There are many historical repertories of interest for which documentary evidence is scant. In such areas traditional models of musicological research, driven by notation, may be of limited use, and there is thus a need to develop alternative formulations for the relationship between the performance, the performer and the text. In this study, textual analysis and ethnographic comparisons of structurally similar performance cultures (namely, classical Greece and Rome and bardic traditions of south-eastern Europe and eastern Africa) are combined to examine one such tradition: the secular music of the bards of medieval and early-modern Wales. Contemporary accounts pertaining to this repertory are characterized by a systematic ambiguity in their description of speech and song, and a selective use of musical notation for instrumental but not vocal figuration. Comparisons with other musical cultures that share this ambiguity lead to the development of a model of performance that accounts for these textual features.

Late eighteenth-century writings bear witness to Mozart's extraordinary skills as a performer-composer. But this dual status has yet to exert a serious influence on our understanding of Mozart's piano concertos. An examination of changes to the autograph scores of his Viennese works catches him in the act of negotiating performance needs as soloist and compositional needs as author. His acute attention to detail and his intense personal involvement and commitment – evident in written testimony and in alterations to the autographs – reveal a performer-composer intent on harnessing very specific musical events (sounds, timbres, instrumental and solo effects) to more general ends that ultimately invite listeners to perceive performance and composition as mutually reinforcing features of a complete musical experience. Modern performers trying to recreate the performer-composer experience – soloists and orchestral instrumentalists alike – are thus encouraged to put sounds, textures and effects centre stage in their own interpretations of Mozart's concertos.

Johann Strauss Sr's most famous composition, his 1848 Radetzky March, was premièred during revolutionary times. The March soon became a standard piece for Habsburg bands in the nineteenth century and was considered ideal for fostering patriotic sentiments at the start of the First World War. After the Great War, however, commentators portrayed the work very differently. No longer a part of contemporary culture, the Radetzky March now belonged to a bygone era. Biographers of the Strauss family found this work to be proof of Strauss Sr's support for the conservatives during the Revolution, a claim not supported by evidence. More generally, treating the piece as a relic from another age transformed it into a marker of nostalgia in the 1930s, as is best demonstrated in Joseph Roth's novel, Radetzkymarsch (1932).

Attempts to promote the aesthetic prestige of serial and post-serial music were grounded in theories of material and philosophies of history. As composers explored new aspects of sound and subjected these to rational organization, they saw themselves pushing history forward, with new musical materials providing physical evidence for each new stage of progress. The continual search for new material fashioned a thread that bound together vastly different personalities, and similar ideas about material and history linked a diversity of approaches to, and reactions against, serialism. Believing themselves to be renouncing a subjectivity made untrustworthy by the recent past, many post-war composers turned to something larger to guide their compositional decisions: to the objective dictate of historical progress. Such deference to a fictitious construction of history veiled subjective aesthetic preferences and provided a way to legitimate new techniques with the authority of ‘higher laws’. This article reconsiders post-war serialism in central Europe from the perspective of theories of material and examines how these theories coupled aesthetic and social concerns with philosophy of history to justify compositional techniques.

The West–Eastern Divan Orchestra – founded in 1999 by Daniel Barenboim with the support of Edward W. Said in response to the Israel–Palestine conflict – brings together young Arabs, Jews and Spaniards for a workshop and concert tour every year. It displays a tension between repertoire (exclusively the Western classical tradition) and marketing (as an expression of inter-cultural dialogue). Drawing on fieldwork from 2006, the article analyses this tension as it evolves for players who shift repeatedly between the demands of Western orchestral playing and political discussion. It exposes the way the hierarchy of musical roles and the discourse elaborated around them create an environment that erases the political identities of players; and discusses the ways in which this environment is punctured at certain moments by a discursive or practical intervention, causing political allegiances to rise back to the surface explosively (only to be subsumed once again into music). Although the orchestra is set up to oppose the violence of war in the Middle East, it can be seen to contain its own disconcertingly coercive regime, one emerging from its hierarchical constitution with Barenboim as omnipotent leader, the professional ambitions of players, and the power that music can have in confounding the conceptual sphere.