This article illustrates, with particular focus on Rolando Chaparro’s rock fusion album Bohemio (2011), the way in which music operates in expressing Paraguayan national, racial and class identity. It first reviews the literature on music and identity generally, as well as more specifically in relation to Paraguay. It then explores expressions of nationalism and paraguayidad (Paraguayanness) in folkloric ‘popular’ musics (música popular) and the concept of raza guaraní (a widespread belief in a common ancestry based on Spanish and Guaraní ethnic identity) in the construction, maintenance and expression of identity. Finally, it examines the Agustín Barrios revivals in Paraguay and people’s class consciousness as it is expressed in Paraguayan guitar music culture.

The Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan (b. 1959) is a vocal proponent of contemporary sacred music, yet little scholarly analysis looks beyond the surface to explore how theological themes and language influence his work. This article offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between theology and music via an analysis of MacMillan’s characterization of his compositional process as ‘transubstantiation’. Far from being merely an evocative description, transubstantiation is a conceptual metaphor that signifies a distinctively eucharistic logic and practice in music. I trace these implications through MacMillan’s Miserere (2009), which reinscribes past music and rituals as part of refashioning the contemporary imagining of religion.

In this study, I take a critical look at the presence of narcoculture in reggaeton using as a case study the music video of the remix of ‘Somos de calle’. Specifically, I evaluate whether and to what extent reggaeton’s narco-messages and narco-representations – when they converge with other variables – could potentially influence an individual’s modes of thinking and behaviour. The study does not aim to provide a definitive answer to the debate surrounding this issue. More than anything, it strives to analyse the extent to which the claim that such influence may occur has scientific merit, in order to advocate further research on this matter. The article also discusses the highly politicized debate that has surrounded this topic in public discourse, and how this has seemingly affected its critical assessment in academia. For the analysis I rely particularly on social psychology literature concerning violent media content and in the areas of persuasion studies and prejudice studies, but I also consider literature from other fields, including criminology.

This article explores music’s role in radio drama. While musical aspects of early experimental radio dramas have often been explored, the music that figures in the Anglo-American radio play tradition has remained under-theorized. Borrowing interpretative tools from audiovisual discourses can help to elucidate some of the subtleties of the medium, but methodological inadequacies soon become apparent. As exemplars of modern radio dramatic technique, the BBC’s complete adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories (1989–98) are explored, their music interwoven into the drama with consistent levels of subtlety. I draw primarily from Michel Chion’s application of the ‘acousmatic’, showing how the ambiguity concerning the location of the enveloping solo violin music – Holmes’s instrument – offers twists and turns to the agency of the unfolding narrative. I examine further how a sustained technique of intertextual allusion creates what I call a paradiegetic space, in which pre-existing music, heard within the dramas, provides a parenthetical narrative that unravels in parallel with the primary narrative, reflecting back on its themes, changing its meanings and moreover challenging our preconceptions about radio’s particular acousmatic zone.

Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils is a shocking historical drama which, eclipsed by its own battle against censorship, has only recently had a critical revival. A landmark musical collaboration central to that film remains unexplored: Peter Maxwell Davies wrote the score, which is heard in tandem with ‘period’ performances from David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London. Though ostensibly historical, the film’s disruptive atemporal style is elevated through an art of stylized anachronism. This collaboration mirrors Davies’s opera Taverner (premièred in 1972), not only because that too featured Munrow and his consort but also because Russell was supposed to direct its première. This article posits Davies’s film score as a compelling work combining historicist compositional interests and a challenging aesthetic of excess within the popular context of mass cinematic spectacle. Informed by the close study of Davies’s own manuscripts, it argues for new ways of understanding the role of a persistent past in the music of a resolutely modernist present.

