I should begin by declaring immediately my standpoint that there is no such thing as race. Race and, by extension, racism may have a social reality but they have no sound scientific grounding whatsoever. No convincing biological evidence has ever been produced that establishes the existence of different human races. DNA analysis offers little support to theories of genetic difference, and has revealed that even the most geographically separate social groups vary in only 6 to 8 per cent of their genes. Race does not present a medical problem when it comes to organ transplants. My research questions are, therefore: When and why did the idea of ‘race’ arise, and how did this fiction affect the production and consumption of music in the nineteenth century? In seeking answers, I make illustrative references to Liszt's Gypsy, Wagner's Jew, Celtic music, African-American music and American Indian music.

One of the most curious aspects about Canadian Chinese cultural history is the role of opera theatres. They served as the public face of the community, cultural ambassadors or even artistic curiosities, but at the same time provided Chinese audiences the intimate world of emotive musical drama. Because of their public role, they were often ambitious projects. Since first appearing in Victoria in the 1860s, Chinese theatres played an integral role in its community life. Featuring performance of Cantonese opera, the regional genre known to the majority of Chinese immigrants that came from the Pearl River Delta of southern China, these theatres provided crucial entertainment. Chinese theatres’ success in Victoria, and later in Vancouver, was not an isolated phenomenon, but rather closely connected to other cities along the Pacific coast. The opera business waxed and waned, in large part as a result of the Chinese exclusionist policy in Canada and United States. In the 1910s and 1920s, through joint ventures, Chinese in Canada and the United States succeeded in forming a network of opera performance and revived their fluidity of movement in the Pacific Northwest region. Because this network returned significant mobility to troupes and performers, Chinese theatres flourished again in North America. This article provides a preliminary overview of this body of troupes and performers in Canada, its impact and the national and transnational forces that shaped it. It addresses key issues related to this history: the effect of immigration control, the relevance of Chinese theatres to community life, and the transborder crossings.

Shortly after Beethoven’s death, several of his closest associates provided performance indications for editions of his works. Previous discussions of Carl Czerny’s and Ignaz Moscheles’s metronome marks for Beethoven’s piano sonatas have highlighted the importance of these indications for our understanding of the intended performance practice of these works. Nevertheless, the provenance and meaning of these metronome marks have remained unclear, which has led to some confusion in the literature.

By presenting new evidence, including the discovery of what are most likely the metronome marks intended for the missing sonatas from the first ‘complete’ edition by Tobias Haslinger, the article presents a more complete overview of the indications in these editions, as well as their chronology. In addition, it also discusses to what degree the editors seem to have influenced each other, which indications are most likely representative of Beethoven’s intended speeds, as well as why the metronome fell out of favour later in the nineteenth century. Finally, it discusses the meaning of these metronome marks for modern performers, and how these editions give options to disentangle the author from the text.

Investigations of how people have used music to represent, perform, enact and cope with trauma have proliferated in the last decade, although these have often focused on post-World War II musicians and musical phenomena. This work has engaged various methodologies and drawn on myriad bodies of trauma theory in order to better understand the relationships between music and trauma for Holocaust survivors, Cold War- and glasnost-era Eastern European musicians and civilians and soldiers in Iraq. However, despite the growing interest in trauma within music scholarship, scant attention has been paid to relationships between musical phenomena and trauma prior to World War II. And yet, the wars, revolutions, forced displacement, slavery and imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make these years some of the most violent in the histories of modern Europe and the Americas, and thus some of the most important to address when asking questions regarding relationships between music and trauma.

In this special issue's introductory essay, we consider why pre-twentieth century musicians and repertoires have historically not been addressed in scholarly literature. In so doing, we outline the aims of the issue; review relevant literature in musicology and trauma studies; discuss the benefits and challenges of applying trauma theory to nineteenth-century music and musicians and provide readers with information on this special issue's collaborative history. Although giving readers a fleshed-out overview of trauma studies from the nineteenth century to present is outside the scope of this article, this introduction nevertheless provides enough background on the status and main ideas of trauma research from the mid-nineteenth century to present day to facilitate comprehension of how the research showcased in this special issue relates to social, historical and political conceptions of trauma.

