A previously unnoticed concerto for two horns and strings published anonymously in London probably in late 1757 or 1758 is attributable to Richard Mudge (1718–63), a clergyman-composer best known for his Six Concertos in Seven Parts. The print names it A Concerto Principally Form'd upon Subjects Taken from Three Country Dances, and there is evidence to suggest that it is identical to the Medley Concerto listed elsewhere under Mudge's name. The concerto can in turn be linked to so-called ‘Medley Concerts’ that took place in London in 1757. The country dances, on whose material Mudge draws with obvious respect for the originals, are all Scottish tunes found in James Oswald's slightly earlier collections. Mudge's original and attractive work testifies to the great interest in Scottish, in particular ‘Highland’, music in mid-eighteenth-century London, prompting reflection on the many-sided and surprisingly intimate relationship that then existed between traditional music and art music.

The ‘réalisme’ of Massenet's La Navarraise divided critics at its belated Parisian première on 3 October 1895. While the opera has typically been read as a straightforward attempt at French verismo, this article suggests a more complex set of ways in which modernity and the modern world shaped critical perceptions of and responses to realism. Placing La Navarraise within its wider cultural and technological contexts, I argue that the critics’ ambivalence to its realism provides insight into the changing and contested nature of critical perception and subjectivity in Paris in the final years of the nineteenth century.

In fin-de-siècle Vienna frustrations with ‘lifelessness’ began to boil over. Unlike previous generations of opera-goers, however, the Viennese did not so much fear singers becoming automata as desire dramatic performance that foregrounded humanness and subjectivity. Critics increasingly fetishized vitality – manifested in characters with dramatic integrity and singers capable of nestling themselves in their roles – and by 1910 wanted singers to communicate their own interiority and ‘wilfulness’ as well. This article uses the reception of the soprano Marie Gutheil-Schoder (1874–1935) to demonstrate the growing currency of these imperatives. A controversial hire for the Hofoper, she was initially disparaged by critics as vocally ‘weak’, but the Viennese gradually ‘learnt to love this voice’ for the way in which it could be pressed into the service of the drama and her will. I explain her changing fortunes, arguing that opera-goers valued certain voices in accordance with evolving conceptions of characterization, acting technique and human subjectivity.

In studies of memory politics in post-war Germany, the role that music played in responding to the Allied bombing of Dresden on 13–14 February 1945 has been overlooked. This article examines one of the first musical reactions to this traumatic event: Rudolf Mauersberger's mourning motet Wie liegt die Stadt so wüst (How Deserted Lies the City, 1945). I argue that Mauersberger, who served as cantor of the world-famous Kreuzchor from 1930 until his death in 1971, used allegory rather than testimony to formulate a response to the firebombing that resonated with historical customs familiar to the city's residents. When premièred in the bombed-out Kreuzkirche, Mauersberger's music provided a communal setting to confront the effects of the air war, transforming a space of destruction into one of contemplation and mourning. Both his compositional process and the performance transformed rubble (the material aftermath of the attack) into a ruin (an aesthetic object).

The venerable founder of Soviet musicology Boris Asafiev aroused widespread dismay by his actions in 1948 after the promulgation of a Central Committee resolution condemning the USSR's leading composers: he not only acquiesced in his appointment as chairman of the Composers’ Union, but agreed to give a keynote address endorsing the resolution at its first national congress. His admirers have claimed that he must have been coerced into collaboration and that his address did not reflect his real views. The present essay re-examines the circumstances, arguing that the evidence of Asafiev's willing complicity is overwhelming. A close analysis of his keynote address reveals its contents to be wholly consistent with views that he had regularly expressed throughout his career, as one of the principal progenitors of an anti-modernist, ethnic nationalist and xenophobic strain in Soviet writing on music that was given forceful expression in the 1948 resolution.

This article examines ongoing efforts to associate the decline of the modernist electroacoustic music tradition with the rise of digital technologies. Illustrative material is drawn from ethnographic and archival fieldwork conducted in 2011 and 2012 in the Canadian city of Montreal. The author surveys examples of institutions, careers, performances and works showing how the digital is brought into the ideological service of existing musical orders and power structures by musicians, policy-makers and other intermediaries. Drawing upon the social theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Georgina Born, as well as on contemporary media theory, the author argues that accounts of the disruptive agency of digital mediation are incomplete without a corresponding attention to the complex cultural mechanisms by which it is kept under control. What is at stake in the transformation of Montreal's electroacoustic tradition is not a collapse so much as a further remediation of modernist social and aesthetic principles.