This article reconsiders sentimentalism in the light of the writings of Adam Smith and the career of Abd al-Halim Hafiz, Egypt’s ‘Dark Nightingale’ and film-star crooner of the 1950s and 60s. It explores competing representations of emotionality, the limits of enchantment, and the contemporary politics of nostalgia and melodrama in Egyptian public culture. Eighteenth-century sentimental theory provides a critical and productive angle on twentieth-century popular musical culture, angles that this paper explores by imagining Adam Smith watching Abd al-Halim Hafiz’s first film, Lahn al-Wafā‘ (1955).

Pet Sounds, the landmark Beach Boys album of 1966, has received wide acclaim as one of rock’s first ‘concept albums’. It also represents a milestone in the artistic evolution of the group’s primary creative force, Brian Wilson. A thorough examination of the texts and music of the songs of Pet Sounds reveals a unified art work projecting a coherent textual narrative. Songs are associated and interrelated via recurrent motives and harmonic patterns, expressing extremely personal themes of romance and heartbreak. The musical ideas are mostly culminations of Brian Wilson’s earlier work – they are the ‘pet sounds’ that he had been raising and nurturing since the early 1960s – but they appear here in an unprecedented artistic context. Despite Wilson’s continued, if sporadic, productivity in the decades that followed, including the ill-fated Smile project, Pet Sounds stands as his crowning artistic achievement, an album with vast appeal and broad influence.

Latin American folkloric-popular music had an impact on the music scenes of both Germanies, where singer-songwriters emerged and became interested in Chilean Nueva Canción, the Argentinian Movimiento del Nuevo Cancionero, and Cuban Nueva Trova in the 1970s. Particularly interesting in this context is the contact of some Latin American countries with the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Based on translation theory and articles on Nueva Canción in Europe, this article examines the Latin American presence at the Political Song Festival in East Berlin and analyses some publications that focus on this annual event. The article focuses on the singer-songwriter Gerhard Schöne, who during the 1980s, took Nicaragua as a political example, as is shown in songs, and who also composed German lyrics to melodies by Violeta Parra, Atahualpa Yupanqui, and Silvio Rodríguez, transferring the songs into a new context.

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.’

Albert Giraud’s cycle of fifty rondels bergamasques, Pierrot Lunaire (1884), famously became, in Otto Erich Hartleben’s German translation, the basis of Schoenberg’s Op. 21 (1912). But for many decades the work of the Belgian poet was either straightforwardly denigrated for its anachronism and ‘mediocrity’ (Boulez), or at least declared inferior to its ‘vivid, Angst-filled transformation’ (Youens) in Hartleben’s hands. This article questions some widely held beliefs concerning the original Pierrot and its subsequent reworking. The claim that Schoenberg’s selection and reorganization of the poems imposed logic and order on an otherwise jumbled collection is found to be belied by the striking narrative coherence of Giraud’s original sequence, which is unified by a clearly defined set of symbols. Meanwhile, Hartleben’s putative ‘infidelity’ to Giraud is challenged by evidence both internal (his careful preservation of the rondel structure) and contextual (an esteem for his Belgian contemporary manifested in further poetic homages). While there is no doubt that Hartleben’s translations distance the poems from their background in Parnassian aesthetics – omitting crucial references to Brueghel, Shakespeare, Watteau, and the painter and lithographer Adolphe Willette – it is Giraud himself who deserves the credit for the most strikingly memorable images later absorbed into the expressionistic milieu of Schoenberg’s melodrama.

Reel-to-reel recordings and 15 kilocycle telelinks converge in Maryanne Amacher's telematic installation series City-Links (1967–81). As long-duration recordings of urban sites, City-Links queries the musicality of ambient sound on tape, a question of critical importance to many composers of the period. But as expressly telematic tape, City-Links embeds these recordings within a transforming US telecommunications industry where expanded long-distance dialing relied on the high-tech labour and gendered discipline of telephone operators, enrolling tapes’ ambient sounding in broader questions about the technological mediation of gender, listening and long-distance embodiment during City-Links late 1960s and 1970s span. An extended reconstruction of one City-Links's tape's tactile qualities interprets this complex interimplication as a kind of telematic ‘weave’, with a spatiotemporal warp shuttling between the weft of environmental sounds and their technical traces.

This article explores Steve Reich's relationship with New York City's downtown artworld during the latter half of the 1960s, aiming to nuance aspects of early minimalism by tracing diachronic connections with the Park Place gallery, the exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt, and movements such as process art and conceptualism. I suggest that, rather than revealing Reich's prior compositional philosophy, his 1968 treatise ‘Music as a Gradual Process’ demonstrated aesthetic cohesion with the stance of a particular milieu, mirroring a broader linguistic turn in contemporaneous art and revealing a certain discrepancy between theory and praxis. Drawing on newspaper reception, I explore Reich's compositions from Melodica (1966) to Pendulum Music (1968), arguing that these pieces gained both aesthetic value and institutional credibility through being understood in relation to concurrent artwork and ideas, affording productive horizons of expectation.