This article illuminates ways in which memory of Ireland's Great Famine or ‘an Gorta Mór’ (1845–1852) shaped US music during the US Civil War (1861–1865). Among scholarship on Irish Americans in the Civil War, few sources substantively address lingering memories and trauma from the Great Famine. Yet, a significant amount of the estimated 1.6 million Irish immigrants living in the US in 1860, 170,000 of whom enlisted in the war, were famine survivors. Music's unique role in emotional life offers robust source material for understanding famine memory in this transnational context. Adopting a concept of ‘private, secret, insidious trauma’ from Laura Brown and Maria P.P. Root, as well as understanding Jeffrey Alexander's ideas about cultural trauma as a sociological process, the article highlights a some of the ways in which famine memories emerged in music-making during the war. Case studies include a survey of US sheet music, the transnational performance and reception history of the song ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’, and research on the life of the northern Union army's most successful bandleader, Patrick Gilmore, who left Athlone, in Ireland famine-ravaged West, as a teenager in the late 1840s. The approach is inherently transatlantic, accounting for histories that occurred in the United States, Ireland and the broader Atlantic world dominated by Britain. The essay illustrates how music can contribute to social history, ways in which the application of research on trauma can inform musicological work, and ways in which traumatic memories can emerge across time and distance, particularly in diasporic contexts.

A Liedertafel concert at which the former Governor His Excellency Sir Henry Loch and Lady Loch were present was reported in the Illustrated Australian News and Musical Times of 1889 as follows:

In the course of some remarks Lord Loch made the statement that the advancement of musical culture in Melbourne is to be attributed to the influence of Germans. Now although the community includes some excellent musicians of that nationality, the opinion expressed by our late governor is by no means in accordance with facts. It is only just that honour should be given where it is due and the untiring efforts of the English musicians in the colony in educating public taste ought to be thoroughly recognised.

Eschewing the polemic surrounding Franz Schubert's private life, as well as the habit of judging his art by Beethovenian criteria, many musicians now have chosen to focus on unique aspects of the composer's œuvre in order to illuminate its distinctive aesthetic values. In particular, some have sought to isolate and explain contextual processes responsible for compelling perceptions of drama and unity in Schubert's later instrumental works. The objects of their inquiries consist of progressive sequences of internally defined musical elements, relations and events that confer effects of internal momentum and comprehensive coherence on Schubert's music. These contextual processes complement tonal, formal and thematic procedures in Schubert's compositions and reveal an ingenious artist engaged in a restless search for new ways of organizing music.

Nineteenth-century gagaku (Japanese traditional court music) songs, composed mainly between 1877 and 1884, are almost forgotten today; but they deserve special attention for their function in the development of modern composition in Japan. More than 100 compositions by 28 composers, belonging to two collections, can be counted as gagaku songs in the narrowest sense. Most of them are accompanied by an individually composed ostinato pattern played on the wagon, a six-stringed zither. The songs are strongly shaped by Restoration thought, one of the characteristic aspects of the early modernization period in Japan, although the genre originated in response to the need for music for a modern Western method of education.

An analysis of the two collections, of intertextually related pieces and of different versions of single songs shows that the collective process of genre development and the individual process of song composition were closely intertwined. The aim of my analysis was to uncover the problems faced by composers when they composed a single song. Particular solutions were often required to fulfil all the demands of the strict stylistic framework of the genre, while meeting the conditions of a specific poem. While similarity to an already existing song was not avoided when a new song was composed, the effort to create a difference can also be observed clearly in some cases. My analysis gives special attention to heterophonic techniques that characterize the relation between voice and accompaniment. Their use is constitutive for the musical form, and their analysis sheds light on the aesthetic significance of each song. An analytical approach to the gagaku song repertoire provides us with a fascinating insight into how musical creativity was performed under the circumstances of a quickly changing cultural environment in the early modernization period of Japan.

