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.

Robert Schumann's review of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique has attracted continued intensive scholarly attention since its serialized publication in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1835. There is a marked tendency in that attention to focus on a set of closely related critical themes: to use the review as a key to the German reception of Berlioz; to read it in terms of what it demonstrates about Schumann's own critico-aesthetic position; to see it as a model of music-critical practices in the first half of the nineteenth century; to scrutinize it in terms of the insights it furnishes into music-analytical practices. More recent scholarship has also added to this cluster of scholarly topoi the formal design of the text, its polyvalent texture and, in particular, what Fred Everett Maus terms ‘intersubjectivity’, scrutinizing the text for any clues it might offer as to the manner in which constructions of forms of subjectivity are engaged, sustained, problematized or subverted. Maus's attention to this ‘intersubjectivity’ stands as testament to musicology's (somewhat belated) interest in theories of subjectivity (or subjectivities), and opens Schumann's text to myriad new readings. In particular, Maus begins to tease out the text's potential as an artefact for the study of contemporaneous formations of ‘the composer’ as a cultural ‘type’ in the music-critical idiom.

The subject of this paper, “Beauty of Touch and Tone,” is one which however admirably it may be exemplified in the public performances of many—unhappily not all—of our leading artists, however conscientiously it may be inculcated by our most eminent teachers, is, in the playing and singing of too many of our amateurs, conspicuous only by its absence; and I can but think that, from the generality of the members of the musical profession, it does not receive that amount of attention which its importance demands, and which the rapid extension of musical education in some other directions might lead us to expect.

This is by no means the first occasion of the introduction of the alto voice as a subject for a paper and discussion. In the eighth Session of the Proceedings of the Musical Association there appears an interesting and animated discussion of the use of this voice after a reading by Dr. W. H. Monk on church music. The late Dr. A. H. D. Prendergast wrote on Man's Alto in English Music for the International Musical Society in August, 1900. This paper is an attempt to show the use of the alto and counter-tenor voice from early times up to the present day.

Although Ralph Vaughan Williams's operas Hugh the Drover (1924) and Sir John in Love (1929) both prominently feature English folk and traditional tunes, the dramatic ends such music serves differ significantly between the two works. This article compares the ways in which Vaughan Williams uses folk music in both operas, with the larger aim of providing a more nuanced perspective on the changing musical and dramatic potential the composer saw for indigenous English music within the context of opera.77

The Lautenlied from Korngold's Die tote Stadt and the Schlummerlied from Schreker's Die Schatzgräber flaunt their ‘folksong’ style in ways that are clearly similar. Contemporary criticism reveals the significance of this stylization. Folksong symbolized genuineness, but also, in its supposedly degenerate form, emotional manipulation of the masses. Both topics informed critics' reaction to diese two arias. Alongside analysis of the many recordings of Korngold's aria up to 1933, the article suggests how folksong characterization contributed to the opera's plot.

One hundred years ago, on the twenty-seventh of March, died Ludwig van Beethoven, a composer whom universal opinion has placed among the greatest men of all time. It is not my purpose to give a sketch of his life, but, as far as it lies within my power, to reconstruct his position in 1827; to explain his position in 1927; and to forecast his probable position in 2027.

The subject with which I have to deal this evening is a very complicated one, and the time at my disposal is very short, so that I can, at the best, give you but a brief outline of it. I will, therefore, not lose a minute upon any preliminary remarks, but proceed at once with my paper.

Drawing on writings concerning the cyborg and the posthuman, this article considers songs by Radiohead, Moby and others that use processed voices, digitally generated speech and sampled vocal loops. In these songs the technological sphere is made the locus of expression, while the human voices are mechanized and drained of subjectivity. These pieces – products of a rock band that relinquishes its voice to a computer, and of a ‘techno’ DJ striving to make mechanized dance music sing – can illustrate some ways musicians have used posthuman voices to chart and destabilize the boundaries of race, gender and the human.

The Regordosa-Turull wax cylinder collection, held at the Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona, is unique among early recording collections. It contains 358 cylinders recorded by the textile industrialist Ruperto Regordosa, mostly at his Barcelona home, featuring prominent Spanish and non-Spanish singers of opera and zarzuela, as well as the composer Isaac Albéniz. This article aims to establish the significance of the collection for the study both of the amateur recording culture that existed alongside commercial phonograph recordings and of performance practices in opera and zarzuela. By examining the broader characteristics of the collection and textual sources from the period, and by closely analysing some of the cylinders, this article explores how Regordosa adopted (and in some cases adapted) certain generic conventions employed in commercial recordings of the time, and what the implications of this are when considering these early recordings as documents of performance practice.

Hans Abrahamsen’s recent music has been the subject of much critical and public acclaim, with his output of the last decade finding a new directness of expression even as it incorporates and develops elements of his musical language that have remained consistent over many years. This article examines the use of compositional processes within a number of these large-scale works – Schnee (2008), Wald (2009), the Double Concerto (2011) and Let me tell you (2013) – and explores the ways in which Abrahamsen generates and controls material through a variety of techniques of transformation and repetition. How smaller-scale systems interact to create music of great allusive complexity is considered through discussion of the variation form of Wald; finally, Abrahamsen’s embracing of types of paradox and illusion are presented as strategies to unlock broader aesthetic issues within his music.

