The convent in Early Modern Italy functioned as a uniquely queer space, denying women heteronormative lives while producing homosocial, virginal communities. As nuns wove together the dual acts of listening and vocalizing, they built queer sonic environments that were the site of massive power struggles between male church officials, the bodies of women religious, and the wealthy families of Italy. Connecting voice studies, feminist and queer musicology, sound studies, and nun studies to explore new ways of approaching convent musicking, the author examines Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana’s ‘O magnum mysterium’ to illuminate the possibilities of women’s agency and queerly inflected performance.

Since its emergence in the 1990s, K-pop has constantly gained popularity and reached a wider audience. K-pop has been described as a blend of different music genres, such as pop, hip-hop, R'n’B and electronic music. However, there was Korean popular music before the rise of K-pop and not all popular music in Korea is K-pop. Using data from Spotify at the track level and exploratory data analysis tools, the paper provides an empirical analysis of the characteristics of Korean popular music since the 1990s and compares K-pop and related genres with Anglo-American pop genres in terms of acousticness, danceability, energy, speechiness and valence. While K-pop is close to the dance pop genre through its danceability, it has on average more energy and cheerfulness than Anglo-American pop. There is also more diversity in Korean popular music than suggested by the K-pop phenomenon. Finally, as K-pop became more successful, it did not become more similar in its audio features to Anglo-American pop.

The cross-pollination between popular music and performance that Philip Auslander has coined as ‘musical persona’ is a concept that is continuously renegotiated against ongoing developments on the intersection of music, performance, technology and new media. Zooming in on the entanglement of character, persona and real person in contemporary popular music culture, this article examines how the identity performance of indie musician Connan Mockasin stages the interlacement of fictional characters and other forms of self-presentation. The fictional music teacher character Mr Bostyn that Mockasin has introduced with the Jassbusters album exists in an intriguing interplay with his broader eccentric identity performance, as demonstrated by the artist's self-presentation with an album collaboration with his father, It's Just Wind. Through the prism of the fictional band frame and music documentary practices I argue that Mockasin's self-presentation across various media formats turns the interplay between theatrical play and performative display into a fundamental aspect of his persona.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

[It] may be that never before in my life have I had to meet such a trial as I am undergoing today.

This article explores Auto-Tune's importance to the production, perception and reception of trap music, a sub-genre of hip hop. Central to this exploration is the observation that Auto-Tuned trap vocals are readily audible as such because the software's pitch correction function is applied unnaturally quickly to the vocal audio signal, a feature herein termed ‘zero-onset Auto-Tune’. First, I posit that although Auto-Tune is ostensibly a pitch-correction device, its impact on vocal timbre is not well documented or understood. Second, I argue that Auto-Tune's recent importance as a creative tool in trap recasts it as an instrument. Third, I suggest that understanding Auto-Tune's repurposing as an instrument begets its situation in a lineage of technologies repurposed, adapted and embraced by the hip-hop community, including the turntable, digital sampler, and analogue mixer. And fourth, I propose that this repurposing surfaces in Auto-Tune's ability to facilitate emotiveness in trap vocals.

The story of East German singer-songwriter Gerhard Gundermann provides a vibrant illustration of a much-neglected area of protest song history. Gundermann, who died prematurely in 1998 at the age of 43, was an excavator driver in an open cast mine for most of his adult life. A stalwart of the singing club and Liedertheater (song theatre) movements in the GDR, he emerged after 1990 as a musical and poetic mouthpiece for the culturally and economically marginalised ‘losers’ of German unification. This article will examine Gundermann's utopian aesthetic: how he creatively transformed a socialist realist ideal of the heroic into a new narrative persona that addressed the democratic deficits of the GDR and later the growing environmental threat. It will also link his utopianism to his deep entanglement with the state, as reflected in his role as a Stasi informer in his early career. While Gundermann's case is symptomatic of the GDR's heavily state-monitored music scene, this article will also set his work within the wider context of international protest and environmental song.

What can queer theory, and drag performance, contribute to music semiotics? This paper proffers ‘dragging’ as a socio-cultural semiotics that demonstrates how musical meanings are dynamically queered through drag lip-sync performance. Departing from approaches to meaning and semiotics in musicology and popular music studies, I intervene with direct insights from queer theory. I draw out oscillations between queer theoretical perspectives on temporality and (post)structural concepts such as assemblages and mediation as they have been incorporated into music studies. ‘Drag’, not just an art form, is here developed as a specific kind of spatial-temporal mediation: dragging is understood as the displacement and heterochronization of meaning, where musical objects are dragged ‘out of time’ and ‘out of space’ into the alien world of queer experience. Dragging as a conceptual instrument allows us to begin answering questions of how meanings – and their political stakes – coalesce inside and outside, within and without, music.

Early in 1850, Charles Dickens went to the Victoria Theatre in Lambeth. One of several theatres sited close to the bridges linking the southern bank of the Thames with the north, the Vic was a prominent neighborhood institution catering to a mostly working-class audience. Launched in 1818 as the Royal Coburg Theatre, a move designed to coincide with the opening of Waterloo Bridge, its investors’ hopes of drawing a more upmarket crowd were largely disappointed. Visiting the theatre in 1820, William Hazlitt was distressed to find Junius Brutus Booth among an ill-assorted and noisy throng, and in 1831 Edmund Kean was reduced to haranguing the “unmitigated brutes” gathered before him. Pelted with orange peel and nutshells, he still drew his nightly fee of £50. Although research by Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow has revealed an audience more varied than once assumed, upon the changing of its name in 1833, the Victoria's core clientele was more or less established, as indeed was its reputation for the bloodier aspects of popular drama. It had also experienced regular changes of management, sudden spells of closure, and periodic clashes with the authorities. Suitably enough for what follows, by 1840, the Vic was judged to have suffered “more vicissitudes” than any other theatre in London.