Scholars have struggled to reconcile the expressive immediacy of Witold Lutosławski's works with his claims that he wrote absolute music. This article seeks a more nuanced understanding of the place of abstraction in Lutosławski's creative practice by exploring connections between his 1981 speeches on artistic ethics and his approach to melodic construction in Chain 2 (1984–5). Lutosławski's words and music both rely on convention, and recycle rhetoric from his past. But these are not their only correspondences. They also engage with a trio of concepts – withdrawal, integrity, and autonomy – that are at the heart of a moral code Lutosławski articulated in response to the volatile political conditions of 1980s Poland. The article thus sheds new light on the entanglement of modernism, ethics, and politics in the late twentieth century, while illuminating what the idea of abstraction may have meant in a particular time and place.

This article argues that through historiography, global musical modernisms decolonize Western musical modernism, expanding and bursting the latter's spatial (geographic), vertical (high–low genres), and temporal boundaries. The unsettling of these various boundaries shows how coloniality is the context of, and thoroughly imbricated with, global musical modernisms – and yet the latter has channelled the self-conscious resistance of global music-makers against the colonial condition that characterizes modernity. Examining global musical modernisms both in the real world and in the inter-disciplines, this article addresses material complexities that are elided in purist dichotomous conceptions of resistance and oppression as inhering in different musics and cultures.

György Ligeti has stated that his micropolyphonic compositions were ‘governed by rules as strict as Palestrina's’ (Ligeti 1983, 14); some of these rules are preserved directly in his sketches and others can be derived from the compositions themselves. This article discusses the artistic context in which Ligeti developed systems of rules for individual compositions, and investigates in depth the composer's rules for the organization of pitch and rhythm in two of his seminal works from the 1960s, transmitting the explicit rules for pitch in sketches for the ‘De die judicii’ movement of the Requiem and uncovering implicit rules for rhythm in Lux aeterna. By examining both the rules and their application in composition, with the exceptions that arise therein, we come to a better understanding of the aesthetic goals Ligeti's rules were devised to meet, and the balance of stricture and freedom that was essential to the composer's persona.

This article examines the meeting point of Olivier Messiaen, Australia and birdsong, particularly as it relates to the transcription of pied butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis) vocalizations. It draws upon correspondence from Messiaen to the Australian ornithologist Sydney Curtis, printed here for the first time, as well as two recordings not previously available to musicologists, from which Messiaen transcribed. Both the recorded birdsong models and Messiaen's transcription of them in his cahiers are subjected to sonographic and waveform analysis. In analytical scrutiny of eight of these transcriptions, I demonstrate that Messiaen's pied butcherbird transcriptions conform to their models in a partial and highly personal way. I propose a provisional template for Messiaen's approach to birdsong transcription, in order to answer Alexander Goehr's question: ‘Why do birds sound like birds, but Messiaen's birds sound like Messiaen?’

Inspired by Brittany Howard's solo album Jaime (2019), this contribution creates a conversation between music studies, queer studies, African American Literature, and memoir to think about lived ways of understanding, performing, and participating in music to create a future of inclusion. I argue that Black queer strategies of listening and musicking contributes to a new layer of music, the dream space, which helps us understand the impact of music on everyday life.

After 1917 the word ‘jazz’ disseminated rapidly throughout the world attaining, along the way, a multiplicity of meanings, sometimes related to musical practices from the United States, but often associated with a diverse array of things, objects, ideas, and situations in the worlds of music entertainment, dance, leisure, and fashion. In the Caribbean, this process entailed not only the constitution of jazz as a symbol of social modernity but also revealed a long history of exchanges between the United States and the Caribbean – not to mention the Afrodiasporic origins of jazz. By examining jazz as a by-product and an expression of Caribbean modernity, this article disentangles some of the cultural meanings of the word ‘jazz’ in the Caribbean between 1917 and 1920, considering, ultimately, how imagining jazz as Caribbean was inevitably intertwined with imagining it as modern.

In this article, I analyse the implications of autoplaying video as a driver of ‘audile techniques’ in the 2010s digital ecosystem – in particular, techniques that respond to the realities of the separability of image and sound, even in media that contain both elements. I then examine a number of strategies through which this audio/visual split has been negotiated, monetized, and creatively bridged by consumers, creators, and corporate personnel – from the creation of new audiovisual genres and aesthetics, to the rise of particular platform pricing models, to the adoption (and, potentially, exploitation) of accessibility features. Ultimately, I seek to show how negotiations of sound and listening factor deeply into contemporary attempts to harness and monetize ‘attention’ as a commodity in a digital economy of platforms, advertisements, and data.

