From 1976, the works of the Venetian composer Luigi Nono (1924–90) are marked by a noticeable change in both his philosophical and his political outlook. What results is a decade (1980–9) of compositions that feature poetry in librettos, live electronics, the spatialization of sound and a prominent use of microtonal pitches. Together these create completely novel soundscapes that are noticeably different from his previous output. This article will examine a particular influence – the philosophy of Martin Heidegger – in the creation of the 1984 piece for large ensemble A Carlo Scarpa. The purpose of this is not only to allow for an insight into the music and structure of A Carlo Scarpa, but also to illuminate how philosophical and political ideas can be represented within the craft of composition, and the new paths of thinking that guided Nono’s artistic output during the 1980s.

Between 1963 and 1966, John Cale, Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and a handful of other collaborators rehearsed together on a daily basis. Held since then in the archive at Young and Zazeela’s Church Street apartment in New York City, the tapes of the Theatre of Eternal Music have become obscure objects of fascination and mystery for experimental music fans. They have also been at the centre of disputes over the authorial propriety of the drones that they record. This paper offers a material history of those tapes as they circulate online. By tracking and organizing the available bootlegs, I trace the ensemble’s changing sonic self-conception as it moved from a composer-led ensemble supporting Young’s saxophone improvisations to an egalitarian collective constituted in its dedication to the daily practice of listening from ‘inside the sound’.

In this article I argue that Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony assumes a pivotal role in advancing the romantically tinged narrative in Luchino Visconti’s film Senso (1954) through a politically recoded message. Visconti offers in this film a reflection upon the political climate in Venetia during the Risorgimento through the pre-eminent role of music. In particular, Bruckner’s music emphasizes the condition of the Venetians under Austrian rulers by dominating as an oppressive and overpowering force, not unlike the Austrian supremacy over the north Italians. Bruckner’s music, which relies on a decisively Wagnerian idiom, conveys throughout the film ideas of betrayal, on both the microlevel and the macrolevel. Such betrayals refer to the Christian Democracy, which excluded the Marxist partisans from governing post-war Italy. These events mirror, for Visconti, the failed revolution of the bourgeois-driven Risorgimento in the 19th century due to the idleness of the aristocracy. Interpreted through Visconti’s Marxist ideology, Bruckner is thus an indicator that the hegemony of the elite remained in place, unchanged and unaltered. As the sonic representative of the Austrian monarchy, it opposes the Risorgimento ideal of the bourgeois class and reassures the supremacy of the ruling class.

‘Austrofascist’ has again become an accepted term to describe the Austrian regime from 1933 to 1938. This article contributes to this re-emergence using the example of the Wiener Symphoniker, and by seeking long-term ‘fascistization’ processes surrounding the orchestra rather than blunt comparisons against developments in neighbouring regimes. The account hinges on the Austrian radio service (RAVAG), through which, during the economic crises of the 1920s, the state exerted alignment pressure on many cultural institutions. As Chancellor Dollfuss declared the ‘depoliticization’ of Austria (the banning of political parties) in 1933, RAVAG used its leverage to break the orchestra’s union alliances and dictate personnel selection according to politics. On this foundation, new radio series like Stunde österreichischer Komponisten der Gegenwart (‘Austrian Composers of the Present’) extolled ‘pan-Germanism’: a nationalist ideology that proclaimed the European supremacy of German Austrians and attempted to forge an Austrofascist community – even as it simultaneously created exploitable overlap with National Socialism.

Gregorian chant exerted a pivotal influence on Olivier Messiaen’s spiritual and musical universe. Scholars have noted his theological preference for this repertoire and its central role in his organ playing, and have observed how some of Messiaen’s melodies contain obvious traces from chants. Recent analytical work has ventured further and shown how plainchant in fact served as a melodic and formal matrix behind the composer’s musical language. This article raises the additional claim that Messiaen’s employment of plainchant rested upon an idiosyncratic and questionable – but largely coherent – theory of neumes as a more or less universal feature in music. A quasi-archaeological reconstruction proves necessary to reconstruct this conception from the composer’s fragmentary and enigmatic statements. The article investigates Messiaen’s readings of Vincent d’Indy and Dom André Mocquereau, including ideas from Hugo Riemann, showing that rhythm is a most central element in their similar connections between chant and freedom of expressivity in contemporary music. All in all, chant theory is highlighted as a vital element in analyses of Messiaen’s own music, as well as a theoretical framework that explains many of the composer’s seemingly eclectic connections between different repertoires.

