Every year, beginning on Memorial Day, a group of 35 to 851 activists walk from Sásabe, Mexico to Tucson, Arizona, USA over eight days, through the arid, rugged terrain of the Sonoran Desert. They walk through soaring desert temperatures, along dirt roads and highways, enduring hot spots, blisters, and leg cramps, as shade gradually disappears with little to block the rising sun. At night, walkers sleep in tents or on tarps. Participants carry small white crosses emblazoned with the names and ages at death of migrants who perished while trying to complete a perilous journey undetected. Some are labeled “Deconocido/a” (Unknown) to memorialize someone whose remains have not yet been identified. Periodically, over the course of each day’s journey, participants conduct a role call in honor of the dead, with each walker reciting the name of the person they commemorate as the group responds with the word “¡Presente!” to “indicate that the life and death of the migrant whose name was read is recognized and witnessed” (Mankel 2021: 104). Participants undertake this journey to highlight the scale of death in the desert and its individual ramifications.2

This essay seeks to limn the vulnerabilities of partnering in competitive ballroom dancing. It argues that for racialized and gendered subjects who fall beyond dancesport’s normative range of aesthetic legibility, lead and follow becomes an especially fraught—yet potentially reparative—mode of relation. It brings sustained ethnographic focus to the Asian American amateur dancesport community in New York City, which not only represents a growing presence in a predominantly white industry, but unsettles its racially charged conventions of skill, prestige, beauty, and belonging. From this position, it maps a field of vulnerable relations: between Asian American amateurs and the dancesport industry, in which they remain largely marginal and illegible figures, but also between Asian American male leads and female follows. Building on partner dance scholarship that complicates assumptions about lead and follow as a one-way flow of power, it treats the embodied mechanics of dancesport partnering as a dialogic practice of mutual vulnerability, in which both dancers effectively lead and follow each other. It also attends to the aesthetic, pedagogical, and social rules that put pressure on competitive couples—demanding resilience, even detachment, at the expense of that mutual vulnerability. In parsing what is contradictory, even compromising, about Asian American dancesport practice, this essay theorizes lead and follow as a mode of relation that involves opening ourselves up, and remaining open, to risk—but also, to the possibility of exquisite moments that can only be co-created.

This article examines the work of the composer Michelle Lou through its affective and formal mechanisms. I propose that Lou’s work has consistently retained a fundamental and specific orientation towards the listener, which I describe as distance or proximity. In addressing three works spanning eight years – Opening (2008), untitled three-part construction (2014) and HoneyDripper (2016) – I show how the idea of distance informs and is articulated through orchestration, gestural and phrasal construction, scenography and form, and thus frames one’s experience of sound, spatiality, memory, time and perception. While the sounds and materials employed by Lou are often formally cold and sonically abrasive, I argue that her work ultimately implicates and invites the listener in as a crucial element of its sonic ecology, even enacting a sort of phenomenological care over the listener.

Egon Wellesz’s Eastern Elements in Western Chant (1947, repr. 1967) is outdated but topical in that the resemblances he adduced between Eastern and Western chant continue to invite explanations. An assessment of his book and research since then on the topics of simple vs. complex melody, melodic resemblance, historical frameworks, musical communities and Semitic antecedents of Christian chant lead to the conclusion that the comparative study of medieval Christian chant repertories and of Jewish melodies from post-medieval sources cannot be shaped by simplistic assumptions, such as that simpler melodies are earlier or more primitive than more complicated ones, or that Christian practices must have had Jewish origins. Nor can melodies that resemble each other be assumed to be historically related. Studies of oral traditions show that what is transmitted is often a more abstract contour that can be realised in more than one way. Most importantly, no music can be studied apart from the community that makes or made it, and musical evidence must be interpreted within a framework of verifiable historical fact, especially when contacts between different communities are alleged.

This re-evaluation of the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen is presented as a dialogue between its authors, conducted by email between July and October 2024. The dialogue takes as its starting point a consideration of the continuing relevance of Stockhausen’s music to music today, but begins by tracing the authors’ engagement with this music over the last five decades. The dialogue moves on to the discussion of a series of key aspects of Stockhausen’s work across his creative life, from Kreuzspiel to KLANG: the relationship between his electronic music and his compositional practice for acoustic instruments; form-schemes in his music and, in particular, the development of moment form; and his use of synthesisers. In conclusion, the authors assess Stockhausen’s influence on their own work and the extent of his significance for younger generations of musicians.

The widespread deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools has created a shift in knowledge culture. The marginalisation of slower, more traditional modes of engagement for quantifiable data easily parsed by mathematical algorithms has resulted in prioritising proprietary or opaque datasets (knowledge) explicitly constructed with measurable parameters. Well-documented concerns persist regarding the narrow range of human data used by algorithmic tools, data that arguably encapsulates the many failures of human society. The inevitable result of the use and priority of this data, alongside very particular notions of value and what is valuable, is a replication of many of the foibles of our history as a species.

Cultural practice in general necessitates the communication of what drives our hopes and underlies our experiences. In algorithmic times we can see that this kind of communication supports some of the many critiques of AI and machine learning already extant in activist circles. Through investigating some of the theoretical backgrounds of this resistance, this article uses the first iteration of HEXORCISMOS’S SEMILLA AI project and the resulting album release as one of the many possible ways in which we might use machine learning and AI tools alongside very deliberate and uplifting models of community and community building.

The tropologion is considered the earliest known extant chant book that has preserved layers of Jerusalem hymnography and liturgy from the fifth or sixth century and was in use until about the twelfth century. Recent study has shown its very wide dissemination: in Byzantium it was known as a tropologion, in Syria as a tropligin and in Armenia as a šaraknoc. Arguments are given that the book was probably known in Bulgaria in the Glagolitic alphabet. Three issues are studied for the purpose of revealing the entire history of this book: the content of the repertory, its arrangement and the liturgical calendar. Their study unquestionably confirms the earlier stage of the compilation of the book, possibly in Jerusalem or its outlying region, and it outlines its uninterrupted development of the book from Jerusalem to the Studios monastery and beyond in different languages. In all probability, John of Damascus rearranged this book, editing the yearly and weekly cycles for the liturgical purposes of his time and arranging the Resurrection repertory for eight consecutive Sundays and for the Common Offices in a consecutive modal order. This rearranged book might be the tropologion we know from its version in the Georgian iadgari, the Syriac tropligin and the Armenian šaraknoc: it contains chants presented in a single succession for the fixed and movable feasts and, at the end of the book, the cycles arranged in the eight modes. The latter cycles constitute the earliest known oktoechos as a chapter of a book.

Crux de Telcz (Crux of Telč, or Kříž z Telče) was one of the most prolific scribes of late medieval Bohemia, active in the second half of the fifteenth century. In various roles, Crux contributed to several dozen manuscripts, which present an extraordinarily broad range of contents in various genres. This study analyses items with musical notation and the texts of sacred and secular songs in manuscripts copied or used by Crux. These are chiefly notated records of monophonic and polyphonic cantiones with texts in Latin and Czech, and to a lesser extent plainchant melodies belonging to the realm of Latin liturgical repertoire. Yet one of Crux’s manuscripts (Třeboň A 4) also bears witness to an early use of white mensural notation in Bohemia. In recent years, it has been possible to refine Crux’s biography substantially, with the result that most of his musical copying activities can be shown to have been made in the period while he was active as a teacher. His manuscripts thus offer important insights into ways in which sacred songs and new polyphonic works were disseminated in the fifteenth century, chiefly within literate and pedagogical circles.