The study of popular music in the Soviet-controlled East-Central European region has yet to receive the attention it merits. The objective of this study was to fill this gap by investigating the genealogy of popular music research in East Central Europe prior to 1989. It provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of popular music research in socialist East-Central Europe, with a particular focus on Czechoslovakia, Hungary and East Germany. It delineates the challenges encountered by researchers in reconciling their work with the complex cultural and political conditions of the era. Furthermore, it considers the influence of Marxist ideology on musicology and sociology, and how this may have shaped research. It offers new perspectives on the history of popular music studies in this domain, which has been lightly explored until now. It seeks to shed light on the intricate relationship between music, politics and ideology behind the Iron Curtain.

This article considers the Okinawan aesthetic of Kumiodori and the role of absence in making a performance. There are two case studies of Kumiodori performances selected for this article, both written by the maker of this theatre style – Tamagusuku Chōkun. I watched both performances of Kōkō no Maki and Nidō Tekiuchi in the National Theatre in Okinawa. I discuss the concept of absence, described as ma (間), through the theory and the interpretation of those performances. The article begins with a brief outline of Kumiodori and the cultural context of the Ryukyu Kingdom, followed by description of the concept of ma in literature, live performance and the culture in general. Finally, two case studies are introduced. The article aims to present an example of the Okinawan version of ma in theatre.

This article presents the theoretical foundations of speculative archaeoacoustics, a methodology of composition in which artistic practice becomes a way of accessing the lost music of the Upper Palaeolithic. It begins by accepting David Graeber and David Wengrow’s understanding of prehistory as a dazzling tapestry of investigations and enquiries, before drawing a methodology of affect and creation from the work of Steven Mithen. From here it critiques two contemporary procedures for realising ancient music – one theoretical and one practical – to show how lost art must be reclaimed not through the empirical limit but the aesthetic exception. By adapting Alain Badiou's theory of eternal, invariant truths through a satirical tradition that includes science- and theory-fiction, the argument concludes with the demonstration of a procedure through which we may reimagine, discover and speak for vanished genius.

The quilisma is a sign found in the earliest surviving notations of Gregorian chant. Since the ‘chant restoration’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the sign is included once again in all chant books, and poses an inevitable question of interpretation to those studying and performing chant. However, since medieval times, there has been considerable debate whether the sign denotes a particular method of voice production, a particular rhythmic value and/or an element in a melody's modal orientation. Chant manuscripts of the northern Low Countries (the northern half of the modern-day Netherlands), although not well known for their melodic content, point to highly interesting developments in response to a continually changing musical aesthetic. Likewise, these manuscripts offer new insights into the quality of the quilisma: the sign was widely used in the region up to the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt, and for much longer than in the better-known square notation. Through analytical and comparative study, the sign's occurrence, position, development, relation to other signs and functions are clarified and presented in this article along with insights into its unique notational development.

A new daily ritual, commonly called the Salve Mass or Lady Mass, rapidly grew throughout the British Isles in the High Middle Ages inspiring new festive chants. John Harper's introduction to Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary establishes the sources of the Lady Mass in its fully developed form in the late Use of Salisbury and earlier related sources. Yet the Marian Mass collections in insular graduals, missals and non-liturgical sources identified in this article exhibit significant local adaptations not assigned in Salisbury Ordinals. I argue that extant Marian Kyries, alleluias and offertories contained in thirteenth-century insular liturgical sources of the Mass of the Virgin Mary are evidence of the daily Lady Mass. A study of chant variants and sources demonstrates the insular circulation of some of these chants outside of sources replicating the Lady Mass at Salisbury. The insular repertory of Marian Mass music, examined here for the first time with concordances in fragmentary and non-liturgical collections, reveals a lively exchange of repertory and compositional techniques between insular monastic and secular churches. This regionally developed, decentralised ritual had an important impact on music composition and transmission in the British Isles in the thirteenth century.

This article presents an exomusicologically informed response to the theme of alienation through encounter in Oli Jan's Three Singers on Planet M, in which actors execute apparently ritualistic sounds and actions. Their activities signal aesthetic intentionality but do so through an unfamiliar cultural display that defies the rules of our own lived experience of embodiment and environment. The conceit sets up an interesting question related to the somatic imaginary: how can and how do we relate to the imagination of non-human bodies?