This article focuses on the innovative developments of some emblematic rock bands in Bulgaria, observed during the late 1970s and 1980s in terms of their social, ideological and artistic maturity, as well as of their significant impact on local youth life-styles through the liberating experience of specific musical styles ranging from classic rock (Shturtsite) and progressive rock (FSB) to, say, new wave (Tangra) or punk (Rock Trio Milena). Why the 1980s? What were the dominant verbal and musical messages at that time? Did they stimulate and accommodate the democratic political changes in 1989? In trying to answer such questions, the article develops a thesis according to which the acculturation of transnational musical models as the ones in the field of rock music is not a form of any flat mimicry of modern trends; this process inevitably passes through the filter of specific local contexts and subjective experiences.

Censorship in Iranian theatre sometimes prevents artists from staging some of the scenes in their plays. Among these are scenes involving embracing, kissing, raping and so on, or scenes containing ideological or political themes. Occasionally, after omitting such scenes, theatre directors try to find suitable alternatives and create a similar effect. The present research, with an analytical–descriptive approach, seeks to focus on alternative solutions, as well as creative models, developed by Iranian directors to circumvent social-regulatory censorship and identify alternatives in performances. In this research, I conduct a comparative analysis of five selected theatre recordings. Using the available theatre recordings, this paper examines the original text of the plays, identifies the omissions resulting from censorship, and analyses directors’ alternative solutions. This research demonstrates that artists use their creativity to express themes, analyses and aesthetic points in the face of censorship and obstacles. The paper focuses on eight creative-performance models that are executed using symbols and auditory elements instead of visual elements, and the function of narrative, stage design, stage direction, costume design, props and cross-dressing as devices to circumvent censorship.

This article explores the relationships between utopianism, activism and networks in the early career of the Hungarian musicologist János Maróthy (1925–2001). A prolific author of pioneering work on the social history of European peasant and urban folk songs from the antiquity to the modern era, Maróthy is noteworthy for establishing academic research of popular music in Hungary, both preceding and contributing to the emergence of new musicology and popular music studies in European and Anglo-American academia at the turn of the 1980s. Maróthy mediated between various grassroots movements and the party state's institutions and was a participant observer of various off-the-mainstream music-related scenes formed in Romani workers’ hostels and jazz clubs. His Department of Music Sociology (at the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) conducted and commissioned research on the local history of workers’ songs, urban folklore, empirical studies of musical taste, and the social life and institutions of youth music. This article offers a critical overview of Maróthy's career from its onset in 1948 up to the mid-1960s. This turbulent period witnessed the most repressive years of Stalinism, the anti-Soviet revolution of 1956, its defeat, and the gradual consolidation of a more liberal Kádár-led regime. It examines how changing political and intellectual trends, ideologies and national and supranational realignments within the Soviet Bloc (and beyond) shaped the forms and meanings of Maróthy's multi-faceted activism, along with his shifting ideas about the relationships between music, political movements and entertainment.

Scholarship on early modern English Catholic music after the reformations tends to focus on the activities of male musicians and male institutions. Despite increased study of English convent culture by scholars of religious, social, and literary history, there remains little specialist examination of music at post-Reformation English convents in exile, and their role in wider musical networks in early modern Europe is markedly under-acknowledged. This article aims to highlight how complex miscellanies with links to English monastic institutions in exile can offer insight into the convents’ otherwise elusive musical world. Using a hitherto unanalysed miscellany – Douai Ms 785 – this article will show how codicological study of manuscripts, combined with study of concordances and unica, can illuminate the role of English convents in early modern musical networks. In doing so, it will demonstrate the need to understand miscellanies like Douai Ms 785 as witness to interacting, overlapping musical and religious ecosystems in early modern Europe.

Compositions for musical clocks made possible a newly objective exploration of the relationship between music and time. Works by George Frideric Handel, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach reflected the absolute and uniform flow of Newtonian time. In contrast, Leopold Mozart's clock music alternated between two different metres and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart used more complex tempo ratios in a musical installation (k608) built around a dramatically illuminated pendulum. Repeated thousands of times, this installation pitted clock against music, in effect providing a new kind of experiment that favoured relative Leibnizian time over uniform Newtonian time. As if responding to k608, Joseph Haydn incorporated his own clock music into his Symphony No. 101 in order to underline, yet then to stop, time, while Schubert's Fantasy in F minor, d940, brought these temporal experiments into a new realm of intimate musical experience.