Just as arabesque carries a range of visual and literary associations, this ornament assumes a diverse presence in music scholarship, where it characterizes a wide repertoire and assortment of techniques. Despite its conceptual breadth, this essay shows that arabesque upheld a specific musical identity for Debussy and Ravel. This is reflected in their simulation of art nouveau’s intricate and fluid designs through melodic gestures that emphasize irregular rhythms and dissonant metres. Also in keeping with art nouveau is the tendency of these composers to privilege musical arabesque’s structural appearance and expressive capacity. These observations are explored with reference to Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, a ballet that critics admired for its arabesque qualities. An analysis of four dances will reveal how the distinct rhythmic and metric profiles of arabesque melodies portray characters and their narratives. In challenging preconceptions of ornament as marginal and meaningless, this essay shows how arabesque became endowed with structural and expressive significance at the début du siècle.

This article reconsiders sentimentalism in the light of the writings of Adam Smith and the career of Abd al-Halim Hafiz, Egypt’s ‘Dark Nightingale’ and film-star crooner of the 1950s and 60s. It explores competing representations of emotionality, the limits of enchantment, and the contemporary politics of nostalgia and melodrama in Egyptian public culture. Eighteenth-century sentimental theory provides a critical and productive angle on twentieth-century popular musical culture, angles that this paper explores by imagining Adam Smith watching Abd al-Halim Hafiz’s first film, Lahn al-Wafā‘ (1955).

Béla Bartók’s Cantata Profana (1930) retains ambiguities inherent in the Romanian myth on which it is based – a story of nine hunting-lads magically transformed into stags. This article explores the mysterious elements through psychoanalysis, positing links between darkness, Bartókian ‘night music’, and the Unconscious. Other aspects of the musical language suggest representations of Lacanian processes, specifically a regressive fantasy to the mental order of the ‘Real’. This is linked to Bartók’s experience of childhood illness, a time of perfect maternal love but profound bodily betrayal, suggesting that the stag-body represents a strong, proud transformation, ‘replacing’ the debilitated body of childhood memory. Musically, the ‘mirror-image’ scales of the opening and ending of the work are re-examined. It is proposed that they represent Bartók acknowledging loss, most importantly the loss of the myth of ‘pure sources’, which had sustained him, both musically and psychologically, up until then. This loss inevitably sought expression after a disastrous polemical debate forced him to abandon the idea of musical purity in folksong.

In the historiography of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, the 1970s, when they are examined at all, are generally regarded as a period of stagnation, between the fervour of serial activity in the 1950s and the resurgence of the courses in the 1980s under the banner of various inflections of New Complexity. Yet, in a period of political upheaval after 1968, dissent was felt at Darmstadt too, and protests in 1970 and 1972 saw the institution at its most politically volatile. These protest movements caused the courses’ director, Ernst Thomas, to institute wide-scale changes in their structure and content. Key roles in these protests were taken by journalists: indeed, clear parallels can be drawn between the seemingly egalitarian calls from journalists for Mitbestimmung (co-determination) at Darmstadt and the similar demands being made by their trade unions in the West German federation. Thomas’s failure to deal with journalistic pressure and his heavy-handed treatment of individual protesters (notably Reinhard Oehlschlägel) meant that, shrewd and durable though his reinvention of the courses was, it would be only in 1982, with the accession of a new director, that the press would begin to speak positively about the Darmstadt courses once more. A close reading of these two protests shows the sometime ‘citadel of the avant-garde’ at a distinctly precarious moment in its history. At the time, some felt that such protests could lead to the demise of the courses, and it was far from clear whether Thomas’s reforms would be successful. But, even within this period of uncertainty, the Darmstadt Ferienkurse were anything but stagnant.