In the last decade, musicologists have definitively put to rest the lingering concern that Robert Schumann misunderstood poetic irony in his settings of Heinrich Heine's poetry. My contribution to this project begins with Robert's written correspondence with his fiancée Clara Wieck in the years leading up to their marriage in 1840. Relying on passages in the letters that have previously received little or no critical attention, I closely observe the lovers’ views about the workings of ironic language in their relationship, especially concerning the technique that scholars of Heine's poetry have called the Stimmungsbruch (‘breaking of mood’): a sudden reversal of tone that punctures a poem's lyric beauty and maliciously invalidates its apparent sincerity. Clara detested this gesture when it came from Robert in everyday life or in his letters; she insisted that Robert share his negative feelings openly, even though Robert knew that this would distress her. The letters thus provide a helpful context in which to understand Schumann's idiosyncratic compositional treatment of the Stimmungsbruch in ‘Dein Angesicht’ (1840). Using the evidence of the letters, I argue that Heine's poem would likely have had strong personal associations for Robert and Clara. In his setting, Robert thus transformed the poem's dual Stimmungsbruch to reflect pain honestly without inflicting it at the same time. Focusing primarily on the torturous dialectic between major and minor in the song, I show how Robert has the protagonist absorb the thrust of Heine's damaging Stimmungsbruch into himself, keeping the beloved out of harm's way while still allowing the dark, throbbing energy of the wound to radiate from beneath the surface.

‘The ‘German band’ as a concept remains integrally associated with German ethnicity in the Australian public mind though such things as the extroverted oom-pah music of present-day Oktoberfest, or the live and recorded oom-pah music in German or ‘Bavarian’-themed venues. However, the costumed ‘German bands’ that were a feature of nineteenth-century British street and seaside resort life also began to appear ubiquitously in various gold-rush era Australian population centres and remained a fixture of Australian street entertainment until the First World War. Gold-rush era chronicler William Kelly described their music as being able to ‘drive swine into anguish’. Yet they had an opposing reputation for excellence in playing Strauss waltzes, polkas and other popular dance music of the era. They were sought after by dance venue, circus and other theatrical entertainment proprietors and were furthermore hired for private balls, picnics, showgrounds and racetrack entertainment. By appearing at German social functions and venues they buttressed pan-German cultural identity and traditions and, for non-Germans, the sight and sound of a disciplined, groomed and costumed German band provided a mildly exciting cultural tourism experience. In blaring street, circus parade or showground mode they, in fact, conformed to the present-day global stereotype of the Bavarian Biergarten oom-pah band. Through foundation research, this article attempts to apply some social, cultural and musicological ‘flesh and bones’ to what has more or less remained the ‘myth’ of the ubiquitous ‘German bands’ (and their not-always-German bandsmen) that sometimes entertained and charmed pedestrians while at other times represented a social and sonic blot on the streetscapes and public spaces of pre-World War I Australia.

According to jazz scholar Howard Rye, when considering public representations of African-American music and those who made it at the turn of the last century, ‘the average jazz aficionado, and not a few others, conjures up images of white folks in black face capering about’. We could extend this to include white minstrels singing so-called ‘coon songs’, which feature reprehensible racist lyrics set to syncopated rhythms. Traditional representations assign the blacks no role in the public performance of these scurrilous ‘identities’, which essentially banished them from the literature as participating in careers in the performing arts. As a result of the problems with the representation of blacks in texted music from the turn of the century, historians have tended to write vocal performance out of the pre-history of jazz, in favour of the purely instrumental ragtime. However, recent research reveals that African-American vocal entertainers did take agency over representations of themselves and over their careers, in a space unencumbered by the problematic history of race relationships in the USA. That space was Europe: beginning in the 1870s, and in increasing numbers until the ‘Great War’, troupes of African-American singers, dancers and comedians travelled to Europe, where they entertained large audiences to great acclaim and gained valuable experience as entrepreneurs, emerging as an important market force in the variety-theatre circuit. Above all, they performed the cakewalk, the late-nineteenth-century dance whose syncopated rhythms and simple form accompanied unnatural, exaggerated dance steps. By introducing Europe to the cakewalk, they prepared audiences for the jazz craze that would sweep through the continent after the war and enabled Europeans to experience the syncopated rhythms and irregular movements whether as dancers or as spectators.

