherto neglected or insufficiently examined field. Thus Music Analysis (Basil Blackwell, 1982) sought to place on a fully professional footing a subdiscipline which, whilst recognized in North America (as Music Theory), was at that time underdeveloped in the UK, while 19th Century Music (University of California Press, 1977) sought ‘to stimulate and focus work on what has for too long been American musicology’s lost century’. There is, however, little need to stimulate the study of twentieth-century music(s): if one includes (as we believe one must) popular music, jazz, film music, and twentieth-century developments in traditional musics, as well as ‘art’ or ‘classical’ music, activity in the field is burgeoning at an impressive rate. What is needed, rather, is a dedicated forum. Earlier journals specializing in twentieth-century music (such as Contact and Perspectives of New Music) tended to act as voices for particular constructions of the field. Established generalist journals have frequently found a place for twentieth-century classical music, and more recently (following the trajectory of musicology in general) have begun to widen their scope to include the discussion of popular, film, and traditional music. But as the first three meetings of the Biennial International Conference on Twentieth-Century Music have shown (the third, held in Nottingham, UK, in June 2003, is reviewed in these pages), forums dedicated to the whole range of twentieth-century music promote a synergy and crossfertilization that will inevitably escape generalist journals or those confined to one corner of the field. twentieth-century music aims to provide such a forum; and not the least of our hopes is that, through the contiguity of divergent topics in each issue, the journal will stimulate the creation of new perspectives by encouraging contact with areas and approaches that we might not, as individual scholars, otherwise think to engage with.

Composers’ self-representations – in articles, programme notes, and interviews – have exerted a significant influence on twentieth-century music scholarship, shaping not only the reception of particular outputs but also wider historiographical conceptions of the recent past. This article traces one particular mode of discourse through the published statements of György Ligeti – a ‘rhetoric of autonomy’, which tends to disavow allegiances to ‘schools’ or institutions and underplay stylistic or aesthetic commonalities with the work of other composers. This type of rhetoric, together with the image it promotes of an artistic culture created out of the polarized activities of individuals, colludes naturally with the now familiar pluralist paradigm of late-twentieth-century culture, a paradigm that much postmodern theory, despite its putative deconstruction of the ‘ideology of the unique self’ (Jameson), has left largely unchallenged. Except that, for an artist such as Ligeti, the rhetoric of autonomy may no longer accomplish its objective purpose. Within a cultural sphere increasingly subsumed by the commercial, the image of the radically autonomous creator, once powerfully symbolic of a refusal of the mass market, becomes inescapably caught up in its mechanisms as an explicitly promotional tool.

In the early 1960s Mahler’s music became a vital stimulus for Henze’s compositional technique and aesthetics. Particularly important were its exploration of formal crises, the incorporation of ‘old’ musical materials, and its apparently direct expression of love and beauty. These aspects confirmed Henze’s desire to break out of the restrictions of Darmstadt dogma, into an apparently anachronistic expressive and technical freedom. This article explores structural and hermeneutic relationships between two of Henze’s works of the period – Being Beauteous and The Bassarids– and Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. In Being Beateous the expressive aspects of cadences in the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony are shown to be crucial models for Henze’s exploration of Rimbaud’s poetic expression of the destruction and revitalization of beautiful form. In The Bassarids an intertextual allusion to the second movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is taken as a signal of Mahlerian ‘breakthrough’ as Pentheus has a vision of Dionysian revelries. Henze’s fragmented, broken, allusive, and eclectic musical textures are interpreted as characteristic expressions of eroticism, as well as being more generally symptomatic of his understanding of Mahler’s importance for twentieth-century music.

Through an examination of the labels Hear Music and Putumayo and their place in coffee shops and retail stores on the one hand, and of world music scholarship on the other, I argue that listening to world music in public spaces demands new theoretical perspectives. The kinds of tourism that take place in listening to world music inattentively suggest a kind of bi-location. Borrowing from quantum mechanics, I suggest that the term ‘entanglement’ might offer some insight into this bi-location and the ‘distributed tourism’ that I argue is taking place.

This article examines a variety of compositional procedures that give rise to what the author defines as ‘accumulative’ and ‘cumulative’ forms in pop-rock music, formal processes which are directly linked to the rapid advances in recording technology that occurred mainly from the late 1960s to the 1980s. The article includes detailed transcriptions and analyses of pop-rock music across a wide range of styles and genres, from progressive rock to post-punk to techno.

The growing number of performances and recordings of Feldman’s music in recent years attests to increased interest among performers and listeners; yet his music remains an uncommon subject for detailed music analysis. Proceeding on the premise that this disparity is no accident, I argue that certain distinctive qualities of the music render it difficult to analyse with tools, methods, and practices developed in response to other repertories. This paper investigates the analytical challenges posed by Feldman’s music. A survey of such challenges as they relate to his output in general is followed by an account of two particular issues associated with his late work: scale and repetition. Two case studies address these issues in turn, advancing relevant conceptual and methodological approaches. In the first study, on Coptic Light for orchestra (1985), I suggest that analysts might reconsider part–whole relationships in music analysis, and use the idea of ‘populations’ (with their attendant features of range of variation and distribution) to develop a non-reductive (and non-constructive) approach to scale. In the second study, on Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello (1987), I encourage analysts to rethink the role of repetition in music analysis, such that repetition is no longer (only) a goal, but becomes a point of departure. Throughout the essay I take the view that analysis is an investigation of experience; that a particular difficulty of analysing Feldman’s music is the self-knowledge it requires; and that the concerted inquiry that is music analysis can well be used to expand – not only condense – the realm of musical experience.

