Nottingham, 1 May 2004: the Kamkars, a group of Kurdish musicians from Iran, close a concert with a flamboyant instrumental encore based upon a song performed earlier in the evening.

This article develops a theoretical analysis of music and mediation, building on the work of Theodor Adorno, Tia DeNora and Antoine Hennion. It begins by suggesting that Lydia Goehr’s account of the work concept requires such a perspective. Drawing on Alfred Gell’s anthropology of art, the article outlines an approach to mediation that incorporates understandings of music’s social, technological and temporal dimensions. It suggests that music’s mediations have taken a number of historical forms, which cohere into assemblages, and that we should be alert to shifts in the dominant forms of musical assemblage. In the latter part of the article, these tools are used to conceptualize changing forms of musical creativity that emerged over the twentieth century. A comparison is made between the work concept and jazz and improvised electronic musics. Three contemporary digital music experiments are discussed in detail, demonstrating the concepts of the provisional work and of social, distributed and relayed creativity. Throughout, key motifs are mediation, creativity, and the negotiation of difference.

Björk’s collaboration with the director Lars von Trier on the film Dancer in the Dark was marked by well-publicized personal and aesthetic differences. Their work nevertheless shares an intense preoccupation with the nature and quality of sound. Björk’s soundtrack systematically explores the boundaries between music and noise, and the title of von Trier’s film itself presupposes a heightened attention to aural detail. This paper proposes a theoretical context for understanding Björk’s music in the light of her work with von Trier. Whereas Björk’s soundtrack responds to the visual and narrative stimuli of von Trier’s film, the use of sound in her album Vespertine thematicizes more familiar Björk subjects: the relationship between music, landscape and the natural world, and Björk’s own (constructed) sense of Nordic musical identity. By placing Vespertine alongside Björk’s music for Dancer in the Dark, the sense of ‘hyperreality’ that defines both also emerges as a primary characteristic of her work.

A multivalent conception of opera, one that understands each operatic domain as functioning independently of every other domain, is one way of accounting for marks of contention: passages in which the music seems not to fit the events, characters, or atmospheres of its accompanying text. With that analytical framework, opera, frequently conceived of as two media subsumed under a cohesive initiative, emerges as a site of elaborate, sometimes contentious, interactions.

Scene 11 of Death in Venice exhibits considerable signs of multivalence. The unusual musical construct of this scene suggests points of reference that are absent in the libretto, and, accordingly, the two media do not distil the protagonist’s character in this passage but rather broaden the representational space into a heteroglossic network of associations.

The incongruities in this scene thereby disrupt the sense of ideological affinity between media, and signal significant differences among artistic perspectives and values. In particular, musico-dramatic dissonances highlight varying concerns regarding the opera’s topic of homosexuality. If the protagonist’s homosexual trajectory in Death in Venice’s libretto ends in shame and death, this is a trajectory that the music might be heard as opposing, even if we cannot translate its meanings precisely.

Lou Harrison seems always to have been re-examining his older works, revising or updating them, reworking them into movements of longer compositions, or creating alternative versions. This article examines Harrison’s revisions, alterations, and self-borrowings in terms of both technique and aesthetic objectives. Harrison’s first reworking of a set of short pieces into an extended composition, the Suite for Symphonic Strings of 1960, resulted in a poly-stylistic work he found so attractive that he not only used the self-borrowing technique in later works (such as the Third Symphony) but also incorporated similar contrasts in most of his long works, whether or not they were based on recycled materials. Thus the process of revision and self-borrowing in itself helped Harrison develop a distinctive personal style – one marked by its own eclecticism.

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.