Gerald Barry's approach to composition has undergone a number of changes. Frequently these developments coincide with the composition of a large-scale opera. One of these points of transition in his output occurs in the period before he commenced work on The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Between 1999 and 2000 Barry composed three works – 1998, The Eternal Recurrence and Wiener Blut – in which he attempted to find a new compositional direction after a period in which canonic proliferation dominated his musical material. This article examines some of the main traits of these works, and Wiener Blut in particular, since it contains a greater variety of approaches than the other two compositions. The article also considers how Barry's shift in approach may have been linked to his decision to set Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play. Its quite plain, realistic prose was a contrast to the sort of text Barry had previously chosen to set, requiring a different musical response, and the article draws out some possible connections between Barry's three ‘pointillistic’ compositions and the opera.

This article proposes a series of connections between the consumption of resources, the creation of new music and ideas about sustainability. A number of examples is discussed, from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, that illustrate the ways in which conspicuous, and often ethically questionable, consumption has been a signifier for innovation in new music. The article concludes by introducing three of the author's recent works, The calm of mountains, This has happened before and Hieroglyph, as models of a compositional practice that attempts to enact and embody ideas of sustainability.

This article sets out the results of research into effort in Dhrupad, a genre of Hindustani music. I examine gestural interactions with imaginary objects that vocalists outline when engaging with melodies. The study takes an embodied cognition stance and applies thematic analysis and inductive coding to original interviews with Dhrupad musicians in India, the UK, and the Netherlands. My findings demonstrate that from the singers’ cognitive perspectives, their hand movements are deeply connected to their voices. I also offer insights on the relationships between bodily movement, sound, and imagery that are used to inform the development of effort inference models.

In the spirit of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály’s work, Miklós Both has been collecting folk songs in Ukraine since 2013 with the help of an international research group. The results of the collecting trips are available in the form of a modern, user-friendly online database that supports both scientific use and public education. The collection received a lot of publicity in 2017 when the Polyphony Project website was launched. The 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War also put the enterprise in the spotlight. This review highlights the scientific and pedagogical usability and importance of the Polyphony Project.

The National Film Board documentary Bing Bang Boom (1969) depicts Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer (1933–2021) teaching seventh-grade students in a suburban public school in Scarborough, Ontario. A close study of the film informs the larger trajectory of the composer’s previous and later writings and compositions over the next several decades, while a deeper dive into archival materials and concurrent productions from Canada’s National Film Board (NFB) illuminates the organisation’s strategy of nation-building at a crucial moment in the country’s history. Together, Schafer and the NFB illuminate Canada’s problematic relationship to Indigenous peoples, places and sounds.