From December 1924 to January 1925 the influential French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger undertook her first concert and speaking tour of the United States of America. The end of January found Boulanger in Houston, Texas, where she had agreed to present three talks as part of the Rice Lecture Series. The stenographer's transcript of her lectures, which differs greatly from the articles she later published in the Rice Pamphlets, provides the earliest evidence of Boulanger's nascent trans-Atlantic pedagogical work. Further details reside in Boulanger's letters home to her mother, offering intimate insight into Boulanger's impressions of the United States and its contemporary musical traditions. I borrow Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of a “minor language” to theorize how Boulanger adroitly manipulated her status as a foreigner, as a prodigious virtuoso, and as a woman to circumvent American prejudices about women's involvement in music making and gain access to “authority.” Thus events from Houston 1925 serve both as a means to document Boulanger's first recorded English lectures and as a case study in her development of a specialized pedagogical language, developed out of an experience with Franco-American translation in the southern United States.

Although responses to 9/11 have often called for unity, the process of memorializing it has proven extremely contentious. This article examines the role of disunity in modern memorialization, focusing specifically on John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls, a work commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 2002 to commemorate the victims of the World Trade Center terrorist attack. Drawing on critical theories of memorialization and on audience surveys I conducted at several performances of On the Transmigration of Souls, I suggest that disunity serves the process of memorializing by mirroring the experience of traumatic memory, by acknowledging loss and absence, and by negotiating regional, racial, gendered, religious, and political differences. Disunity thus encourages reflection on how multiple perspectives recast the act of memorialization. Such reflection, I argue, can inform both performance and scholarship of musical memorials toward what Judith Butler calls the “ethical responsibility” of mourning.

The literature on the Hungarian-Canadian composer Istvan Anhalt (1919–2012) has centered on Anhalt's immigrant status and on the connections between his life story and his creative work—deservedly so, as his compositions reflect an interest in issues of displacement, memory, and the relationship between the present and the past. These biographical and geographical themes, however, have yet to be explored as they have been expressed temporally in his music. An examination of his historically based operas, La Tourangelle (1975) and Winthrop (1986) through literary theorist Steven Connor's lens of contemporality reveals the ways in which these works reflect a postmodern conception of temporality and experience. Through their temporal flexibility, these operas demonstrate the genre's ability to express historical processes and experience in a way that literary accounts cannot. The models of subjectivity and contemporality expressed in these works moreover reflect the composer's own complex identity as one that celebrates the continued life of the past in the present.