Composers' increasing and increasingly evocative use of chromatic mediants during the first few decades of the nineteenth century is arguably a hallmark of early Romantic harmony. The apparent association in Schubert's songs between ♭VI and the representation of utopia, fantasy, reverie, dreams and other positive, other-worldly states has been noted by many scholars. However, the fact that he also occasionally employed ♭VI to portray darker sentiments is rarely commented on and questions the degree to which the ♭VI harmony itself acts as a positive, other-worldly signifier. This article accounts for these various opposing uses and proposes that surface voice-leading details (ones that are often overlooked by Schenkerian and neo-Riemannian approaches) are key to understanding the musico-poetics of ♭VI in Schubert's songs.

Geraldine Farrar's performances in Ruggero Leoncavallo's Zazà (1900) at New York's Metropolitan Opera House in the early 1920s were widely acclaimed as an unexpected triumph for the soprano. This article examines Farrar's Zazà in the context of New York's post-war operatic crisis, the concurrent emergence of Hollywood cinema and Farrar's own highly prominent movements between operatic and cinematic media throughout the 1910s. While Leoncavallo's opera raised a number of pressing difficulties for New York critics, Farrar's critical and popular success in Zazà points to new understandings of operatic performance at the dawn of the cinematic age.

The voice of Berg's Wozzeck has been characterized by his Sprechgesang, heard as manifestation of his abnormality or even ‘hysteria’. However, Wozzeck often sounds more lyrical and emotive in relation to his oppressors, whose sense of authority is undermined by their caricatured vocal lines and vocal types. Rather than representing a ‘broken’ voice, Wozzeck's Sprechgesang is reserved for moments shared with his fellow low-ranking comrades, suggesting that it served as a voice of solidarity and empathy. In this article, I historicize the première of the opera at the Berlin State Opera; indeed, a glance at the singers who played the central roles suggests how the characters were perceived. It reveals an intertextual web of suffering shared between Berg's traumatized soldiers, and the perverse exercise of authority. Wozzeck therefore opens up questions about the expression of ideals in post-First World War Germany: the ideal of a stoic man demanded by the army, and the ideal of a voice.

Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus (1888–1964) was one of the Soviet era's most iconic musicians. Settling in Russia reluctantly, he was dismayed by the policies of the Soviet state and unable to engage with contemporary narratives of selfhood in the wake of the Revolution. In creating a new aesthetic field that defined him as Russian rather than Soviet, Neuhaus embodied an ambiguous territory whereby his views both resonated with and challenged aspects of Soviet-era culture. This article traces how Neuhaus adopted the idea of self-reflective or ‘autobiographical’ art through an interdisciplinary melding of ideas from Boris Pasternak, Alexander Blok and Mikhail Vrubel. In exposing the resulting tension between his understanding of Russian and Soviet selfhood, it nuances our understanding of the cultural identities within this era. Finally, discussing this tension in relation to Neuhaus's contextualization of the artistic persona of Shostakovich, it contributes to a long-needed reappraisal of his relationship with the composer.

This study addresses listening as a hinge between therapeutic and musical contexts. In the first two sections I examine the productive confluence of Jean-Luc Nancy's thought and Moshe Feldenkrais's somatic practice. I show that the ‘subject’ is configured as both embodied and enactivist. Drawing on Nancy's work, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud and educational and developmental child psychology, I position the listening subject on a fulcrum of balance and imbalance essential to learning and musical practice. In the third part of this study, I concretize Feldenkrais's ideals of correct action and listening in musical practice. Using Glenn Gould and empirical work on musical practice, I explore the significance of listening between acts of playing. Listening is proposed not merely as a phenomenological form of making sense (Nancy), but as a form of self-negotiation and an enactivist and imaginative space that leads to new possibilities of thought and refinement of action.

The ubiquity and diversity of notational practices in music suggest that notation is a significant part of human beings' musicking behaviour. However, it is difficult to address its function since the usual conception of notation in music scholarship is at odds with studying performance in the first place. This article presents a methodological outline for an ethnomusicology of music notation by investigating the musicality of notation not in terms of its representation of musical structures, but in terms of its mediation of the social and creative agency of musicians. It is suggested that, rather than detracting from musical reality, notation composes musical cultures. This constructive work is simultaneously ontological and ethical. It is described in terms of three distinct processes, namely mobilization, entextualization and remediation. In doing so, this article presents an interdisciplinary approach to a topic that has traditionally defined the disciplinary centre of music scholarship.