In this article, I study three videos by the Finnish far-right grouping Soldiers of Odin and investigate their audiovisual messages, which present different ‘cultural politics of emotion’ for members and non-members of the group. Special attention is given to the concepts of nationalism, masculinity, and their intertwined meanings, which play a defining role in many neo-fascist cultures. Despite their slap-dash, DIY nature, the videos’ use of global popular culture contradicts their logic of an exclusively ‘national’ Finnish culture, as every reference has global reach. This shows that the group’s nationalism is not about Finnishness, but about a hegemonic, global, Euro-Western, white masculinist, and xenophobic culture.

This study relies on the prevalence of certain structures that largely distinguish the creation and reception of music from that of language – namely, temporal grids, scalar grids, and segments with their repetitions – to construct a model of the human cognitive faculty for music that allows humans to make music the way they do. The study draws on research and thought in philosophy (including phenomenology), linguistics, psychology, and neurology, coupled with musicology, to produce a model of a human capacity to make complex comparisons between ongoing sound sequences and those simultaneously reconstructed from memory by registering the relativities within their flow. This model is then used in a consideration of how the faculty for music interacts with the faculty for language in the experience of song and a consideration of how a similar cognitive capacity for music might be identified in other species.

The ‘Bridal Chorus’ of Wagner’s 1850 opera Lohengrin is one of the most recognizable pieces of music in the world. This article explores how it became so inextricably associated with wedding ceremonies – real ones, or on stage and in film. Furthered by its use at several British royal weddings the music was especially popular at wedding ceremonies in Britain and the USA. Notwithstanding that the chorus was usually performed in an instrumental arrangement, its attractiveness as wedding music was strengthened by various new English texts, its popular title of ‘Here comes the Bride’ deriving from a 1915 silent film. On a different level, this study contextualizes and evaluates the long-lasting criticism of the use of Wagner’s ‘Bridal Chorus’ at wedding ceremonies. Proportional to the decline in its actual use, this criticism has now mostly gone; yet, the ‘Bridal Chorus’ remains as the archetypical music to represent the arrival of the bride.

This book review was written in the form of a letter correspondence, allowing us to explore a more dialogic approach to review writing. During the seven-month period of working on the review, we also met and discussed some of the ideas shared below. In writing these letters, we embraced the main theme of the books by being mindful of the soundscapes that surrounded us, and that have inevitably formed part of our final review.

This article presents a musical bestiary, a collection of creatures found in the work of the composer Liza Lim. It is a thought experiment, meant to unsettle current ways of thinking about music and its relationship with the world. Centring our discussion on sonic figurations rather than on a composer’s works, we experiment with alternative musical ontologies and consider their lessons for understanding the role of contemporary art in a time of ecological breakdown. Thinking of Lim’s musical creations in terms of strange beasts inhabiting the Anthropocene draws out a range of themes – including uncanny ventriloquism, performer-instrument symbiosis, theatricalization and the everyday, musical mourning and witnessing – that might help make sense of the sensory and conceptual derangements of our time. The prose style and nonlinear format are likewise experimental, intended as provocations that we might read and write otherwise about music in the Anthropocene.

Malcolm Arnold’s symphonies have persistently divided critical opinion because of their problematic relationship with traditional genre expectations. This is especially the case in works that eschew sonata-style tonal conflicts and formal markers in favour of theme- and timbre-driven processes. In these respects, Sibelius, rather than members of the Austro-German symphonic tradition, was an important model for Arnold’s individual approach to symphonic composition. This article applies four formal principles (content-based forms, teleological genesis, rotational form and klang meditation), which James Hepokoski has explicitly identified with Sibelius’s later symphonic style, to the first movement of Arnold’s Fifth – one of his most admired and yet most unconventional symphonic structures. The resulting analysis shows a complex and yet accessible movement that generates its own unique tension and dramatic interest. Far from being the feeble work of a symphonic lightweight, it is an impressively realized landmark of the genre in the late twentieth century.

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.

Towards the middle of 2021, the world felt like a shattered place. The fatigue of a little more than a year of social distancing was perhaps at its most acute and resuming a more immediate form of academic exchange seemed all but impossible. It was during this time that we were approached by this Journal’s then newly appointed reviews editor, Amanda Hsieh, to co-author a review article. It was an intriguing request for us both: review articles in the humanities are seldom co-authored and even more seldom by two authors with diverging backgrounds and research interests. George’s work focuses on medievalism and queer theory in contemporary opera, while William works on issues of modernism in post-apartheid South Africa. George is currently at the University of Oxford and William is at Rhodes University in the rural Eastern Cape province of South Africa. We had not written together before and neither of us had ever imagined working together. What were we to make of this request, which would require the reconciliation of so many differences, at a time when establishing the social closeness of thinking together seemed unfathomable?

It can sometimes seem as if musicology is perpetually running late. At least, that is the impression that emerges from two new histories of music and the discourse of the sublime in European culture and aesthetics. Both books stress an imbalance between music and other scholarly fields as a premise for revisiting the long history of the sublime, charting its rise to prominence in the late-seventeenth century with the reception of Peri Hupsous (On Sublimity, attributed to the Greek critic Longinus), to its dominant place in British, German, and French aesthetics and criticism in the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. During this period, the sublime was debated by critics, literary writers, theologians, philosophers and musicians, and used to evoke multiple meanings and applications. Put simply: the sublime was more than a set of intrinsic qualities – such as elevation, grandeur, excess, power, persuasion, innovation and so on – to be located in an external object, style, or mode of expression. It was also an experience and state of mind identified with the (usually male) perceiving subject, an emotional and cognitive confrontation with that which is overwhelming, unknowable, or indescribable.1

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.