This article examines the meaning of Western music performances in interwar Shanghai through the theoretical framework of performativity that originated in John Austin's speech act and Judith Butler's notion of identity as performed. The early concerts of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra (SMO), I suggest, were an assertion of settler sovereignty in a treaty port such as Shanghai. Therefore, Chinese musicians performing Western music – propagated through the establishment of the National Conservatory of Music by Chinese elites in Shanghai's French Settlement in 1927 – was the embodiment of three contradictory ideals: colonialism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Zooming in on four SMO concerts that featured Chinese musicians in 1929, I argue that they were sites of identity and power negotiation, the SMO and the Chinese musicians asserting quite distinct performative utterances. On the one hand, the performing Chinese body enacted the cosmopolitan outlook that the Municipal Council was eager to project, not only for the sake of ideology but also to increase SMO's concert revenue by appealing to the increasing number of Chinese concert attendees. On the other hand, it meant national glory to Chinese residents in Shanghai, marking Chinese musicians participating in a global musical network. Lastly, this study draws attention to the diverse geographies of Western music in the twentieth century and its coeval development beyond the West, testifying to the timely need for a global music history in which the musicking of Western music in so many Asian cities should be interwoven into its narrative.

Where postcolonial studies often retain a focus on the imperial metropole, decolonial analysis takes as an imperative the re-location of the critical nexus into former colonies. Yet with this shift there emerges a recalcitrant question about the need for decolonial analysis in the centre: if decolonization is something that happens in the periphery, why, for instance, should we engage with it in the United Kingdom? While this question might have been less pressing in music studies in the 1990s when systematic approaches to decolonial analysis first started gaining traction, I argue that the amnesiac appeals to the Anglosphere which have accompanied the Brexit vote implore us to consider the possibilities of decolonial analysis in musicology anew. I suggest that decolonial analysis can be reconfigured through the notion of the coloniality/modernity bind to turn the decolonial gaze upon the musical subject in the metropole.

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.

This article considers several prominent pieces of minimalism in their movement from primary sound recording to secondary transcription. In place of the score-based formalism of much musicological scholarship on minimalism, I draw on my own archival work and interviews to consider the frequency of transcriptions of minimalism, as well as the politico-historical aspects of minimalism's development that are elided when the distinction between score and transcription is not taken into account. I argue that defining minimalism in relation to material practices of composing, writing, performing, and listening – rather than to formal features like gradual process, long duration, and diatonicism – helps in defining minimalism as a cohesive field of musical production.

In the years around 1968 London was home to a sizeable community of writers, musicians, artists, and political activists whose countercultural attitudes are expressed in the publications of the ‘alternative’ or ‘underground’ press – magazines such as International Times, OZ, INK, Friends (later Frendz), Time Out, Gandalf's Garden, The Black Dwarf, and The Hustler. That most of them had at least some pages devoted to music reflected the crucial role of rock in particular in summing up the community's aspirations, focused less on political or social than on cultural transformation. This article seeks to chart in these underground publications the changing attitudes towards music and its revolutionary potential. Initially the alternative press portrayed popular music as sharing with avant-garde tendencies a basic equation between new creative means and their would-be disruptive effects on society as a whole. However, there soon arose contradictions between the radical social potential of music and its growing commercialization, contradictions stemming not only from the co-optation of rock by market forces and record companies but also from the underground's own lack of a coherent ideological agenda. Paradoxically, it was precisely when popular music began to be considered a form of ‘high’ culture – just as the alternative press advocated – that its perceived effectiveness as part of the revolutionary, countercultural project began to diminish.

Queen's ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (1975) has been the subject of many academic analyses; the song has not been considered, however, in the context of Queen's wider output. This article examines ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in relation to Queen's idiolect as identified from the group's songs written between 1973 and 1975. ‘Idiolect’ refers to the common musical details of an artist's output or segment of their output. I subdivide the category of an idiolect to include sonic patterns and compositional strategies. The former accounts for patterns that are consistent in their presentation across songs, the latter accounts for patterns that differ in their presentation across songs. The formal and harmonic structures of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ reflect the group's common compositional strategies; the song's textural arrangements highlight Queen's sonic patterns. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ occupies a unique place in Queen's output, as the first song to present all the major elements of the group's idiolect.

The performance practice of European serial music has long been misunderstood. This article uses Stockhausen's Klavierstück I (1952–3) as a lens through which to view the realities of this practice, drawing on close contextual analysis of the affordances of the score and the now significant corpus of recordings. These findings are used to extend M. J. Grant's view of serial aesthetics and to provide a practical basis for what she calls ‘serial listening’. Three principal styles of performance are identified and attendant modes of listening suggested, relating to the non-thematic principles and hermeneutic contexts of serial music, which include the embodied response of the performer to defamiliarized musical material and the nascent dialectic of instrumental and electronic composition. This investigation – informing serious judgements of value and taste – has broader implications for the development of Stockhausen's notation and temporal theory in the 1950s and for the performance practice of new music.

