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.

The terms ‘arrest’ and ‘movement’, deployed by Tippett in his Third Symphony (1970–2) as part of what Kemp defines as a ‘dialectic of strong contrasts’, were in fact significant at an earlier stage of the composer’s output. Some ten years previously Arrest and Movement appears as a possible title for his Second Piano Sonata in the pencil manuscript of the work. Tippett’s notebooks further reveal how these two categories determined the formation of two distinct types of temporality in the piece: one halting or stuttering, the other flowing. Art critic Henriette Groenewegen-Frankfort’s book Arrest and Movement: an Essay on Space and Time in the Representational Art of the Ancient Near East, which was published in 1951 and which Tippett is known to have read, uses these terms to explore the relationship between spatial and temporal representation. This prompts investigation of the arrest–movement dialectic in Tippett’s Sonata along analogous lines, analysing structure, balance, and use of quasi-spatial proportions. The two threads converge by means of the criterion of ‘monumentality’, a term Groenewegen-Frankfort uses to describe works of particularly effective balance. While critical evaluation of the Sonata might suggest that this work itself falls short of ‘monumental’ stature, it is arguable that Tippett was able to carry forward lessons learned to works of his later œuvre (such as his Fourth Symphony), which do indeed approach this status.

Recent scholarship has taken the leap from documenting cyclic form in Shostakovich's Seventh String Quartet to its interpretation. David Fanning, Judith Kuhn, and Sarah Reichardt, for instance, endorse a belief in the quartet's satisfactory closure. I propose an alternative reading that qualifies such resolution as merely apparent. I posit a musical ‘persona’ (Edward T. Cone) that achieves comfort in denial. I support my claim by analysing shifting hypermetre, metrical insertions, motif, and cyclic form, then weave my observations into a narrative interpretation. While acknowledging the limitations of the narrative analogy (following Carolyn Abbate, Lawrence Kramer, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez), I rely on its principal strength: the ability to help construct a compelling interpretation of the elusive ‘meaning’ of a piece of absolute music (Cone, Fred Maus, Anthony Newcomb, Leo Treitler). I conclude that the peculiar arrangement of shifting metrical identities and the DSCH-motto-related fragments tell a psychological story: of a musical persona's thwarted search for self.

This article argues that early twentieth-century debates about both musical modernism and the idea of Europe were conditioned by prevailing attitudes towards autonomy. It will challenge the current rendering of modernist autonomy as depoliticized by showing how the attribution of ‘cosmopolitan’ characteristics to the music and persona of Frederick Delius indicated both an absence of affiliation and a definitive marker of Englishness. Underpinning this argument is the idea that attending to the dialectical interplay between independence and cooperation in the notion of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ can offer a model for a renewed conception of autonomy and commitment in musical modernism. Delius’s devotion to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, and Nietzsche's own analysis of European nihilism, will act as the backdrop to this discussion and help to suggest how both ‘Europe’ and musical modernism can be understood – via the notion of cosmopolitanism – as dispositions extending beyond their conventional geographical and historical demarcations.

The Notenkrakersactie of 17 November 1969 was a landmark event for Dutch musical life: a group of composers disrupted a concert of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, protesting against the orchestra's lack of contemporary music programming. Scholars have tended to interpret this protest as a watershed for the avant-garde, but historical performance – not just contemporary music – proved to be a significant beneficiary. Early Musicians, like New Musicians, had common political goals and appealed to the youth counterculture. Ensuing reforms to the federal arts subsidy system, state-funded music schools, and conservatories in the 1970s were also advantageous for the Dutch Early Music movement. During the welfare retrenchment of the 1980s and the subsidy restructuring of the 1990s, Early Music ensembles economized and had greater success with mainstream recording companies and audiences than new music groups. Nearly forty years after the Notenkrakersactie, traditional symphony orchestras have less influence on Dutch musical life, but recent cutbacks to arts subsidies threaten contemporary music and historical performance alike.

