To start with the obvious: journals come into being for specific reasons. And if one regards the most influential titles born during the last thirty years or so, it seems that one of the principal motivating factors has been interventionist – an attempt to kick-start a particular subdiscipline, or to promote a hitherto neglected or insufficiently examined field. Thus Music Analysis (Basil Blackwell, 1982) sought to place on a fully professional footing a subdiscipline which, whilst recognized in North America (as Music Theory), was at that time underdeveloped in the UK, while 19th Century Music (University of California Press, 1977) sought ‘to stimulate and focus work on what has for too long been American musicology’s lost century’. There is, however, little need to stimulate the study of twentieth-century music(s): if one includes (as we believe one must) popular music, jazz, film music, and twentieth-century developments in traditional musics, as well as ‘art’ or ‘classical’ music, activity in the field is burgeoning at an impressive rate. What is needed, rather, is a dedicated forum. Earlier journals specializing in twentieth-century music (such as Contact and Perspectives of New Music) tended to act as voices for particular constructions of the field. Established generalist journals have frequently found a place for twentieth-century classical music, and more recently (following the trajectory of musicology in general) have begun to widen their scope to include the discussion of popular, film, and traditional music. But as the first three meetings of the Biennial International Conference on Twentieth-Century Music have shown (the third, held in Nottingham, UK, in June 2003, is reviewed in these pages), forums dedicated to the whole range of twentieth-century music promote a synergy and crossfertilization that will inevitably escape generalist journals or those confined to one corner of the field. twentieth-century music aims to provide such a forum; and not the least of our hopes is that, through the contiguity of divergent topics in each issue, the journal will stimulate the creation of new perspectives by encouraging contact with areas and approaches that we might not, as individual scholars, otherwise think to engage with.

Composers’ self-representations – in articles, programme notes, and interviews – have exerted a significant influence on twentieth-century music scholarship, shaping not only the reception of particular outputs but also wider historiographical conceptions of the recent past. This article traces one particular mode of discourse through the published statements of György Ligeti – a ‘rhetoric of autonomy’, which tends to disavow allegiances to ‘schools’ or institutions and underplay stylistic or aesthetic commonalities with the work of other composers. This type of rhetoric, together with the image it promotes of an artistic culture created out of the polarized activities of individuals, colludes naturally with the now familiar pluralist paradigm of late-twentieth-century culture, a paradigm that much postmodern theory, despite its putative deconstruction of the ‘ideology of the unique self’ (Jameson), has left largely unchallenged. Except that, for an artist such as Ligeti, the rhetoric of autonomy may no longer accomplish its objective purpose. Within a cultural sphere increasingly subsumed by the commercial, the image of the radically autonomous creator, once powerfully symbolic of a refusal of the mass market, becomes inescapably caught up in its mechanisms as an explicitly promotional tool.

This article examines a variety of compositional procedures that give rise to what the author defines as ‘accumulative’ and ‘cumulative’ forms in pop-rock music, formal processes which are directly linked to the rapid advances in recording technology that occurred mainly from the late 1960s to the 1980s. The article includes detailed transcriptions and analyses of pop-rock music across a wide range of styles and genres, from progressive rock to post-punk to techno.

Pli selon pli is Boulez’s richest encounter with Mallarmé. As a ‘portrait’ of the poet which sets three of his sonnets, it can be associated not only with other composers – Ravel, Debussy – who set Mallarmé, but also with the poet’s own views on music, and his radical yet tradition-conscious formal practices. Structural and poetic aspects of the fourth movement of the work, ‘Improvisation III’, are examined in detail, highlighting Boulez’s increasing concern with matters of formal coherence. This suggests a strengthening resistance to modernism as fragmentation and the embrace of a modern classicism which shuns the fixed hierarchies of tonal classicism as well as the parodistic juxtapositions of neoclassicism. At the same time, however, the multiple resonances on which modern classicism depends for its coherence ensure that certain aspects of Mallarmé-inspired narrative – concerning shipwrecks and sirens, among other things – cannot be entirely suppressed in present-day critical commentary.

This paper takes a close look at the music of Kraftwerk, perhaps the best known of the ‘electronic’ groups of former West Germany’s so-called neue Welle, in order to raise some fundamental questions about the politics of elektronische Musik before the dawn of the digital age and, in particular, how constructions and performances of the voice in late analogue technology rehearse new and critical strategies of resistance in the aftermath of 1968.

It is a commonplace of recent cultural-theoretical considerations of digital technology to ascribe to it a fundamental re-positioning of imaginations of the subject, of authorship and of agency in the broadest sense. What has never really been fully worked through in this (usually utopian) figuration of digital technology is the extent to which technology can be conceived as ‘autonomous’ (as Rosie Braidotti would have it) or whether new technologies in themselves are a guarantor of new cultural formations. In particular, this paper seeks to test the extent to which Kraftwerk’s pre-digital imagination can be read as an expression of the politics of the so-called Tendenzwende (a ‘turning inwards’ from explicitly activist politics to a more diffuse politics of the personal) of the Schmidt- and early Kohlzeit. The article looks in particular at Kraftwerk’s use of what might be termed the ‘electronic sublime’ as a way of disengaging the music from the ego-centred practices of earlier German rock music and as a way of anticipating new German subject positions and political identities in the light of de-industrialization and globalization.

Socialist Realist ceremonial art has generally been viewed in the West as a form of high art, because of its air of monumentality and references to classics. Judged by high-art standards, such works are invariably failures, and Western commentators have accordingly treated Socialist Realism as something exotic or inexplicable. This approach is inadequate: firstly, because it does not examine Stalin-era art on its own terms, and secondly, because it refuses to acknowledge any similarities in Western culture.

Socialist Realism was a discipline placed upon artists to provide a suitably dignified backdrop to state ritual. In this sense, it was a species of religious art, in which blandness, anonymity and tedium were by no means vices. This article compares the relatively smooth passage of Myaskovsky into Socialist Realism with the troubled homecoming of Prokofiev, who only mastered the discipline just before the end of his life.

In Trotsky’s classic theory of uneven development, ‘combined development’ designates how some regions may graft characteristics of new production relations onto older formations: examples might include the information economies of Guangzhou and Lagos, integrated to early capitalist, or even older, social orders. ‘Combined development’ provides a handy metaphor for Postmodern Music / Postmodern Thought, suggesting the grafting of post-Marxist ‘postmodern theory’ onto a musicological field that never substantively encountered Marxism, instead embracing ideologies that had already repudiated it.

The great stylistic diversity of the music written during the twentieth century (and beyond) would seem to make the organization of any conference devoted to it a formidable task: can one really hope to cover a representative selection? While a decade ago such an event might well have covered only art music (a disparate enough field in itself), nowadays one would expect to see some attention given to jazz, popular music, and film. The organizers of the Third Biennial International Conference on Twentieth-Century Music at the University of Nottingham made a conscious attempt at inclusivity, selecting papers that might have been better put together under the title of ‘Twentieth-Century Musics’. The diversity of music represented by the papers was reflected in the plurality of approaches and methodologies. Indeed, one central feature of the conference was its concern not only with musical works, or with twentieth-century composers, but with musical practices. Alongside the statutory selection of more or less canonical art composers and their music, there were several sessions on popular music, jazz, and perspectives from ethnomusicology.