The Gemshorn can be defined as a folk recorder, made from an animal horn, which enjoyed some currency from the latter part of the fourteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth. It belongs to that definitively European class of instruments, the end-blown fipple pipes; but it is unique amongst them in having a bore which is a stopped inverted cone. Apart from endearing itself to organists for some four and a half centuries as a useful flute-stop in which its name survives, the Gemshorn made few appearances, whether folk or formal, after its final decline round about 1550.

The principal aim of the present paper is to bring before the Musical Association some results obtained last autumn from numerous and very careful experiments by Dr. W. Preyer, Professor of Physiology in the University of Jena, because those results are not accessible in an English form, and seem to have a very practical bearing upon tuning and singing. My subordinate purpose is to exhibit a method of representing pitch and intervals, which shall be more consonant to the habits of musicians than that adopted by Dr. Preyer for the statement of his results. For the idea of this method I am indebted to Mr. Bosanquet, though I have worked it out somewhat differently from him.

Mercure, a ballet in three tableaux with scenery and costumes by Pablo Picasso and choreography by Léonide Massine, created a scandal on a par with that of Parade (1917) when it was first performed at La Cigale Theatre in Montmartre on 15 June 1924 as part of the ‘Soirée de Paris’ season mounted by the wealthy Comte Etienne de Beaumont. Although Mount Etna, as it transpired, featured in the scenario but not in Picasso's stage sets, the première was certainly the scene of a volcanic eruption, a deliberate demonstration orchestrated by the Surrealists (led by the poet André Breton), who tried to drown Satie's music-hall score with their cries of ‘Long live Picasso! Down with Satie!’ The reasons behind this were complex and inseparable from Satie's enthusiastic support for the Dada movement and its founder, Tristan Tzara, from 1919 onwards. After the failure of the Congrès de Paris (convened by Breton to establish a Dada constitution and himself as leader), Satie took great delight in assuming the presidency of Breton's public trial at the Closerie des Lilas restaurant on 17 February 1922. Their enmity was further intensified by Satie's participation in the ‘happening’, known as La soirée du Coeur à barbe, which Tzara mounted at the Théâtre Michel on 6 July 1923. In what might be regarded as a dress rehearsal for Mercure, the newly founded Surrealists under Breton mounted a campaign in support of Picasso, which led to Breton being expelled by the police.

Half a century ago jazz was an obscure, regional American music. Today it can reasonably claim to be an international idiom. Jazz took shape in the southern part of the United States, the result of a fusion between Negro blues, ragtime and military march music, and for the past sixty years it has followed a pattern of development almost exactly similar to that of European music, but undertaken at a much more hectic speed. First came the beginning, in folk song. Next followed a polyphonic period, a period during which jazz evolved the New Orleans style of playing, with its improvising front line of trumpet, clarinet and trombone. The 1920s saw the introduction of written arrangements: on the one hand the organization of New Orleans jazz into a dramatic pattern by Jelly Roll Morton, the first authentic jazz composer; on the other, an increasing preoccupation with harmony, reflected in the growth of eleven- and twelve-piece ensembles. But for genuinely orchestral writing, jazz had to wait a few years longer, until Duke Ellington came to maturity as a composer, using timbres that were peculiar to the Ellington orchestra, building his scores around the talents of individual musicians.

The ‘cultivation of the self’, which Carl E. Schorske has identified as a characteristic of the Viennese bourgeoisie, establishes a ‘link between a devotion to art and a concern with the psyche’. Such a life ‘appropriated the aesthetic, sensuous sensibility’ leading to ‘narcissism and a hypertrophy of the life of feeling’. Szymanowski, who was for many years fascinated by Viennese culture, reflects many of these characteristics. He was, furthermore, greatly influenced by the work of Pater and Wilde, central figures in the English ‘decadent’ scene which, in Arthur Symons's words, was marked by ‘an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity’. It is unsurprising, therefore, to find narcissism appearing as a prominent theme in many of Szymanowski's works.

In his study of Turner's great picture of the sea, The Snowstorm, Sir Kenneth Clark draws attention to Turner's preoccupation with ‘visions’ and ‘dreams’. These words, he says, ‘were commonly applied to Turner's pictures in his own day, and in the vague, metaphysical sense of the nineteenth century they have lost their value for us. But with our new knowledge of dreams as the expression of deep intuitions and buried memories, we can look at Turner's work again and recognise that to an extent unique in art his pictures have the quality of a dream. The crazy perspectives, the double focuses, the melting of one form into another and the general feeling of instability, all these are forms of perception which most of us know only when we are asleep. Turner experienced them when he was awake’.

In this study, I take a critical look at the presence of narcoculture in reggaeton using as a case study the music video of the remix of ‘Somos de calle’. Specifically, I evaluate whether and to what extent reggaeton’s narco-messages and narco-representations – when they converge with other variables – could potentially influence an individual’s modes of thinking and behaviour. The study does not aim to provide a definitive answer to the debate surrounding this issue. More than anything, it strives to analyse the extent to which the claim that such influence may occur has scientific merit, in order to advocate further research on this matter. The article also discusses the highly politicized debate that has surrounded this topic in public discourse, and how this has seemingly affected its critical assessment in academia. For the analysis I rely particularly on social psychology literature concerning violent media content and in the areas of persuasion studies and prejudice studies, but I also consider literature from other fields, including criminology.