Pietro Metastasio’s opera Catone in Utica (Rome, 1727) represents ancient Roman imperial politics through the recurring trope of ‘enslavement’. Reading Catone alongside Metastasio’s sources, from Lucan to Addison, reveals how the poet’s de-particularizing representational code converted historical modes of racialization into a generalizing Cartesian moral framework, and thereby demonstrates how the continuing influence of post-Enlightenment constructs of biological race has obscured the multiplicity of racialisms in earlier contexts. Turning from a physiological episteme to an earlier, ‘unassimilated space’ limned by poetics, sentimentality, and song, this article takes Metastasian opera seria as a window onto historically contingent conceptions of racialized difference.

As practised by Nicholas Cook, Philip Tagg, and Nicolai Graakjær, the analysis of advertising music has largely concentrated on how advertising works to communicate meaning. Within media and communications studies, such a focus is seen as a distraction — albeit a fascinating one. For Sut Jhally, for example, advertising has pernicious social and ecological effects and advertising scholars’ goal should be to understand ‘what work advertising does’ in order to mitigate them. This examination of a Ford automobile advert featuring Nina Simone’s ‘I Wish I Knew …’ (1967) shows how music analysis might contribute to this pressing project.

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.