I’m sat at my office desk writing this review when I receive a notification on my phone. An alert of this kind would usually be unworthy of comment. Yet, this notification informs me of a recent BBC News article on sperm whale vocalization. Intrigued, I read the story, which explains how a team of Cetacean Translation Initiative (Ceti) researchers, led by PhD student Pratyusha Sharma at MIT, are using AI technology to analyse large bioacoustics datasets of sperm whale clicks. Their analysis shows that the combining of clicks in sperm whale communication appears to parallel the grouping of phonemes to create words in human languages. What the whales’ different rhythmic sequences of clicks — called ‘codas’ — mean, however, is still unknown. Scientists have, so far, only caught a glimpse of the lives of sperm whales, and so it is impossible to know at this stage what information is carried by particular combinations of codas.1

In the early 2000s, a video of Nina Simone's 1960 performance of “Love Me Or Leave Me” on The Ed Sullivan Show resurfaced online. The song's original piano solo, rife with references to the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach, clearly displays Simone's training as a classical pianist. Several inaccurate claims on the solo circulate in scholarship, magazines, and social media—some describe the solo as a fugue; others incorrectly attribute it to Bach himself. This article unpacks the racial and gendered implications of the Ed Sullivan clip's reception. The misreadings of Simone's performance, I argue, are rooted in a possessive investment in whiteness and classical music. By exaggerating Bach's influence on Simone, various media erase her musical agency to advance a romanticized view of classical music as a universal art form. These narratives obscure the way her stylistic heterogeneity emerged as a response to the racial and gendered structures that shaped her performing career. Through an analysis of Simone's four renditions of “Love Me Or Leave Me,” I demonstrate how she strategically inserts textural, melodic, and harmonic allusions to Bachian counterpoint within the structure of the song. Her performances therefore showcase a form of stylistic hybridity in which she draws on her classical piano training to synthesize the conventions of fugue and popular song. By challenging narratives that incorrectly label Simone's solos as quotations or imitations rather than original compositions, I draw attention to the inner workings of her stylistic heterogeneity at the piano.

How do the tools of musical composition shape the cognitive processes of composition in absentia? In exploring the role of these absent tools, can progress be made towards an extended understanding of imagination and memory? This article posits the conceptual framework of ‘Integrated Tool Competency’ as a way of reconciling the powerful insights of externalist accounts of cognition with the fact that so much of the process of musical composition can take place without directly interacting with compositional tools. Effectively, this concept extends the integration of tools into a composer’s cognition beyond the moment of their use, including both unconscious competencies such as audiation and conscious actions such as imagining using a certain tool. This article proposes the concept of Integrated Tool Competency and discusses its potential ramifications for understanding the tools of composition.

Despite the density of scholarly engagement with Mozart’s operas, Donna Elvira’s aria ‘Mi tradì quell’alma ingrata’, composed for the 1788 Viennese production of Don Giovanni, has received little sustained, critical attention. Yet this oversight is unjustified, particularly considering the aria’s many stylistic elements that expand beyond the musical language of the original Prague Don Giovanni, and which therefore show Mozart not only deepening Elvira’s characterization but probing new compositional horizons. This article undertakes a thorough, analytic examination of ‘Mi tradì’, focusing especially on its evocation of Elvira’s subjectivity and self-consciousness, and paying particular attention to formal rhetoric and topical reference, both of which, by suggesting affinities with genres such as variation and the free fantasia, move the aria significantly beyond the expressive world often associated with Mozart’s vocal writing. The article closes with brief speculations on the relationship between ‘Mi tradì’ and the composer’s career aspirations in the late 1780s.

Sergei Rachmaninoff is widely regarded as one of the great pianists of the twentieth century. In a research project that has stretched over two decades, I have compiled data on Rachmaninoff’s performance career, comprising research in archives as well as published sources in Russian and English languages. The resulting Rachmaninoff Performance Diary has been publicly available online since 2011. A missing link in the data has been the complete programmatic details of over 1,080 solo recitals. In 2006, I discovered research that was apparently unrecognized in its completeness in an archive of the Library of Congress, undertaken and donated by Rachmaninoff’s sister-in-law, Dr Sophia Satina. In this article, I examine the details of the 1924/25 season, which was a critical time for Rachmaninoff: after the collapse of his personal fortune caused by the Russian Revolution, he at last had achieved sufficient success and financial security from his hectic touring to allow him to return to composition the following year, his ‘sabbatical’ break of 1926. From the data, a clearer picture emerges of how Rachmaninoff varied his repertoire in his many concert appearances and recording sessions, showing how frequency of performance and, in instances, apparent self-assessment of his own music, were key factors.

A recurrent trope in the reception of Joseph Joachim's performances is the notion that that he magically transformed himself into the composer of the work. In particular, his performances of violin concertos frequently evoked this perception, as documented by Andreas Moser, Otto Gumbrecht, Hans von Bülow, and Johannes Brahms. Building on work by Katharina Uhde and Karen Leistra-Jones, this article will propose that Joachim's cadenzas played a central role in fostering the perceived slippage between the composer and performer. Joachim composed – and performed – cadenzas for many of the concertos in his core repertoire, including works by Giuseppe Tartini, W. A. Mozart, Giovanni Battista Viotti, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Brahms. I will argue that Joachim's cadenzas enact a compositional approach to the thematic material. The depth of this engagement is profound, encompassing not only the soloistic passages but also the ritornello sections as material for developmental reworking and modulatory processes. In fact, he often explores harmonic avenues that are only hinted at in the ‘parent’ concerto, highlighting and fulfilling moments of unrealized potential. Joachim's cadenzas thus create the impression that the composer of the concerto is revising and expanding his own work. I propose that he inhabits the genre of the cadenza as a site of compositional and performative virtuosity, fusing the two personas at a time when they were becoming increasingly polarized in European musical culture.