Musicology has recently re-evaluated the nature, form and purpose of musical biography, reflecting a broader ‘biographical turn’ in the humanities. This article takes up recent challenges to move beyond the traditional model of the ‘life and works’ of ‘great’ composers and joins the search for new paradigms of musical biography. The lives of the Australian microtonal composer Elsie Hamilton (1880–1965) and the British music archaeologist Kathleen Schlesinger (1862–1953), and their collaboration, which spanned three decades, are offered as a case study that demonstrates the importance of international and transnational networks for comparative musicology and modern music, and reveals the role of women as critical agents of scholarship and cultural transmission. It also lays bare the considerable influence exerted by the fin de siècle occult revival upon the search for new modalities of musical expression. It is an example of how a biographical approach allows an expansive examination of a mentalité and can bring together a range of discourses to reveal unrecognized connections and relationships.

In 1985, Albi Rosenthal reported his discovery of a printed libretto for the opera Andromeda, composed by Monteverdi for performance in Mantua in Carnival 1620. This libretto deserves a new examination for its dramatic content, its likely musical setting (now lost) and some fundamental questions of genre. Its patron, Prince Vincenzo Gonzaga, used the librettist Hercole Marliani to broker his self-fashioning by imitating both Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607), supported by Vincenzo's elder brother, and Arianna (1608), which in effect belonged to the prince's parents. Monteverdi was typically slow to produce the score. The customary explanation is his disenchantment with Mantua and his new duties at St Mark's, Venice. However, we now see that both the Gonzagas and Monteverdi used Andromeda, like others of his Mantuan-commissioned works, as a bargaining chip in a complex exchange of obligations and favours typical of the courtly world to which the composer still belonged.

Ferruccio Busoni could be called an advocate of absolute music because of his frequent description of music as ‘absolute’ and his discussion of music as consisting of pure tones and rhythms found in the vibrating universe. However, he developed idiosyncratic theories about the term, its usage and its ideal manifestation in Tonkunst that remain largely unexamined in scholarly literature. True, Carl Dahlhaus noted Busoni's use of the concept to refer to music unconstrained by traditional forms, but this is merely one aspect of Busoni's views, which also, paradoxically, allowed for and included the visual and explicit connections to culture. The hybridity of Busoni's notion, which this article explores through an examination of writings and representative compositions, is especially relevant for current musicological discourse about absolute music. Sitting uneasily with Dahlhaus's more consistent view of absolute music as music apart from text or programme as well as with new musicological approaches that seek to refute the notion of music's autonomy, Busoni's view of absolute music offers a fascinating middle ground between compositions as discrete artistic artefacts on the one hand and as representations of their immediate culture on the other.

Brahms's dedication of his op. 51 string quartets (1873) to the surgeon Theodor Billroth provides a window into Brahms's musico-political views in the 1870s that has hitherto been unexplored by music scholars. Analysis of correspondence, performance traditions and the scores of these two quartets demonstrates that Brahms chose to align himself and his works with the learned connoisseurs of the domestic chamber-music-making tradition, represented by Billroth and his frequent musical soirées. Brahms's music also shows the influence of Joseph Joachim, his oldest and dearest friend and Europe's premier chamber musician. Brahms's compositional choices in these two works combine public and private musical styles, to offer a touching memorial to earlier composers and friends, and to provide a teachable moment for the musical public.

Luigi Nono's early spatial works with tape are characterized by strong political commitment as well as by compositional devices and performance solutions that reflect the composer's involvement with technology and theatrical practices after his detachment from Darmstadt in the late 1950s. Looking at the tape works composed between 1961 and 1969, the article outlines the development of Luigi Nono's unique spatial practice, its theatrical influences and the dramaturgical implications. The analysis is centred on the composer's use of acoustic space as a conveyor of meaning designed to stimulate active and critical audience engagement. Particular emphasis is thus placed on the use of tape and amplification in performance, introducing notions such as ‘doubling’, ‘con-fusion’, fragmentation, non-linearity, simultaneity and multiplicity, which inform Nono's vision of space and are essential for a serious understanding of the composer's engaged spatial aesthetic.

The first movement of Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937) has been noted for its Beethovenian use of sonata form and shares a number of features with the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata. This article examines the relationship between these two composers and these two works, starting with an examination of Bartók's use of sonata form. It attempts to establish whether Bartók borrowed gratefully from his predecessor in an attempt to ‘synthesize’ old and new, folk and art, or whether he misread Beethoven in the anxious process of carving a place for himself in the musical canon.

This article considers why septuple metres are so rare in Western music, despite being common in many other cultures. The scene is set by tracing the history of the septuple-time ‘meme’ (an idea that replicates by imitation) from ancient Greece through to Western art and popular music. The following sections consider the psychological, musical and environmental factors in more detail. The scarcity of septuple time in Western music is largely attributable to the development of the time signature, as a vertical conception of music evolved during the Renaissance. Subsequent evolution of the ‘Western music memeplex’ maintained septuple time on its periphery. Analysis of this interaction permits the construction of a meme-centred narrative of aspects of the development of Western music.

The repeated use of the ‘Goldberg’ Variations in the Hannibal Lecter saga offers a route into the complexities of cinema's appropriation of Western art music. To an extent, the affiliation of Bach with a cannibalistic serial killer rehearses the notion of ‘classical music’ as socially and culturally other. Yet at the same time, from its first appearance in a memorable scene in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the music is tied to the workings of a mass-media phenomenon. This becomes evident in the sequel, Hannibal (2001), where the ‘Goldberg’ Aria, used as title song, crossing in and out of the diegesis and mixed with sound effects, becomes part of the development of the character into a media franchise, of the romanticizing of his masculinity and the spectacularization of his violence. Thus, in the process of capitalizing on Lecter's success, the saga at once insists on classical music's otherness and blurs its difference from film music.

This article explores the relationship between music and material urban environments by drawing on ethnographic research with rock and hip-hop musicians. The first of its three sections introduces some of the musicians who participated in that research and the maps they drew to illustrate their music-making activities in the city. The second compares these hand-drawn maps and their various lines and patterns, and relates their differences to music genre and particular urban conditions. The final section of the article explores the broader implications of the maps for conceptualizing the relationship between music and material environments. It starts by considering notions of articulation and mediation and their usefulness for understanding relations between music and material urban environments. Focusing on the maps’ detailed lines and patterns, it then describes how music and music-making are mediated by material urban environments, a process involving the navigation of journeys and boundaries and the forging of multiple relations along the way.