Just as arabesque carries a range of visual and literary associations, this ornament assumes a diverse presence in music scholarship, where it characterizes a wide repertoire and assortment of techniques. Despite its conceptual breadth, this essay shows that arabesque upheld a specific musical identity for Debussy and Ravel. This is reflected in their simulation of art nouveau’s intricate and fluid designs through melodic gestures that emphasize irregular rhythms and dissonant metres. Also in keeping with art nouveau is the tendency of these composers to privilege musical arabesque’s structural appearance and expressive capacity. These observations are explored with reference to Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, a ballet that critics admired for its arabesque qualities. An analysis of four dances will reveal how the distinct rhythmic and metric profiles of arabesque melodies portray characters and their narratives. In challenging preconceptions of ornament as marginal and meaningless, this essay shows how arabesque became endowed with structural and expressive significance at the début du siècle.

Liminality seems to have become something of a buzzword. Typing ‘liminal OR liminality’ into Google™ produces one and a quarter million hits. That this should be so is not altogether surprising, for the liminal state has much in common with the postmodern age, as scholars as diverse as Homi Bhabha and Sharon Zukin have argued: the blurring and crossing of thresholds and boundaries; the breakdown of historically fixed categories; the exposure of ambiguities; the fluidity and hybridity of identities; play and absurdity; and uncertainty. Indeed, Bhabha has gone so far as to suggest that liminality is the hallmark of postmodernity, that the postmodern age is itself liminal, existing between a dead modernity and a future not yet known.

This article reconsiders sentimentalism in the light of the writings of Adam Smith and the career of Abd al-Halim Hafiz, Egypt’s ‘Dark Nightingale’ and film-star crooner of the 1950s and 60s. It explores competing representations of emotionality, the limits of enchantment, and the contemporary politics of nostalgia and melodrama in Egyptian public culture. Eighteenth-century sentimental theory provides a critical and productive angle on twentieth-century popular musical culture, angles that this paper explores by imagining Adam Smith watching Abd al-Halim Hafiz’s first film, Lahn al-Wafā‘ (1955).

Béla Bartók’s Cantata Profana (1930) retains ambiguities inherent in the Romanian myth on which it is based – a story of nine hunting-lads magically transformed into stags. This article explores the mysterious elements through psychoanalysis, positing links between darkness, Bartókian ‘night music’, and the Unconscious. Other aspects of the musical language suggest representations of Lacanian processes, specifically a regressive fantasy to the mental order of the ‘Real’. This is linked to Bartók’s experience of childhood illness, a time of perfect maternal love but profound bodily betrayal, suggesting that the stag-body represents a strong, proud transformation, ‘replacing’ the debilitated body of childhood memory. Musically, the ‘mirror-image’ scales of the opening and ending of the work are re-examined. It is proposed that they represent Bartók acknowledging loss, most importantly the loss of the myth of ‘pure sources’, which had sustained him, both musically and psychologically, up until then. This loss inevitably sought expression after a disastrous polemical debate forced him to abandon the idea of musical purity in folksong.

This paper offers a new, cross-cultural paradigm for understanding the location of professional musicians in modern social hierarchies. Basing my argument on Victor Turner’s theories of liminality and on primary-source research on North Indian musicians in the Mughal empire (c. 1658–1858), I maintain that professional musicians in most, if not all, societies possess institutionally liminal status. Although the occupation of ‘musician’ is relatively low, being essentially both service profession and cultural labour, the cultural capital that accrues to the product of their labour – their music – enables musicians to cross over into higher-status spaces, to mingle on more equal terms with their patrons, and, in the moment of performance, to exercise power over them. While this may offer opportunities of permanent social elevation for the best performers, in many societies patrons may apply subtle social sanctions to those who attempt to overstep the boundaries, in order to keep musicians in their place. While this hypothesis has clear resonances with Merriam’s famous tripartite formulation of low status/high importance/tolerance of ‘deviance’, institutional liminality also makes sense of the puzzling exceptions to his rule.

