In this article we ‘read against the grain’ of the archive to explore the sound world of an Indigenous rebellion against Spanish colonial rule in Chiapas in 1712. Although this topic has often interested historians and anthropologists, none of them explicitly engage the rebellion’s sonorities. Contending that a focus on sound may allow new features of the rebellion to come to light, we explore the use of sonorous objects and musical instruments in the rebels’ religious worship and military practices. Building on this analysis, we emphasize the place of ideas about ‘quietude’ within practices for violently reasserting colonial power.

This article develops an approach to music history that centres performers and their artistic work, drawing on insights from musical performance studies. It responds to criticisms of the practice turn and builds on recent scholarship on Soviet music to contextualize the life of pianist Maria Yudina in the years 1959–63, in which she dedicated herself (at great cost) to new, avant-garde music. Case studies include Yudina’s key role in performing the first Soviet twelve-tone composition in 1961 — Andrei Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta: Fantasia Ricercata — and her advocacy of Igor Stravinsky in the build-up to his homecoming in 1962.

This essay reflects on a new digital realization by Andrew Hugill of the ‘Christian ballet’ Uspud (1892) by Erik Satie and J. P. Contamine de Latour. The creative process of making the realization entailed a critical re-examination of existing scholarship and revealed that the relationship between music and drama is closer than has previously been understood. The essay situates Uspud in the context of 1890s Montmartre and demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that it was conceived as a shadow play and scored for solo harmonium. It analyses the music in detail, considering how its motivic construction and use of timbral contrasts both supports the action and conveys the inner states of uspud himself. It considers the humorous and serious aspects of Uspud, arguing that this was a key work in the evolution of Satie’s artistic and personal identity.

The zeal for ‘modality’ in French modernist composition drew sustenance from the Indo-European hypothesis (or ‘Aryan myth’) of a linguistic-turned-‘racial’ patrimony linking India, Greece, and Europe, prevalent in Francophone intellectual, including musicological, discourse. Against this backdrop, the central case study traces how the Karnatic melakarta system of rāga classification travelled from Southern India, via British imperial networks, to French universities and conservatoires, whereupon it found widespread interest among composers and pedagogues including Roussel, Emmanuel, Tournemire, and Dupré. Yet the melakartas’ enduring imprint upon French music is found not simply in the use of individual scales, but in the premise of a fecund ‘modal republic’, inspired by the system’s generative logic and resonant in the rationalized modalism of the 1920s and ’30s, including Messiaen’s ‘modes of limited transposition’. The article concludes by proffering a novel conceptualization of the entanglements between Karnatic and French scale systems (and epistemologies of music) in the early twentieth century.

Despite the density of scholarly engagement with Mozart’s operas, Donna Elvira’s aria ‘Mi tradì quell’alma ingrata’, composed for the 1788 Viennese production of Don Giovanni, has received little sustained, critical attention. Yet this oversight is unjustified, particularly considering the aria’s many stylistic elements that expand beyond the musical language of the original Prague Don Giovanni, and which therefore show Mozart not only deepening Elvira’s characterization but probing new compositional horizons. This article undertakes a thorough, analytic examination of ‘Mi tradì’, focusing especially on its evocation of Elvira’s subjectivity and self-consciousness, and paying particular attention to formal rhetoric and topical reference, both of which, by suggesting affinities with genres such as variation and the free fantasia, move the aria significantly beyond the expressive world often associated with Mozart’s vocal writing. The article closes with brief speculations on the relationship between ‘Mi tradì’ and the composer’s career aspirations in the late 1780s.

This article discusses a music treatise written in 1812 by the Catholic Armenian polymath Minas Bzhshkean (1777–1851). The article focuses on the historical and intellectual context in which the idea of notational reform emerged within the Armenian diaspora. Bzhshkean was born in the Ottoman Empire but educated at the Mekhitarist monastery of San Lazzaro in Venice, which was the leading intellectual centre of the Armenian Enlightenment. By discussing Bzhshkean’s use of sources from multiple cultural and intellectual traditions (including European authors such as Rousseau), the article provides a new perspective on music and Enlightenment in global context.

