Theodor W. Adorno suggested that music is mediated by socially derived forms of reason, a provocation here considered with respect to neoliberalism. Drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of neoliberalism, which in Wendy Brown's summary takes neoliberalism as ‘a specific and normative mode of reason’, I consider what this means for immanent features of music and processes of its composition. This critical attention to music's formal, aesthetic register enables me to go beyond the more well-established (although nonetheless valuable) frameworks for discussing music and neoliberalism, which focus on music's relation to labour conditions and creative industries. A range of music and sonic art is discussed, work by Chino Amobi, Brian Eno, Bryn Harrison, Sarah Hennies, Johannes Kreidler, Wolfgang Rihm, Marina Rosenfeld, and John Zorn. I ultimately argue that some core features of Adorno's conception of critical art and music need reformulating for the neoliberal age.

This article presents a history of alternative electronic music education in Melbourne, Australia. It documents early examples of experimentation with non-traditional classes and programmes in tertiary institutions and subsequently the emergence, over several decades, of alternative teaching and learning in community centres, nightclubs, retail stores, message boards and magazines. The article uses Scheffler’s Models of Teaching to provide a framework to document the differing pedagogical approaches, and draws upon archival material, interviews, essays and first-hand experiences to explain how Melbourne’s rich history has informed and influenced today’s learning practices. It posits that the adaptable, dynamic and flexible practices found in Melbourne’s electronic music education were the result of influences from key educators, the needs of the communities that enabled them and the adaptation to cultural and technological changes.

Black and indigenous musics continue to evolve and dominate global markets and cultural spheres, notwithstanding a history of intellectual property theft and cultural appropriation. DJs and producers (by way of sampling or extrapolation) have played archival roles outside traditional music archiving. Colonial invasions and the transatlantic slave trade, as well as academic neocolonialism, displaced cultural histories imparted through oral traditions. The Black radical tradition resists global corporate capitalism, even within a music industry that emphasises stereotypical Black tropes for profit. Without regulation, the practices of museums, the education system and the music industry will be exacerbated by the development of recommendation systems and artificial intelligence (AI). Hence, in communities that have already suffered unjust intellectual and cultural property theft, I recognise and re-centre the archiving musico-cultural role that DJs and producers have historically played.

This essay examines how racial discrimination operates under the surface and through the guise of preserving musical excellence, as exemplified through the 1969 lawsuit filed by double bassist Arthur Davis and cellist Earl Madison charging the New York Philharmonic with racial discrimination in hiring practices. Analyzing the narratives that emerged during the 1969 hearings around artistic merit, racial discrimination, and screened auditions, I argue that the New York Philharmonic weaponized musical excellence as a pure entity abstracted from race and other social categories in order to claim that its sanctity required protection from societal charges of discrimination. Notably, these same legal arguments were used in a subsequent case in which timpanist Elayne Jones charged the San Francisco Symphony with discrimination on the basis of race and sex following her tenure denial in 1974. Placing these two cases in conversation not only illuminates the tenacity and power of discriminatory ideas and practices in U.S. orchestras, but it also demonstrates how the experience of fighting legal battles reverberated personally and professionally for Black classical musicians. These lawsuits exacted a significant toll on Davis, Madison, and Jones, each of whom was sacrificed at the altar of change that, decades later, has yet to come.

Ever since dance was established as a theatrical art form in Western Europe, it has had a constitutive relationship with other dramatic, plastique, and musical arts. In being described as relying on these other art genres, dance works were often regarded as secondary creations. Ballets, for example, were works likened to narrative tableaux that tell stories without words, with music as their indispensable accompaniment, animating the dancing bodies. In the early 20th century, however, the relationship of dance to other art genres was fundamentally shifting. Towards the end of the 19th century, art works were to be envisaged on the basis of a musical model instead of plastique arts hitherto, and dance as an individual art genre was thereby to be redefined, independently of other art genres, as its own medium, its own material for human creative activity. In dance the human body was being recognized as its medium, and the body’s nature, as encompassed in the “plastique,” was to be scrutinized. The usage of the term “plastique” in dance must then have evolved.

