In an April 1962 article previewing the First International Webern Festival, Hans Moldenhauer promised that Anton Webern's music would one day be known as ‘the music of the space age’. Moldenhauer chose his words carefully. The Webern Festival was set to take place in Seattle at the same time as the World's Fair (an event also known as the ‘Century 21 Exposition’ and ‘America's Space Age World's Fair’) and its opening night concert would be held on the grounds of the World's Fair. Yet the two ‘W.F.s’ made for an awkward pairing. Far from space-age music, the lush textures and sweeping gestures of the Webern's Festival's posthumous premieres revealed a young Webern rooted in nineteenth-century Romanticism. Critics and scholars’ responses to these premieres reveal much about the contested place of Webern's music – and modernist music more generally – within mid-century mainstream culture.

Music streaming service Spotify has recently declared that genre is becoming less important in popular music culture, linking this idea to post-identity claims. In contrast, the central argument of this article is that genre continues to matter in music streaming, where algorithmic recommendation systems remediate genre and its association with constructions of identity and difference. We examine Spotify's mediation of genre through a multimodal discourse analysis of genre metadata as presented on the website Every Noise at Once, playlist curation, and media discourse. Analysing the genres bubblegrunge and rap français (French rap), we show that the algorithmic and human processes of Spotify and its users rearticulate genre, shaping, in turn, patterns of recommendation, curation, and consumption. These processes remediate earlier constructions of identity, temporality, and place in music culture. Simultaneously, they intensify differentiation and individuation, tying in with postulations of multiplicity and diversity in neoliberalism that conceal power imbalances.

In the song cycle Libro de cantares (1987), Spanish-Cuban composer Julián Orbón (1925–91) entered into a dialogue with the work of two other men who, like him, were displaced under the Franco regime: he re-used Asturian folk songs compiled by Eduardo Martínez Torner in 1920; and he followed compositional models deployed by Manuel de Falla in Siete canciones populares españolas (1914). In this article I argue how, by doing so, Orbón engaged in individual and collective memory-building processes that matched to an extent but also diverged from similar processes that were then underway in Spain in the 1980s (following the end of the Franco regime in 1975) and, particularly, in Orbón's natal region of Asturias. I also argue that Orbón's understandings of memory and modernity are unique within the context of displaced twentieth-century Spanish composers, and as such afford us opportunities to reconsider these crucial categories.

Theodor W. Adorno suggested that music is mediated by socially derived forms of reason, a provocation here considered with respect to neoliberalism. Drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of neoliberalism, which in Wendy Brown's summary takes neoliberalism as ‘a specific and normative mode of reason’, I consider what this means for immanent features of music and processes of its composition. This critical attention to music's formal, aesthetic register enables me to go beyond the more well-established (although nonetheless valuable) frameworks for discussing music and neoliberalism, which focus on music's relation to labour conditions and creative industries. A range of music and sonic art is discussed, work by Chino Amobi, Brian Eno, Bryn Harrison, Sarah Hennies, Johannes Kreidler, Wolfgang Rihm, Marina Rosenfeld, and John Zorn. I ultimately argue that some core features of Adorno's conception of critical art and music need reformulating for the neoliberal age.

In Janet Cardiff's The Forty Part Motet (2001, 40Part), ‘a reworking of Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium (c. 1570)’, the forty voice parts of the motet are played back via forty speakers. Visitors walk through and around the encompassing speakers arrayed in eight groups of five. Still in constant demand, 40Part enjoys unparalleled success in the contemporary art scene. This article shows how 40Part became associated with New York City's rituals of remembrance and healing after 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy, and considers the politics of the installation's stagings as part of those commemorations. Here, 40Part took on a specifically comforting function that speaks to larger tendencies in twenty-first-century auditory culture, American cultural responses to trauma, and commemorative uses of music, which are built on white bourgeois sentimental attachments and the techno-social production of imagined spaces and times of privilege.