How does the process of screening orchestral music direct and focus audience attention? Visualization strategies can have a profound impact on how we appreciate music and can guide us to listen in very specific ways. Just as particular conductors and orchestras have interpretative identities, so do multi-camera directors. There has, however, been scant research on the influence of strategies and methods used in the visualization of orchestral concert music. Nicholas Cook suggested that musical enjoyment is spoiled by the ‘monstrous close-up’1 and Keith Negus explained that broadcasters believe that viewers will direct their attention to whatever instrument is most noticeable to the ear, ‘as if music audiences are similar to those following the ball in a tennis or football match’.2 The close-up is not solely about chasing action, though; it is also central to the continuity editing system, which is designed to maintain a continuous and clear narrative across time and space.3 Edits are not just about faithfully following or capturing action; they also have dramatic and psychological implications.

This study explores the experience of concert piano technicians who work on pianos played by the top tier of concert pianists in the world. They identify as craftspeople with a strong sense of vocation, who are autonomous, skilled, yet connected. They consider their pianos to be alive, with their own personalities and agency, needing to be tamed, loved, and negotiated with. The connection between their human fingers and the body of the piano is experienced as one of sensation and vibration rather than conscious thought, leading to ‘flow’. Findings are contextualized through qualitative psychology, Actor Network, and Material Engagement Theory.

If the current state of publishing is anything to go by, the classical music industry and music academia are in a state of crisis. This will come as little surprise to anyone either teaching, researching, or studying music, or existing in the professional world of musical performance. The mushrooming of edited volumes, journal articles, and think-pieces such as op-eds and podcasts, all offering perspectives on variations of classical music’s ‘challenges’ and ‘futures’ is notable, and has only accelerated in recent years. More important than this quantity, however, is the sheer diversity of opinions, revealing how widely the ideological fissures across all corners of academic music studies and the classical music industry have deepened. Fraught debates have spilled over from the relatively insular bubbles of social media discourse and academic publications into national headlines.

The passing of the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity in 1559 and the publication of the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer later that year returned the language of public worship to English, but a Latin translation of that prayer book issued in 1560 — the Liber precum publicarum — allowed certain scholastic institutions to continue using Latin liturgies. Seldom has this volume been discussed in detail, despite its important implications for composers connected to those institutions in permitting the continued composition of Latin-texted music for liturgical, rather than merely extra-liturgical or devotional, use. This article considers the background to the Liber precum publicarum, assesses its contents, and examines the extent to which it was acquired and used by the few institutions for which it was produced. It finds that the volume was apparently not acquired by those institutions, owing probably to the political and religious climates of Oxford and Cambridge in the 1560s. It therefore casts light on why little (or indeed any) Latin-texted polyphony composed for bona fide liturgical use survives from the reign of Elizabeth I.

This article amplifies current understanding of the Afro-diasporic composer-violinist Joseph Bologne, Le Chevalier de Saint-George, by exploring his 1770s musical career in relation to Mozart. Director of the progressive Concert des amateurs during Mozart’s visit to Paris in 1778, Bologne was one of the leading exponents of a virtuosic style of symphonie concertante writing that became a touchstone for Mozart following his return to provincial Salzburg. A comparison of the musical spheres inhabited by Bologne and Mozart nuances our understanding of developments in ‘concertante’ composition and the performative dimensions of the medium, enabling a broader, more inclusive history to emerge.

Polish cathedral and monastic archives preserve multiple precious handwritten sources of musical and liturgical contents originating from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Three such manuscripts have been the topic of research in this paper. The article’s problem is the provenance of the Pauline Gradual (PL-CZ III-913 olim R659) from 1596, owned by the Order of Saint Paul the First Hermit in the Jasna Góra Monastery (Luminous Mount) in Częstochowa, Poland. The authors have examined the provenance by comparing the book’s repertoire of alleluiatic verses of the commune sanctorum with the contents of two older Polish codices from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, kept in the Archives and Library of the Cracow Cathedral Chapter: Wawel Gradual (PL-Kk Ms. 45) and Jan Olbracht Gradual (PL-Kk Ms. 44). The research leads to an ascertainment that the Pauline codex has, to some extent, been modelled on the Cracow manuscripts. The main text has been accompanied by photographs of each source’s selected original folios, and by transcriptions of the alleluiatic chants analysed.

