The Anglo-Scottish ‘traditional’ ballad has coexisted in the different media of sound and writing from the early modern period to the present day. Nevertheless, it became the orthodoxy in the twentieth century that the ballad should be conceptually tied to its vocal performance. This essay seeks to argue that in fact a hierarchy of documentation that privileges sound is misleading. Rather, the ballad has always been, and remains, accessible through complementary media, fulfilling different purposes and following different conventions.

It considers different levels of music-writing (‘prescriptive’ and ‘descriptive’) and the non-indexical relationship between sound and writing in the ontology of music. It goes on to relate the privileging of sound over writing to the ‘metaphysics of presence’, and offers theoretical reasons as to why both sound and writing can in fact be divorced from the metaphysics of presence. A further analogy is offered with the work of the text and music editor in establishing a ‘set of instructions’ for the reconstruction of the ‘work’. Some pragmatic examples and theoretical principles are considered in relation to how ballad words might be transcribed, leading to the conclusion that different and complementary sets of instructions facilitate access to the intangible ballad, without the need to posit any hierarchical relationship between sound and writing.

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.

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.

Aaron Copland's Quiet City (1940), a one-movement work for trumpet, cor anglais, and strings, derives from incidental music the composer wrote for an unsuccessful and now forgotten Irwin Shaw play. This essay explores in detail the pitch structure of the concert work, suggesting dramatic parallels between the music and Shaw's play.

The opening of the piece hinges on an anhemitonic pentatonic collection, which becomes the source of significant pitch centres for the whole composition, in that the most prominent pitch classes of each section, when taken together, replicate the collection governing the music's first and last bars. Both this principle and the exceptions to it suggest a correspondence to the internal struggles of Shaw's protagonist, Gabriel Mellon.

In addition, Quiet City offers a distinctive opportunity to observe the composer's assembly of a unified tonal structure. Sketch study makes it possible to observe the composer altering his original material in ways that reinforce tonal connections across the span of the piece.

A recurring trope in the literature on Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey holds that the HAL 9000 computer has more feelings than any of the human characters. But the film itself presents the question of HAL's ‘real feelings’ as something no one can truthfully answer. One way to begin negotiating this contradiction is by attending anew to the way the Jupiter Mission episode, in which HAL appears, is cut to the Adagio from Khachaturian's ballet Gayane, the excerpt that remains the least discussed in this renowned compilation score. Suggesting that the elusive affect of this music, as it is deployed through several interrelated scenes, brings focus to questions of emotion and embodiment that fundamentally inform the conflict between human and machine, I go on to offer a new hearing of HAL's unforgettable death song ‘Daisy Bell’ in this light, and to re-evaluate some of the director's own words about his film. Ultimately, I carry the same questions forward to inform a contribution to the ongoing debate about the Nietzschean philosophical inflections occasionally thought to enter the film with its much more famous cue from Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra.

In 1957, soon after his emigration from Hungary, György Ligeti began an internship at the electronic music studio of Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne. The three electronic works Ligeti produced there constitute a small portion of his oeuvre, but it is commonly acknowledged that his experiences in the studio were crucial for his stylistic development. This article makes specific analytical connections between the techniques of elektronische Musik that Ligeti encountered at the WDR and his sound-mass techniques in acoustic composition. The discourses in circulation in the electronic studio of the 1950s – especially as articulated by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts, and Gottfried Michael Koenig – reveal a collective obsession with gaining compositional control over timbre. By internalizing and reusing mainstream elektronische Musik techniques such as additive synthesis, filtering, and Bewegungsfarbe in an acoustic form, Ligeti brought timbre forward as the central compositional problem in the acoustic work Atmosphères.

Laptop composition – the creation and performance of music primarily using laptop computers – emerged as an important musical activity in the last decade of the twentieth century. While much has been written about the cultural and conceptual significance of this new music, less has been published regarding the sonic structure of specific works. This article explores the musical structure and design of compositions by three laptop composers at the turn of the millennium: ‘Untitled #2’ by Oval (Markus Popp), ‘Cow Cow’ by Merzbow (Masami Akita), and ‘Powerbookfiend’ by Kid606 (Miguel De Pedro). Each piece is analysed using spectrographic images, representations of musical sound that allow for the precise measurement of frequency and intensity. Repetition and noise are revealed as musical characteristics common to all three pieces, defining both smaller-scale patterns and large-scale designs. Using the conceptual vocabulary of Paul Virilio and Gilles Deleuze, repetition and noise are framed in relation to a ‘machine aesthetic’ and ‘difference and repetition’.

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.