‘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.

Music podcasts have proliferated as public discourse about popular music. A significant part of the expanding podcast industry, music podcasts include titles such as All Songs Considered, Switched on Pop, Song Exploder, Sound Opinions, New York Times Popcast, and Lost Notes. These podcasts often feature a combination of conversation and musical selections, which highlight aspects of the music for podcast listeners. In this article, I argue that we should think of music podcasts as persuasive demonstrations of music consumption. Music podcasts present music as a subject for discussion and also implicitly model listening techniques, convincing podcast listeners to adopt specific approaches to music recordings. I explore three podcasts: All Songs Considered, Switched on Pop, and Disability Visibility. I examine how these podcasts present music as their subject, while advancing particular theories of listening that can serve or subvert privileged modes of music reception.

Lady Gaga's work is noted for her references to the work of other artists and is often criticized for borrowed content that is perceived as exceeding mere generic norms. In this study, we engage closely with the musical and lyrical content of two songs from her extended play release, The Fame Monster (2009), with the goal of identifying and interpreting the intertextual pathways that led to these works. Relying upon theories of intertextuality, we unearth a network of texts invoked in each of her songs and consider these connections to comprise a musical genealogy, invoking Foucault's conception of genealogy as the process of revealing historical knowledge.

That Skryabin's harmonic language is rooted in dominant functionality is commonly acknowledged. However, the flow of his tensile dominant-based sonorities has not been adequately explored. This article seeks to correlate his harmonic processes with his erotically charged philosophy. It sketches ways in which our understanding of Skryabin's harmonic ‘flow’ can be reinforced by analytical thinking in both psychoanalysis and music theory, bringing Jacques Lacan's semiotic model of the circuit of human desire into dialogue with Hugo Riemann's Funktionstheorie. Two of Skryabin's harmonic proclivities direct the chosen analytical approach: 1) sequential chains of fifths and 2) transposition by multiples of the minor third. The interchange of these two characteristics is explored, with Riemann's categories of chordal function (T, S, and D) grafted onto a model of tonal pitch space derived (via Fred Lerdahl) from Gottfried Weber. The way in which Skryabin ‘rotates’ tonal functions sequentially (i.e., T→S→D→T) in a potentially infinite cycle of fifths, rerouted occasionally through minor-third transposition, is correlated with Lacanian drive theory. The article's concluding analysis of Skryabin's late octatonic Sonata no. 6, Op. 62, takes this ‘rotation’ of tonal function to a deeper structural level. The labelling system of Funktionstheorie, which is stretched at this point, is reconceptualized through Lacan's extension of his theory of desire into semiotics.

In 1965, the Australian government and Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT) debated which performing arts ensembles should represent Australia at the London Commonwealth Arts Festival. The AETT proposed the newly formed Aboriginal Theatre, comprising songmakers, musicians, and dancers from the Tiwi Islands, northeast Arnhem Land and the Daly River. The government declined, and instead sent the Sydney Symphony Orchestra performing works by John Antill and Peter Sculthorpe. In examining the historical context for these negotiations, I demonstrate the direct relationship between the historical promotion of ‘Australianist’ art music composition that claimed to represent Aboriginal culture, and the denial of the right of representation to Aboriginal performers as owners of their musical traditions. Within the framing of Wolfe's settler colonial theory and ‘logic of elimination’, I suggest that appropriative Australian art music has directly sought to replace performances of Aboriginal culture by Aboriginal people, even while Aboriginal people have resisted replacement.

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) is recognized as one of France's most well-known film directors, directing six films over a thirty-year period. This article argues that his film soundscapes occupy a unique position in the history of French film sound, providing a key link between contemporary experimentation in art music and the sonic experimentation of the New Wave filmmakers. This argument is best exemplified by Le Testament d'Orphée (1960), which represents the apotheosis of Cocteau's artistic output as well as the stage at which he was most confident in handling the design of a film soundscape. Indeed, Cocteau was comfortable with the selection and arrangement of sonic elements to the extent that his regular collaborator Georges Auric became almost dispensable. Nevertheless, Auric's willing support enriched the final film and Cocteau created a highly self-reflexive work through his arrangement of the composer's music with pre-existing musical borrowings. Cocteau's engagement with contemporary developments in film and art music can be heard throughout this film, highlighting his position as a poet simultaneously establishing himself in the canon of art and looking to the future.

Listeners of a certain age tend to think that the cassette tape fell out of favour sometime during the 1990s, but is experiencing a revival of sorts as curious Millennials discover the pleasures of mixtapes and decaying media. But cassette tapes have been in constant use since their invention in 1963. Outside of North America and Western Europe, the tape is still the predominant phonographic medium, and is unseating hard drives as the preferred medium for data storage. For whom, then, is this a revival? My article argues that the tape revival is less an attempt at neutral recuperation of the past than a purposeful rewriting of history. Cassettes are particularly potent because they signify death and decay more forcefully even than vinyl. Their acoustic imperfections and mechanical frailties are now aestheticized in novels and contemporary popular music. Even curated listening experiences, from podcasts to streaming services, are designed to replicate the mixtape. The second era of the cassette tape represents another example of Simon Reynolds’ concept of retromania, and can be fruitfully understood as a chapter in the evolving story of phonographic waste.