Incidental music of the early twentieth-century has received little musicological attention, despite its widespread use during this period of history. Theatres were a popular means by which audiences could interact with new music, and composers could experiment with new ideas and build collaborative relationships. Using a 1926 Swedish production of August Strindberg’s Till Damaskus (III), directed by Per Lindberg with music by Ture Rangström, this article argues for the importance of analysing incidental music as collaborative performance. It explores the use of ‘reflexive performance’ as a method of analysis, combined with semiotic and intermedial approaches.

In this paper we offer a preliminary framework that highlights the relational nature of solo music-making, and its associated capacity to influence the constellation of habits and experiences one develops through acts of musicking. To do so, we introduce the notion of extended musical historicity and suggest that when novice and expert performers engage in individual musical practices, they often rely on an extended sense of agency which permeates their musical experience and shapes their creative outcomes. To support this view, we report on an exploratory, qualitative study conducted with novice and expert music performers. This was designed to elicit a range of responses, beliefs, experiences and meanings concerning the main categories of agency and creativity. Our data provide rich descriptions of solitary musical practices by both novice and expert performers, and reveal ways in which these experiences involve social contingencies that appear to generate or transform creative musical activity. We argue that recognition of the interactive components of individual musicking may shed new light on the cognition of solo and joint music performance, and should inspire the development of novel conceptual and empirical tools for future research and theory.

This round table grew out of two gatherings in 2018–19 that endeavoured to bring musicologists into dialogue with recent revisions in the history of international relations.1 Our specific focus was the interwar period, more often discussed in terms of nationalism – or perhaps at best transnationalism – than within the context of internationalism, a principle that lay behind the foundation of elite governmental organizations such as the League of Nations, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Labour Organization and others. As the historians Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin have shown, the construction of objects of global governance by these organizations ran alongside a broader sweep of non-governmental groupings that forwarded the interests of indigenous, working-class, anti-colonialist, anti-slavery and feminist causes.2 What role or roles did music play in these contexts? The case studies that follow illustrate the far-reaching implications of internationalist policies for musical institutions, groups and individuals.

After the First World War, some musicians embraced ‘international’ identities in novel ways, requiring novel strategies.6 During the 1920s, internationalist initiatives were launched in musicology, music education, folk music and more, joining a more general proliferation of institutions devoted to cultural internationalism.7 In the domain of Western art music, the most high-profile internationalist organization of the era was the ISCM, founded in Salzburg in 1922.8 The ISCM’s principal activity during the interwar period was to organize an annual contemporary music festival. This peripatetic event, hosted in a different European city each year, served two intertwined ambitions: to promote contemporary music and to further international cooperation. The latter aspiration gave rise to an unofficial nickname – the ‘musical League of Nations’ – encapsulating the ISCM’s perceived affinities with other, heftier internationalist endeavours.9 A ‘musical League of Nations’ was, however, an ambivalent and precarious project: the moniker recognized, through analogy, a necessary proximity to the era’s chief prototype of an international structure; but it clung, by way of its adjective, to a degree of detachment from the treacherous waters of politics and diplomacy.

At the height of the strikes and factory occupations that marked Turin’s biennio rosso (‘two red years’, 1919–20) a series of songs circulated among the workers. I will focus on two of these songs – La guardia rossa and Miśeria, miśeria – to listen to the particular stories they tell about the experiences of the city’s labouring classes: the ways in which the songs functioned as vehicles of political expression and solidarity, and as loci of memories of past labour and strife. Both songs survived in the memories of workers and their families long after the biennio rosso, as oral and written testaments to a moment when it seemed that revolution might be possible. The crucial point, however, is that while both were expressions of a local political milieu and neighbourhood-specific, working-class sentiment, they also gestured to a broader network of internationalist solidarity. It is the tensions and convergences between localism and internationalism that I want to explore further – a ‘local internationalism’, perhaps, that prompts us to pay attention to the broader political potential of small-scale communities, as well as to the situatedness of political ideologies during a period often framed in terms of national retrenchment and transnational exchange.60

