This article examines the employment of brass instrumentalists in German cities around 1500, as a reflection of the political circumstances of the epoch, where rivalry between the distinct components of the social hierarchy encouraged the assertion of power and status through musical patronage. Archival records and contemporary chronicles provide invaluable insights into the performances of civic brass instrumentalists, whether in the provision of signals (by the city watchmen or those who played alongside the cities’ troops) or for the entertainment of the citizens and their guests (within the civic instrumental ensembles – the Stadtpfeifer (‘town pipers’)). Although the use of ambiguous nomenclature in contemporary records can hinder a definitive understanding of the instruments used by these musicians, the musicians different duties within the city walls can often be inferred. Important insights can thereby be gained into the extent of the patronage of these civic brass instrumentalists, their roles within everyday city life, and their resultant contribution to the communication of civic strength to the populace and their guests.

It has been claimed that Burlington House and Cannons, the homes of the Earl of Burlington and the Duke of Chandos, were homosexual or homoerotic settings and that Handel's presence in these environments suggests that he was ‘gay’ or influenced the secular works he composed there. Examining in detail biographical information about John Gay, Alexander Pope and William Kent, eighteenth-century biographical accounts of Handel and insights from the history of sexuality, this article argues that there is no basis for these claims about the homosexual milieux at Burlington House and Cannons or for Handel's sexuality.

This article explores the treatment of space in Gustav Mahler's First Symphony from the perspective of the composer's experience as a conductor of opera. It considers the ‘theatrically’ located offstage utterances in the work's introduction in light of passages from Beethoven's Fidelio (Act 2, scene ii) and Tristan und Isolde (Act 2, scene ii), and against the backdrop of Mahler's controversial attempt to assign the Alla marcia section from the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to a small offstage orchestra. By considering in turn the implications of Mahler's treatment of offstage space on the work's overall structure, specifically with respect to the moment of ‘breakthrough’ in the first and last movements, I suggest that Mahler ultimately re-establishes the vitality of the symphony as genre at the intersection between the waning symphonic tradition and the immediacy of operatic convention.

The French composer Raoul Laparra held an advanced knowledge of Spanish culture and music that was rare among French musicians. In his first opera, La habanera (Opéra-Comique, 1908), he tried to represent a Spain that was ‘different from Carmen’, focused on the ‘colder’ central region of Castile rather than southern, gypsy stereotypes. However, owing to several inconsistencies in his ideological agenda, and the weight of conventional representations of Spanish music and culture, Laparra rendered a contradictory image of Spain, which drew partly on the very southern and gypsy stereotypes he had intended to oust. Furthermore, the French critics’ lack of familiarity with Spanish traditions caused his project to be misunderstood. Those critics read La habanera in the context of French cultural struggles, mostly related to the definition of a national identity and the influence of Italian and German music.

Björk's 2004 album Medúlla offers listeners radical and new combinations of vocal sounds in pop music. The album features emergent processes ranging from textural emergence, as in standard pop-rock formulas for song introductions, to less common emergent and transformative processes involving metrical, tonal, motivic and phrasal structure. When such processes involving different parameters are combined, other (non-emergent) processes recede to the background, and the effect of emergence assumes a fundamental role over the course of the composition as a whole. Recognizing emergent processes opens up connections with song lyrics and possibly also extra-musical narratives which can enrich our analytical understanding and ultimately our listening experiences of these songs. Furthermore, Medúlla models ways in which other contemporary songwriters could develop sophisticated emergent processes that disturb conventional understandings of popular music as simplistic and formulaic.