This article examines the transformations in musical activity in Mozambique between 1987 and 1994, a period marked by the transition from a socialist single-party to a capitalist multiparty system. Drawing on data from articles published in local newspapers and complemented by interviews with key individuals, this study focuses on three pivotal domains of musical activity: radio broadcasting, the phonographic industry and entertainment industries. It aims to clarify the importance of musicking activities in reflecting the cultural, social and economic transformations that occurred in Mozambique, particularly in the capital city Maputo, as well as the decline of the ‘new Mozambican man’ cultural project. It also delves into various topics, including the production shift from vinyl records to cassettes, the invitation of international artists as a symbol of ‘openness’ to capitalist countries and the broader revisions made to broadcasting and phonographic publishing policies.

The Rolling Stones played a core role in establishing the generic conventions of rock. A key ideological element of this was the band's reverential dedication to the blues and the importance of the blues to their musical development. However, what is much less recognised is the influence of soul on the band's sound. By looking at the band's repertoire, composition and performing style, this paper explores the influence that soul, particularly Southern soul, had on the band's formative years and argues that, in many ways, they have adopted the aesthetic conventions of soul, rather than rock, for the majority of their career. Rethinking The Stones’ style in this way may help us better understand their position in the rock canon, while also encouraging careful interrogation of the racialised division of rock and soul that emerged in the late 1960s.

Fifty-six years after its establishment, the Ghana National Symphony Orchestra in 2015 recorded its debut album Ghanaian Classics at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon. Despite the overwhelming challenge of low patronage of art music in Africa generally, the choice of repertoire and composers for this historic album was largely drawn from the Ghanaian popular music domain. This paper investigates the extent to which the album recording and launch represented a deliberate attempt by the orchestra to negotiate its multiple identities through Ghanaian highlife music and musicians. We argue that the album recording, the choice of the highlife genre and artists featured on the CD, the instrumentation and the venues for the recording and launch were all a deliberate attempt to de-escalate the elitist label the Ghana National Symphony Orchestra has carried right from its inception and to court a larger following from the Ghanaian populace as a national cultural asset.

Why would Celtic women performers invoke a dead colonialist English poet in their airs and dance sets? This article provides close readings of Shakespearean elements in the musical compositions of gold- and platinum-selling artists Loreena McKennitt, Ensemble Galilei, and Méav. It assesses the archaicising musical language, structural reshapings, and ekphrastic elements as signals of ‘restitutional creativity’ and trans-temporal collaboration. It also analyses the reception of these works by fans and critics, responses replete with invocations of tradition and of timelessness. Like the fanfic-producing enthusiasts of Johnathan Pope's Shakespeare's Fans, the fans for Celtic music capitalise on their awareness of Shakespearean elements in this music to display personal expertise. In so doing, they enhance their own belonging within the Celtic music community.

In 1981, Bernice Johnson Reagon gave a talk at the West Coast Women's Festival, challenging the group of mainly white feminists to embrace coalition politics—a political praxis theorized and advocated by Black and Israeli feminists that sought to build coalitions only after distinct group identities were embraced and nurtured. Long before she articulated this concept as the future of the Movements within which she worked, Reagon piloted it in her post-Civil Rights Movement music making. In her work with the Harambee Singers and the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project between 1966 and 1974, Reagon developed a musical coalition politics that would inform her later interventions. Not only were Reagon's musical coalition politics during this period a musical embodiment of the vanguard of feminist theory, but they also shed light on how one of the most important musician-scholar-activists of the twentieth century approached the crafting of a new political identity in conversation with the shifting front of the Black Freedom Movement in the immediate wake of the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement. This little-known period of Reagon's output offers scholars of Black music, scholars of American music, feminists/Black feminists, and activists much to contemplate and incorporate into our work.