In the Hungarian folk revival, Hungarian Roma (Gypsies) serve as both privileged informants and exotic Others. The musicians of the revival known as the táncház (dance-house) movement rely heavily on rural Rom musicians, especially those from Transylvania, as authentic sources of traditional Hungarian repertoire and style. Táncház rhetoric centres on the trope of localized authenticity; but the authority wielded by rural Rom musicians, who carry music both between villages and around the world, complicates the fixed boundaries that various powerful stakeholders would place on the tradition. Drawing on media sources and on fieldwork in Hungary and Romania, I examine how authenticity and ‘Gypsiness’ are presented and controlled by the scholars, musicians, and administrators who lead the táncház movement, in particular in the context of camps and workshops dedicated to Hungarian folk music and dance. Organizers often erect clear boundaries of status, genre, and gender roles through such events, which, among other things, address the anxiety raised by Rom musicians’ power in liminal spaces. In addition, I look at how Rom musicians both negotiate with the táncház’s aesthetic of authenticity and challenge it musically. Finally, I discuss how musicians and the crowds that gather to hear and dance to their music together create a carnival atmosphere, breaking down some of the boundaries that organizers work so hard to create. Throughout, I demonstrate that liminality is an extraordinarily pertinent lens through which to view Roma participation in the Hungarian folk music scene.

In the historiography of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, the 1970s, when they are examined at all, are generally regarded as a period of stagnation, between the fervour of serial activity in the 1950s and the resurgence of the courses in the 1980s under the banner of various inflections of New Complexity. Yet, in a period of political upheaval after 1968, dissent was felt at Darmstadt too, and protests in 1970 and 1972 saw the institution at its most politically volatile. These protest movements caused the courses’ director, Ernst Thomas, to institute wide-scale changes in their structure and content. Key roles in these protests were taken by journalists: indeed, clear parallels can be drawn between the seemingly egalitarian calls from journalists for Mitbestimmung (co-determination) at Darmstadt and the similar demands being made by their trade unions in the West German federation. Thomas’s failure to deal with journalistic pressure and his heavy-handed treatment of individual protesters (notably Reinhard Oehlschlägel) meant that, shrewd and durable though his reinvention of the courses was, it would be only in 1982, with the accession of a new director, that the press would begin to speak positively about the Darmstadt courses once more. A close reading of these two protests shows the sometime ‘citadel of the avant-garde’ at a distinctly precarious moment in its history. At the time, some felt that such protests could lead to the demise of the courses, and it was far from clear whether Thomas’s reforms would be successful. But, even within this period of uncertainty, the Darmstadt Ferienkurse were anything but stagnant.

This paper explores the relationship between music, time, and movement in those Western art music rituals within which orchestral performance occurs. It begins by reviewing some of the literature on the symphonic performance event itself, particularly the work of Christopher Small, who has written about this at length. It goes on to consider the nature of the conductor’s gestures within these events, and argues that these can be construed as a form of dancing, and that the functional ambiguity of these gestures serves only to enhance their symbolic significance; their greater importance, in fact, is in connection with the creation of another world of time. Finally, the paper compares the work and gestures of conductors with shamanistic practice in other cultures, both in terms of the conductor’s role within the concert hall and as a result of the images of them presented to us in various media.

The interaction between ‘marginal’ music performance (whether socially or musically marginal, e.g. busking, ambient music, etc.) and ‘liminal’ spaces is at first sight a characteristically twentieth-century phenomenon. However, performance history as revealed not only through historical scholarship but through contemporary anecdotal or fictional writings can contextualize these current uses of music in negotiating public space, while revealing some of our assumptions about performance in general. I argue that much of liminal performance is concerned with the appropriation and retention of spaces in which to perform, and that this is no new thing but was, until relatively recently, the norm. I look at some aspects of performance history in the light of contemporary thinking about liminality, and consider how buskers, particularly in Bath (where I lived for several years) contend for temporary possession of public space as a prerequisite of their performances. I conclude by suggesting that the defining of liminal space might be usefully extended, in thinking about street performance, into the notion of ‘liminal spacetime’.

In this study, criss-crossing discourses – written, visual, and aural – are brought together in an effort to shed light on a section of the tawa’if (traditional courtesan) community in contemporary North India. As a kind of companion text to my point-of-view documentaries Guria, Gossip, and Globalization and Chandni’s Choice, I present an overview of the NGO Guria. This organization works to empower tawa’ifs to reclaim their liminality as artists, able to move back and forth between their own profoundly socially marginalized community and mainstream society, a privilege they enjoyed historically but have virtually lost in the present day. I have juxtaposed this with an exegesis of talk, including gossip, about and by these performers and their music. This includes issues of their gossip- and media-driven legacy that have led to their current position, often dangerously vulnerable, in the global marketplace. Finally, I examine the life of a teenage member of a musical matriarchy whose foremothers have been somewhat successful at continuing to traverse the borderlands between various levels of society.