‘Hot clubs’ proliferated all over Europe and the United States during the 1930s. For a brief period (1935–6), they joined forces in an International Federation of Hot Clubs (IFHC), the main purpose of which was to link together devotees in search of American hot jazz recordings at a time when they were difficult to find and buy in Europe, since that sub-genre was less popular and commercially successful than what was then called ‘straight’ jazz. The expression ‘hot jazz’ was coined by jazz musicians at the end of the 1920s and referred to a style based on performance and improvisation rather than on the composition and performance of written parts. A founder of the Hot Club de France (HCF) in 1932, the French jazz critic Hugues Panassié was the first to establish a hierarchy between these two styles:

In October 1945, five months after the end of the Second World War in Europe, German critic Edmund Nick wrote the following in the American-sponsored Munich newspaper Neue Zeitung:

In an account of the early history of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) for a 1946 BBC broadcast, president of the ISCM Edward Dent recounted the ‘two main reasons’ why London was proposed as the society’s initial headquarters at that first meeting in 1922 in Salzburg. Firstly, he maintained, ‘it stood apart from all the quarrels and jealousies of the Continent’, and secondly, and most importantly for the purposes of this article, he outlined a triangulated relationship: ‘[London] was regarded as a link between Europe and America.’ ‘American music’, he continued, ‘really needed that link in those days; and the general feeling of the European musicians was that they would provide the music and England the money to pay for it.’ But then (again using ‘the Continent’ and ‘Europe’ interchangeably) he signalled a profound shift: ‘Today the situation has changed. It is Europe now which needs the link with America, for America has become a great music-producing country, while it will take the Continent some little time to recover its creative energy.’262 Tantalizing though Dent’s references to ‘links’ may be, obtaining clarity on what these transatlantic connections were and how they operated has proved elusive. The telling of an international and transnational history by way of searches of nationally bounded archival collections has raised certain methodological challenges.263 Rising to meet them, however, has uncovered some interesting threads which in turn offer an alternative dimension to a story that is often told from a Eurocentric perspective; one, as already noted by the editors of this round table, which places the Austro-Germanic modernist tradition at its centre.264 Moreover, Dent’s framework of a transatlantic musical internationalism that triangulated England, Europe and America as three distinct entities with a set of different and fluid musical relationships and roles has obvious resonances today as Britain, the USA and Europe are once again struggling to rearticulate their positions in respect of each other in a rapidly shifting world order.

Towards the middle of 2021, the world felt like a shattered place. The fatigue of a little more than a year of social distancing was perhaps at its most acute and resuming a more immediate form of academic exchange seemed all but impossible. It was during this time that we were approached by this Journal’s then newly appointed reviews editor, Amanda Hsieh, to co-author a review article. It was an intriguing request for us both: review articles in the humanities are seldom co-authored and even more seldom by two authors with diverging backgrounds and research interests. George’s work focuses on medievalism and queer theory in contemporary opera, while William works on issues of modernism in post-apartheid South Africa. George is currently at the University of Oxford and William is at Rhodes University in the rural Eastern Cape province of South Africa. We had not written together before and neither of us had ever imagined working together. What were we to make of this request, which would require the reconciliation of so many differences, at a time when establishing the social closeness of thinking together seemed unfathomable?

It can sometimes seem as if musicology is perpetually running late. At least, that is the impression that emerges from two new histories of music and the discourse of the sublime in European culture and aesthetics. Both books stress an imbalance between music and other scholarly fields as a premise for revisiting the long history of the sublime, charting its rise to prominence in the late-seventeenth century with the reception of Peri Hupsous (On Sublimity, attributed to the Greek critic Longinus), to its dominant place in British, German, and French aesthetics and criticism in the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. During this period, the sublime was debated by critics, literary writers, theologians, philosophers and musicians, and used to evoke multiple meanings and applications. Put simply: the sublime was more than a set of intrinsic qualities – such as elevation, grandeur, excess, power, persuasion, innovation and so on – to be located in an external object, style, or mode of expression. It was also an experience and state of mind identified with the (usually male) perceiving subject, an emotional and cognitive confrontation with that which is overwhelming, unknowable, or indescribable.1