Wolfgang Rihm's is one of the more radical – which is to say ‘deep’ and ‘rooted’ – relationships towards tonality among all post-war composers. In this article, I concentrate on the role psychosis plays in this relationship, arguing that tonality for Rihm often assumes the operations of what Jacques Lacan called a symbolic order: a network of laws and codes which sustain the world of subjects and others. In Lacanian terms, it is the subject's unsuccessful installation in the symbolic which triggers psychosis – a state organized by mimetic rivalries, the body's invasion by jouissance, and the de-hierarchization and loss of control of the drives. Tonality, for Rihm, is a poorly installed symbolic order, from which music ‘breaks’ psychotically. But it would be a mistake to pathologize Rihm's music. Rather, Rihm's is one of the more cunning, problematic, ‘neurotic’ solutions to one of modernism's oldest challenges: how to function creatively in the absence of (a) language. Both the challenge and the solution are themselves as old as aesthetic modernism; they can be understood as the two sides of modernism's ‘fundamental fantasy’, in which madness becomes a practicable sanity, and psychosis a saving symbolic order.

‘You can hear everything? You can hear my voice?’ The scratchy recording that opens REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony prefigures the questions of memory and performance that underlie Philip Miller's multimedia exploration of testimony from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In this article, I adapt Diana Taylor's concepts of the archive and the repertoire to questions of musical communication. I posit that Miller's collage of testimonial ‘shards’, images, and historic audio recordings disrupts the TRC's official narrative by replacing the archive's narrative of completion with one comprising deliberately disjointed moments of individual suffering. The result is an audiovisual creation that sutures together disparate elements to reflect the complexity of the South African truth-telling process. I suggest that in performance, Miller's work re-animates the TRC archive, bringing it into the contemporary repertoire where it re-inscribes the experiences of TRC testifiers for contemporary audiences.

The traditional narrative of the development of musique concrète and elektronische Musik tells a story of esoteric, academic branches of musical modernism emerging out of Paris and Cologne in the 1950s. But this narrative clouds our understanding of the unique ways this music developed in Britain, largely filtered through the BBC, as a relatively populist, accessible iteration of Continental techniques. This article explores how British reactions to contemporary music and, in particular, musique concrète and elektronische Musik, reflected on the one hand continued suspicion towards Continental music and on the other a deep insecurity about Britain's musical position in the world. The predominantly hostile attitude towards electronic music from within establishment musical cultures betray profound concerns about trends that were seen to exert a harmful influence on British musical society.

This article investigates music in the modern transmedial franchise. Popular culture franchises flow across different forms of media, taking the audience, and often the music, with them. Music plays an important role in articulating and developing textual relationships, while adapting to the possibilities of each particular medium.

To focus on the role of music, a case study that emphasizes audio is chosen, a transmedial franchise founded upon a rock album. Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds (1978) has served as the basis for several (very different) video games that also prioritize music. The article traces how musical materials are selected, transformed, and deployed as media boundaries are traversed. It ultimately argues that music is an important part of how media consumers engage with transmedial franchises.

Soon after Debussy's death in March 2018, Stravinsky began work on a memorial, the Symphonies d'instruments à vent (1920). This piece was to become iconic both for music-theoretical reflection on modern approaches to musical time and for musicological archaeologies of Stravinsky's debts to ‘Russian traditions’. Along both avenues, particular emphasis has long been given to the work's closing chorale, initially published separately in the 1920 Debussy tombeau issue of La Revue musicale.

This article argues for a radical reappraisal of the Symphonies, which builds anew on Stephen Walsh's 1996 study of the sketches and shifts the emphasis onto temporal questions long neglected under pitch-focused analysis. Exposing ‘thematic’ concerns of rhythmic and metrical parsing (as distinct from unifying motives or pitch sets), and interpreting Stravinsky's hommage in light of Debussy's famous 1907 definition of music as ‘de couleurs et de temps rythmés’, I ultimately bring fresh metacritical perspective to fundamental questions of analytical method and purpose long entertained (e.g.) by Joseph Kerman, Carl Dahlhaus, Kofi Agawu, and Robert Walser.