This chapter looks at Barbara Strozzi both as a daughter and a mother. She was raised in the house of her adoptive father, Giulio Strozzi, and her mother, Isabella Garzoni, or Griega. The relationship between Barbara–born illegitimately, as had been her father and grandfather before her– and Giulio, is enhanced through a close reading of his wills. The household eventually expanded to include Barbara’s four children, born to her and one of her father’s friends, Giovanni Paolo Vidman. Barbara had known Vidman at least from 1634, as revealed in Nicolò Fontei’s dedication to Vidman in his Bizzarie, though their first child was born only in 1641. Vidman died in 1648, yet the Strozzis’ connections to his family continued until 1719, with the death of Barbara’s eldest son, Giulio Pietro.

This essay examines various forms of transactional relationships, from marriage and concubinage to brothel prostitution and the informal exchange of sex for sustenance. It considers the life of famous musician Barbara Strozzi, institutional attempts to manage prostitution through legislation and charity, and the negotiation of transactional sex amongst the city’s poorest residents. Byars demonstrates that early modern Venetians saw sexuality as both necessary and dangerous, fleshes out the porous boundaries on the spectrum between marriage and prostitution, and explores how women navigated the socioeconomic systems that commodified them.

The Veglia prima, ..seconda, and ..terza degli Unisoni (Venice, 1638) describe three meetings of the Academia degli Unisoni founded and hosted in 1637/8 by Giulio Strozzi (1583–1652). They reveal details of Barbara Strozzi’s public role as composer and performer, and the defend the Strozzis and Unisoni from anonymous libel and slander, compiled in the manuscript Satire et altre raccolte per l’Accademia de gli Unisoni in casa di Giulio Strozzi (Marciana, It X, Codice 115 (=7193)) [Satires and other collected works regarding the Academy of the Unisoni in the home of Giulio Strozzi]. This essay clarifies the chronology and relationship between these two bodies of writing discussed by Ellen Rosand. I identify the Academico Spensierato as the author of the three letters that conclude the Satire: the letter from the Spensierato to Giulio Strozzi, and the two letters following that ventriloquize Giulio and Barbara Strozzi.

In this chapter, I highlight specific challenges the continuo players face when performing Strozzi’s music. I argue that only by understanding Strozzi’s music as well as its poetry and harmonic language that the harpsichordist can truly partner with the singer to deliver a dynamic performance. First, most of Strozzi’s music is sparsely notated, so the continuo player must figure out the harmonies and notate figured bass according to their own analysis. Second, Strozzi—like composers of her time—does not provide performance instruction on how long the realized chords should be held or how they should be arpeggiated. To that end, I examine the cases of long-held notes and provide concrete suggestions on how one might approach the realization and timing based on text and rhetoric. In addition, I discuss how figured bass can be utilized to flesh out the melodies in written-out ritornello when no treble part is provided.

This chapter introduces one of most unusual madrigals in Strozzi’s Opus 1, Al Battitor di bronzo della sua crudelissima Dama. Giulio Strozzi’s sonnet takes its inspiration from one of the most practiced themes of ancient Greek and Latin poetry, that of the exclusus amator, the excluded lover. While many such poems focus on the door itself Strozzi’s poem brings to the fore, instead, the plight of the doorknocker itself, for it (and the madrigal’s music) will only find its repose after the beloved allows the lover to enter her home. It was in Venice that bronze objects, with their innate sensuality, reached their greatest heights. The Strozzis’ madrigal, then, celebrates one of the city’s highest art forms through a combination of literary wit and musical inventiveness.

This chapter illuminates the deeper history of a Black concert music tradition that undergirded Price’s path. Part of a systemic response to de jure and de facto segregation, the Black concert music tradition became not only an alternative to the white mainstream; it also presented a multifunctional use of the concert stage: a space to perform old and new repertoires and educate audiences on Black music history. The intersection of Emancipation, establishment of colleges and universities for the formerly enslaved, Jim Crow laws, the institutionalization of music education, and the rise of a Black professional class laid the foundation for the development and cultivation of a community of Black composers, performers, teachers, and patrons – a community that Price actively participated in and contributed to.

This chapter explores the practical realities of what it is to perform Strozzi’s music in a twenty-first century context and the artistic possibilities those realities open up, the challenges they raise, and the potentialities they create. Combining personal experience, recent classical music industry research, and cross-genre artistic ideas and insights, this chapter suggests new ways in which Strozzi’s works might be made to sing, in multiple meanings of that word. Identifying barriers to performing Strozzi’s music, this chapter then turns to Strozzi’s working practices in search of tools with which to overcome or side-step those barriers. Through sharing the author’s methods for creating new performances of Strozzi’s works, inspired by Strozzi’s example, this chapter concludes with an invitation to readers to discover their own ways of singing Strozzi today.

This chapter explores the emergence of goth zine culture through three different zines: Panache, Whippings and Apologies and Propaganda. The main objective is to address the ways in which goth subculture evolved from its underground origins in the late 1970s to the early 1990s, focusing in part on how goth zines moved from DIY and amateur production to an aesthetic which was much more glossy and mainstream

Karl Siebengartner demonstrates the function of fanzines within a local space, while also shedding light on the inner-workings of a particular punk milieu. By using Munich and its punk fanzines as a case study, the chapter challenges assumptions as to the development and influence of German punk. Methodologically, Siebengartner argues, fanzines offer a crucial resource for constructing a view from within this metropolitan subculture.

Punk’s youthful energy is here captured by Nic Bullen, remembering how fanzines provided a key aspect of his punk epiphany. As a pre-teen school kid, fanzines opened up new horizons for Bullen, enabling contact with the networks that helped sustain punk’s evolving culture and fired the inquisitive minds of those attracted to punk’s angry aesthetic.

This chapter comprises case studies of three fanzines: Jolt, Anathema and Hard as Nails. Each is examined as a means of understanding how fanzines offered space to develop political discourses and/or to define cultural identities in the face of competing media constructions. In their various ways, the fanzines engage with questions of feminism, anarchism and class.

The introduction sets out in part to locate The Clash in their own very specific historical context. It is argued that the band offer one of the most compelling cultural documents of that moment when the crisis of social democracy paved the way for what would in time be termed the ‘neoliberal revolution’. While The Clash may well have chronicled the political defeats of the past, the body of work that they bequeathed to us represents perhaps one of the resources that might facilitate a rather more progressive political future. There has been no time since the band parted company when their songbook has seemed more relevant. It is acknowledged that there are certain dangers in seeking to take radical artists like The Clash out of their own place and time. Not the least of these is the possibility that we might mimic the culture industries in canonising the band in ways that airbrush out their critical political perspective. The chapter concludes, however, that there are theoretical resources that allow us to avoid this pitfall and to embrace The Clash as though they were a contemporary band, documenting our own current period of global economic and political crisis.