Difference is among the twentieth century’s most volatile legacies to the twenty-first. Over this period it has increasingly lodged itself in our cultural consciousness, as both theoretical concept and lived experience. Its workings are refracted through culture (through phenomena such as music) and the way we contemplate and study it (through a journal such as this). A Brief History of Difference, at least the chapter relevant to the present story, might start in the early part of the last century with Ferdinand de Saussure’s courses on linguistics. Not only language, but potentially all signifying phenomena, Saussure argued, articulate the world for us by cutting it into units (e.g. phonemes, concepts, words, signs) that carry meaning precisely through being differentiated from one another: reality is rendered as a system of mutually conditioning differences. By mid-century these ideas had become decisive for literary and cultural theory under the banner of structuralism and semiotics, in which even a cultural practice such as fashion could be seen to signify as a system of difference. With the rise of poststructuralism and deconstruction, difference (or différance) was again seminal in debates about the very nature of meaning, which in turn informed later twentieth-century cultural politics of class and society, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity. (As we know, all these movements would also in the end, and no less contentiously, make their mark on musicology.) Most recently – in terms far from academic – cultural difference has moved into the foreground of global consciousness with the literally shattering and explosive events of our new century.

There is currently a backlash against modernism in English-language music studies. While this vogue of ‘modernism bashing’ is ostensibly based on progressive ideologies, it is dependent on a one-sided perception of musical modernism which it shares with earlier conservative disparagements. Of central importance in this respect is the ‘othering’ of musical modernism as an essentially continental European phenomenon in the ‘Anglosphere’, where it is consistently suspected of being a ‘foreign import’ – by conservative commentators in the first part of the twentieth century, just as by their ‘new-musicological’ successors at the turn of the twenty-first.

The example of the Anglo-American reception of the so-called Darmstadt school, usually regarded as quintessentially modernist, demonstrates how certain partial understandings and downright prejudices are handed down. For instance, the critical commonplace of Darmstadt’s presumed obsession with such values as technical innovation, structural coherence, and a scientistic rationalization of composition says more about those who coined it – mostly American critics who were uncomfortable with the aesthetic as well as the political radicalism of Darmstadt – than about the music itself. It is often precisely this depoliticized, sanitized construction of modernism that present-day critics have attacked, apparently unaware that this has always been a misrepresentation. By thus tracing some common misapprehensions in the Anglo-American reception of musical modernism, I want to argue for a fuller recognition of modernism’s essentially dialectical nature.

In the early 1960s Mahler’s music became a vital stimulus for Henze’s compositional technique and aesthetics. Particularly important were its exploration of formal crises, the incorporation of ‘old’ musical materials, and its apparently direct expression of love and beauty. These aspects confirmed Henze’s desire to break out of the restrictions of Darmstadt dogma, into an apparently anachronistic expressive and technical freedom. This article explores structural and hermeneutic relationships between two of Henze’s works of the period – Being Beauteous and The Bassarids– and Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. In Being Beateous the expressive aspects of cadences in the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony are shown to be crucial models for Henze’s exploration of Rimbaud’s poetic expression of the destruction and revitalization of beautiful form. In The Bassarids an intertextual allusion to the second movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is taken as a signal of Mahlerian ‘breakthrough’ as Pentheus has a vision of Dionysian revelries. Henze’s fragmented, broken, allusive, and eclectic musical textures are interpreted as characteristic expressions of eroticism, as well as being more generally symptomatic of his understanding of Mahler’s importance for twentieth-century music.

Through an examination of the labels Hear Music and Putumayo and their place in coffee shops and retail stores on the one hand, and of world music scholarship on the other, I argue that listening to world music in public spaces demands new theoretical perspectives. The kinds of tourism that take place in listening to world music inattentively suggest a kind of bi-location. Borrowing from quantum mechanics, I suggest that the term ‘entanglement’ might offer some insight into this bi-location and the ‘distributed tourism’ that I argue is taking place.

The growing number of performances and recordings of Feldman’s music in recent years attests to increased interest among performers and listeners; yet his music remains an uncommon subject for detailed music analysis. Proceeding on the premise that this disparity is no accident, I argue that certain distinctive qualities of the music render it difficult to analyse with tools, methods, and practices developed in response to other repertories. This paper investigates the analytical challenges posed by Feldman’s music. A survey of such challenges as they relate to his output in general is followed by an account of two particular issues associated with his late work: scale and repetition. Two case studies address these issues in turn, advancing relevant conceptual and methodological approaches. In the first study, on Coptic Light for orchestra (1985), I suggest that analysts might reconsider part–whole relationships in music analysis, and use the idea of ‘populations’ (with their attendant features of range of variation and distribution) to develop a non-reductive (and non-constructive) approach to scale. In the second study, on Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello (1987), I encourage analysts to rethink the role of repetition in music analysis, such that repetition is no longer (only) a goal, but becomes a point of departure. Throughout the essay I take the view that analysis is an investigation of experience; that a particular difficulty of analysing Feldman’s music is the self-knowledge it requires; and that the concerted inquiry that is music analysis can well be used to expand – not only condense – the realm of musical experience.

This close reading of Claude Sautet’s music-film Un coeur en hiver / A Heart in Winter (1992) also reflects on issues raised by music-films generally. Films that take music as their central subject raise special questions about the role of music in cinematic representation. Un coeur en hiver’s musically saturated narrative explores people’s abilities to know themselves and others and to express themselves adequately in emotional contexts. At the same time, the film’s techniques interrogate both the role of music in the construction of cinematic subjectivity and the potential of cinema to engage with our understandings of musical subjectivity. On one level the music self-critically serves its classic role in cinematic narrative of encouraging – even coercing – us into filling in narrative gaps otherwise left open by plot and dialogue. On another level, however, Un coeur en hiver can be read as a species of cinematic meditation on Ravel’s music: traces of Ravelian biography are scattered throughout; on-screen performances of the Piano Trio provide a musical metaphor for the narrative love triangle; and the Trio’s first movement provides a formal skeleton for the film as a whole. Drawing on recent film-music theory as well as Naomi Cummings’ account of musical subjectivity, I suggest that the film reflects specifically upon the music by exploiting its cinematic resources – dramatis personae, narrative, and mise-en-scène– to position us as auditors of Ravel; it projects a sense that Ravel’s subjective presence inhabits his trio and sonatas. To shed light on the nature of this cinematic meditation on musical authorship, I draw on John Corbett’s account of recorded music as something that both promises pleasure and threatens lack. I also revisit Edward T. Cone’s understanding of ‘the composer’s voice’, proposing a reading of Un coeur en hiver as a cinematic reflection on our fetishism of composer biography in an era marked by the loss of human presence in mechanical musical reproduction.

Death not only robbed Anthony Pople of more than two decades from his three score years and ten; it robbed a community dedicated to the study and promotion of western classical music, especially twentieth-century music, of one of its leading lights. Pople was a prolific thinker and doer, and quite a bit of his legacy is in the form of influence, as a teacher, of course, but also as an imaginative person of action who gave of his time and expertise in all sorts of ways – on committees, as an editor, examiner, adviser, studio producer – and, let us not forget, as a most gifted composer and performer of music. There is also the black-line legacy. His writings show, consistently, his rare talent for both clarity and depth of thought. I think he was one of those authors who wanted every piece to be special, shunning the routine as well as the speculative: and if that sentiment might remind us of the composer Alban Berg, it is no accident.