In its ruling on White-Smith v. Apollo (1908), the Supreme Court declared that the punched holes of a player piano roll did not constitute a form of writing, and thus fell outside the purview of copyright statutes. Because the decision was superseded by the Copyright Act of 1909, which extended copyright coverage to piano rolls and sound recordings, commentators have relegated White-Smith v. Apollo to the status of legal footnote. The case, however, deserves closer attention. It reveals much about the fault lines between the auditory experience of music and its visual representation at the beginning of the era of recorded sound. Witness testimony is notable for its disquisitions on the history of musical notation, exegeses of recently patented notation systems, and philosophical ruminations on the nature of a musical work in relationship to its visual representation and sonic instantiation. Trial proceedings show how the perforations of a piano roll, which were more evocative of traditional musical notation than soundwaves etched on a phonograph cylinder or disc, destabilized the mundanity of reading music. Moreover, this instability suggests an explanation for why the piano rolls figuring in the case featured the music of Adam Geibel. The composer was blind, and in a lawsuit about the textuality of music, his disability served to contrast musical sights and sounds. Moreover, White-Smith v. Apollo furnishes a means of bringing the player piano out of the shadow of the phonograph, giving it a place in the “separation of the senses” that media scholars identify with modernity.

Between 2022 and 2023 I ran two experimental DJing workshops in a school in East London with Year 10 GCSE music students. They were experimental in the sense that I had not run workshops with this age group before and that I was sharing some experimental techniques with digital DJ technology (DDJT) that I had been exploring in my own practice. They proved to be highly engaging for the young people and highlighted significant, and sometimes unexpected, benefits of using DDJT in the classroom. The results of the workshops are analysed in the context of the 2016 addition of DJing as an ‘instrument’ for the performance component of the GCSE assessment, alongside claims that this is a ‘challenge to colonisation’. While the addition is viewed as positive, it is questioned whether viewing DJing as being equivalent to other instrumental playing captures the plurality of a practice that is distributed across sonic, social and discursive realms. Historical and conceptual precedents for viewing DJing both as an instrument and as an art are explored, and it is suggested that it could also be assessed under the GCSE Art & Design criteria.

In Kuwait, women are prohibited from dancing in public; however, dancing in private spaces is allowed. As a result of government censorship, socio-cultural values, and commercial marketability examples of women dancing in Kuwaiti film and television are exceedingly rare. However, recently, Manaf Abdal’s steaming television series Mohammed Ali Road (2020) included representations of Kuwaiti women performing a zar dance. Although the scene was shown in other countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, the scene was censored by the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information. Following the censorship of the zar dance featured in Mohammed Ali Road, the actress, Hessa Al-Nabhan, who performed the dance, noted that while she respected the decision to censor the scene, she felt that the dance “has nothing to do with ethics or moral issues” (in Alelah 2020). Her father, a well-established Kuwaiti actor, Jassim Al-Nabhan, publicly expressed that the decision to censor the zar dance scene in Mohammed Ali Road was “a disappointment” and stated that, “not showing [the dance] means that we are not showing the historical events accordingly with credibility. It’s a scratch for the history” (Al-Marsd News 2020).

In 2016, a New York Times dance critic devalued the genre of Chinese dance dramas by reducing a performance of Dragon Boat Racing (Shawanwangshi 沙湾往事) by the Guangdong Song and Dance Ensemble to “kitschy spectacle.” This review exemplifies illiteracy of Chinese dance dramas based on bias against maximalist deployment of spectacle filtered through a Cold War influenced understanding of Chinese aesthetics that is exacerbated by American ignorance of Chinese history. This dismissive review contrasts with the warm reception the Chinese language press gave this contemporary piece (2014 premiere) and the regional and national awards it won in China (Liu 2014). Chinese critics generally describe it as an original choreographic work grounded in the specifics of local Cantonese culture (F Wu 2014; She 2018). This positive reception aligns with my experience watching the piece with a mostly Chinese diaspora audience at the Merriam Theater in Philadelphia in January 2018.1 This article addresses the gap in understanding, examining the dynamics that shaped the development of Chinese dance dramas as a genre as well as the forces shaping American reception of it. I assert that key to the mistranslation is differing understandings of the maximalist deployment of spectacle, which is connected to fissures in the field of dance between supporters of classical ballet and modern dance. I argue that the use of the aesthetic is a celebration of China’s economic development and an assertion of belonging in modernity. But, in the United States its reception is shaped by aesthetic hierarchies developed during the Cold War.