The two related notions of honour and reputation are closely associated with the social status of individuals (male or female), particularly in a society governed by traditional, patriarchal moral values. However, writing about honour and reputation in Iraq (and in the Middle East in general) means talking about women's chastity and their sexual morality specifically. Eclipsing honour and societal reputation to women's bodies are deep-rooted patriarchal norms that stigmatize women's involvement in sexual relations (mainly outside marriage codes) and exclude men from this adultery framework. The current paper investigates the concepts of honour, chastity and reputation in relation to gender norms in Iraq through two contemporary Iraqi plays. First, the article introduces the two concepts through the social, traditional and religious context in the Middle East, focusing on Iraq. The discussion in the second section moves to tackle Ali Al Zaidi's play Rubbish (1995), while the third section deals with Amir Al-Azraki's The Widow (2014). In these two sections the study looks critically at how the two plays dramatize the concepts of honour and chastity through their characters. Being written respectively during and after wars, the two plays are seen as reactions to such issues. Hence they represent the new complex visions of two male perspectives challenging dramatically and shaking the settlement of such notions of morals and their impact on women as well as on society.

This article examines a group of seventy-two fragments from a twelfth-century pontifical whose attribution is under discussion. They contain part of the dedication of a church, the ordo synodalis, and the ordines for the sick, marriage and baptism, and they display neumatic notation on red lines. The fragments are kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France: five of them are now in NAL 1989, while the remaining sixty-seven are kept in a temporary repository and have not been inventoried yet. As regards their origin, the fragments have been assigned either to northern France or to England. The article considers textual concordances, as well as palaeographical and musical features, in order to reconstruct their context of production, and leaves room for methodological observations.

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.