As practised by Nicholas Cook, Philip Tagg, and Nicolai Graakjær, the analysis of advertising music has largely concentrated on how advertising works to communicate meaning. Within media and communications studies, such a focus is seen as a distraction — albeit a fascinating one. For Sut Jhally, for example, advertising has pernicious social and ecological effects and advertising scholars’ goal should be to understand ‘what work advertising does’ in order to mitigate them. This examination of a Ford automobile advert featuring Nina Simone’s ‘I Wish I Knew …’ (1967) shows how music analysis might contribute to this pressing project.

How does the process of screening orchestral music direct and focus audience attention? Visualization strategies can have a profound impact on how we appreciate music and can guide us to listen in very specific ways. Just as particular conductors and orchestras have interpretative identities, so do multi-camera directors. There has, however, been scant research on the influence of strategies and methods used in the visualization of orchestral concert music. Nicholas Cook suggested that musical enjoyment is spoiled by the ‘monstrous close-up’1 and Keith Negus explained that broadcasters believe that viewers will direct their attention to whatever instrument is most noticeable to the ear, ‘as if music audiences are similar to those following the ball in a tennis or football match’.2 The close-up is not solely about chasing action, though; it is also central to the continuity editing system, which is designed to maintain a continuous and clear narrative across time and space.3 Edits are not just about faithfully following or capturing action; they also have dramatic and psychological implications.

This study explores the experience of concert piano technicians who work on pianos played by the top tier of concert pianists in the world. They identify as craftspeople with a strong sense of vocation, who are autonomous, skilled, yet connected. They consider their pianos to be alive, with their own personalities and agency, needing to be tamed, loved, and negotiated with. The connection between their human fingers and the body of the piano is experienced as one of sensation and vibration rather than conscious thought, leading to ‘flow’. Findings are contextualized through qualitative psychology, Actor Network, and Material Engagement Theory.

During the ragtime craze at the turn of the twentieth century, the popular repertoire of “coon songs” was coupled with a robust style of vocal delivery called “coon shouting.” This vocal technique was associated with white women—the most famous “coon shouters” of the day—who, like the performers of the nineteenth-century minstrel show, claimed to have studied so-called authentic Black performance in order to replicate it on stage. Performing the “coon song” repertoire, these women sang, often from a Black male protagonist's point of view, about the trials and tribulations of Black life and romance. How did the dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality in this repertoire change when it was performed by Black women? This article addresses this question by examining caricatures of Black womanhood within the “coon song” genre and by exploring the phenomenon of Black women performing the “coon song” repertoire, using the career of vaudeville performer Dora Dean (1872–1949) as a case study. I track Dean's participation in the “coon song” craze through an archival survey of sheet music and newspaper reviews dating from the height of her career (ca. 1896–1914). Using these sources, I explore the recurring theme of racial passing and the ubiquity of caricatures derived from blackface minstrelsy within Dean's “coon song” repertoire. I argue that Dean successfully navigated stereotypes of Black women's femininity, sexuality, and morality in her performances of “coon songs” and, in the process, subverted stereotypes of Black life, romance, and vocal sound.

This article discusses a music treatise written in 1812 by the Catholic Armenian polymath Minas Bzhshkean (1777–1851). The article focuses on the historical and intellectual context in which the idea of notational reform emerged within the Armenian diaspora. Bzhshkean was born in the Ottoman Empire but educated at the Mekhitarist monastery of San Lazzaro in Venice, which was the leading intellectual centre of the Armenian Enlightenment. By discussing Bzhshkean’s use of sources from multiple cultural and intellectual traditions (including European authors such as Rousseau), the article provides a new perspective on music and Enlightenment in global context.

The passing of the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity in 1559 and the publication of the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer later that year returned the language of public worship to English, but a Latin translation of that prayer book issued in 1560 — the Liber precum publicarum — allowed certain scholastic institutions to continue using Latin liturgies. Seldom has this volume been discussed in detail, despite its important implications for composers connected to those institutions in permitting the continued composition of Latin-texted music for liturgical, rather than merely extra-liturgical or devotional, use. This article considers the background to the Liber precum publicarum, assesses its contents, and examines the extent to which it was acquired and used by the few institutions for which it was produced. It finds that the volume was apparently not acquired by those institutions, owing probably to the political and religious climates of Oxford and Cambridge in the 1560s. It therefore casts light on why little (or indeed any) Latin-texted polyphony composed for bona fide liturgical use survives from the reign of Elizabeth I.

This article explores the cultural commemorations of J. Robert Oppenheimer through the lenses of opera and film, specifically focusing on Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer (2023) and Peter Sellars and John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic (2005/2018). It engages with Michel-Rolph Trouillot's theories on history and mythmaking to analyze how these cultural productions function as acts of commemoration that sanitize and mythicize historical processes. The revival of Oppenheimer as a mythic figure reflects a broader societal negotiation with the legacy of nuclear technology and its implications in the twenty-first century. Both the opera and the film reify a political and ideological attachment to the U.S. nuclear complex. Furthermore, this article critically examines the production settings of “Doctor Atomic” at the Santa Fe Opera and Nolan's on-location filming in New Mexico. It argues that these settings add a ritualistic valence to the narrative, enhancing the mythic portrayal of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. Through a detailed analysis of narrative strategies and media affordances, this study reveals how contemporary depictions of historical figures and events shape and sustain national myths that support an ongoing attachment to the nuclear complex.

If the current state of publishing is anything to go by, the classical music industry and music academia are in a state of crisis. This will come as little surprise to anyone either teaching, researching, or studying music, or existing in the professional world of musical performance. The mushrooming of edited volumes, journal articles, and think-pieces such as op-eds and podcasts, all offering perspectives on variations of classical music’s ‘challenges’ and ‘futures’ is notable, and has only accelerated in recent years. More important than this quantity, however, is the sheer diversity of opinions, revealing how widely the ideological fissures across all corners of academic music studies and the classical music industry have deepened. Fraught debates have spilled over from the relatively insular bubbles of social media discourse and academic publications into national headlines.

Pietro Metastasio’s opera Catone in Utica (Rome, 1727) represents ancient Roman imperial politics through the recurring trope of ‘enslavement’. Reading Catone alongside Metastasio’s sources, from Lucan to Addison, reveals how the poet’s de-particularizing representational code converted historical modes of racialization into a generalizing Cartesian moral framework, and thereby demonstrates how the continuing influence of post-Enlightenment constructs of biological race has obscured the multiplicity of racialisms in earlier contexts. Turning from a physiological episteme to an earlier, ‘unassimilated space’ limned by poetics, sentimentality, and song, this article takes Metastasian opera seria as a window onto historically contingent conceptions of racialized difference.