This article explores the extent to which Michael Zev Gordon’s A Kind of Haunting is a work of postmemory, a concept defined and refined by Marianne Hirsch to describe memories inherited by the generations that follow one that has experienced great collective trauma. I complicate some of the claims around the efficacy of music as a site of postmemorial aesthetics by considering the limits of musical representation in Gordon’s work via theories of spectacle and orientalism.

This special issue takes as its conceptual starting point ‘theatrical things’ too commonplace to ordinarily deserve scholarly notice – bits of foam, cushions, mothballs or even elephants. It sheds light on how unassuming features of performance practice constitute critical apertures for the study of theatre historiography, telling us something vital about theatre-making and sense-making. In the study of theatre history, Tracy C. Davis says, there is a premium on asserting originality and innovation, so we are ill-disposed to acknowledge consistency, unoriginality and derivation. Following Davis’s line of thought, we consider how utterly commonplace theatrical things become interfaces between theatre and world-making or microcosms for understanding theatre practice in ways that social ‘context’ does not allow us to imagine. We denote this form of historiography as metonymy.

Wilbrand von Oldenburg was born in the second half of the twelfth century into a noble Germanic family and embarked on an ecclesiastical career while still young, becoming canon of the cathedral chapter of Hildesheim in 1211. Linked to the political circles of the empire’s high officials and the religious circles that supported the emperor, he travelled to the Holy Land from 1211 to 1213 for purposes of diplomacy and pilgrimage. The Itinerarium Terrae Sanctae is a significant source of information about the political, military and ecclesiastical affairs of the recent Christian kingdom of Lesser Armenia, Cyprus and territories such as Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, characterised by the coexistence of different peoples and religions. Wilbrand also recounts this diversity through the soundscape he encounters. Perhaps the most interesting sound element of the travel account is the description of the music of the kingdom of Cilicia, particularly for the feast of the day of Epiphany, including the procession of the sovereign and clergy. The many musical details in the text testify to ritual practices that can be traced back, in some respects, to Eastern Greek customs and, in others, to Latin ceremonials, particularly the Franco-Ottonian imperial model. Finally, an unexpected account of discantus for the rite of the day of Epiphany in aurora provides an opportunity to reflect on Wilbrand’s terminology in reference to liturgical musical performance for the intonation of the office, the recitation of epistles and gospels, and the rituals of the most solemn ceremonies.

A newly identified musical source (Columbus, Ohio, Private collection, JP.MS.220, here Ohio 220) was publicised on social media in 2019. Recognising the value of the fragment, our research prioritised establishing its contents and provenance. The single parchment folio contains four polyphonic songs for two and three voices that once sat within a larger collection. Although aspects of the notation and repertoire within Ohio 220 resemble Ars Antiqua or early Ars Nova motets from northern Europe – with which one lyric shares a poetic concordance – our examination of the source’s artistic, textual and musical features supports a provenance within central European devotional culture approximately a century later. The polyphonic songs – not motets, but in the tradition of cantiones – draw on material and notational strategies with a long, pan-European heritage. We present an edition of all four pieces, outlining, in broad terms, the original provenance for the fragment and its music.

OTTOsonics is an open hardware platform developed by a team of engineers and composers, designed to prioritise affordability and flexibility, addressing the needs of a broader community interested in spatial audio. At its core, the platform features a custom-designed, high-quality 4-inch speaker with a 3D-printed cabinet, and an affordable multichannel power amplifier. It also offers a comprehensive set of mounting accessories and a knowledge base for producing and presenting spatial audio using open-source software. Over the past three years, OTTOsonics has been adopted by multiple cultural initiatives, universities, and audio enthusiasts, enabling the production of new spatial audio works across genres such as electroacoustic, experimental, and pop music. This article outlines the key decisions made throughout the project and presents the technical and artistic outcomes after three years of operation. We discuss the key features of an open platform for spatial audio and how our designs address these needs, as well as future directions for further projects and initiatives.

Studying Arik Shapira’s 1982/2003 opera Aqedah (Binding), this article probes the boundaries of Shapira’s resistance to the Zionist ideological apparatus. Having set the banishment of Ishmael (Genesis 21) side by side with the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22), Shapira highlighted the intricate network of correspondences between these two stories while restoring balance to Jewish victimhood, which usually excluded Ishmael in favour of politically actualising Isaac. To reflect the brutality embedded in these biblical stories (nationally appropriated or not), Shapira disintegrated the text into syllables to which he assigned mostly even durations and inert pitches; the result was a deliberately unemotional and stringent reportage, whose violent conveyance equalled its desemanticisation. Shapira’s use of musical and textual ready-mades in the third movement of Aqedah is situated here alongside an oratorio that reverences similar ready-mades, and in so doing affirms the nationalisation of the Holocaust (Noam Sheriff’s The Revival of the Dead), and a poem by Yizhak Laor, which marks a dialectical threshold Shapira could never cross. Despite his ensnarement, Shapira’s almost vandalistic approach signalled the separation of art music from territorial nationalism.