This article explores how human curation and algorithmic recommendation are figured in cloud-based streaming platforms. In promoting their services as alternatives to illicit file-sharing, platforms such as Spotify, Deezer, and Apple Music have long touted the access they provide to a massive database of music. Yet the effectiveness of appeals to musical plenitude have been thrown into doubt, as high rates of user turnover threaten streaming's economic viability. Curation and recommendation have thus been posited as solutions to this problem, as means of producing and reproducing consumer desire. By attending to the fantasies woven around streaming and music recommendation more specifically, this article highlights the peculiar form of subjectivation at work in the way recommendation hails listeners. The normative listener constructed through such modes of hyper-personalized address is ideally one that is as dynamic and adaptive as the algorithmic systems that adjust to their fluctuating needs, dispositions, and desires.

Work on this article began as a contribution to a wider discussion of twentieth-century music theatre, and in particular a genre in the category of twentieth-century musical monodramas – one-act staged monologues with, or in music for, one performer.1 My current research focuses on the genesis and performance tradition of works composed for solo female singer, and raises questions about the creative agency of the performer in the making of such works, reflecting on matters such as subjectivity, voice, and identity.2 If this outlook may slightly drift from a conventional narrative springing from the composer's voice, a critical investigation of the collaborative process foregrounding the genealogy of some of these works is compelling, especially since every composer who embarked on this ‘genre’, or compositional topos, inflected it in idiosyncratic ways. In works such as Erwartung, La Voix humaine, The Testament of Eve, Neither, and La machine de l’être, the performative voice of the female soloist to whom the work was tailored became a generative element capable of shaping the formal, musical, and dramaturgical material.3 Examination of selected case studies, focusing especially on the creative and performative processes surrounding these works, triggers an array of questions about gender politics. More importantly, transversal insight into the making of these works and their performativity reveals the interconnected nature of the two phases of creation and performance. In musical monodrama, more than in larger forms of music theatre, the two processes interweave and depend on each other; reconstructing the performative genealogy of the ‘work’ reveals an intrinsic impasse in the very notion of the musical ‘text’ associated exclusively with the compiled score and its literary sources.

With the appearance of opera videos in 2013 (DVD) and 2015 (YouTube), Paul Dukas's Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1907) has been revived for twenty-first-century audiences. Not only has this formerly obscure work migrated to a mass-media landscape of personalized digital consumption, but its cultural recontextualization has also been extended to the interpretations staged in those opera videos. Both challenge historical, feminist readings of Ariane. Updating the action to modern scenes of abduction and captivity, these productions recast Ariane as victim and reframe the opera as part of the present discourse on sexual violence. As these recent productions of Ariane resonate with broader aesthetic tendencies in current popular culture, I trace parallels between the opera and three such examples from 2015. Selecting works that exemplify the trend of repackaging the Bluebeard tale as contemporary drama, I cite the films Fifty Shades of Grey and Room, and the Netflix series The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

In 2013, trucks and vans were driving across London, bearing the message ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.’ These mobile billboards declared the number of arrests that had taken place ‘in your area’ in the previous week and provided a number to which people could text the message ‘HOME’ to initiate voluntary repatriation. In 2016, Theresa May, who had organised this scheme as home secretary, became prime minister, following the upheaval caused by the country's plebiscite to leave the European Union. One of the main strands of argument of the successful ‘Brexit’ campaign centred on the ‘deep public anxiety . . . about uncontrolled immigration’ and promised to reduce numbers of immigrants to the country. This desire to control the nation's borders continued to dominate the official soundscape of Britain's government. At the 2016 annual Tory conference, May endeavoured to draw clear lines on issues of belonging, territory, citizenship, and the fuzzy notion of British values, discursively excluding not only migrants, but also anyone with an international(ist) outlook from the national debate: ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world’, she posited, ‘you are a citizen of nowhere.’