Bernstein was a prolific recording artist, and this chapter considers his vast recorded legacy, from his earliest recordings made in the 1940s to later ventures, including several important opera sets as well as a large swathe of orchestral repertoire, with the symphonies of some composers (notably Beethoven, Schumann, and Mahler) recorded more than once. As well as mainstream European repertoire, Bernstein never lost his enthusiasm for recording music by American composers, including outstanding discs of Copland, Foss, Harris and Ives. While Bernstein was usually pleased with the results of his sessions – whether in the studio or recorded live in concert – he also felt the need at times to return to composing. These creative phases were intermittent (Bernstein was usually at his happiest when working with other musicians), but the consequence was a healthy output of new work, most of which Bernstein himself subsequently recorded, including two cycles of his symphonies and recordings of his major stage works.

This chapter considers Puccini complicated relationship with the musical canon, or rather with two canons. The author argues that while Puccini’s works stand at the apex of the performing canon, they have been denied entry to the scholarly canon, a body of works deemed historically significant and of high artistic worth. The chapter traces how Puccini’s operas established their place in the international operatic repertory (observing different regional patterns), via stage performances, publisher promotion, and recordings, to the point where they became pre-eminent. The author then turns to examining Puccini’s critical fortunes and evolving reputation among music historians across the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. She explains how Puccini has been castigated as a derivative, overly sentimental composer who appealed to ‘the wrong people’ and did not deserve a place in the history books, though his reputation was to some extent rehabilitated by the end of the twentieth century, finally regarded as worthy of serious scholarly analysis. In recent years, however, Puccini has become the target of calls to dismantle the canon and his works have been criticised for their treatment of gender, sexual violence, race, and class.

This chapter examines the fate of Molière’s plays in the years immediately following the author’s death as first the Hôtel Guénégaud company (1673–80) and then the Comédie-Française (from 1680) battled to capitalise on their Molière inheritance and make the most of plays with which the public was becoming increasingly tired. Strategies employed included ‘resting’ plays and then reviving them, digging deep into the Molière stockpile to produce plays that had not been seen for some time, and increasing the number of double bills given so as to enhance the diversity of their programmes. By these and other means, the Guénégaud company and the Comédie-Française actually succeeded in growing the number of Molière plays in the repertoire and in so doing began the process of turning Molière into the cornerstone of the French national canon. An analysis of statistical information from the company account books enables us to see how successful these strategies were at the box office, at the same time as revealing which of Molière’s plays were most popular in this period.

Chapter 4 explores the travelling form of Cantonese opera in the Guangdong region of south China in the nineteenth century. We address the genre’s wide geopolitical context by combining it with the popular form as toured on the Australian goldfields in Victoria in circus-style tents in the 1850s to 1870s to entertain miners who hoped to make a fortune and return to China. The virtual reconstruction of a tent theatre set up for the opening of a joss house (or temple) in Victoria suggests a consistency from the Pearl River Delta to the goldfields. We examine the sophisticated techniques used by this sojourner company to minimise the disruptions that a touring schedule with multiple and dissimilar sites of performance creates. Carrying a portable stage/backstage platform, and orientating the audience–performer relationship, the company created a spatial layering of two geographies to support its sacred and secular repertoire.

Based on a distant reading of key periodicals, this chapter investigates the music and musicians that received the most contemporary attention – and how recognition developed – throughout the era. It demonstrates in the first instance that the Reich had its own practical repertoire that transcended any one area, national tradition, or group of composers. Contemporaries often referenced musical titles without identifying a composer despite the fact that works could circulate in multiple versions by a single musician, in various settings by different composers, and as adapted texts by dramatists and musicians. But evidence suggests that the years around 1785 marked a moment of increasing normalization during which topics already set to music would be generally avoided and pieces circulating in multiple settings were increasingly linked to the work of just one composer. Establishing which music and musicians received the most attention, their relative importance to one another, and how associations between them altered in time, this chapter demonstrates that the Reich cultivated a shared repertoire that was formed and informed by networks of information and communication.

This epilogue considers the afterlife of music theatre and the Holy Roman Empire as well as its relevance today.

This central chapter turns to written communication to explore its part in regulating and networking theatres and repertoire. It begins with an exploration of the types of information shared between troupes and how discursive networks supported their performances. Although theatres are commonly portrayed as having to compete to survive, this chapter reveals that they also regularly cooperated. By illustrating the equal importance of discursive networks and material exchange among the Großmann (touring), Mainz (ecclesiastical court-affiliated), and Schwerin theatres (secular court-affiliated), it reveals that theatre companies were designed with both court and public audiences in mind, and in practice cultivated a shared repertoire. Programming choices were made to some degree based on location, the status of audiences, tastes of patrons, and access to performance materials. But this chapter argues that such decisions were usually owing to the intense communication of theatrical information and recommendations between theatre directors and enthusiasts – and, ultimately, on the expectations to which a collective imperial culture gave rise.

