This article engages with issues of musical historiography and politics – mainly in the 1930s and 1940s – through the example of Edward J. Dent, a towering figure of international musical and musicological life during that period. Dent's career was tightly interwoven with musical and musicological practice both in Britain and in the wider Western world. It offers a fascinating access point to European musical modernism on the one hand, and to mid-century concerns with the uses of music history on the other. In this article, I focus on these aspects of Dent's career and their intersections by exploring first Dent's involvement with the International Society for Contemporary Music, before turning to two further and closely related issues: Dent's scholarly work of that period – especially his turn to Handel – and his involvement in international cultural politics during the 1930s and 1940s.

Spain was a latecomer to the cyclic Mass, which began to develop there in the 1490s or late 1480s. A number of different strands in this process – free single movements, mix-and-match Masses, ferial Masses, imports, three-voice Masses, Missae sine nomine and the six cycles of Francisco de Peñalosa – can usefully be separated and laid at least tentatively onto a chronological framework on the basis of manuscript date and composer biography. The surviving evidence seems to show a tradition that arose with particular energy in the decade or so after 1500 and reached maturity within a single generation.

The years 1886–91 saw Gabriel Fauré developing a new boldness and intensity in his composition of mélodies, prompted in part by the discovery of new poets (notably including Villiers de l'Isle Adam and Verlaine), and arguably also by his acquaintance with the excellent tenor Maurice Bagès. In particular, the songs of this period (spanning the opus groups 43–58) reveal an intriguingly exploratory approach to transposition, tessitura, timbre and texture. These songs are also remarkable for the seriousness and complexity of their pre- and post-publication revisions. The present study considers these revisions in relation to what is known of Fauré's habits and performing preferences, and in the light of his relationship with Bagès. It explores the practical and conceptual challenges the songs pose for the critical editor: how do we balance the logical principle of Fassung letzter Hand against the occasional musical compromise that appears to have ensued?

The critical reception of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) often circles around two related questions: its relationship to Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel and the implications of its classical ‘compilation’ soundtrack. Revisiting both, this article challenges the pervasive emphasis in existing musicological literature on the film's use of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by offering a formal analysis of its excerpts by (among others) Rossini, Elgar and Purcell. A fresh look at Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary (1695) serves to open a dramatic lineage leading back to the seventeenth-century ‘Don Juan’ archetype, which brings in tow the vast musicological literature on Don Giovanni along with philosophical accounts from Kierkegaard through Bernard Williams. The film's notorious references to Gene Kelly's dance routine in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) add to its confrontation with individual and collective ideals of ‘liberty’ a cinematic reflexivity that can serve (with some help from Marshall McLuhan's influential 1964 study Understanding Media) to shed new light on Luis Buñuel's assertion that this is ‘the only movie about what the modern world really means’.