This study relies on the prevalence of certain structures that largely distinguish the creation and reception of music from that of language – namely, temporal grids, scalar grids, and segments with their repetitions – to construct a model of the human cognitive faculty for music that allows humans to make music the way they do. The study draws on research and thought in philosophy (including phenomenology), linguistics, psychology, and neurology, coupled with musicology, to produce a model of a human capacity to make complex comparisons between ongoing sound sequences and those simultaneously reconstructed from memory by registering the relativities within their flow. This model is then used in a consideration of how the faculty for music interacts with the faculty for language in the experience of song and a consideration of how a similar cognitive capacity for music might be identified in other species.

In this article, I study three videos by the Finnish far-right grouping Soldiers of Odin and investigate their audiovisual messages, which present different ‘cultural politics of emotion’ for members and non-members of the group. Special attention is given to the concepts of nationalism, masculinity, and their intertwined meanings, which play a defining role in many neo-fascist cultures. Despite their slap-dash, DIY nature, the videos’ use of global popular culture contradicts their logic of an exclusively ‘national’ Finnish culture, as every reference has global reach. This shows that the group’s nationalism is not about Finnishness, but about a hegemonic, global, Euro-Western, white masculinist, and xenophobic culture.

Karol Szymanowski and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz were leading figures in Polish modernism. A thorough review of their relationship and an examination of Witkiewicz’s theory of ‘pure form’ and its applicability to music (via Witkiewicz’s literary portraits of Szymanowski, his attempts at composition, and the critical and theoretical extensions of his work by Konstanty Regamey) provides the basis for analysing the form and content of Szymanowski’s Third Piano Sonata and First String Quartet.

The importance to reception history of the first complete cycle of Beethoven’s string quartets, given in London in 1845 by the Beethoven Quartett Society, is securely established. Less well recognized is the significance of the complete edition of the quartets prepared by the cellist Scipion Rousselot and published in London in 1846. This article offers the first close examination of Rousselot’s edition and posits that while its claims for unparalleled correctness were unsustainable, its inclusion, uniquely in the case of the late quartets, of two uncommon features – rehearsal letters and instrumental cues – constitutes a trace of the rehearsal practices of the four players responsible for these historically outstanding performances.

In 1789, the Academy of Ancient Music replaced Benjamin Cooke with Samuel Arnold as its musical director. This article offers a detailed analysis of an autograph copy of the address Cooke delivered to the Academy responding to their action, and of a letter to Cooke from Arnold countering accusations made regarding his conduct in the affair. Both documents are annotated by Henry Cooke, who used them in writing a biography of his father. These documents enable a new understanding of the significant changes made within the Academy in the 1780s and of the reasons Academy subscribers replaced Cooke with Arnold.

This article addresses links between musical-poetic structure and architecture in four songs of the Cantigas de Santa Maria. Made at Alfonso X of Castile’s court in the latter years of his reign (1252–84), the Cantigas present a unique case of miracle narratives (cantigas de miragre) set to song. As Parkinson has shown, the four songs in the Castrojeriz set present technical faults that hinder effective comprehension of their miracle texts. This article shows that the songs’ cyclical structures can aid textual logic by aligning narrative highlights with points of sonic focus in the poetry and music. Tension between textual and musical-poetic form often mirrors the songs’ narratives, which concern difficulties during the construction of Castrojeriz’s church. This article argues that such tensions can be read as a text-as-building metaphor, also alluded to in the songs as they appear in surviving manuscripts.

It feels fitting to have worked on this review in Baden bei Wien, in which Beethoven spent many summers. This pretty town southwest of Vienna boasts not only a Beethoven-Haus, but also a Beethoven-Panoramaweg, Beethoven-Rundwanderweg, Beethoven-Spazierweg, and even an imposing Beethoven-Tempel, offering a scenic view; notions of decentring, decolonizing, or even critically engaging with Beethoven’s canonic status feel not only remote, but also faintly inappropriate in this, as many other, Beethoven-designated spaces. Moreover, at the time of writing, the international press is reporting that Beethoven’s skull fragments are being returned to Vienna, as though they are holy relics.1 Such material traces of Beethoven’s canonicity seem to mock attempts to rattle the ideological cage, yet two recent books by Erica Buurman and Nancy November make significant contributions.2 The former indirectly poses questions about Beethoven’s relationship to Viennese dance culture, while the latter is a deeply impressive account of the chamber music arrangements of Beethoven’s symphonies. Both left me a touch nostalgic for the now marginal cultures of formal dancing and musical arrangement, which dominated the soundscape of early nineteenth-century Vienna.

Four substantial volumes dedicated to women in music, all published within the past couple of years, give welcome indication of the continuing growth of this area of study.1 Following some general background, I first survey the books, then consider each individually. That I select chapters to discuss in detail does not mean that others would not deserve comparable attention. I can give only a glimpse of the riches these books contain.