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.

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.

In his later music Giacinto Scelsi rejected the mediation of notation, improvising his works and viewing the scores, produced mostly by assistants, as a mere record. But to what extent did he really transcend the ‘tyranny of writing’ and how might one demonstrate this? Critics have tended to echo the composer in reducing the problem to an opposition between writing and sound per se. In this article I discuss the limitations of this view and propose a more structural approach, using in particular the analysis of Walter Ong. I argue that Scelsi's idiom, while novel in its extreme economy of means, uses these means in such a way as to restore a traditional sense of musical ‘grammar’. I illustrate the rhetorical versatility of this grammar by contrasting the two apparently similar movements of the Duo of 1965.

This article focuses upon an arrangement of part of Stravinsky's Mavra made for the British dance-band leader Jack Hylton (1892–1965), which, on its presentation at the Paris Opéra in 1931, marked a notable, yet ultimately unsuccessful, attempt at ‘jazzing a classic’. For the French critic Pierre Leroi the failure was a direct consequence of combining different musics (‘La confusion de genres aboutit toujours à un résultat mauvais’). But while the ‘contest’ of style and genre undoubtedly played its part in the negative critical reception of the transcription, the reasons for its failure were not entirely straightforward.

Drawing on Fauconnier and Turner's models of ‘conceptual blending’ and their recent applications in theories of musical ‘multimedia’, I compare Stravinsky's source and the Hylton band's jazz translation in terms of their intrinsic musical ‘attributes’, their relationship, and their potential emergent meanings. The exercise identifies commonalities and discrepancies, revealing problems with the original, the reworkings, and the resulting performances. The main issue is, however, not so much one of mixture (‘confusion’) as of imbalance between the elements invoked: ultimately, it is argued, Hylton's reading was insufficiently ‘jazzique’.

This essay explores changes in Prokofiev's compositional style that occurred in the mid-1930s, around the time that he was making his decision to return to his homeland. In his diary Prokofiev wrote about a desire for a ‘new simplicity’, a style that featured simple melodies and comprehensible form. Compared to the avant-garde aspirations of his earlier works, his ‘new simplicity’ features a self-conscious return to Classical precedents. Prokofiev believed his new lyricism would be a uniquely modern yet accessible music for the Soviet people. Many of his most popular works, including Lieutenant Kijé (1933), Romeo and Juliet (1935–6), and Peter and the Wolf (1936), are written in the style associated with this ‘new simplicity’. The style is distinctive because of its sudden and markedly trangressive chromatic swerves to distant harmonic areas. By invoking and then thwarting tonal conventions, Prokofiev creates a compelling tension between Classicism and modernism. This essay presents the first movement of his Violin Concerto no. 2 (1935) as an exemplar of his ‘new simplicity’. The fractured musical surface is interpreted as a musical narrative, as an ironic satire of sonata form.

The return of expressionistic textures in Arnold Schoenberg's late chamber works creates a play of allusion that raises important questions about his creative process in the ‘American’ period. Passages in the Phantasy and the String Trio resemble the characteristic sound of the so-called Klangflächen (‘sound sheets’) that were located at key expressive moments in his music from the first two decades of the century. Their return in these two late instrumental works evokes associations with the mystical and spiritual, and gives rise to intertextual resonances that extend beyond the confines of closed form and the immanent referentiality of the musical material.

This article seeks to reassess Schoenberg's concept of expression by means of a hermeneutic understanding of his belated expressionism. Rather than adopting a conventional analytical approach that emphasizes structure and pitch, it makes the musical surface of the works the primary focus of attention. By pursuing the mimetic and allusive properties of sensuous similarity in certain textures within these works, the discussion elucidates how a hermeneutic approach might cause us to redefine Schoenberg's belated expressionism as self-reflexive Late Style.

What are the consequences of understanding a musical score as an ‘action plan’ – a composed set of performance instructions – rather than as a document, a transcript, or a concretization of a composer's idea and, ultimately, of a fixed musical work? This question is discussed through a consideration of four examples of contemporary percussion music – solo pieces by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, David Lang, and Helmut Lachenmann. Considering the musical text in relation to the dynamics of a work's execution and performance can give us not only a ‘sound picture’ but also a kinaesthetic picture of the performer on stage. Through this shift of perspective the score comes to be viewed as a script or an agent, which then acts as both a foundation and a catalyst for the actions of the performer and his or her production of sound.

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 is one of a series exploring the spatialization of sound sources in recorded songs and how they may be understood (see also ‘The Virtual Performance Space in Rock’, twentieth-century music 5/2). Its theoretical basis is multi-faceted, utilizing notions of ecological perception, of the sound-box, of the singer's persona, and of interpersonal distance in communication, as well as further concepts from cognitive science. It focuses particularly on image schemata and proxemics, exemplifying them across a range of genres, while also addressing them critically, for instance from a feminist perspective. Finally, it explores how this theoretical basis helps us not only to understand the contribution of spatialization to the interpretation of songs and their meanings, but also to shed light on the role of other musical domains.