Utilizing the ideas of convivencia (convivial interaction) and Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz's framework of ‘accompaniment’, I suggest that the ‘modern-urban’ mariachi, often characterized as an expression of standardization and commodification, has established a capacity for facilitating culture that contributes to the development of convivial communal spaces. In the midst of marginalization and systemic oppression, migrant and aggrieved communities throughout Greater Mexico engage in cultural practices and actions to reaffirm a sense of belonging, to which mariachi musicians have contributed and at times served as cultural bearers. I examine mariachi practices of apprenticeship learning and chambas (contractual gigs), the emergence of the Misa Panamericana (the mariachi mass) in Cuernavaca, and the integration of Mexican cultural expressions in San José, California to illuminate the convergence of political, cultural, and religious action and how the mariachi expression has played a role in these intersections.

This article examines constructions of national musical identity in early twentieth-century Britain by exploring and contextualizing hitherto neglected discourses and practices concerning the production of an ‘English’ singing voice. Tracing the origins and development of ideas surrounding native vocal performance and pedagogy, I reconstruct a culture of English singing as a backdrop against which to offer, by way of conclusion, a reading of the ‘English voice’ performed in Ralph Vaughan Williams's song ‘Silent Noon’. By drawing upon perspectives derived from recent studies of song, vocal production, and national and aesthetic identity, I demonstrate that ‘song’ became a place in which the literal and figurative voices of performers and composers were drawn together in the making of a national music. As such, I advance a series of new historical perspectives through which to rethink notions of an English musical renaissance.

This article offers a revisionist perspective on the contested notion of Witold Lutosławski's authenticity as a modernist composer. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to musicology's increasingly nuanced narration of the story of musical modernism. The case is argued partly by relating Lutosławski's output to broader traditions in twentieth-century modernism, including musical representations of alienation, loss, violence, and nostalgia. Crucially, however, it is also argued by interpreting the more conventionally gratifying aspects of his pieces as something other than a hedonistic cop out. Adapting ideas from Michel Foucault, such passages are deemed heterotopian in function and interpreted in a wider-ranging sociohistorical context including Poland's responses to modernism and to Soviet Cold War oppression. The article's other main objective, therefore, is to interpret as heterotopian (and thus alternatively authentic) the expressive, structural and symbolic functions of passages in Lutosławski's works, thereby introducing Foucault's little-known idea to a wider audience of music scholars – given the concept's potential to contribute to critical explorations of a much wider diversity of musical texts and phenomena. Analysis of Lutosławski's Les espaces du sommeil for baritone and orchestra (1975) interconnects these strands.

Textured voices include both voices heard as interpolated into a musical texture and voices heard as having their own textured character, whether as a ‘voice’ with a ‘timbre’ or as a ‘collective voice’ with a ‘composite timbre’ made up of many voices, each textured itself. They have often been heard as performances of ethical life. Comparisons between these performances can be misleading because the contingencies characterizing the textured voice for a listener who listens in a particular way can make each performance irreducible. A pair of articles and cartoons in TV Guide from the summer of 1966 depict the making of a textured laugh track as a contradictory activity. Yet they seem to resolve contradictions into surface conflicts between individuated parties. Listening for textured voices in this case was itself a political activity because it was productive of more than one distinct form of ethical life.

In this article the highly contested relationship between art and politics in the twentieth century is discussed by way of the life and work of the Portuguese composer Fernando Lopes-Graça (1906–94). Lopes-Graça, who described himself as ‘a communist from birth’, lived for almost fifty years in Salazar's ‘New State’, a Fascist-type dictatorship, which emerged from a military putsch in 1926 and lasted until 1974. His experience as a communist under a right-wing régime was therefore very different from that of either communist composers living in Western democratic countries or those active in the Eastern bloc. Lopes-Graça stood apart from most other party intellectuals in his resistance to the doctrine of socialist realism. Yet from 1945 onwards he composed revolutionary songs in which his communist engagement is directly evident. Understanding this apparent tension within his output requires both a careful and nuanced understanding of his own personal position and a clear distinction between political engagement in music on the one hand and socialist realist or neo-realist tendencies on the other. It is that latter distinction – between (in the composer's own terms) ‘lived action’ and ‘imagined action’ – that accounts for the seemingly contradictory coexistence in Lopes-Graça's thinking of aesthetic autonomy and political commitment, and in his music of (to adopt categories posited by Heinrich Besseler) both ‘presentational’ music (for conventional concert settings) and ‘colloquial’ music (to be sung and played ad libitum in political meetings, at demonstrations, in the home, or even in political prisons).