Iannis Xenakis visited Argentina as a professor of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in 1966 where he discussed his interdisciplinary interests – mathematics, architecture, and computer-aided composition. Using archival resources and oral history, this article explores three aspects of Xenakis's trip to Argentina. First, the way the media framed the visit of the European composer and the reception of the events organized around it under a modernist discourse. Second, the direct impact that this visit had on some of the composers at CLAEM, particularly Graciela Paraskevaídis. Finally, the exchanges that Xenakis had with engineer Fernando von Reichenbach, who had been working on transforming graphic material into sound, something that crystallized with the development of Reichenbach's Convertidor Gráfico Analógico (1969), and Xenakis's Unité Polyagogique Informatique CEMAMu (UPIC 1977).

This article combines historiographic reflections on the open-work concept in serial music with a new philology of Pierre Boulez's Don, the opening piece of Pli selon pli. I begin by presenting challenges in defining the open-work concept. I also deconstruct the dual use of the term ‘serialism’ to define a set of compositional techniques and a musical style. This leads me to a reconsideration of the similarities between the changing compositional strategies of Boulez and John Cage (and their influence on others) during a time of formal and stylistic experimentation in the 1950s. Finally, I segue to Boulez's compositional plans for Don. In doing so, I provide a concrete example of how the techniques of serialism often belie the aesthetic and extramusical connotations at play in works that are serial in style.

Utilizing the ideas of convivencia (convivial interaction) and Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz's framework of ‘accompaniment’, I suggest that the ‘modern-urban’ mariachi, often characterized as an expression of standardization and commodification, has established a capacity for facilitating culture that contributes to the development of convivial communal spaces. In the midst of marginalization and systemic oppression, migrant and aggrieved communities throughout Greater Mexico engage in cultural practices and actions to reaffirm a sense of belonging, to which mariachi musicians have contributed and at times served as cultural bearers. I examine mariachi practices of apprenticeship learning and chambas (contractual gigs), the emergence of the Misa Panamericana (the mariachi mass) in Cuernavaca, and the integration of Mexican cultural expressions in San José, California to illuminate the convergence of political, cultural, and religious action and how the mariachi expression has played a role in these intersections.

Singled out as one of the finest and most original works by the leading film-music composer Alberto Iglesias, the score for Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (2011) stands out for its inclusion of a (neo-baroque) virtuoso part for solo violin with key symbolic functions in the film. This part is largely derived from the composer's post-minimalist string trio Cautiva (c. 1990). The present article analyses Iglesias's reconfiguration of key materials from Cautiva to express the relationship of domination, violence, and desire between the film's villain and the heroine as well as the role played by violin virtuosity in establishing links to the (gothic) horror genre and in the exaltation of the artist's power as creator that Almodóvar ultimately reflects upon in The Skin I Live In. The article adds to recent studies on the centuries-old symbolism of the violin as a topos of the demonic and otherworldly by analysing these meanings in one of the finest contemporary film scores. The study is part of a recent upsurge of critical assessments of Almodóvar–Iglesias's work from cultural and musico-analytical perspectives.

While it is often assumed that flamenco is strongly oriented towards the past, thus far, few scholars have explored the roles of flamenco in voicing memories of the Franco dictatorship (1939–75). During the second half of the dictatorship, a series of natural disasters, combined with new economic and political developments, led to the forced displacement of a number of flamenco artists and their wider communities in various Spanish cities. This article will explore how memories of this episode have impacted the flamenco dance repertoire associated with the Triana neighbourhood in Seville, focusing on three interrelated case studies: the performance and documentary film Triana pura y pura, and recent productions by the flamenco dancers Pastora Galván and Israel Galván. By analysing these performances alongside their historical, social, and institutional contexts, this article conceptualizes the intersections between dance, nostalgia, and festivity as a meaningful scenario of embodied memory in post-Franco Spain.