Wanda Landowska and Joaquín Nin were, in the context of the Parisian Schola Cantorum during the first decade of the twentieth century, two of the leading artists performing the harpsichord repertoire. This established them as pioneers of its concert practice, but their irreconcilable attitudes to performance – Landowska’s supposedly historical/reconstructive (employing the harpsichord) and Nin’s updated (employing the modern piano) – embroiled them in a fierce controversy conducted in French and Spanish journals between November 1911 and October 1912. This article examines a large quantity of unedited correspondence together with the relevant press articles in the context of the two performers’ agendas. The results suggest that this controversy was an unprecedented marketing strategy orchestrated by Nin against, but reliant upon, Landowska’s success at the time when he was about to make his début in Spain. However, the unforeseen and long-lasting consequences of this controversy brought priceless publicity for Landowska’s cause: the revival of the harpsichord.

In the genesis of Mahler’s Third Symphony, the composition of the first movement occupies a particularly interesting and important position. The first in the symphony but the last to be composed, this movement had a complex structural development from the mere introduction that it was originally supposed to be to the gigantic and extraordinary construction that we know today. As it is, every new piece of evidence that surfaces sheds more light on this fascinating process. This article examines one such item: an original manuscript source in a private collection which gives a fresh take on the creative mechanism behind the composition of this movement and is directly connected to a well-known manuscript housed in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna.

Historians have viewed nineteenth-century music salons in Paris as concert-like environments where performers and audience gathered in a designated music room. Architectural studies and first-hand accounts, however, show that the music salon incorporated multiple reception rooms, and that guests frequently listened to musical performances from adjoining spaces. While conceptual space has been a subject central to salon studies, this project analyses material space, re-evaluating how the architecture of the salon influenced audience structure, listening modes and compositional practices. This architecture was ultimately central to the development of salon opera, which flourished between 1850 and the 1870s and was epitomized by Gustave Nadaud’s Le docteur Vieuxtemps (1854).

In 1965, a short article entitled ‘On the Performing Arts: An Anatomy of their Economic Problems’ appeared in the American Economic Review, the flagship journal of the American Economic Association.1 Written by two Princeton-affiliated economists, William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, the article laid out in eight short pages a powerful explanation for why the operating costs of so many performing arts organizations consistently overran their earnings, and why this tendency had become more pronounced over time. The problem was not that lavish budgets were being spent on productions, nor that musicians’ unions had wrung too many concessions from management. Rather, the problem was more prosaic, having to do with ‘differential rates of growth in the economy’.2 To illustrate the argument, Baumol and Bowen asked readers to perform a thought experiment: ‘Think of an economy divided into two sectors: one in which productivity is rising and another where productivity is stable.’3 For the sake of simplicity, they explicitly assumed a number of useful fictions: that labour can easily and frictionlessly move between the two sectors; that wage increases across the board will keep pace with productivity growth (a standard if problematic assumption in modern economic theory);4 and that the monetary supply is sufficiently controlled to maintain overall price stability. What, given these assumptions, is the outcome of such a stark split in the economy? In the productive sector, the increase in wages that workers receive will be offset by increased productivity. In the stagnant sector, wages will rise but output will not. And if an organization is to avoid bankruptcy, the only way to do so is by raising prices to cover the rise in labour costs. (Remember, one of Baumol and Bowen’s working assumptions is that wage increases will keep pace with productivity growth, in both productive and stagnant sectors.) Yet this solution to the problem creates another one, since over time prices in the unproductive sector will increase at a much faster rate than those in the productive one, making the products of the former unaffordable to an increasing number of workers.

In January 2019, the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage (CRAL) at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris presented the conference Sound and Music in the Prism of Sound Studies.1 A spectacular video announces the event: a heavy-metal band screams about the conference’s themes and cries out each speaker’s name, which is in turn spelt out on screen in gothic-bloody font. The band’s song lyrics note that the focus of sound studies is on topics such as soundscape, noise, silence, recording techniques and listening. Most critically, the band shouts: ‘These are issues that musicology has been dealing with for a long time. What is then the place of musicology in the wake of sound studies?’