In the current discourse surrounding classical music institutions, issues of inclusion and diversity are regularly to the fore. There is pressure to prove the relevance of orchestras and ensembles to wider society, with outreach work in educational settings and in communities already an established part of their output. Using data gathered from a research project with the International Music and Performing Arts Charitable Trust Scotland (IMPACT Scotland), which is responsible for planning a new concert hall in Edinburgh to be called the Dunard Centre, this article extends these debates by relocating them to a new arena: the buildings classical institutions inhabit. First, the public nature of the concert hall is explored by examining three ‘strategies for publicness’ identified in concert-hall projects: the urbanistic strategy, the living building strategy and the ‘art for all’ strategy. These will be discussed in relation to the extensive literature on public space. The second part of the article examines recent developments in musicology and arts policy which encourage more ‘democratic’ arts practice. These will be used as the basis for asking how the concert hall (and its primary tenant, the orchestra) might better achieve the publicness that is so often promised on their behalf.

Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s (1981) approach to deconstructing Platonic dichotomies, this article argues that any notational system is inherently structuring and should be subjected to deconstructive efforts. Further, my contention is that this deconstruction can be realized in how notation itself is used, in what I refer to as ‘deconstructive notation’. This article looks at how notation has been used by composers to deconstruct the categories of Western staff notation, opening up the ways in which music is studied as an invitation to all those engaged in notating music to make room in their work for deconstructive notational play.

The Beach Boys’ 2012 album That’s Why God Made the Radio is typically nostalgic, filled with seemingly sunny reminiscences and retreads that hark back to the 1960s. And yet other parts of the album look back in a more critical fashion, exploring unresolved melancholy through a rich musical language. What makes this even more complicated is the fact that it is possible to hear these two ‘sides’ of the album differently, for the retreads to feel like eerie simulations and the melancholy parts to align with earlier, similarly complicated Beach Boys music. This ambivalence embodies the album’s dual relationship with what I describe as the primary strains of late style: Goethean serenity and Adornian intransigence. In exploring this contention and in applying late style to other examples of popular music, notably David Bowie’s 2016 album Blackstar, I argue that the late-style lens helps to shed new light on popular music’s increasingly complicated knots of nostalgia, ageing and death.

The popularity of the classical guitar in Britain surged between 1950 and 1970. The virtuosity of elite professionals led by the pioneering Andrés Segovia and the new stars Julian Bream and John Williams earned the classical instrument considerable purchase within the wider culture. Above all, it inspired thousands of largely middle-class, male, relatively young and urban amateur players, attracted not simply by the instrument’s intrinsic appeal but also by the opportunity offered to display a fashionable modernity and sophisticated connoisseurship. However, although securing for the classical guitar a much-enhanced musical role, these enthusiasts also created an often inward-looking specialist culture.

Der Meister von Nürnberg is a silent film adaptation of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg remembered chiefly for the protests it generated on its release in 1927. Several authors refer to it briefly in reception histories of Die Meistersinger, but the film has not yet attracted sustained attention either within Wagner scholarship or within literature on opera and film. Der Meister von Nürnberg is, however, an effective lens through which to examine sensitivities in opera’s relationship with film in 1920s Germany, as well as various ambiguities in Weimar-era film making and consumption. The film constitutes fascinating proof of the historically conditioned reverence for Wagner’s Die Meistersinger that existed within conservative opera criticism in 1920s Germany, while its ephemerality serves as a key to understanding several wider features of the Weimar cultural landscape. In this sense, the film exceeds curiosity status and emerges as a multivalent artefact of a complex, contradiction-ridden time.

On 2 February 1900, Gustave Charpentier’s opera Louise premièred at Paris’s Opéra-Comique. Set in contemporary Montmartre, the work was discussed ubiquitously by its earliest critics as réaliste (translatable as both ‘realistic’ and ‘realist’) – a tendency that has continued in more recent musicological writing. In this article, I focus on Louise and discourse around it in order to re-examine the complex relationship between opera and realism. After sketching the terms of the opera’s reception to assess the case for understanding it as a ‘realist’ work, I position the opera in relation to theoretical conceptualizations of realism in other art forms. I then present two music examples to explore how Louise might not only resonate with existing understandings of late nineteenth-century French realism, but also expand or disrupt them. Ultimately, this article ponders the possibility that the act of listening might shape its own distinct form of realism.

In the decades spanning the turn of the twentieth century Italian opera singing underwent a profound transformation and became ‘modern’. I explore the formative elements of this modernity and its long-term effects on the way we sing today through the paradigmatic case of the tenor Enrico Caruso. I frame Caruso’s vocal evolution within the rise of verismo opera, comparing selected recordings, reviews and the rules and aesthetic prescriptions contained in vocal treatises to show how his new vocalism differed from that of the old bel canto. To set Caruso’s achievement in context I also analyse recordings of two other tenors of the era: Giovanni Zenatello and Alessandro Bonci.

This article provides a critical account of Brahms’s early collection of quotations, aphorisms and poems commonly known as Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein in the context of the composer’s youthful engagement with German literature. Drawing on archival materials housed in Vienna, it evaluates the 1909 publication of the Schatzkästlein by the Deutsche Brahms-Gesellschaft and traces Brahms’s path in assembling his quotations to reveal borrowings from sources he encountered in the Schumann house in Düsseldorf in 1854. The second section of the article considers the different modes of reading implied by Brahms’s collection, while the third reflects on the artistic worldview articulated by the assembled entries. While scholars have viewed the Schatzkästlein largely as evidence of Brahms’s adolescent infatuation with the writings of the German Romantics, this investigation emphasizes the competing conceptions of artistry present in these fascinatingly messy notebooks and argues that this youthful collection points to the important role played by literature in the development of Brahms’s distinctive musical sensibility.