The musical comedy film was perhaps a surprising genre to appear and flourish in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, a decade traditionally associated with the grimmer realities of Stalin's ruthless consolidation of power, show trials, and purges. Despite (and in many ways because of) this, the musical comedy became quite popular, with audiences and officials alike. Its creation did not, however, proceed without controversy or difficulty. In this article, I examine how director Grigory Aleksandrov and composer Isaak Dunayevsky drew on well-known and well-liked American musical and cinematic models to construct the first Soviet musical comedy film, Jolly Fellows (1934), and the role of music in the controversy that the film sparked. I argue that in choosing musical content appropriate for contemporary Soviet viewers and transmitting it by using American-inspired formal structures that rely on music, Aleksandrov and Dunayevsky created a powerful hybrid that spoke convincingly to audiences and critics, who ultimately used the film and its music as a means for debating issues of cultural significance.

The textbook historical account of post-war New Music describes a logical and radical succession from Schoenberg to Webern to the Darmstadt School. Against this narrative of inevitability, I provide a more contingent account of the institutionalization of a particular discourse of New Music in the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe. What is contingent here is not so much why or how certain figures – chiefly Pierre Boulez and René Leibowitz – were important, but the shape and the logic by which this importance was established and maintained. Accordingly, this article first of all provides a summary of just what it meant for Leibowitz's understanding of New Music to be reproduced in an institutional capacity. From here, I undertake close critical reading of Boulez's break with Leibowitz in order to discover what, exactly, Boulez began to do differently to establish a new practice.

Video installation art is a collaboration of sound, image, and space, with a closer relationship to music and art than to cinema. Accordingly, those working in this genre are often both artist and musician, a double role that represents a radical departure from the artist/musician divide of many other audio-visual genres. Because it is single authored, video installation can invert many elements of the filmmaking process: while it is common procedure to add a soundtrack to film during post-production, for instance, many video artists use sound as their starting point, often basing whole works on a musical structure. While such an inversion invites reconsideration of musical audibility and film narrative, video work, when installed, also challenges the notions of screen space and realism. An audience is no longer offered the single-point perspective of film, but is instead enveloped within a three-dimensional space. And as image expands beyond the four sides of the cinema screen – a space occupied previously by music alone – important questions are raised: what happens to music when film breaks from the containment of the screen? when it destroys its own boundaries? Focusing on the work of Bill Viola, this paper explores the ways in which video installation art confronts methods of film exhibition and audience engagement, and investigates how such confrontation redefines the roles of music and image in film.

In Jim Jarmusch's Int. Trailer. Night (2002) a young American actress, alone in her trailer for a ten-minute break, lights up a cigarette and puts on a CD of the Goldberg Variations. In this short, almost plotless experimental film Bach sounds outside the frameworks that typically motivate the diegetic presence of so-called ‘classical music’ in cinema, detached from the places and signifiers of high art and from high-level meanings and pointed occurrences. This unusual representation of listening opens up two complementary lines of enquiry: first, into the way in which Jarmusch draws on Bach to invent a reality that is strange and irreducible, marked by unexpected cultural affiliations and by an elusive affective realm; second, into the way in which, by thus channelling Bach into his poetics of the everyday, the director reinvents the music's own identity, putting forward a de-essentialized image of its cultural placement and aesthetic status.

The London Sinfonietta’s reputation as a contemporary music ensemble comes from the continuing commitment by its players and artistic directors to its quality of performance. The ensemble also developed a sense of its musical identity by generating a repertoire of commissioned works. This article looks at some of the ways that the Sinfonietta defined its musical ideology and has functioned as a performance-centred art world in which composers are invited to collaborate but are not there by right. It examines the Sinfonietta’s strategies for audience building, the ensemble’s contribution to the development of London’s concert life since its foundation in 1968, and looks at the ways that it has sought to renew itself in response to the different funding and aesthetic environments it has encountered in its history. The Sinfonietta’s venture into Broadway repertoire is discussed in terms of social identity. The article argues, after Jürgen Habermas and T. W. C. Blanning, that one of the most significant contributions of the Sinfonietta has been its continued commitment to the concert event as a forum for critical engagement and cultural debate.