Pli selon pli is Boulez’s richest encounter with Mallarmé. As a ‘portrait’ of the poet which sets three of his sonnets, it can be associated not only with other composers – Ravel, Debussy – who set Mallarmé, but also with the poet’s own views on music, and his radical yet tradition-conscious formal practices. Structural and poetic aspects of the fourth movement of the work, ‘Improvisation III’, are examined in detail, highlighting Boulez’s increasing concern with matters of formal coherence. This suggests a strengthening resistance to modernism as fragmentation and the embrace of a modern classicism which shuns the fixed hierarchies of tonal classicism as well as the parodistic juxtapositions of neoclassicism. At the same time, however, the multiple resonances on which modern classicism depends for its coherence ensure that certain aspects of Mallarmé-inspired narrative – concerning shipwrecks and sirens, among other things – cannot be entirely suppressed in present-day critical commentary.

This close reading of Claude Sautet’s music-film Un coeur en hiver / A Heart in Winter (1992) also reflects on issues raised by music-films generally. Films that take music as their central subject raise special questions about the role of music in cinematic representation. Un coeur en hiver’s musically saturated narrative explores people’s abilities to know themselves and others and to express themselves adequately in emotional contexts. At the same time, the film’s techniques interrogate both the role of music in the construction of cinematic subjectivity and the potential of cinema to engage with our understandings of musical subjectivity. On one level the music self-critically serves its classic role in cinematic narrative of encouraging – even coercing – us into filling in narrative gaps otherwise left open by plot and dialogue. On another level, however, Un coeur en hiver can be read as a species of cinematic meditation on Ravel’s music: traces of Ravelian biography are scattered throughout; on-screen performances of the Piano Trio provide a musical metaphor for the narrative love triangle; and the Trio’s first movement provides a formal skeleton for the film as a whole. Drawing on recent film-music theory as well as Naomi Cummings’ account of musical subjectivity, I suggest that the film reflects specifically upon the music by exploiting its cinematic resources – dramatis personae, narrative, and mise-en-scène– to position us as auditors of Ravel; it projects a sense that Ravel’s subjective presence inhabits his trio and sonatas. To shed light on the nature of this cinematic meditation on musical authorship, I draw on John Corbett’s account of recorded music as something that both promises pleasure and threatens lack. I also revisit Edward T. Cone’s understanding of ‘the composer’s voice’, proposing a reading of Un coeur en hiver as a cinematic reflection on our fetishism of composer biography in an era marked by the loss of human presence in mechanical musical reproduction.

This paper takes a close look at the music of Kraftwerk, perhaps the best known of the ‘electronic’ groups of former West Germany’s so-called neue Welle, in order to raise some fundamental questions about the politics of elektronische Musik before the dawn of the digital age and, in particular, how constructions and performances of the voice in late analogue technology rehearse new and critical strategies of resistance in the aftermath of 1968.

It is a commonplace of recent cultural-theoretical considerations of digital technology to ascribe to it a fundamental re-positioning of imaginations of the subject, of authorship and of agency in the broadest sense. What has never really been fully worked through in this (usually utopian) figuration of digital technology is the extent to which technology can be conceived as ‘autonomous’ (as Rosie Braidotti would have it) or whether new technologies in themselves are a guarantor of new cultural formations. In particular, this paper seeks to test the extent to which Kraftwerk’s pre-digital imagination can be read as an expression of the politics of the so-called Tendenzwende (a ‘turning inwards’ from explicitly activist politics to a more diffuse politics of the personal) of the Schmidt- and early Kohlzeit. The article looks in particular at Kraftwerk’s use of what might be termed the ‘electronic sublime’ as a way of disengaging the music from the ego-centred practices of earlier German rock music and as a way of anticipating new German subject positions and political identities in the light of de-industrialization and globalization.

Socialist Realist ceremonial art has generally been viewed in the West as a form of high art, because of its air of monumentality and references to classics. Judged by high-art standards, such works are invariably failures, and Western commentators have accordingly treated Socialist Realism as something exotic or inexplicable. This approach is inadequate: firstly, because it does not examine Stalin-era art on its own terms, and secondly, because it refuses to acknowledge any similarities in Western culture.

Socialist Realism was a discipline placed upon artists to provide a suitably dignified backdrop to state ritual. In this sense, it was a species of religious art, in which blandness, anonymity and tedium were by no means vices. This article compares the relatively smooth passage of Myaskovsky into Socialist Realism with the troubled homecoming of Prokofiev, who only mastered the discipline just before the end of his life.

Death not only robbed Anthony Pople of more than two decades from his three score years and ten; it robbed a community dedicated to the study and promotion of western classical music, especially twentieth-century music, of one of its leading lights. Pople was a prolific thinker and doer, and quite a bit of his legacy is in the form of influence, as a teacher, of course, but also as an imaginative person of action who gave of his time and expertise in all sorts of ways – on committees, as an editor, examiner, adviser, studio producer – and, let us not forget, as a most gifted composer and performer of music. There is also the black-line legacy. His writings show, consistently, his rare talent for both clarity and depth of thought. I think he was one of those authors who wanted every piece to be special, shunning the routine as well as the speculative: and if that sentiment might remind us of the composer Alban Berg, it is no accident.

In Trotsky’s classic theory of uneven development, ‘combined development’ designates how some regions may graft characteristics of new production relations onto older formations: examples might include the information economies of Guangzhou and Lagos, integrated to early capitalist, or even older, social orders. ‘Combined development’ provides a handy metaphor for Postmodern Music / Postmodern Thought, suggesting the grafting of post-Marxist ‘postmodern theory’ onto a musicological field that never substantively encountered Marxism, instead embracing ideologies that had already repudiated it.