The end of the twentieth century was marked by a sense of closure for many in the West. The Cold War was over, Western democracy had triumphed, and the future of neoliberalist capitalism seemed secure. The ‘end of history’, as Francis Fukuyama prematurely called it was, of course, short lived.1 The new century ushered in a series of economic and political crises that have shaken fin-de-siècle complacency to its core. Events ranging from the banking crisis of 2008 and the economic collapse of countries such as Greece to recent scandals surrounding ‘fake news’ and the activities of organizations like Cambridge Analytica have posed serious challenges to the primacy of neoliberalism, capitalism, and contemporary democratic processes. At the same time, the rise of far-right extremism and populism has resulted in bewildering shifts to the political discourses of both Europe and the United States. One response to these unsettling changes has been a resurgence of leftist politics. Over a century after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and fifty years on from the protests of 1968, socialist ideals have found a renewed impetus in the rise of movements such as Occupy, Podemos, Syriza, and grassroots support for politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.

Despite Nono's and Carter's opposing views, divergent compositional aesthetic, and applicability of twelve-tone music, the two composers shared their admiration for the works of the Second Viennese School. In this article, I examine Carter's 1957 and Nono's 1956 analyses of Schoenberg's pivotal twelve-tone work: Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (1926–28). The study offers a rare opportunity to look at the same piece analysed by two composers with unique points of view. Completed only a year apart, the analyses illuminate aspects of Schoenberg's work that each composer found most compelling and applicable to their own works. Thus, these analyses, combined with sketches housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel), the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), and the Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono (Venice), not only shed light on Schoenberg's system, but also become a valuable tool for tracking both Carter's and Nono's compositional processes, showing how Schoenberg influenced two schools of thought.

For Dmitri Shostakovich, reaching the heights of the Soviet musical establishment proved easier than staying there. He triumphed with his Fifth Symphony of 1937, which marked the composer's return to official favour after the denunciation of his second opera and third ballet. Following that success, Shostakovich faced the problem of the sequel: whether or not, in the Sixth Symphony, to repeat, refute, or re-inscribe. I propose Shostakovich first thought about going big with his new project, composing a grand text-based score about Lenin, and then considered going small, grounding the first movement in folk fare and mixing light genres in the others. But in the end, he chose a more experimental approach. The Sixth Symphony collapses boundaries, both semantic and syntactic, pulling them back from a fixed state into a play of possibilities.

This article asks how we might map the complex relations between music and socialism. If an abiding concern of socialism is the collective appropriation of the means of production, what are the points at which music might participate in this project? Three moments from the history of music's entanglements with socialism shed light on this question. The first considers music's role in workers’ struggles in Europe c. 1900. Here what is at stake is how music and musical associations (most notably workers’ choruses) were mobilized as a tool in the struggle to socialize the means of production. A second vignette turns to France after May 1968, when music itself became a site of political intervention. Here what is at stake is the struggle to socialize the means of musical production, part of the struggle to institute a truly democratic culture. The third vignette turns its attentions to the proximate future, considering music's place in emerging forms of digital capitalism. Crucial in this regard is the way music is being transformed into a means of production in its own right – a means, that is, of producing the kinds of subjects required by contemporary capitalism – as well as the political constraints and possibilities these shifts present for a socialism of the future.

This article presents a historical study of black British poet and recording artist Linton Kwesi Johnson. Drawing on archival research, I argue that Johnson's hybrid literary and reggae-based practice, known as ‘dub poetry’, offers fresh insight into the status of ‘the popular’ in histories and theories of the avant-garde, and of black avant-gardism specifically. I begin by discussing Johnson's participation in the Caribbean Artists Movement, a hub for diasporic arts in 1960–70s London, whereupon I show how dub poetry transposed the ideas of Johnson's colleague, pan-African Marxist C. L. R. James, in simultaneously documenting and instigating grassroots efforts at community centres where Johnson worked, notably the Race Today Collective. I contend that Johnson forged a cultural programme that paralleled James's well-known rejection of the elitist model of the political vanguard: Johnson furnished a ‘popular avant-garde’, as I call it, whose community-oriented ethos was realized via popular media like the LP and mass-democratic – populist – action campaigns.