What can queer theory, and drag performance, contribute to music semiotics? This paper proffers ‘dragging’ as a socio-cultural semiotics that demonstrates how musical meanings are dynamically queered through drag lip-sync performance. Departing from approaches to meaning and semiotics in musicology and popular music studies, I intervene with direct insights from queer theory. I draw out oscillations between queer theoretical perspectives on temporality and (post)structural concepts such as assemblages and mediation as they have been incorporated into music studies. ‘Drag’, not just an art form, is here developed as a specific kind of spatial-temporal mediation: dragging is understood as the displacement and heterochronization of meaning, where musical objects are dragged ‘out of time’ and ‘out of space’ into the alien world of queer experience. Dragging as a conceptual instrument allows us to begin answering questions of how meanings – and their political stakes – coalesce inside and outside, within and without, music.

Late in 1947 Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) wrote to Alan Frank, music editor at Oxford University Press. He asked Frank if he or his wife, the composer Phyllis Tate, could ‘suggest any pieces of the wrong note school’ as he wanted to use some of their compositional techniques.1 Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–83), the British serial composer, appeared on his list of possible candidates alongside Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Roberto Gerhard. In the early 1950s, Lutyens, always wilfully controversial, distanced herself from the music of the previous generation of British composers, chief among them Vaughan Williams, acidly dismissing it as ‘cow-pat music’. Decades earlier, in a letter to ‘My Darling Betty’, his beloved former student, Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–94), ‘Uncle Ralph’ had made a passing derogatory reference to a ‘Freak Fest’, his nickname for the annual festivals organized by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM).2 But, it was Vaughan Williams’s close friend Edward Dent (1876–1957), a musicologist, who had helped to found the ‘Freak Fest’ in 1922. Both Dent and Edward Clark (1888–1962), a champion of modern European music and a BBC programmer during the institution’s early days, went on to be president of the society. Throughout this period, works by Maconchy, Lutyens (Clark’s wife) and Vaughan Williams were performed at ISCM festivals. The purpose of the preceding examples is not to highlight the aesthetic differences between the dramatis personae of the four volumes under discussion here – Vaughan Williams, Lutyens and Clark, Maconchy, and Dent – but rather to suggest some of the myriad ways their lives intertwined. These tangled webs of personal and professional relationships combined in different formations to produce overlapping musical networks. Together and individually these books provide rich insights into the British musical world during an important period in its development.

This article explores classical music education through analysing findings from a project on embedding ‘youth voice’ within instrumental teaching and learning. Drawing on theorizations of classical music as a genre, I describe how the young people in this project saw classical music’s genre conventions as working against a youth voice approach. The article also outlines the ways in which youth voice was shaped through social relations in this space as well as the ‘institutional ecology’ of music education. I argue that embedding youth voice approaches in instrumental education will only be effective if the genre itself is open to transformation.

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 importance to reception history of the first complete cycle of Beethoven’s string quartets, given in London in 1845 by the Beethoven Quartett Society, is securely established. Less well recognized is the significance of the complete edition of the quartets prepared by the cellist Scipion Rousselot and published in London in 1846. This article offers the first close examination of Rousselot’s edition and posits that while its claims for unparalleled correctness were unsustainable, its inclusion, uniquely in the case of the late quartets, of two uncommon features – rehearsal letters and instrumental cues – constitutes a trace of the rehearsal practices of the four players responsible for these historically outstanding performances.

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.

In 1789, the Academy of Ancient Music replaced Benjamin Cooke with Samuel Arnold as its musical director. This article offers a detailed analysis of an autograph copy of the address Cooke delivered to the Academy responding to their action, and of a letter to Cooke from Arnold countering accusations made regarding his conduct in the affair. Both documents are annotated by Henry Cooke, who used them in writing a biography of his father. These documents enable a new understanding of the significant changes made within the Academy in the 1780s and of the reasons Academy subscribers replaced Cooke with Arnold.

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.