Eduard Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful (1854) constitutes the nemesis of the sentimental-Romantic ‘aesthetics of feeling’. It did not however completely expel emotion from music, as some thought, but from music aesthetics, framed as a new ‘science’ equally removed from historical and political context. This position differed radically from the Left Hegelian politics and Romantic aesthetics Hanslick had espoused a few years earlier. His change of heart was prompted by the revolution of 1848 and the subsequent growth of ‘Herbartianism’, an Austrian ‘state philosophy’ synthesized from the anti-Idealist thinkers J. F. Herbart and Bernard Bolzano. Hanslick’s own Herbartian programme had a direct impact on the Viennese tradition of musicology, and a more indirect influence over late Romantic thought on music, pushing toward a more analytical, ‘objective’ concept of music’s dynamic processes. By World War I, ‘energetic’ aesthetics had replaced Romantic emotions with an unsentimental vocabulary of forms, lines and energy-flows.

The chapter offers a focused historical account of Anglophone analysis of Wagner’s music, particularly that of the Ring, beginning with the work of the British Wagnerians Ernest Newman and Deryck Cooke, and continuing to that of more recent American scholars such as Robert Bailey and Warren Darcy. The central task of the chapter is to trace the analytical approaches of these and other scholars to three critical elements of Wagner’s music: leitmotiv, tonality and harmony, and form. The scene between Siegfried and the Rhinemaidens in Act 3, Scene I of Götterdämmerung serves as an example of how these analytical approaches can work, either separately or together, to enrich our understanding of Wagner’s musical practice in his penultimate opera.

Metalcore is a slippery concept. A relatively new genre category, dating from the early 2000s, it provokes wide disagreement about what counts as metalcore and arguments within metal scenes about its legitimacy. This chapter provides an overview of metalcore as an ‘abject genre’, a useful shorthand term for nu metal, screamo, and a variety of core subgenres that have been widely criticised by metal fans. Beginning with commonalities that metalcore shares with other abject genres – some mass popularity, stylistic alterations of traditional metal traits that detractors view as simplified dilutions, quotidian rather than supernatural lyrics, and associations with marginalized categories of identity – I then outline diverse historical accounts by other authors to argue for a more complex view of chronological and conceptual boundaries than an individual narrative might allow. Finally, an analysis of Currents’ ‘Silence’ (2017) provides an example of metalcore as an amalgamation of stylistic qualities from multiple sources. I conclude with thoughts on the utility of abject genres as a concept for reception histories and the potential for metalcore’s complexity as a genre to teach broad lessons about genre in popular music.

As the popularity of K-pop has grown around the globe, the number and scope of K-pop studies have also expanded. While many have provided important insights into socioeconomic aspects of K-pop, the music itself has rarely been at the center of discussion. The purpose of this chapter is to help fill the gap by examining the sound of K-pop, focusing on its musical elements such as melody, rhythm, and instrumentation. This approach involves close listening and reading of select songs covering various stylistic genres and analyzing their sound using the language of music theory. By so doing, this study will identify and offer an understanding of common musical structures used in K-pop songs. Furthermore, the chapter attempts to respond to the question asked most frequently in the author’s K-pop class: How is K-pop different from popular music of the West? To that end, a comparative analysis is conducted between K-pop songs and Western pop music. Among the styles of songs examined are bubblegum popular music, ballads, and songs that quote Korean traditional music, the types of music that are most revealing in addressing the question of distinctiveness of K-pop songs.

Entering into Anton Webern’s twelve-tone music and its complex reception history is like entering into a combat with the Hydra: cleave off one head of the Webern myth, and two more grow in its place. Taking a step back from the embattled scenes of the past in search of a broader vantage point, this chapter argues that the crux in understanding late Webern lies in understanding that the competing, often contradictory images of the composer that have emerged pose no real contradictions after all. Instead, in the same way that the Hydra’s separate heads are essentially connected entities, these different images are best understood as mediated with one another on a deeper level, representing different aspects of one and the same aesthetic concern: musical lyricism.

This chapter explores Britten’s relationship with the critical press and various writers on music. The composer’s antipathy to critics is widely acknowledged, and his relationship with members of that circle could be contentious at times. In his article ‘Variations on a Critical Theme’, published in Opera in 1952, Britten addressed many of the concerns he had about music criticism in Britain and posited some remedies, but he only created further animosity in some quarters. Nevertheless, several music writers gained his confidence and respect, including Henry Boys, Donald Mitchell, and Hans Keller. Mitchell and Keller, in particular, attempted to elevate discourse about music in England and gave special attention to the works of Britten in their periodical Music Survey and in Boosey & Hawkes’s publication, Tempo, among other Britten-centred endeavours. The chapter focuses upon proponents and adversaries alike, including such disparate personalities as Eric Blom, Boys, Norman Demuth, Peter Evans, Frank S. Howes, Keller, Colin Mason, Mitchell, Eric Roseberry, Erwin Stein, Eric Walter White, and Virgil Thomson.