This article engages with a wide range of existing literature relevant to understanding the artist persona in popular music, and advocates a view of personae as multiply constructed through sound recordings, music videos, live performances, interviews, social media posts, and a variety of other means. In an initial effort to theorize pop personae as transmedial phenomena, I merge a critical musicological understanding of the performative potential of aesthetics with perspectives from celebrity studies and media studies to produce new insights into how personae are articulated across a variety of disparate but intersecting spaces. Through a case study of Sam Smith, I demonstrate how the signs and symbols scattered across numerous platforms are aggregated in the pop persona, and elucidate the interpretive possibilities afforded by different points of contact between artist and audience. I conclude that the task of reading pop personae amounts to an assessment of the conglomerate of texts and contexts that shape both the production and the reception of pop expressions.

Our fraught political moment is a propitious one for renewing the Marxist approach to music. Because that approach has consistently been folded into a more general Marxist discourse on art and aesthetics, any attempt must begin by revisiting what is essential to that discourse. I take its keystone to be the realist conception of art. This conception holds that artworks are a means by which at least some of their appreciators come to know truths about the world outside consciousness. Insofar as they are representational, painting, fiction, music, and drama potentially constitute vehicles for coming to understand the real world. Artistic representation on this view is understood to be analogous to mental representation.

Previous studies of Marxist aesthetics have followed Maurice Merleau-Ponty in making a sharp distinction between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ branches of the tradition. The Eastern, beleaguered by the exigencies of Communist Party rule is often presented as the corrupt twin of the Western. The latter, developed in relative freedom and informed by a Hegelian legacy suppressed by Stalinism, alone commands theoretical, rather than merely historical, interest. This article departs from this Cold War framework in arguing that the Hegelian strand in Marxist aesthetics grows out of its Bolshevik predecessor and, crucially, shares with it a realist conception of art. After reconstructing the emergence and development of this conception (paying special attention to how music is directly addressed in the literature), I evaluate the compatibility of the realist conception of art with the materialist conception of history as it is found in Marx and Engels. I ultimately argue that moving past the realist conception of art is key to renewing the Marxist approach to music for our time.

The notion of a shared history across the Mediterranean is central to a number of Spanish-Moroccan musical collaborations, which draw on the notion of convivencia: the alleged peaceful coexistence between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in medieval Spain. In this article, I explore the relationship between a ‘musical’ convivencia and Moroccan immigration in Spain, focusing on two prominent case studies: Macama jonda (1983) and Inmigración (2003). Spanning a twenty-year period, I argue that these two productions illustrate shifting responses to Moroccan immigration at distinct historical moments: the post-Franco era and post-9/11. These two productions illustrate the malleability of the convivencia myth, employing it for distinct social and political purposes. I argue that Macama jonda and Inmigración should be read as products of shifting political and cultural relations between Spain and Morocco, and Spain's negotiation of its Muslim past.

This article demonstrates how migration formed a process of memory construction in the work and thought of Russian émigré composer Arthur Lourié (1891–1966). It analyses Lourié’s song cycle Recollection of Petersburg, composed over two decades and across four countries, providing close readings of music and poetry and exploring the network of intertextual connections the cycle activates. Lourié has proven a difficult subject because of the diversity of aesthetic positions he took from decade to decade. Recollection allows us to trace a line of continuity as he passed through these incarnations, revealing an aesthetics of accumulation and arrangement with origins in Acmeist poetics. This aesthetics, in turn, served as a coping strategy for Lourié’s life in emigration, as he sought to order the voices of memory and escape the flow of time. Lourié’s case will contribute to our understanding of the profound impact of migration on music in the twentieth century.

In this article I examine localized cultural change that nevertheless serves as an applied instance of broader change. Focusing mostly on British, white male musicians and music writers active in the improvised and experimental music scenes of the UK (and, to a lesser extent, United States and Europe) across the 1970s and early 1980s, I identify clear shifts in taste, attitude, and practice. These shifts arc across what Ben Piekut calls the ‘mixed avant-garde’ of the 1960s to what I describe as the ‘unpop avant-garde’ of the late 1970s and 1980s, in which influences from popular and non-Western music play more significant roles than before and liminal, quasi-popular practices such as noise are in the emergence. I trace the appearance of the unpop avant-garde through independent music publications from the period, most prominently Microphone, Musics, Collusion, Impetus, and Re/Search, using these published scene discourses as barometers of the musical atmosphere of the time.