This article investigates music in the modern transmedial franchise. Popular culture franchises flow across different forms of media, taking the audience, and often the music, with them. Music plays an important role in articulating and developing textual relationships, while adapting to the possibilities of each particular medium.

To focus on the role of music, a case study that emphasizes audio is chosen, a transmedial franchise founded upon a rock album. Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds (1978) has served as the basis for several (very different) video games that also prioritize music. The article traces how musical materials are selected, transformed, and deployed as media boundaries are traversed. It ultimately argues that music is an important part of how media consumers engage with transmedial franchises.

This article considers the twentieth- and twenty-first-century practice of presenting Johann Sebastian Bach's Passion compositions on stage, in light of recent debates about performativity, presence and liveness. By tracing the history of such stagings from Ferruccio Busoni's plans in the 1920s to contemporary versions by Peter Sellars, Alain Platel, and others, I explore the increasing tendency to turn these canonical works into politically or aesthetically relevant events. Through a close reading of the critical reception of each production, I show how stagings have the capacity to challenge productively our easy familiarity with these pieces outside their initial liturgical setting. Unlike a standard concert presentation, staged performances tend to confront audiences more immediately with the violent imagery and spiritual demands of the Passions, thereby continually renewing the dialogue between Bach's works and later audiences. The article thus offers a contribution to an anthropological enquiry into the present-day cult of Bach and the particular forms of aesthetic pleasure that classical music affords its twenty-first-century devotees.

This article provides a critical account of the appropriation of semiotics in Anglo-American musicology, its theoretical and discursive foundations, and its impact on the discipline in the period from the mid-1970s to the present. Starting out from the work of Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Philip Tagg in the 1970s, it traces two principal approaches in music semiotics, here termed the ‘structural–analytical’ and the ‘semantic–interpretative’, which draw in significant measure on, respectively, the Saussurean and Peircean legacies. Both differences of musicological tradition and the wider state of the discipline have a part to play in explaining why semiotics never established itself as a discrete and distinctive subfield in the English-speaking world in the way that it did in continental Europe. But with the increasing currency of, among other concerns, topic theory, theories of emotion and affect, and studies of musical gesture and metaphor, it might be argued that semiotics – or, rather, an interdisciplinary aggregation of approaches that might be termed ‘post-semiotic’ – has never had a stronger presence in anglophone musicology than at the present time.

This article explores the strategies employed by user-creators as they listen to, sense, make, and share digital audiovisual memes of musicking non-human animals on social media. Memes, reels, and other forms of audiovisual social media posts are a form of cultural expression that reveals the varied ways humans relate to, connect with, and represent non-human animals – especially their pets – through sound, music, and the moving image. By listening to the plurality of musicking animals circulating on social media platforms and networks, I argue that user-creators conspicuously use music and performance to express alternative ideas of what it means to be musical, to feel closer to and connect with the important animals in their lives, and to explore the ways they can represent non-human animals using sound and music to explore musical concepts. Using a varied selection of viral musicking animal memes shared across social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, I frame musicking animal participatory media as a creative space for exploring different approaches to listening, performing with, and scoring sound and music to the behaviour, movement, and acoustic communication of the non-human animal. Non-human animal musicking takes a variety of forms across this particular kind of participatory media making by online user-creators.

In the foreword to the first issue of Popular Music and Society, published in 1971, Ray B. Browne wrote that, ‘until very recently … academics, with a few notable exceptions, were by and large indifferent to the role of popular music in their world’; he then recounted a rejection he had received from an academic journal, whose editor had written that, ‘although this might be interesting, we both had to admit that popular songs really had no academic significance’. Today, exactly fifty years later, the position of popular music studies within the academy is far removed from Browne's experience: there are multiple academic journals and scholarly press book series devoted solely to popular music, scholars regularly present papers on popular music topics at academic conferences, and departments across colleges and universities offer an increasingly wide variety of popular music courses. Popular music has even become a viable area of interest within music scholarship.

Focusing on a multimedia practice labelled ‘intermedia art’, this article shows how experimental musical practices complicate popular characterizations of the idea of politics in 1960s Japan that are polarized by their focus on extraordinary economic growth, on the one hand, and radical protest, on the other. Like their counterparts in art, experimental musicians and artists such as Shiomi Mieko, Kosugi Takehisa, and Yuasa Jōji took an interest in everyday sounds, spaces, and technologies as sites for artistic exploration. However, their musical approaches did not share the overtly political engagement with the scenes of protest playing out in the public sphere that played a central role in the visual arts. Through an investigation of the notion of ambiguity in the acoustics of intermedia, the article seeks to re-examine understandings about the role of sound in shifting perceptions about political participation.