This article examines Haas's politically programmatic work in vain in relation to a later essay wherein Haas disavows politically motivated composition. The first section investigates Haas's allegation that in vain’s ideological failure is due to its politically inappropriate semantic richness. Yet multiple interpretive passes through the piece show that in vain fails to be ideologically straightforward only because of a deeper ethical commitment to an aesthetics of defamiliarization. In the second section, I show how the basic political narrative is complicated by the estranging effect of darkness; in the third section, I align Haas's aesthetics with a post-Spectral ethics, and consider how the narrative meaning of overtone chords is complicated by their potential for challenging preconceived categories of listening. The final section returns to the essay and its blind spot for this deeper ethical aesthetics that obscures in vain’s ideological clarity, speculating that Haas's omission betrays hidden anxieties about the modernist ethical project.

This article examines the underexplored history of the 1973 Philadelphia Orchestra China tour and retheorizes twentieth-century musical diplomacy as a process of ritualization. As a case study, I consult bilingual archives and incorporate interviews with participants in this event, which brings together individual narratives and public opinions. By contextualizing this musical diplomacy in the Cold War détente and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, I argue for the complex set of relations mobilized by Western art music in 1973. This tour first created a sense of co-dependency between musicians and politicians. It also engaged Chinese audiences by revitalizing pre-Cultural Revolution sonic memories. Second, I argue that the significance of the 1973 Orchestra tour lies in the ritualization of Western art music as diplomatic etiquette, based on further contextualization of this event in the historical trajectory of Sino-US relations and within the entrenched Chinese ideology of liyue (ritual and music).

This article considers the role of Marxism in the history of popular music studies. Its approach combines the sociology of knowledge with a personal memoir and its argument is that in becoming a field of scholarly interest popular music studies drew from both Marxist theoretical arguments about cultural ideology in the 1950s and 1960s and from rock writers’ arguments about the role of music in shaping socialist bohemianism in the 1960s and 1970s. To take popular music seriously academically meant taking it seriously politically. Once established as an academic subject, however, popular music studies were absorbed into both established music departments and vocational, commercial music courses. Marxist ideas and ideologues were largely irrelevant to the subsequent development of popular music studies as a scholarly field.

To start with the obvious: journals come into being for specific reasons. And if one regards the most influential titles born during the last thirty years or so, it seems that one of the principal motivating factors has been interventionist – an attempt to kick-start a particular subdiscipline, or to promote a hitherto neglected or insufficiently examined field. Thus Music Analysis (Basil Blackwell, 1982) sought to place on a fully professional footing a subdiscipline which, whilst recognized in North America (as Music Theory), was at that time underdeveloped in the UK, while 19th Century Music (University of California Press, 1977) sought ‘to stimulate and focus work on what has for too long been American musicology’s lost century’. There is, however, little need to stimulate the study of twentieth-century music(s): if one includes (as we believe one must) popular music, jazz, film music, and twentieth-century developments in traditional musics, as well as ‘art’ or ‘classical’ music, activity in the field is burgeoning at an impressive rate. What is needed, rather, is a dedicated forum. Earlier journals specializing in twentieth-century music (such as Contact and Perspectives of New Music) tended to act as voices for particular constructions of the field. Established generalist journals have frequently found a place for twentieth-century classical music, and more recently (following the trajectory of musicology in general) have begun to widen their scope to include the discussion of popular, film, and traditional music. But as the first three meetings of the Biennial International Conference on Twentieth-Century Music have shown (the third, held in Nottingham, UK, in June 2003, is reviewed in these pages), forums dedicated to the whole range of twentieth-century music promote a synergy and crossfertilization that will inevitably escape generalist journals or those confined to one corner of the field. twentieth-century music aims to provide such a forum; and not the least of our hopes is that, through the contiguity of divergent topics in each issue, the journal will stimulate the creation of new perspectives by encouraging contact with areas and approaches that we might not, as individual scholars, otherwise think to engage with.