MacMillan’s St Luke Passion was generated in part through a process that entailed the composer working with a group of theologians from Duke and Cambridge Universities. This, in addition to the fact it sets a biblical text, makes it an eminently suitable work to consider from a distinctively theological point of view. This chapter will focuses on a number of unusual features of the score: for example, the way in which Luke’s passion narrative is set in the wider context of the Annunciation and the Ascension; the assignment of the part of Jesus to a girls’ choir; the manner in which the work invites a strongly gendered (‘feminine’) reading when set in contrast to MacMillan’s (arguably more ‘masculine’) St John Passion; the extensive use of rich tonal material within the narrative sections; and the relatively modest orchestral and choral forces MacMillan deploys in ‘dramatic’ works. Attention will be paid to the extent to which these factors are associated with the distinctiveness and uniqueness of the Lucan text itself, and the extent to which they derive from non-Scriptural factors.

Seven Last Words from the Cross is a landmark work in MacMillan’s career. Contextualized within MacMillan’s own oeuvre and the historical genre, this chapter analyses Seven Last Words both musically and theologically, demonstrating that rather than merely being a setting of the traditional text, MacMillan has provided a sophisticated exegesis of the seven last words uttered by Jesus. This is achieved through textual and musical means that demonstrate MacMillan’s modernist approach to tradition. Although the work is powerful and effective as an occasion-specific Christian work, MacMillan has managed to transcend time and place, and make the historicized narrative into a psychological melodrama. MacMillan’s exposition speaks to a traditional understanding of the seven last words representing respectively forgiveness, salvation, relationship, abandonment, distress, triumph and reunion. Through a series of connected musical episodes MacMillan has utilized an array of musical techniques that serve to underscore the dramatic narrative. By analysing key structural moments and deconstructing the sophisticated and multi-layered theology, this chapter demonstrates that MacMillan has, in the words of George Mackay Brown, found ‘an old wisdom out of the cluster of gathering shadows’. Ultimately, MacMillan leaves his listeners with a legend that is ultimately human and unfailingly optimistic.

In 2014, James MacMillan established a music festival in his hometown of Cumnock, calling it The Cumnock Tryst.MacMillan has explained that the festival’s title was inspired by a simple love song he wrote in 1984 called ‘The Tryst’, setting a poem by William Soutar. So brief is this song that it might have fallen into obscurity. Yet its melody has infused no fewer than twelve works in MacMillan’s oeuvre, spanning over a quarter of a century. The scope of genres in which it appears is striking: from a folk song to an early orchestral tone poem; from a large-scale setting of the Christian passion to a congregational mass setting. Although MacMillan has reused musical material from numerous works, The Tryst is unarguably the most important and fruitful of these reincarnations, revealing the most significant degree of his self-retrospection. The broad variety of musical contexts in which the song features demands a range of interpretations to understand the various ‘meetings’ MacMillan proposes with each use of the melody, from the erotic, to the sacred, to the communitarian. By examining these ‘Trystian’ works, we may come to appreciate the extent to which this love song has permeated his career to date.

On 13 October 2017, James MacMillan’s 29-minute cantata The Sun Danced received its first performance in the Sanctuary of Fatima in Portugal. This was the 100th anniversary of what is claimed by the Catholic Church to have been the last in a cycle of apparitions of the Virgin Mary to three shepherd children in the Cova da Iria where, according to historical documentation, at least 50,000 people witnessed dramatic solar phenomena that to date remain unexplained. This chapter focuses primarily on the theological background to MacMillan’s compositional process, with particular reference to his choice of texts. These are highly unusual to the extent of being attributed by the children to a supernatural origin (the Virgin and the Angel of Portugal). The chapter will seek to explore how the work relates to the composer’s larger artistic and spiritual trajectory, to assess MacMillan’s purpose behind the writing of The Sun Danced, and to contextualize it with reference to other attempts by contemporary composers to take up the challenge of engaging with themes, positing the existence of an invisible spiritual realm and its interaction with human history and assessing the ‘mystical’ elements of the work in comparison to the musical mysticism of Olivier Messiaen.

MacMillan has never lost the direct connection with his homeland. While his link with his cultural identity is not refracted through nostalgia for the lost immediacy of the cultural environment, there is a nostalgia present in MacMillan’s work for what has been ‘lost’ to Scottish culture through the Reformation. MacMillan sees as part of his compositional ‘mission’ to engage in ‘acts of remembrance’, restoring what has been lost. This encompasses a wide spectrum of ideas, from the purely musical, to the connection of music to the spiritual, from a response to the local, to an engagement with the national. Two related works which embody these dialectics are the St John and St Luke Passions. The Passion narrative pervades both MacMillan’s religious works and some of his most abstract compositions. His two completed Passions are determinedly international in their reach and yet reflect a personal commitment to the meaning and significance of the religious narrative. These facets are reflected in the choices MacMillan makes in his approach to the setting: the works draw upon the established traditions of this chapter will explores some of the paradoxes that this creates.