The chapter re-positions the study of contact-induced language change in the context of the individual user’s management of a complex repertoire of linguistic structures. Taking as a point of departure the assumption that for multilinguals, boundaries among “languages” are permeable and subject to users’ creativity, I draw links between structural outcomes of contact and the inherent functions that structural categories have in information processing in communication. Topics covered include code-switching, lexical borrowing, functional and grammatical borrowing, and convergence and contact-induced grammaticalization. I examine proposed hierarchies of borrowability in lexicon and grammar, and revisit the notion of “constraints” on borrowing. I argue in favour of an epistemology that identifies trends as worthy of attention even if isolated exceptions exist; and which seeks to derive explanatory models from such cross-linguistic trends. I conclude that the study of structural outcomes of language contact can contribute to a better understanding of the language faculty itself, and possibly even of key aspects of the evolution of human language.

This chapter explores how Diana Taylor’s definition of “archive” (e.g., historical artifacts and written records) and “repertoire” (performance practices) as distinct but related forms of cultural memory illuminates the representation of mythic performance in Plutarch’s Lives. More than simply applying modern performance theory to ancient texts, my analysis brings Plutarch into dialogue with Taylor, showing that he reflects upon similar theoretical problems in a distinctive way. In recounting Theseus’ visit to Delos, Plutarch describes how the hero’s defeat of theMinotaur is commemorated by object dedication and choral dance. These two acts of memory are closely intertwined, as both ritual object and mimetic dance function as vehicles to transmit specific elements of the myth. Yet Plutarch also questions the efficacy of dedications and performance practices as such vehicles, calling attention to the limits of both object endurance and mimetic song-dance. By positioning his own writing as a form capable of encompassing and surpassing both the archive and the repertoire, he ultimately reveals how the literary text itself both instantiates and complicates those very distinctions.

The editors’ Introduction provides an overview of and rationale for the volume as a whole. It highlights the book’s key contributions and conceptual frameworks, in part by offering two brief case studies – or “snapshots” – of the dynamic interplay of music and memory in different times, places, and media: Etruscan tomb painting and Athenian comedy.

This chapter thinks through the presence and absence of drama and performance within Asian American literary studies. It highlights disciplinary intersections between Asian American literary studies and theater and performance studies by attending to the ways in which Asian American performance has been strategically collected as archives, from anthologies to repositories housed in universities, libraries, and theater companies. Such attention to the dramatic archive foregrounds a retrospective analysis of Asian American plays and performance, and, in its singular vision, is incomplete. In considering these archives, the chapter foregrounds the remains of Asian American performance to hold together both archive and repertoire, through its inter(in)animation, as sites of knowledge making, transmission, and Asian American subject formation. The chapter traces the performance and publication histories of plays collected in three canonical anthologies and ends with a close reading of Genny Lim’s Paper Angels. To recollect Asian American performance is to look again and against the collection of Asian American performance.

This chapter explores singers’ repertoires, from whence they were derived, and their networks of dissemination, and centres on my formulation of a cultural ‘mainstream’ of songs. I begin by placing the notoriously mixed repertoires available to us within a theoretical framework of the miscellaneous as a form of cultural consumption, before moving beyond specific lists of songs to a consideration of historical process. I examine the remarkable ways in which singers appropriated tunes from other cultural spaces, and the varying methods by which a lyric might be sourced. I look at the question of circulation both within and without London, and the movement of songs between different physical and social sites, demonstrating in particular the overwhelming musical importance of the theatre to mainstream song culture. I construct an image of this ‘mainstream’ as a working model for understanding how songs were produced, performed, and consumed in an age before sound recording: a model that necessarily takes issue with Peter Burke’s influential theory of the separation of elite and popular cultures by 1800. As the century progressed and harmonic forms of songwriting, informed by keyboards, came to prominence, this cultural model was no longer tenable, and newly-literate workers with a slightly improved disposable income began to consume songs in both physical and performative forms that bypassed the ballad-singer.

Social interaction in the twenty-first century involves dynamic use of multilingual and multimodal semiotic resources and is often characterized by the transient, momentary occurrence of creative features. This chapter aims to present Translanguaging as an analytical framework for such dynamic use and creative features in social interaction. The chapter begins with an outline of the diverse phenomena of dynamic and creative practices involving multiple languages and multimodal semiotic resources. Special attention is paid to new media mediated interaction. The characteristics of such practices are identified and discussed. And theoretical issues such as temporality and momentarity are addressed. The chapter then reviews the various analytic concepts, frameworks and approaches that may help to understand these practices, their characteristics and the theoretical issues herein. It focuses specifically on those that have the capacity to offer new insights into the dynamics at the interface of the temporal and spatial dimensions of human social interaction and the creativity of multilingual language users. Perspectives from social semiotics and multimodality, as well as the traditional sociolinguistic and discourse analytic approaches are included. Thus, concepts such as creativity and criticality are also critiqued. The theoretical motivations for the translanguaging perspective and the methodological implications of adopting such a perspective are then discussed and highlighted. It aims to show the added value of translanguaging as an analytic framework for social interaction in the linguistically and culturally diverse world today.