Throughout the history of television, American audiences have participated in a tradition of programs that follow a consistent structure: Amateur musicians and entertainers are offered an opportunity to display their talent on stage, competing for audience votes to win first prize and a chance at stardom. This article contributes to a growing literature on the significance of televised talent shows, demonstrating how their remarkable longevity and representational power stems from their configuration as a “format,” the set of guidelines that structure and constrain the content of each broadcast—an aesthetic process grounded in exclusion. Through their formatting, I argue, these programs reify the notion of “talent” at the heart of talent shows, transforming a multidimensional and context-contingent assemblage of musical abilities into a seemingly stable object able to be recognized, rated, and ranked. Musical auditions offer a microcosm of formatting's role as a means of training audiences’ attention. They normalize the practice of eliminating whatever (or whomever) is deemed unworthy—on these programs and in the wider world. Through analyzing examples from Ted Mack and the Original Amateur Hour (1948), The Gong Show (1978), and The Voice (2017), the article demonstrates how beneath the widely discussed content of contestant demographics, judge commentary, or audience voting results, the talent show format serves to obscure the contradictions upon which meritocracy's cruel optimism rests.

Since its organization in the mid-twentieth century, Colonial Williamsburg (CW) has been an important site for the consolidation of powerful narratives of American exceptionalism, patriotism, and the so-called consensus history of the American Revolution. This article looks at the role that music and performance has played in this historiography, taking as its primary texts two films produced by CW: The Story of a Patriot (1957) and The Music of Williamsburg (1960). With musical contributions by Bernard Herrmann and Alan Lomax, respectively, these films offer an opportunity to analyze the relationship between history and politics in the early Cold War era. Although The Story of a Patriot reflects a static and essentially conservative portrayal of American exceptionalism, the more liberal inclusiveness of The Music of Williamsburg showcases the fraught power dynamics of attempting to showcase historical Black music making in a patriotic context.

In recent years, music education has seen a decline in the number of students choosing to continue their studies at Key Stage 4 (14- to 16-year-old students) and choose music as a GCSE option in England. Whilst the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), a school performance measure which excludes the arts, has come under much scrutiny as to its impact on school music, enjoyment and the perceived importance of music lessons could also be contributing factors to low uptake. This paper presents student survey findings from the first part of a two-phase project that was based on a qualitatively driven mixed-method research design. Findings demonstrated that a decline in enjoyment and in the importance attributed to school music occurred in the first three years of lower secondary school (Key Stage 3). The enjoyment of school music was linked with the students’ engagement with practical components of music making, and its importance was mostly equated with future employment opportunities. The findings are discussed in terms of their practical implications in the teaching of music in secondary schools.

The title of Beat Furrer's nuun, for two pianos and chamber orchestra (1996), invites two principal readings. As a pun on the German ‘nun’, meaning ‘now’, it invokes a presentist mode of musical thinking, whereby each moment is heard to exist in a continuous state of development. It also invokes myth, as suggested by Wolfgang Fuhrmann, in its palindromic reflection of the name of the Breton goddess Nu, who, in medieval mysticism, ‘had the power to let time stand still’. In this article, I use Byron Almén's 2017 theory of musical narrative as the basis for a narrative analysis of nuun, aiming to reconcile these allusions with the aesthetics and formal processes of the piece, as well as Furrer's documented preoccupation with notions of storytelling in music. In doing so, I expand upon the hermeneutic readings of the piece proposed thus far, establish connections with textural archetypes in Furrer's oeuvre, both pioneered by and preceding nuun, and consider lines of dialogue with broader discourse on time in contemporary music.