This article is concerned with the relationship between musical style and religious prejudice in Turkey during the early Republican period (1923–38). It focuses on a musical contest in 1932 between a Jewish cantor (hazan) and an Islamic vocalist (hafız) in the presence of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), the president of the Turkish Republic who instigated revolutionary reforms that affected many aspects of Turkish culture, including music. Historical accounts of this musical contest not only suggest how religious discrimination manifested itself in a competitive setting but also serve to question the parameters of religious tolerance in Turkey, a country often admired for its favourable attitude towards Jews during the twentieth century. The discussion draws on Homi Bhabha's concept of a ‘third space’ to uncover the complex relations that existed in Turkey between Jews and Muslims on the one hand and among Jews on the other. It also invokes Bhabha to show how music can be viewed as a ‘supplementary discourse’ that serves both to unify cultural interests and to perpetuate cultural differences. By challenging the accepted narrative of religious tolerance in historical sources, the article explores through music the characteristics and consequences of racism in the country during a period of growing anti-Semitism both at home and abroad.

Aaron Copland's Quiet City (1940), a one-movement work for trumpet, cor anglais, and strings, derives from incidental music the composer wrote for an unsuccessful and now forgotten Irwin Shaw play. This essay explores in detail the pitch structure of the concert work, suggesting dramatic parallels between the music and Shaw's play.

The opening of the piece hinges on an anhemitonic pentatonic collection, which becomes the source of significant pitch centres for the whole composition, in that the most prominent pitch classes of each section, when taken together, replicate the collection governing the music's first and last bars. Both this principle and the exceptions to it suggest a correspondence to the internal struggles of Shaw's protagonist, Gabriel Mellon.

In addition, Quiet City offers a distinctive opportunity to observe the composer's assembly of a unified tonal structure. Sketch study makes it possible to observe the composer altering his original material in ways that reinforce tonal connections across the span of the piece.

In 1957, soon after his emigration from Hungary, György Ligeti began an internship at the electronic music studio of Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne. The three electronic works Ligeti produced there constitute a small portion of his oeuvre, but it is commonly acknowledged that his experiences in the studio were crucial for his stylistic development. This article makes specific analytical connections between the techniques of elektronische Musik that Ligeti encountered at the WDR and his sound-mass techniques in acoustic composition. The discourses in circulation in the electronic studio of the 1950s – especially as articulated by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts, and Gottfried Michael Koenig – reveal a collective obsession with gaining compositional control over timbre. By internalizing and reusing mainstream elektronische Musik techniques such as additive synthesis, filtering, and Bewegungsfarbe in an acoustic form, Ligeti brought timbre forward as the central compositional problem in the acoustic work Atmosphères.

Laptop composition – the creation and performance of music primarily using laptop computers – emerged as an important musical activity in the last decade of the twentieth century. While much has been written about the cultural and conceptual significance of this new music, less has been published regarding the sonic structure of specific works. This article explores the musical structure and design of compositions by three laptop composers at the turn of the millennium: ‘Untitled #2’ by Oval (Markus Popp), ‘Cow Cow’ by Merzbow (Masami Akita), and ‘Powerbookfiend’ by Kid606 (Miguel De Pedro). Each piece is analysed using spectrographic images, representations of musical sound that allow for the precise measurement of frequency and intensity. Repetition and noise are revealed as musical characteristics common to all three pieces, defining both smaller-scale patterns and large-scale designs. Using the conceptual vocabulary of Paul Virilio and Gilles Deleuze, repetition and noise are framed in relation to a ‘machine aesthetic’ and ‘difference and repetition’.