Spanish estudiantina plucked string ensembles achieved immense popularity in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and were an important catalyst in the creation of the sonority of a variety of European and American popular musics. Such ensembles had precedents in Spanish student groups dating back to the Renaissance and the rondallas (or groupings of plucked instruments) that were associated with popular outdoor serenades. However, the modern estudiantina movement can be traced back to 1878, and was consciously framed as a modern historical construct. A large grouping of youths and former students, donning Renaissance student dress, decided to form a society to visit Paris during Carnival, on the eve of the 1878 Exposition Universelle. They took Paris by storm, performing in a variety of street settings, reinforcing the exotic stereotypes of serenading musicians associated with Spain, and bringing to life historical notions of the minstrel. In the decade that followed, the European performance contexts of the estudiantinas included theatres, outdoor venues and expositions, garden parties and salons – and they became fixtures of the music hall and the café chantant. This paper explores early English and French constructions of the estudiantina phenomenon, and how the groups were framed in the light of exotic street musics and prevailing tropes of Spain. It also examines how the outdoor performance settings of the estudiantinas were translated onto the theatrical stage.

The close relationship between music and other art forms is a well-established feature of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Interdisciplinary study since the 1970s, of the relationship between literature and music, reflects among other things a recovery of nineteenth-century concerns. This article equates Mahler's development of symphonic form with a development of narrative form within his works, by linking three phases of his symphonic output with his literary interests. The first phase links the early symphonies with the early nineteenth-century author Jean Paul. His novel Titan provides the subtitle of Mahler's First Symphony, and correspondences can be discerned between the character of Albano, the hero of the novel, and Mahler at this stage of his career (1888). The opening of the Finale of the symphony shows narratological similarity to the opening of the final volume of the novel. The second phase links the middle-period instrumental symphonies with Dostoevsky, who became Mahler's greatest literary and moral hero. The Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies exhibit narrative structures different from those of the earlier symphonies; rather than ending with indivdualistic triumph, after the manner of Jean Paul, they pose the Dostoevskian question of whether some sort of redemption of their material is possible. The third phase links the late works with Mahler's contemporaries Robert Musil and Marcel Proust. In this context, the ending of Mahler's Ninth Symphony can be seen as a adaptation of musical narrativity analogous to the Modernist extension of the lengthy novels of these two authors.

Under the recurring headline ‘the Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches’, several British newspapers reported in early 1900 that, during the ongoing siege of Mafeking, British army concertina players were capturing enemy soldiers by simply playing strains of the concertina to distract them out of their hiding places. ‘One is sorry to learn that the art of music should be pressed into service to lure persons to destruction’, a commentator in the Musical News noted, but then, it was rationalized, ‘all's fair in war’. This hybrid use of the concertina during the South African War was further employed as a metaphor for the decay of the physical body itself: as has been noted by Elizabeth van Heyningen, food in Boer concentration camps was so meagre that the meat served to prisoners was once described as coming from a ‘carcase [who] looks like a concertina drawn out fully with all the wind knocked out’. Likewise, Krebs (1999) has discussed the presence of the concertina in the trenches as an example of contemporaneous stereotypes about the susceptibility of Boer soldiers to music in relation to perceived notions that they were backwards and easily manipulated. Drawing upon references to music – particularly the ubiquitous, anthropomorphised, instrument of the concertina – in concentration camps during the South African War, this paper will situate the use of British military music at the dawn of the twentieth century within the framework of trauma studies, proposing that the soundscapes of imperial war were implicitly tinged with traces of physical suffering.

What influence did contemporary attitudes towards empire and towards ‘Other’ peoples exert on musical works, especially when those peoples were perceived as being of a different race?

