Throughout its 150-year history New York City's Central Park has inspired writers, painters, poets, and musicians. In 1906 Charles Ives was moved by its rich soundscape to compose his orchestral piece Central Park in the Dark; nearly one hundred years later, in 2005, the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude unfurled 7500 saffron-coloured cloth panels for a sixteen-day installation at the park. Although separated by a century, these artworks appear similarly preoccupied with the construction, manipulation, and perception of nature and place, honouring and celebrating the park as a naturalistic setting, while also acknowledging it as a fabricated entity, shaped by human interactions, and as an ongoing cultural project. The present article suggests parallels between Ives's construction of the park in sound, and ‘Christo's Gates’, as the installation became known – parallels that suggest the continuing resonance of Ives's musical contemplation, as well as the issues that occupied its composer as the Gilded Age gave way to the progressive era.

Larry Starr's analysis of Charles Ives's ‘The Cage’, in his book A Union of Diversities, contrasts with most readings of the song in that he focuses on how the points of congruence between the highly dissimilar vocal and piano parts form a ‘powerful unity’. However, he provides no specific analytical method for examining this unity more closely. This study offers one such method for ‘The Cage’, revealing a path within a virtual, bounded space that correlates with some of the syntactic and semantic aspects of the song's text. These syntactic correlations also hold true in a similar passage in Ives's song ‘Majority’.

Conlon Nancarrow is often classified as an ‘experimental’ composer. Definitions of experimentalism in twentieth-century music, however, vary widely, from general ones simply requiring the invention of new compositional techniques to some of John Cage's more specific definitions, which advocate indeterminacy. Nancarrow's music, pioneering in its use of the player piano and its exploration of rhythm and tempo, easily fulfils the criteria for experimentalism in a general sense, yet is by no means indeterminate. Nancarrow does not set up experiments and let them take their course, but rather carefully crafts his compositions, drawing on more traditional techniques of motivic development, counterpoint, and formal planning. Through analyses of Nancarrow's Studies nos 21 and 36 for player piano, I shall suggest that it is through the interaction of experiment and tradition that Nancarrow highlights the perceptibility of what is most experimental in his music: the highly novel approaches to the structuring of musical time.

Analysis of the spatial elements of popular music recordings can be made by way of the ‘sound-box’, a concept that acknowledges the way sound sources are perceived to exist in four dimensions: laterality, register, prominence, and temporal continuity. By late 1972 producers working across a range of styles and in different geographical locations had adopted a normative positioning of sound sources across these dimensions. In 1965 no such norm existed. This article contextualizes the notion of the sound-box within academic discourse on popular music and explores the methodology employed by a research project that addressed the gradual coming-into-existence of the norm, which the project defined as the diagonal mix. A taxonomy of types of mix is offered, and a chronology of the adoption of the diagonal mix in rock is presented.