One important reason why opera has been so resilient in Vienna is that its institutional framework has proved at once relatively stable and adaptable to change. This chapter traces the development of opera’s institutional history in Vienna. It discusses the city’s opera houses, their administration and repertoires, teasing out the relationship between their political, social and cultural function from the seventeenth century to the present.

This study explores the role of musical salons in nineteenth-century Mexico as dynamic spaces where gender, sociability, and national identity intersected. Salons functioned as transitional domestic arenas where elite women played a central role in music making, shaping both cultural tastes and national sentiment. While largely absent from traditional music histories, these spaces were crucial to the circulation and performance of European and Mexican music, fostering artistic exchange among amateurs and professionals. Through tertulias (soirées), women exercised agency in defining musical and social conventions despite being constrained by patriarchal norms. Drawing on historical accounts, literary sources, and travelers’ testimonies, this work highlights the importance of salons as sites of gendered musical practice, elite cosmopolitanism, and identity formation in post-independence Mexico. It also underscores the need for a revised historiographical approach that integrates women’s contributions to the broader narrative of Latin American music history.

The Introduction surveys the existing literature on musical salons and related institutions from cross-cultural perspectives, laying out the need for the present volume and placing it within the landscape of existing scholarship in historical musicology, ethnomusicology, women’s and gender studies, cultural studies, and other disciplines. It also provides a flexible, working definition of musical salons and related practices from c. 1600 to the present day. It provides a summary of each chapter in the volume.

Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, this chapter shows how women artists navigate the gendered complexities of working in the highly male-dominated occupation of electronic music production and performance. Using a feminist critical management studies lens and positioning the construction of subjectivity as a relational, and power-laden process, the discussion notes six subjectivities enacted by women producing and performing electronic music. (1) The Intersectional Artist (2) The Genderless Artist (3) Visible Woman: Invisible Artist (4) Shrinking Violets and Tough Cookies (5) One of the Boys and (6) Bringers of Divine Feminine Energy. The discussion addresses the impacts these subject positions have on women’s careers and concludes by showing how women’s collectives, despite representing an additional burden on those who organise them, are challenging the status quo by providing public and visible action through the ‘safety and strength in numbers’ of collective activism.

This chapter presents an analytic autoethnographic account of techno production within the Berlin electronic dance music scene. The discussion analyses the composition, production, and creative processes underpinning several commercially successful techno records: ‘Ellipse’, ‘Pulse Train’, and ‘Cognitive Resonance’. Observations of the production practice reveal several rhythmic principles underpinning techno music: sixteenth notes flow in uninterrupted ‘pulse trains’, kick drums articulate 4/4 beats; groupings in powers of two predominate; polymetricity enables non-binary groupings. Describing a process of integration in the global techno scene and its Berlin focal point, the chapter is written in the first person to show the author’s presence. Links are drawn between personal experience and rhythmic structures in techno music. Three insights emerge: pulse trains as central rhythmic structure of techno music; interiorising production techniques and immersing oneself in scene-specific aesthetic codes; and using embodied knowledge, gained through listening and dancing, is a significant component of producing techno.

Fanny Hensel inherited a tradition of powerful salonnières and redefined it for her time. She navigated gendered constraints on her music career via her Sonntagsmusiken, which were private yet highly curated performances that prioritized music just as much as conversation. Hensel’s social and religious concerns shaped many of her choices, initially confining her to informal settings and to a secondary role as her parents launched her brother’s career. However, her early exposure to Berlin’s elite musical circles allowed her to analyze areas for improvement in Berlin’s musical culture, and she embarked on a mission to raise the level of musical excellence and taste in her circle. This study examines key milestones in Hensel’s journey, highlighting shifts in the number of performers, performance formats, genres, and complexity. Hensel’s evolving approach to musical gatherings reflected broader nineteenth-century tensions between domesticity and professionalization, and shaped her eventual legacy far beyond her Berlin salon.

Vienna enjoys particularly high esteem as a city of music, a reputation that emerged long ago and still holds true today. This chapter considers the Viennese institutions focused on music as a prime generator of the frequent and the frequently high level of musical activity, discussing inter alia churches, the Tonkünstler-Societät, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the Vienna Philharmonic and twentieth-century institutions such as the Wiener Konzertverein and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

Women in mid-nineteenth-century Madrid participated in salon culture as a means of social mobility and musical expression, navigating both the opportunities and constraints of gender norms. As salons expanded beyond aristocratic circles into the bourgeoisie, music became a key marker of cultural refinement and an avenue for female participation in public and semiprivate artistic spaces. Institutions like the Liceo Artístico y Literario de Madrid provided performance opportunities, though women also faced criticism for their growing visibility. Figures such as Paulina Cabrero exemplified the dual role of women as performers and composers, blurring boundaries between domestic leisure and public recognition. Personal albums, inscribed with musical compositions, poetry, and dedications, serve as vital sources for understanding salon culture’s influence on female artistic agency. Examining these albums alongside periodicals and historical accounts, this study situates salon culture within Spain’s broader sociopolitical transformations, highlighting its impact on women’s musical production, education, and cultural expression.

DJ culture has long been associated with the collective experience of the dance floor in Electronic Dance Music Cultures (EDMCs), yet it has also spread through various forms of broadcast technology, from radio to television and the internet. In this chapter, we explore some of the ways that DJ culture adapted to the conditions of social isolation that defined the Covid-19 pandemic. We are particularly interested in the adoption of the streaming platform Twitch to facilitate aspects of virtual belonging and online community that emerged to redress the absence of the dance floor. We are also interested in how ‘online DJing’ constructs conditions for virtual engagement by remediating forms of broadcast media. In this chapter we address how DJ culture navigated the transition from in-person events to ‘being-scene’ on the screen, and how affective experiences of the dance floor, the ‘vibe’ and its communitas transformed during this process.

This chapter introduces the notion of the rave moment as an aesthetic experience that foregrounds affect. Its theorisation takes place in the context of an affect-deficit society through the case study of a series of dance parties that took place in Blackburn, UK, between 1989 and 1990. Seemingly resisting a categorisation within hegemonic discourses of raves, the Blackburn parties are used to show that the rave moment is a cultural product that can be exported and adapted. Its flexibility is evident in the changing character of the parties with regard to their location, organisational structure, popularity and promoted values. On the one hand, it is difficult to portray them as a coherent series of events. On the other hand, the parties were retrospectively labelled as ‘raves‘ in an attempt to fit their development into common narratives of rave culture. This tension is used as a starting point to argue for a reframing of electronic dance music events as contextualised aesthetic experiences.

This essay considers music-making in Vienna over five centuries, dividing attention between the court and the city’s institutions, outdoor performance spaces and homes. It discusses not only well-known individuals who elevated Vienna’s fame as a musical city but also representative figures who stand in for others whose lives and careers are less known, and many whose names are lost.