The opera Gawain (1991; revised 1994 and 1999) brought together Harrison Birtwistle and the poet David Harsent in a reworking of the late fourteenth-century narrative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. That Birtwistle asked Harsent to make a large number of alterations to his original libretto has already been documented. The present article, which draws on the sketching processes of both librettist and composer, reveals the nature and the ramifications of those changes. The discussion is particularly concerned with the contradictions and multiple narrative layers that resulted from the Harsent–Birtwistle collaboration, and with the composer’s suggestion that there is both a secret drama in the orchestra, and instruments that function like unheard voices. A consideration of Birtwistle’s sketches also reveals a preoccupation with line, in particular with finding different ways of shadowing vocal and instrumental parts, and ambiguously shrouding originary lines in layers of varied reflection. These musical devices represent Birtwistle’s response to Harsent’s interest in divided subjectivity, and to the idea that Gawain should develop a sense of his own identity.

For many Cubans, the internet remains an inaccessible destination. The residents of repartimiento districts – Black Cuban residents from outlying districts across Havana – manage the situation through custom solutions that bridge gaps of technological precarity. Utilizing USB drives to share content with one another, artists and music fans have constructed a complex, alternative internet that allows for the peer-to-peer trade of movies, music, and other media. Pirate digital networks such as el paquete semanal and Zapya, for instance, circulate music across the island without the need to rely on costly and unreliable internet infrastructure. Utilizing interviews, physical and digital ethnographies, and theories of viral musicking, I argue that Black Cuban artists and music fans, despite internet scarcity, use alternative networks to generate viral events. In particular, Cubans in 2021 joined in a transnational expression of sonic protest through the popularity of the politically subversive song ‘Patria y vida’, a song that circulated widely through underground, USB-based networks. In this article, I discuss the song's construction, circulation, and role in sounding the J-11 Cuban protests to demonstrate how Black Cuban artists and fans share music through USB-based networks not only to solve gaps in technologically precarious situations, but also to generate powerful moments of viral musicking.

Although he composed more than 120 film scores during his career, Georges Auric (1899–1983) did not compose his first until well after his thirtieth birthday. However, as a disciple of Guillaume Apollinaire's esprit nouveau he was interested in the genre much earlier. Between 1919 and 1928 he published three pieces of film music criticism that are couched in the rhetoric of Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau. In 1931 he composed his second film score, for René Clair's 1931 film A Nous, la Liberté! Although the music was composed after the esprit nouveau movement had effectively faded away, it is one of the clearest examples of that aesthetic. Because of the extraordinary collaborative relationship between Clair and Auric, the film also presents one of the most striking early solutions to the problem of how sound could be incorporated into the artistic rhetoric of silent cinema.

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.

Coming to terms with foreign otherness in 1900 inevitably involved interpretation, negotiation and acceptance of the ungraspable ‘space between’ the oral and the written. Julien Tiersot's transcriptions of non-western music into western notation tell us more about racial preconceptions and the search for musical universals than about musical difference. Léon Azoulay, French physician and member of the Société d'Anthropologie, similarly presumed something universal in human languages, and wished to fix them through ‘non-systematic’ transcriptions into phonemes and ‘semi-literal’ translations. However, whereas Tiersot took dictation from musicians performing at the Paris Universal Exhibitions, in 1900 Azoulay made over 400 wax cylinder recordings there. This little-known and, until recently, unavailable collection includes diverse languages and dialects, accompanied by notes on the linguistic and sociological characteristics of those recorded. These documents shed light upon the ‘revolution in knowledge’ they sought to bring about, and how the genre of transcription reveals fundamental aspects of the colonial experience.

Music streaming service Spotify has recently declared that genre is becoming less important in popular music culture, linking this idea to post-identity claims. In contrast, the central argument of this article is that genre continues to matter in music streaming, where algorithmic recommendation systems remediate genre and its association with constructions of identity and difference. We examine Spotify's mediation of genre through a multimodal discourse analysis of genre metadata as presented on the website Every Noise at Once, playlist curation, and media discourse. Analysing the genres bubblegrunge and rap français (French rap), we show that the algorithmic and human processes of Spotify and its users rearticulate genre, shaping, in turn, patterns of recommendation, curation, and consumption. These processes remediate earlier constructions of identity, temporality, and place in music culture. Simultaneously, they intensify differentiation and individuation, tying in with postulations of multiplicity and diversity in neoliberalism that conceal power imbalances.