This article examines the labour of socialist music in the German Democratic Republic, focusing on composer Paul Dessau's use of political cryptography and quotation in a number of compositions from the opera The Condemnation of Lukullus (1950) through to Choral Music No. 5 (1976). Most famous for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, Dessau was the leading avant-garde composer of the GDR and its chief practitioner of serialism. He believed that only difficult, progressive New Music could convey the struggle(s) of socialism. This brought him into conflict with the authorities, who accused him of formalism. Choral Music No. 5 is a setting of a poem by Heiner Müller based on a speech by Erich Honecker (Žižek refers to the text as an ‘obscenity’). Dessau's composition is complex and dialectical, abrasive in its rhythms and counterpoint, and pluralistic in style. It is the embodiment of Dessau's belief in socialist music as rewarding hard work.

Members of the rock band Henry Cow co-founded Music for Socialism in early 1977 with the assistance of several associates in London's cultural left. Their first large event, a socialist festival of music at the Battersea Arts Centre, gathered folk musicians, feminists, punks, improvisers, and electronic musicians in a confabulation of workshops, performances, and debates. The organization would continue to produce events and publications examining the relationship between left politics and music for the next eighteen months. Drawing on published sources, archival documents, and interviews, this article documents and analyzes the activities of Music for Socialism, filling out the picture of a fascinating, fractious organization that has too often served as a thin caricature of abstruse failure compared with the better resourced, more successful, and well-documented Rock Against Racism. As important as the latter was to anti-racist activism during the rise of the National Front, it was not concerned with the issues that Music for Socialism considered most important – namely, how musical forms embody their own politics and how musicians might control their means of production. Affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party (UK), Rock Against Racism produced massive benefit concerts and rallies against the fascist right, drawing together musicians and audiences from punk and reggae. The much smaller events of Music for Socialism enrolled musicians from a range of popular music genres and often placed as much emphasis on discussion and debate as they did on having a good time. The organization's struggles, I will suggest, had less to do with ideological rigidity than it did with the itineracy and penury of musicians and intellectuals lacking support from the music industry, governmental arts funding, labor organizations, or academia.

Shortly before finishing his studies with Arnold Schoenberg, Roberto Gerhard composed Andantino, a short piece in which he used for the first time a compositional technique for the systematic circulation of all pitch classes in both the melodic and the harmonic dimensions of the music. He modelled this technique on the tri-tetrachordal procedure in Schoenberg's Prelude from the Suite for Piano, Op. 25 but, unlike his teacher, Gerhard treated the tetrachords as internally unordered pitch-class collections. This decision was possibly encouraged by his exposure from the mid-1920s onwards to Josef Matthias Hauer's writings on ‘trope theory’. Although rarely discussed by scholars, Andantino occupies a special place in Gerhard's creative output for being his first attempt at ‘twelve-tone composition’ and foreshadowing the permutation techniques that would become a distinctive feature of his later serial compositions. This article analyses Andantino within the context of the early history of twelve-tone music and theory.

In February 1959 East Germany fêted the legacy of Felix Mendelssohn with a week-long celebration. Like earlier festivals honouring composers such as Handel, these festivities provided a site for working out in practical terms abstract theories of the ethico-political value of the Germanic cultural heritage to a socialist German state. Yet, discourse surrounding the Festwoche indicates a unique approach to such negotiations. Debates surrounding the festival are analysed, including publications in journals and newspapers as well as speeches, in order to demonstrate that the circumstances surrounding the Mendelssohn festivities fomented remarkably diverse responses to issues pertaining to the value of the musical heritage and to Mendelssohn's place within that heritage. Further, the problems Mendelssohn's life and work presented led one of the most important musicologists in the GDR – Georg Knepler – to embrace a radically Marxian (rather than Marxist–Leninist) account of the significance of the composer's music to East German audiences.

In this article I examine the use of music in modernist and politically engaged Yugoslav cinema of the 1960s through three groundbreaking black wave films: Želimir Žilnik's Rani radovi (Early Works, 1969), Dušan Makavejev's WR: Misterije organizma (WR: Mysteries of the Organism, 1971), and Lazar Stojanović’s Plastični isus (Plastic Jesus, 1971). With a specific focus on the use of Partisan songs, I analyse how key political moments are encoded with new levels of meaning in these films, often through parody, irony, and satire. I identify a ‘sonic turn’ within black wave cinema and propose a method of ‘intertextual listening’ to reflect the importance of contextual knowledge in identifying and interpreting the cultural and political baggage trafficked into these movies. I ask how does music shape the discursive strategies and communicative potential of these films, rendering pre-composed music a powerful medium for social and political critique? And in what ways does film music construct the Yugoslav socialist experience more broadly, reflecting how ideals of reform socialism found musical expression in Yugoslav novi film?