‘Hot clubs’ proliferated all over Europe and the United States during the 1930s. For a brief period (1935–6), they joined forces in an International Federation of Hot Clubs (IFHC), the main purpose of which was to link together devotees in search of American hot jazz recordings at a time when they were difficult to find and buy in Europe, since that sub-genre was less popular and commercially successful than what was then called ‘straight’ jazz. The expression ‘hot jazz’ was coined by jazz musicians at the end of the 1920s and referred to a style based on performance and improvisation rather than on the composition and performance of written parts. A founder of the Hot Club de France (HCF) in 1932, the French jazz critic Hugues Panassié was the first to establish a hierarchy between these two styles:

In October 1945, five months after the end of the Second World War in Europe, German critic Edmund Nick wrote the following in the American-sponsored Munich newspaper Neue Zeitung:

In an account of the early history of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) for a 1946 BBC broadcast, president of the ISCM Edward Dent recounted the ‘two main reasons’ why London was proposed as the society’s initial headquarters at that first meeting in 1922 in Salzburg. Firstly, he maintained, ‘it stood apart from all the quarrels and jealousies of the Continent’, and secondly, and most importantly for the purposes of this article, he outlined a triangulated relationship: ‘[London] was regarded as a link between Europe and America.’ ‘American music’, he continued, ‘really needed that link in those days; and the general feeling of the European musicians was that they would provide the music and England the money to pay for it.’ But then (again using ‘the Continent’ and ‘Europe’ interchangeably) he signalled a profound shift: ‘Today the situation has changed. It is Europe now which needs the link with America, for America has become a great music-producing country, while it will take the Continent some little time to recover its creative energy.’262 Tantalizing though Dent’s references to ‘links’ may be, obtaining clarity on what these transatlantic connections were and how they operated has proved elusive. The telling of an international and transnational history by way of searches of nationally bounded archival collections has raised certain methodological challenges.263 Rising to meet them, however, has uncovered some interesting threads which in turn offer an alternative dimension to a story that is often told from a Eurocentric perspective; one, as already noted by the editors of this round table, which places the Austro-Germanic modernist tradition at its centre.264 Moreover, Dent’s framework of a transatlantic musical internationalism that triangulated England, Europe and America as three distinct entities with a set of different and fluid musical relationships and roles has obvious resonances today as Britain, the USA and Europe are once again struggling to rearticulate their positions in respect of each other in a rapidly shifting world order.

Towards the middle of 2021, the world felt like a shattered place. The fatigue of a little more than a year of social distancing was perhaps at its most acute and resuming a more immediate form of academic exchange seemed all but impossible. It was during this time that we were approached by this Journal’s then newly appointed reviews editor, Amanda Hsieh, to co-author a review article. It was an intriguing request for us both: review articles in the humanities are seldom co-authored and even more seldom by two authors with diverging backgrounds and research interests. George’s work focuses on medievalism and queer theory in contemporary opera, while William works on issues of modernism in post-apartheid South Africa. George is currently at the University of Oxford and William is at Rhodes University in the rural Eastern Cape province of South Africa. We had not written together before and neither of us had ever imagined working together. What were we to make of this request, which would require the reconciliation of so many differences, at a time when establishing the social closeness of thinking together seemed unfathomable?

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.

In January 2019, the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage (CRAL) at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris presented the conference Sound and Music in the Prism of Sound Studies.1 A spectacular video announces the event: a heavy-metal band screams about the conference’s themes and cries out each speaker’s name, which is in turn spelt out on screen in gothic-bloody font. The band’s song lyrics note that the focus of sound studies is on topics such as soundscape, noise, silence, recording techniques and listening. Most critically, the band shouts: ‘These are issues that musicology has been dealing with for a long time. What is then the place of musicology in the wake of sound studies?’

It can sometimes seem as if musicology is perpetually running late. At least, that is the impression that emerges from two new histories of music and the discourse of the sublime in European culture and aesthetics. Both books stress an imbalance between music and other scholarly fields as a premise for revisiting the long history of the sublime, charting its rise to prominence in the late-seventeenth century with the reception of Peri Hupsous (On Sublimity, attributed to the Greek critic Longinus), to its dominant place in British, German, and French aesthetics and criticism in the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. During this period, the sublime was debated by critics, literary writers, theologians, philosophers and musicians, and used to evoke multiple meanings and applications. Put simply: the sublime was more than a set of intrinsic qualities – such as elevation, grandeur, excess, power, persuasion, innovation and so on – to be located in an external object, style, or mode of expression. It was also an experience and state of mind identified with the (usually male) perceiving subject, an emotional and cognitive confrontation with that which is overwhelming, unknowable, or indescribable.1