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.

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.

Drawing on the tradition of Formenlehre, this article puts forward a methodological historicism as a means of mediating between the disciplinary expectations of musical analysis, on the one hand, and philosophical aesthetics, on the other. Stylistic developments in the later music of Frank Bridge, perhaps British music's best claim to a high modernist of the generation of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, are illuminated by means of Theodor W. Adorno's notion of musical ‘reification’. A comparative analysis of the complementary modernism of Bridge's contemporary Ralph Vaughan Williams is also put forward, and a critical light shone on recent writing on British musical modernism in general.

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.

When we use the term “Ancient Egypt,” a hazy picture of pyramids forms in the mind and we have a vague notion that it refers to a culture that reached an exceedingly high plane a very long time ago. How long ago, it is almost beyond the everyday mind to grasp. Our ideas of time are, after all, only relative; and when we speak of “six thousand years ago” it conveys little more to our minds than would “two thousand years ago.” Five hundred years is a very long time; yet if we enquire what was the state of music at that distance of time back, we should find things in a very primitive state. A thousand years ago we only find King Alfred burning cakes, and two thousand years ago we should see the Romans teaching our barbarous ancestors how to build roads, to dress themselves decently, and to take baths. Yet, when Greece was only just beginning to show her first promise of greatness later, the Twelfth Dynasty of Egyptian Kings was ruling a country that enjoyed a musical culture that must seem astonishing to us. We find evidences of musical activity as far back as the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties (ca. 4000–3500 b.c.), and the music made then, and the instruments upon which it was made, could not have been the result of a sudden inspiration and invention. A long era of development must have preceded these early evidences of music—and allowing for the inevitable periods of decline and decadence, we arrive at a date which is so remote that we could scarcely realise its meaning.

In 1965, a short article entitled ‘On the Performing Arts: An Anatomy of their Economic Problems’ appeared in the American Economic Review, the flagship journal of the American Economic Association.1 Written by two Princeton-affiliated economists, William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, the article laid out in eight short pages a powerful explanation for why the operating costs of so many performing arts organizations consistently overran their earnings, and why this tendency had become more pronounced over time. The problem was not that lavish budgets were being spent on productions, nor that musicians’ unions had wrung too many concessions from management. Rather, the problem was more prosaic, having to do with ‘differential rates of growth in the economy’.2 To illustrate the argument, Baumol and Bowen asked readers to perform a thought experiment: ‘Think of an economy divided into two sectors: one in which productivity is rising and another where productivity is stable.’3 For the sake of simplicity, they explicitly assumed a number of useful fictions: that labour can easily and frictionlessly move between the two sectors; that wage increases across the board will keep pace with productivity growth (a standard if problematic assumption in modern economic theory);4 and that the monetary supply is sufficiently controlled to maintain overall price stability. What, given these assumptions, is the outcome of such a stark split in the economy? In the productive sector, the increase in wages that workers receive will be offset by increased productivity. In the stagnant sector, wages will rise but output will not. And if an organization is to avoid bankruptcy, the only way to do so is by raising prices to cover the rise in labour costs. (Remember, one of Baumol and Bowen’s working assumptions is that wage increases will keep pace with productivity growth, in both productive and stagnant sectors.) Yet this solution to the problem creates another one, since over time prices in the unproductive sector will increase at a much faster rate than those in the productive one, making the products of the former unaffordable to an increasing number of workers.

Reacting to recent materialist developments in music studies and beyond, I argue for the value of dialectics in accounting for compositional orientations vis-à-vis their objects – be these objects sound-producing, non-human entities, such as musical instruments, or the object that is ‘sound itself ’. Engaging the compositional thought and practice of Busoni, Russolo, Varèse, Cage and Tudor by way of example, I highlight two intersecting tendencies: the first constitutes a presumed mastery over the object in question; the second is suggestive of an exploration of the object on its own terms. Interweaving aspects of post-Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, I argue that, ultimately, our orientation towards the object manifests a negotiation of the self in a changing material world.

In July 1817 Benjamin Flight and Joseph Robson, two of London's most celebrated organ-builders, unveiled their latest concept in organ design — the Apollonicon. This mammoth finger-and-barrel chamber organ, predecessor to the giant orchestrions of the Victorian era, had been five years in the making. And when it opened for performances at the firm's fashionable West End premises, 101 St Martin's Lane, it heralded a new era of evolution for the organ in British concert life.