The answer surely varies with the genre and also with the complexity of the given work. The late Edward Said – the most prominent and controversial figure in cultural critique of this sort – put it well: a work that is ‘rich in … aesthetic intellectual complexity’ must not be treated as if it were a crudely ‘jingoistic ditty’ – or, for the present context, a racist one. Said's specific example of a complex literary work, in that passage from his important book Culture and Imperialism, is Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, with its occasional, resonant references to a sugar plantation in the Caribbean and thus also to the British slave trade.1 The problem becomes even more intense in music (of equivalent aesthetic complexity). Instrumental works are particularly difficult to interrogate on any ‘extra-musical’ basis, for an obvious and much-discussed reason: the relative inability of music, without verbal or visual anchors, to denotate and to narrate.2

A certain Filippo Nardoni, upon completing his review of the libretto of Giuseppe Verdi's Don Alvaro (the Roman version of La forza del destino), wrote to the director of the police: ‘I have marked in pencil the proposed corrections, which I have thought advisable for the wretched subject of the opera. If you don't like them, they can be easily erased with sandarac’. It seems strange that an ostensible censor would correct a libretto and then not mind seeing his corrections erased; censors were, after all, gatekeepers of morality and political propriety, and no libretto was supposed to be permitted without their approval. As it turns out, Nardoni was not an official Roman censor, and yet, he and other prominent personalities were more important in censoring Verdi's operas than their official colleagues. They were not only more rigorous when it came to identifying potentially dangerous passages but also worked as a team, passing the libretto around among themselves until an acceptable alternative was found.

Less than a century after the introduction of the violin to Japan, in the late nineteenth century, Japan offers the highest level of training on the instrument and has produced many internationally successful violinists. Although one can hardly imagine it from the current role of the violin in modern Japan, in the early twentieth century the instrument played a significant role, not in the development there of Western classical music, but in the survival of the indigenous Japanese music that we call today ‘traditional Japanese music’.

With the flood of Western culture into Japan after the Meiji Restoration, of 1868, the Japanese government reconsidered whether their native music was worthy of Japan as a civilized country. In fact, except for court music, native Japanese music was held in low esteem by society and the government alike. The music of the shamisen was particularly problematic, due to the vulgar texts of shamisen songs and the low class status of shamisen consumers. Shakuhachi had until recently been restricted to Fuke monks, and was still establishing a new role in the musical culture. Thus, the whole world of ‘traditional Japanese music’ was entering a new age.

It was during this period that many Japanese became acquainted with the violin, by playing it in ensemble with koto, shamisen and shakuhachi. Young Japanese professional musicians began to learn the violin. The principles of Western music they learned in this way gradually made their way into Japanese music. At one time, the ‘traditional Japanese music’ ensemble of violin with Japanese instruments seemed to have become firmly rooted in Japan as ‘home music’; but this has not turned out to be the case. As Japanese violinists have become increasingly dedicated to Western classical music, traditional Japanese music has once again become the exclusive use of native instruments.

Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, published in 1827 after being detached from his string quartet Op. 130, appears to be the first work ever to have been allocated rehearsal letters. These were added by Beethoven’s friend Karl Holz at the request of the composer and his publisher Mathias Artaria. The rehearsal letters can be compared with the work’s structure, which is best perceived as dividing into three main ‘movements’, the third being much the longest. A different approach is necessary for analysing each of the three. In the first, reference to medieval rhythmic modes helps to clarify Beethoven’s procedure. The second is essentially a fugue, albeit unusually homophonic. The third is multi-partite but mainly in $$\raster="rg4"$$ , and includes a 32-bar theme that returns intact – the only substantial exact reprise of material. This movement also include two fugal expositions. Thus there are four full fugal expositions altogether, and each is a double fugue in which the exposition is more or less regular. Holz’s letters match up well but not perfectly with the structure of the work.

In the spring of 1856, the critic Émile Girac published a review of George Frederick Bristow's Symphony No. 2, the Jullien Symphony, in The Albion. What he wrote is revealing; it reads in part:

But do you know how much is expressed by those two little words the Jullien Symphony? They mean simply that Jullien did more for Concert music in three months, than the Philharmonic Society has accomplished since Mr. U.C. Hill created it and brought it before the world. [Jullien] gave us Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn, as we have never heard them interpreted in New York. He taught us the art of shades and effects in music …. He [also] revealed to us the powers of Bristow, Fry, and Eisfeld, and did far more for their reputation than was ever done by the Society, which owed so much at least to the first and last of these noble and courageous musicians. … [T]his is the true meaning of Bristow's symphony.