The rhythmic and metrical qualities of electronic dance music (EDM) are clearly among its most prominent and appreciated features. Yet scholarship on rhythm, as well as popular discourse surrounding EDM, often frames the pervasively duple metres that characterize popular dance-based styles as simplistic and limited in capacity. Given the allure of EDM’s temporal qualities, how do musicians devise creative solutions to the constraints of its duple metrical organization? This article addresses this question through a consideration of embedded grouping dissonance, one of several distinctive rhythmic phenomena found in EDM. In theorizing embedded grouping dissonance, the article both builds upon and expands recent music-theoretical formulations of ‘metrical dissonance’, which describe similar occurrences without addressing this specific phenomenon. It then situates embedded grouping dissonance in relation to EDM’s technologically mediated means of production, arguing that this rhythmic technique exemplifies recurring principles of design that shape and reflect the aesthetics of electronic dance music on a broad scale.

In this study, criss-crossing discourses – written, visual, and aural – are brought together in an effort to shed light on a section of the tawa’if (traditional courtesan) community in contemporary North India. As a kind of companion text to my point-of-view documentaries Guria, Gossip, and Globalization and Chandni’s Choice, I present an overview of the NGO Guria. This organization works to empower tawa’ifs to reclaim their liminality as artists, able to move back and forth between their own profoundly socially marginalized community and mainstream society, a privilege they enjoyed historically but have virtually lost in the present day. I have juxtaposed this with an exegesis of talk, including gossip, about and by these performers and their music. This includes issues of their gossip- and media-driven legacy that have led to their current position, often dangerously vulnerable, in the global marketplace. Finally, I examine the life of a teenage member of a musical matriarchy whose foremothers have been somewhat successful at continuing to traverse the borderlands between various levels of society.

In the Hungarian folk revival, Hungarian Roma (Gypsies) serve as both privileged informants and exotic Others. The musicians of the revival known as the táncház (dance-house) movement rely heavily on rural Rom musicians, especially those from Transylvania, as authentic sources of traditional Hungarian repertoire and style. Táncház rhetoric centres on the trope of localized authenticity; but the authority wielded by rural Rom musicians, who carry music both between villages and around the world, complicates the fixed boundaries that various powerful stakeholders would place on the tradition. Drawing on media sources and on fieldwork in Hungary and Romania, I examine how authenticity and ‘Gypsiness’ are presented and controlled by the scholars, musicians, and administrators who lead the táncház movement, in particular in the context of camps and workshops dedicated to Hungarian folk music and dance. Organizers often erect clear boundaries of status, genre, and gender roles through such events, which, among other things, address the anxiety raised by Rom musicians’ power in liminal spaces. In addition, I look at how Rom musicians both negotiate with the táncház’s aesthetic of authenticity and challenge it musically. Finally, I discuss how musicians and the crowds that gather to hear and dance to their music together create a carnival atmosphere, breaking down some of the boundaries that organizers work so hard to create. Throughout, I demonstrate that liminality is an extraordinarily pertinent lens through which to view Roma participation in the Hungarian folk music scene.

Nearly thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have got used to seeing the Bolshevik Revolution as the prelude to a failed political experiment, albeit one that lasted a remarkably long time. But why do we see it as a failure? After all, the Soviet Union was a vast empire regarded as the military equal of the United States, feared and hated by successive US presidents, whose influence extended far beyond Soviet borders to include regimes in Africa, South East Asia, Central and South America. Had Mikhail Gorbachev not been removed in 1991, and had the Soviet system been able to reform itself into something like the form of communism we see today in China, no one would regard those seventy-plus years of Soviet power as a failure at all. What is meant by failure, in truth, is not really military or economic failure so much as a failure to sustain and uphold the ideals of equality and social justice that originally drew so many to the communist cause. The haemorrhaging of members from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1956, for instance, was a result of widespread feelings of shock and disgust after Nikita Khrushchev's revelations at the Twenty-First Party Conference that year, at which he delivered his so-called ‘secret speech’ condemning Stalin's regime. For those who left the CPGB, and other communist parties across Western Europe, it was painful to realize that what they had for decades dismissed as ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’ had in fact been accurate reportage. Most shocking of all was learning that the mass arrests and disappearances of the 1930s, and even the show trials of prominent Politburo and party members, were not proportionate, if regrettable, responses to plots to murder Stalin and overthrow Soviet power at all, but rather Stalinist crimes of epic and tragic proportions. Right up to the end of the Communist regime in Russia, reports of political and religious repression, the continued use of the Gulag system, confinement and forced treatment of dissidents in mental hospitals, literary and other cultural censorship continued to filter through the Iron Curtain.