The ambiguity of the title of my paper is intentional—I wish to speak on “The Teaching of Musical History” in more than one sense. A further preliminary explanation I have to make is this. If I present to this Society a plea for a proper and more general study of musical history, it is not because I think the members to be in need of advice and guidance, but because I look upon them as influential agents able to bring about a change in a now obtaining unsatisfactory state of matters. In short, my object in drawing your attention to the importance of certain facts is to inspire you with missionary zeal, to induce you to go forth and spread the light that is in you among the ignorant, the idle, and the indifferent. This, however, is not my only object. I wish also to lay before you some views of perennial interest, and invite you to discuss them —to discuss them for our own profit and, if possible, for the profit of the world at large.

In 1977 I discussed some common ways of writing about the social and economic contexts of music, and then suggested alternative procedures. Expressing dissatisfaction with prevailing fashions, that paper was essentially a plea for the use of economic history, recommending its analytical insights and quantitative sense. It sought discussion of typical events, and deliberately challenged the ‘deep-seated antipathy felt by most humanists toward anything that smacks of statistics’. The desired emphasis was also upon ‘thick’ description and analysis, by which one might avoid such contrasted, but equally fruitless, pursuits as unsubstantiated dogma and antiquarianism. Ten years later the invitation to arrange a conference on ‘music in the market-place’ provided an opportunity to look again. There was no attempt to survey current research systematically; less still to restrict subjects and speakers to any particular discipline. Indeed, despite the conference title, conventional approaches to the analysis of markets were scarce, with the notable exception of Julia Moore's paper, an exemplary demonstration of ‘thick’ economic history. Trying to achieve some coherence without imposing a strait-jacket inevitably brought overlaps and gaps. But if penalties were attached to open-mindedness, it also ensured the stimulus of diverse and multi-disciplinary papers, and informal contributions by active participants in the market-place. This introduction is not a summary of the conference, and is not confined to, though it touches upon, what was said there. Schematic, and therefore thin, it merely introduces a few possible themes which are further developed elsewhere, or still await exploration.

Some people may ask: “Why have centenary celebrations?” My answer must be in the form of a legend of a certain British composer. He was praised by foreigners and called “The Father of Counterpoint.” Most of his MSS. are in Vienna; and about twenty years ago Vienna honoured him and honoured herself by publishing some of them. Here in England, however, his music is absolutely unknown. His name was even confused at one time with that of an early Saint of the Church, who was thus, quite unjustifiably, endowed with miraculous musical powers. Such a thing could only happen in England; and this is sufficient answer to those who decry centenary celebrations. They may be dangerous; but England needs at least one a week. 1923 is a good year to begin; for 1623 saw the death not only of Byrd and Weelkes, but of Rosseter, the Lutenist composer, and the birth of John Playford, the first systematic collector of English folk-dances and their tunes; while in 1523 Merbecke was born, who was the first to write a special plainsong for the (then) new English Prayer Book, and Hugh Aston died, who was called the “Inventor of Instrumental Music in Europe”; but about whom so little is known.

The method of determining absolute pitch, to which I shall ask your attention this afternoon, does not pretend to compete in point of accuracy or completeness with some of the other methods which have been employed, particularly in the last few years, with success. But I think it stands alone in the extreme simplicity and general availability of the means which it employs. Of course to determine the pitch of a note you must have the note, and you must also have some standard of time. I hardly want more than that. All that is necessary is two notes on the harmonium, and a watch, and by those means alone I am able to say how many vibrations in a second the notes make. To carry out the observations with ease requires a little more in the way of instrumental assistance, but the feasibility of the method does not at all depend upon this extra assistance.

During the past forty years much of the finest pre-Restoration service music has come back into the cathedral repertoire. So many are the distinguished scholars who have contributed to this welcome revival that one hesitates to single out any by name. Nevertheless some small tribute must be paid to Dr. Fellowes who has been responsible for publishing so much music of the period and who has written several valuable historical studies, including one on the subject of English Cathedral Music. As Dr. Fellowes pointed out in this very book, however, there is still much to do before a definitive survey of pre-Restoration church music can be attempted. Many sources have yet to be collated and much music scored. With this in mind I began some time ago to catalogue the contents of all the known sources of early seventeenth century anthems. I would like this evening to discuss one or two points which have resulted from my work, all of which are connected, directly or indirectly, with the anthem.

One of Shakespeare's most eloquent eighteenth-century apologists was an Italian: Dr. Johnson's good friend Giuseppe Baretti, who had acquired the taste during his residence in London in the 1750s. When Johnson's Shakespeare edition appeared, Baretti, now back in Italy again, wrote to request a copy: he wished, he explained, ‘to expound the great tragedian to the ladies of Italy’. Baretti was as good as his word, writing in the literary magazine Frusta in January 1764 of this poet who ‘in both the tragic and the comic style stands quite alone, ahead of all the Corneilles, all the Racines, and all the Molières of Gaul’. And it was Baretti who took up arms against Voltaire, whose prestige as a Shakespeare critic had been hitherto unquestioned in France and Italy, publishing in 1777 his Discours sur Shakespeare el sur Monsieur de Voltaire.