In the 1930s, the Iron Foundry, a short orchestral piece by the Soviet composer Aleksandr Mosolov, became hugely popular with audiences across Europe, North America, and beyond. Reassembling the fragmented archives of its performance and reception histories, this article sets out to follow the work on the circuitous routes that ensued. Addressing issues including programmaticism, the reception of Soviet music, and the history of comedy, I show how Mosolov's composition became a lightning rod for larger debates about concert music's relationships with modernity, politics, and mass entertainment. The case of the Iron Foundry, I suggest, illustrates how the pleasures of machine aesthetics – and, more specifically, a stylized idiom of mechanized gesture distinctive to the period – became widely assimilated into what we might call the vernacular internationalism of the interwar middle classes.

Using GDR dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann's ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ as a point of departure, this article explores the role that ‘revolutionary’ South America and its musical corollary, the Nueva Canción, played in expressions of inner-communist critique in 1970s East Germany. Biermann's critique was Janus-faced. Lyrically, the ‘Chilean’ allegory of his ballad, in which a cameraman is murdered by a soldier, expressed support for the Allende administration while simultaneously destabilizing Soviet Bloc rhetoric. Musically, references to Nueva Canción music such as that of singer-songwriter Daniel Viglietti represented the anti-imperialist Other while simultaneously rejecting GDR-style socialist realism. On the one hand, Biermann's inspiration in South America can be heard as a colonizing gesture; on the other, it can be understood to reflect a provincialized East German society looking to the Third World for alternative sociopolitical – and musical – models.

This article reinterprets the tension between sound and music in Pierre Schaeffer's 1966 Treatise on Musical Objects. Schaeffer famously insisted that the Treatise did not address music or composition; scholars have therefore engaged with it primarily as a theoretical text on sound and listening. In this article, however, I argue that the denial and deferral of music throughout the Treatise should be considered a discrete and key part of its theoretical contributions. By the early 1960s, Schaeffer's aesthetic frustration with the practice of musique concrète had blossomed into something of an ethical imperative and paradox. He saw it necessary to suspend all musical activity in the present, so as to salvage music's future. This dynamic is key to understanding Schaeffer's controversial and influential calls for the deferral of cultural responses to sound in the Treatise, as illustrated by the practices of ‘deconditioning’ and ‘reconditioning’.

Valentin Kruchinin was the first major ‘Soviet sci-fi’ composer, writing the music for Yakov Protazanov's silent film Aelita: Queen of Mars in 1924. While his score is regrettably lost, evidence of Kruchinin's musical vision for Aelita remains, including a two-page piano piece, ‘Aelita’, seemingly designed to promote the film. Lacking any ‘space-age’ musical tropes, this brief work instead showcases Kruchinin's affection for ‘eccentric dance’. Resembling a slow foxtrot, Kruchinin's piece brings Aelita's cinematic world into contact with ‘light-genre’ popular fare, much of it borrowed from American jazz and maligned by critics for its ‘bourgeois’, ‘Western’ connotations. Within the context of Protazanov's anti-New Economic Policy film, Valentin Kruchinin's ‘Aelita’ comments on both the imperial past and the decadent allure of the Western present.

This article discusses how and why disorientation is used as an aesthetic strategy in breakdown sections of festival-house tracks and performances. Breakdowns in electronic dance music (EDM) have many sound layers removed from the mix. For house music at EDM festivals, this usually includes drums, therefore in many breakdowns it is easy for listeners to lose their metric entrainment. Breakdowns also often introduce a new sound layer, use metrical dissonance, and feature prominent ‘effects’. Through analyses and interviews, the article argues that festival-house breakdowns can be disorienting both physically and psychologically, but that this fulfils multiple purposes for performers, such as providing contrast that makes musical climaxes more exciting and allowing an opportunity for dancers to physically rest. Breakdowns also encourage visual interaction between performers and dancers and allow performers to communicate a narrative. The analyses in the article make interpretations about the meaning of tracks as communicated primarily in breakdown sections.