The music of The Whole Book of Psalms (first printed in 1562) was not a product of English tradition, but a new congregational system brought home from Geneva. Psalm tunes in Edward VI’s time had been secular, iambic and based on dance rhythms; in so far as Thomas Sternhold’s metrical psalms were sung in church, they were chanted by choirs to Sarum tones. The tunes created for congregational use by the Marian exiles had to satisfy Calvin’s principle that they must be distinct from secular songs. They avoided strong rhythms and imitated the Huguenot psalter, which catered for a very different French prosody. Elizabethan congregations were enthusiastic about singing, but did not take to many of these tunes. Evidence shows a growing tendency for the printed tunes to be ignored in practice, and to be replaced by orally transmitted ‘common tunes’ restoring the secular Edwardian idiom. These, rather than the Elizabethan tunes, became the lasting model for the English hymn tune.

Hans Abrahamsen’s recent music has been the subject of much critical and public acclaim, with his output of the last decade finding a new directness of expression even as it incorporates and develops elements of his musical language that have remained consistent over many years. This article examines the use of compositional processes within a number of these large-scale works – Schnee (2008), Wald (2009), the Double Concerto (2011) and Let me tell you (2013) – and explores the ways in which Abrahamsen generates and controls material through a variety of techniques of transformation and repetition. How smaller-scale systems interact to create music of great allusive complexity is considered through discussion of the variation form of Wald; finally, Abrahamsen’s embracing of types of paradox and illusion are presented as strategies to unlock broader aesthetic issues within his music.

This article argues that songwriting can be an autobiographical activity. I trace a long-standing mistrust of self-expression in popular music through a branch of scholarship fixated with performance and personification, demonstrating its underlying affinities with post-structuralism and modernist dreams of impersonality. What we have lost as a result of this undue insistence on mediation is an awareness of the two-way traffic between life and lyrical craft. A poetics of song should pay increased attention to this intricate relationship – not reducing lyrics to biographical contingencies, but rather viewing autobiography itself as a complex process of self-reading, a public act of autobiographical making. My argument is illustrated with reference to three contemporary singer-songwriters who have interpreted aspects of their lives through song: Vic Chesnutt, Sun Kil Moon (Mark Kozelek) and Anohni (formerly of Antony and the Johnsons). Their work ultimately traverses and obscures the interstices between experience and imagination.

Using a combination of ethnography, empirical measures of microtiming between rhythm-section musicians and ethno/musicological analyses, this article examines and measures groove in three real-world performances of the popular dance tradition of Cuban son and salsa. The findings paint a complex picture of groove that is shaped by rhythmic-harmonic structure, shared concepts of timing, individual preferences, group dynamics and rhythmic interactions between musicians as they work together to negotiate a groove with the ‘correct’ feel. Microtiming analyses produce a snapshot of how rhythmic timing relationships are ‘played out’ between musicians in live performances and provide quantitative measures of the level of synchrony and separation within the rhythm section. They also suggest that microtiming is influenced by certain metric locations within the rhythmic-harmonic structure, particularly those locations that anticipate harmonic changes and mark the beginning of repeated rhythmic-harmonic sequences.

This article explores the politics of performing Wagner outdoors, focusing on the Waldoper in Sopot, Poland, and its operations under the Third Reich. Festival literature suggests that the Reich combined climatic deterministic logic with established open-air theatrical practice to implicate experiencing Wagnerian sounds outdoors as inculcating völkisch character in Poles, positioning the festival within the Reich’s imperial mission. However, this vision from ‘on high’ was undermined by bureaucratic disorganization and inefficiency, much like other Nazi artistic projects. The article concludes with a discussion of the post-war afterlives of the Waldoper and its attendant mythologies.

Although royal entries have long been studied by scholars, those undertaken by nobles and other political figures have generally attracted less attention. This is particularly true in musicological literature, a fact undoubtedly attributable to the paucity of surviving documentation on this topic. Yet music often played an important part in these spectacles, both by underlining the dignitary’s status and by enhancing key components of the symbolism deployed. Rather than concentrating on one particular event, this article brings together information about as many entries as possible made by such figures into French cities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This enables us to make general observations about the types of music used in these events (such as fanfares, Te Deums and dance music) in order to draw possible connections with extant musical sources, and also to ponder why certain musical elements mattered more than others to the contemporaries describing these occasions.

Naomi André’s Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement is a call for recognition and inclusion. Over the course of nearly 300 pages, André covers a range of subjects, from long-forgotten concert performances, to opera, Broadway and opera film, to contemporary operatic composition and practice. As she does, she moves between the United States and South Africa – a striking way of approaching her material and a feature of the book that ought to prove highly influential. Some of the arguments she makes are new, some combine pre-existing thought and research in new ways. The most important moments, though, are when she pauses to describe her experiences or those of another black opera lover or group of black opera lovers.

As Emma Hanna notes in the opening line of Sounds of War, ‘In parallel with studies of the poetry of the Great War, Britain’s musical history of the conflict has focused on a small group of elite composers’ (p. 1). Indeed, musical interest in the war has tended to focus on the likes of Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth just as literary enquiry has traditionally centred on Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. However, as William Brooks, Christina Bashford and Gayle Magee write, ‘There are many stories that could be told [about the war], and the vast bulk of them concern ordinary people, not statesmen or generals or celebrated composers. To understand the war, surely, we need do no more than to give these voices a hearing.’1