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.

Hungarian composer György Ligeti has not lacked for attention since coming into contact with Europe’s new music scene in the early 1960s. In 1966 he was featured in Moderne Musik I: 1945–65, and by 1969 Erkki Salmenhaara had published a dissertation on three major works. Although periodic illness and a painstaking approach to composition slowed his progress, Ligeti continued to refine and expand his style in the 1970s, producing everything from intimate solo works for harpsichord to the suitably grand opera Le Grand Macabre (1974–7, revised 1996). His turn towards traditional orchestral forms and a quasi-diatonic language in the 1980s brought him new prominence, and the voluble composer has seemed ever ready to provide ripe commentary on his work and the state of new music. The numerous awards and publications that followed Ligeti’s seventieth birthday in 1993 support his status as probably the most widely fêted and influential composer of the latter half of the twentieth century. And if that degree of timely recognition was not enough, the composer has entered his ninth decade with no noticeable decline in compositional energy or ideas. Ligeti continues to fashion brilliant revisions of the tried but true genres of concerto, solo étude, song cycle, choral work, and character piece. His compositions bear the weight of extramusical influence as well as that from beyond the Western canon, yet each innovation affirms his inimitable voice and his singular musical journey from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century.

This article examines how musical practices in 1970s Spain formed ways of imagining democracy and how they participated in the wider social struggle to define freedom and equality for the final years of Franco's dictatorship and its immediate aftermath. I shall analyse two case studies: a large-scale experimental art festival held in the streets of Pamplona in 1972 and a grassroots musical collective created in 1973 on the initiative of the composer Llorenç Barber. Drawing on previous studies on the relationship between music and democracy, participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, and the insights of political science and philosophy into democracy, I offer a critical reassessment of the Pamplona festival and explore the relationship between grassroots collaboration and ideas of participatory democracy, and analyse the significance of this relationship in 1970s Spain.

The large-scale structure of Anton Webern's String Quartet (1905) is an ongoing conundrum in music scholarship. Initially inspired by Giovanni Segantini's Trittico della natura, the quartet has been interpreted by most commentators in terms of a tripartite episodic form. Through the lens of rotational theory, this article puts forward an understanding of the quartet that interprets it in dialogue with the sonata paradigm. Based on this reading, it will be argued that the quartet bears strong links to the early modernist discourse on musical form. This perspective will be further explored, with reference to Webern's manuscripts and sketches, in the way the quartet engages with the Zarathustra trope. In casting the quartet in this light, this article challenges the common historiographical interpretation that sees it merely as a precursor to the high modernism of Webern's later development.

When discussing the relationship between popular music and social-political change in the long 1960s, historians and critics have tended to fluctuate between two opposing poles. On the one hand, there is Arthur Marwick's approach, echoed in Jon Savage's recent book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded. In Marwick's cross-national survey, he examines social change in the West during the ‘Long Sixties’ (1958–72), when a ‘cultural revolution’ occurred in which protest music played a major role. On the other hand, there are Peter Doggett's and Dominic Sandbrook's observations that the top-selling albums of the 1960s and 1970s did not include some masterpiece by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Queen, or other leading figures in rock music, but rather the soundtrack of The Sound of Music. Sandbrook writes that it ‘projected a familiar, even conservative vision of the world, based on romantic love and family life. In a period of change it offered a sense of reassurance and stability, not only in its plot but also in its musical style . . . [T]hese were the values of millions . . . in the Swinging Sixties’. Doggett similarly points to the popularity of Julie Andrews and the soundtracks of Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. These soundtracks ‘made no attempt to alter the culture or educate the listener’ he suggests, and that is why they have been relegated ‘to a footnote in the history of popular music’ even while being the top-selling records of 1965 and 1966.

In May 2021, Brazilian pop-funk superstar Anitta released ‘Girl from Rio’. The song was based on the melodic foundation of the bossa nova song ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ that became a huge international hit at the end of the 1960s bossa nova craze. ‘Girl from Rio’ features trap beats on top of the familiar melody with a clear lyrical message that critiques international stereotypes of women from Brazil. When Anitta attempted to capture the US market through TikTok and a high-profile remix, much of her critique disappeared. This article employs the concept of ‘digital fatigue’ to explore how viral musical content loses crucial aspects of its meaning through circulation and endless embodied repetition. By focusing on how the repetition of viral musical media perpetuates stereotypes, it shows how the environment for transnational success requires easy associations to spread.

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.