The many researchers who have transcribed Tudor music during the last half-century or so have been acutely conscious of the problems of interpreting accidentals in sources. Few, if any, scribes seem to follow a completely consistent or determinable set of conventions, and the difficulties are compounded when manuscripts of different date give significantly different readings. Some editors of Henrician music have taken the principal sources of that period at, by and large, their face value. Others have preferred the evidence of later (mainly Elizabethan) manuscripts on the assumption that they attempt to spell out earlier unwritten practices of various kinds. In a paper published in the last issue of this journal Roger Bray offered a case for the second of these views. The present article seeks, not to disprove his case, but rather to question some of his premises and methods of deduction, and to enter a plea for caution. It does not claim to do more than touch on some of the issues involved.

The Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum owns an appreciable number of Beethoven letters and also of musical manuscripts from his hand. These comprise holographs of finished compositions, sketchbooks and sketch sheets, corrected printer's copy, and the like. At one period, from around 1870 to 1895, the Museum would appear to have been in the market for Beethoven material, in a small but discriminating way; and its holdings have been augmented by occasional gifts and bequests, from the time of Vincent Novello (1843) to E. H. W. Meyerstein (1952).

The question of how the term ‘Expressionist’ relates to certain music can best be answered by reference to the principle features of Expressionism in painting. The word was coined by a German art critic in 1911 to serve as an appropriate antonym to Impressionism. The new art to which it was applied was based not on purely visual impressions of the outer world but on the expression of the artist's inner experience. The Expressionist does not paint an object but his own subjective reaction to it. He recreates it in the light of his emotions, often distorting form to penetrate essence and reveal the truth that lies behind the outward appearance. The results are highly emotive, dramatic, visionary and often violently ugly. They express the fears, real and subconscious, of men who saw materialism eating into society and enslaving the individual. The technical implications of this art meant that traditional principles of ‘beauty’, ‘symmetry’ and so forth gave way to exaggeration, distortion, grotesqueness, startling colour clashes and vehement emotional release; and precisely the same process, and results, can be seen in the work of Schönberg as he turned from the musical orthodoxes of form and key to the instinctive, tortured sounds of atonality. His work in this direction was more or less contemporary with that of the original Expressionist art group, ‘Die Brücke’ (‘The Bridge’), which existed as a community from 1905–13. Its members were Kirchner, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff, and later Nolde, Pechstein and Müller. Schönberg's own paintings bear a strong likeness to the productions of this group. There are the same brutalized portraits and nightmare visions, the same distortion of natural forms parallelled by the angular, disintegrating lines of his atonal music.

In order to avoid any misapprehension, it may be well to explain at the outset that the term “Colour-music” is used in this paper in a limited sense, as descriptive of the dual nature of the experiments, and not in the sense in which it is generally used, as the title of a separate art, in which the medium of sound is replaced by mobile colour. Such an art is far more nearly allied to painting than to music.

It was in 1842 that John Curwen, a Congregationalist minister aged 26, began his life's work as one of the most notable pioneers of popular musical education. For fully fifty years his was the dominant single influence on music in the state schools of England, Scotland and Wales, and hence upon the large mass of the community. Even today, at the end of a period of more than twenty-five years during which the trend of musical education has tended to discredit his teaching, his figure still broods over the teaching of vocal music, and quantities of school songs continue to be published with the Tonic Sol-fa ‘interpreting’ notation along with the standard Staff notation. Nevertheless, except in Scotland, the true essentials of his teaching are no longer an effective force—a fact which makes possible an attempt at an analytical re-statement of his principles today in a less controversial atmosphere than formerly. Curwen's own writings will be examined in an effort to get behind the numerous adaptations, modifications and dilutions which his method underwent before being discredited.

The reason why music appeals to every side of our nature is that music itself is the result of the activity of the whole nature of a man. Being called forth by the travail of thought, feeling, and will, its effect is the stirring of the thoughts, emotions, and volitions of the listener. It reminds me of one of the natural phenomena in my Oriental country—those mysterious springs that well forth from unknown depths and penetrate into mysterious depths again; the strength which enabled them to break their way from the dark, also enables them to find their path into new depths—the greater the warmth that gave existence to the well, the brighter it sparkles, the higher it rises, and the deeper it sinks again.