Pli selon pli is Boulez’s richest encounter with Mallarmé. As a ‘portrait’ of the poet which sets three of his sonnets, it can be associated not only with other composers – Ravel, Debussy – who set Mallarmé, but also with the poet’s own views on music, and his radical yet tradition-conscious formal practices. Structural and poetic aspects of the fourth movement of the work, ‘Improvisation III’, are examined in detail, highlighting Boulez’s increasing concern with matters of formal coherence. This suggests a strengthening resistance to modernism as fragmentation and the embrace of a modern classicism which shuns the fixed hierarchies of tonal classicism as well as the parodistic juxtapositions of neoclassicism. At the same time, however, the multiple resonances on which modern classicism depends for its coherence ensure that certain aspects of Mallarmé-inspired narrative – concerning shipwrecks and sirens, among other things – cannot be entirely suppressed in present-day critical commentary.

One dominant issue in the writing of music histories is the question of how (or indeed whether) a musician's life and work can be interwoven convincingly. In recent years, music biographers have begun to reassess the historical legacies of many significant musicians with this issue in mind, but their critical reflections have for the most part focused on composers. This article seeks to transfer some of this rethinking – particularly on the life/work question – to the twentieth-century classical performer. Doing so reveals a historiography of the performer which sharply divides life and work in a way that is disciplinarily entrenched between biographical approaches on the one hand and empirical approaches to recordings on the other. After illustrating the nature and development of this division, I conclude by calling for greater scholarly convergence and suggest two directions forward, taking leads from artistic research and popular music studies in doing so.

In John Corigliano's and William Hoffman's opera The Ghosts of Versailles (1991), generic, musical, and temporal boundaries are dissolved, and historical processes revealed, resulting in a work that performs an operatic rendering of what philosopher Frank Ankersmit has referred to as sublime historical experience. As Marie Antoinette's ghost resolves her trauma by narrativising it in performance, and as music extends and dramatises the experience of the sublime, the audience experiences profoundly the liminal realm that historically-based operas inhabit in their movement between past and present. Indeed, the temporal suspension that is so central to theories of the sublime finds parallels in opera's historical obsession with death, and in music's ability to momentarily blur the boundaries between life and death, and past and present. The Ghosts of Versailles allows for the audience's relationship to history to be revisited, reconfigured, and in many cases, reconciled, through a haunting of the present in operatic performance.

This article analyses composer Pamela Z's work in light of critiques of posthumanism from Black studies and sound/music studies. Z's large-scale multimedia work Voci (2003), which the artist describes as a ‘polyphonic mono-opera’, consists of a series of eighteen scenes that combine vocal performance with digital video and audio processing. Z manipulates these sources using the BodySynth, an alternate controller interface that converts bodily gestures into expressive control signals. Z's work has been considered through cyborgian, Afrofuturist, and posthumanist discourses. But rather than affirm her practice as fully consonant with technological visions of the posthuman, I argue that she challenges the very liberal humanism upon which the posthuman is built. For a key tenet of liberal humanism, as Alexander G. Weheliye observes, was the racial and gendered apportionment of humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans. We have never been completely human, he suggests, let alone posthuman.

Z uses technologies of the embodied voice to confront both the posthuman imaginary and the continued effects of its ideological preconditions in racio-colonial liberal humanism. In a Voci scene entitled ‘Voice Studies’, for instance, Z engages the problem of ‘linguistic profiling’ as it applies to housing discrimination, citing the work of Stanford linguistics researcher John Baugh. Against a backdrop of percussive vocalizations, Z explains, ‘Studies reveal that people can often infer the race of an individual based on the sound of their voice’, subsequently playing back recordings of housing applicants containing vocal signifiers of racial difference. The article then contrasts this kind of ‘aural dimension of race’ found in Jennifer Lynn Stoever's notion of the ‘sonic color line’ with Pierre Schaeffer's attempt to separate sound from the social – as well as from bodies and identities – in his practice of acousmatic reduction. With this in mind, I show how Z construes the voice as an acous(ma)tic technology of embodiment while reframing opera's humanist legacy through Voci's allegorical narration of the ‘prehuman’, ‘human’, and ‘posthuman’. Moving with and against a posthuman imaginary, Z suggests that although we have never quite been human or posthuman, we may nevertheless narrate new versions of each.