Despite Nono's and Carter's opposing views, divergent compositional aesthetic, and applicability of twelve-tone music, the two composers shared their admiration for the works of the Second Viennese School. In this article, I examine Carter's 1957 and Nono's 1956 analyses of Schoenberg's pivotal twelve-tone work: Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (1926–28). The study offers a rare opportunity to look at the same piece analysed by two composers with unique points of view. Completed only a year apart, the analyses illuminate aspects of Schoenberg's work that each composer found most compelling and applicable to their own works. Thus, these analyses, combined with sketches housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel), the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), and the Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono (Venice), not only shed light on Schoenberg's system, but also become a valuable tool for tracking both Carter's and Nono's compositional processes, showing how Schoenberg influenced two schools of thought.

For Dmitri Shostakovich, reaching the heights of the Soviet musical establishment proved easier than staying there. He triumphed with his Fifth Symphony of 1937, which marked the composer's return to official favour after the denunciation of his second opera and third ballet. Following that success, Shostakovich faced the problem of the sequel: whether or not, in the Sixth Symphony, to repeat, refute, or re-inscribe. I propose Shostakovich first thought about going big with his new project, composing a grand text-based score about Lenin, and then considered going small, grounding the first movement in folk fare and mixing light genres in the others. But in the end, he chose a more experimental approach. The Sixth Symphony collapses boundaries, both semantic and syntactic, pulling them back from a fixed state into a play of possibilities.

The notion of a shared history across the Mediterranean is central to a number of Spanish-Moroccan musical collaborations, which draw on the notion of convivencia: the alleged peaceful coexistence between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in medieval Spain. In this article, I explore the relationship between a ‘musical’ convivencia and Moroccan immigration in Spain, focusing on two prominent case studies: Macama jonda (1983) and Inmigración (2003). Spanning a twenty-year period, I argue that these two productions illustrate shifting responses to Moroccan immigration at distinct historical moments: the post-Franco era and post-9/11. These two productions illustrate the malleability of the convivencia myth, employing it for distinct social and political purposes. I argue that Macama jonda and Inmigración should be read as products of shifting political and cultural relations between Spain and Morocco, and Spain's negotiation of its Muslim past.

This article demonstrates how migration formed a process of memory construction in the work and thought of Russian émigré composer Arthur Lourié (1891–1966). It analyses Lourié’s song cycle Recollection of Petersburg, composed over two decades and across four countries, providing close readings of music and poetry and exploring the network of intertextual connections the cycle activates. Lourié has proven a difficult subject because of the diversity of aesthetic positions he took from decade to decade. Recollection allows us to trace a line of continuity as he passed through these incarnations, revealing an aesthetics of accumulation and arrangement with origins in Acmeist poetics. This aesthetics, in turn, served as a coping strategy for Lourié’s life in emigration, as he sought to order the voices of memory and escape the flow of time. Lourié’s case will contribute to our understanding of the profound impact of migration on music in the twentieth century.

In February 1959 East Germany fêted the legacy of Felix Mendelssohn with a week-long celebration. Like earlier festivals honouring composers such as Handel, these festivities provided a site for working out in practical terms abstract theories of the ethico-political value of the Germanic cultural heritage to a socialist German state. Yet, discourse surrounding the Festwoche indicates a unique approach to such negotiations. Debates surrounding the festival are analysed, including publications in journals and newspapers as well as speeches, in order to demonstrate that the circumstances surrounding the Mendelssohn festivities fomented remarkably diverse responses to issues pertaining to the value of the musical heritage and to Mendelssohn's place within that heritage. Further, the problems Mendelssohn's life and work presented led one of the most important musicologists in the GDR – Georg Knepler – to embrace a radically Marxian (rather than Marxist–Leninist) account of the significance of the composer's music to East German audiences.