Mieko Shiomi (b. 1938) is a pioneering Japanese artist, composer, and performer, known for her lifelong practice that crosses the boundaries between music, visual art, and performance, which has evolved fluidly across cultures, media, and technologies. She co-founded a leading postwar Japanese experimental music collective, Group Ongaku, and later joined Fluxus at the invitation of George Maciunas, which led her to spend a year in New York from 1964–65. This article presents 11 images from an extended interview with Shiomi, conducted by composers Chikako Morishita and Akiko Yamane during their visit to her home in Osaka in January 2020, as part of the filming of the documentary Shadow Piece. In the interview, Shiomi reflects on her childhood, education, career, and family life, and discusses the creation and reception of works such as Endless Box, Mirror Piece, and Spatial Poem. The conversation, originally in Japanese, was translated into English by Kiyo Kamisawa and the author.

Thus spake Immanuel, the son of Rabbi Shlomo, blessed be the memory of that righteous man: … I was living in the city of Fermo, which is in the province of the Marche. And it happened one day, after the banquet of Purim,1 when we had enjoyed a wealth of eating and wine and poultry, we sat together on broad cushions, and we carried on with the telling of our tales, and we decided that we were going to converse exclusively about poems and melitsot [rhyming prose].

And each man who had made up a poem in his own head, he would recite it; and if he had heard a poem written by someone else he would recite it; and there was a man who collected them and put them together into a book, and showed their beauty and their splendour to the signori … And the prince said: ‘And now rise up, tongue of gold and splendour, and make for yourself a name of glory, and collect the hosts of your poems into machberot.'2

The catalogue produced for the Armenian intermedial performance Ararat (1977) in Milan stands as the most significant remnant of an avant-garde project that combined music, painting and poetry. The volume includes musical scores by Ludwig Bazil and artwork by Herman Vahramian, artists connected to the Armenian community, as well as critical essays. Analysing the catalogue as an integral component of the performance demonstrates its role as an evocative remnant that aligns with the event’s intermediality. Drawing on archival studies, I argue that the catalogue embodies a metonymic relation to the performance, serving as a crucial tool for fostering a historiography of Milanese-Armenian cultural production. Ararat’s diasporic context amplifies the catalogue’s impact and contributes to the memory practices of the marginalized community. Steeped in affective resonance, the artefact incites the community to engage with cultural and historical narratives, contributing to a broader discourse on Armenian identity within the Milanese context.

This article presents a survey of the work of the Montreal-based ensemble Quatuor Bozzini (QB), in celebration of 25 years of the quartet’s activity, both as performers and as educators. Four composers – Christopher Butterfield, Christopher Fox, Bryn Harrison and Linda Catlin Smith – offer their reflections on working with QB, and the musicologist Emanuelle Majeau-Bettez focuses in particular on QB’s collaboration with Éliane Radigue on her OCCAM DELTA XV.

The eleventh-century Aquitanian troper-proser Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds latin 887 (Pa 887) is a manuscript whose provenance has long been a matter of debate. Five features of its distinctive repertory are considered: (1) a unique relationship with the early tenth-century troper Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, latin 1240 (Pa 1240); (2) the inclusion of elements that have links with northern France, not all of which can be accounted for through shared material with Pa 1240; (3) material that has clearly been derived from the repertory at the Abbey of St Martial, Limoges; (4) on the other hand, concordances within Aquitaine, of tropes and proses not performed at St Martial; and (5) material unique to Pa 887. Consideration of the Translation of Saint Valeria in the year 985 to the priory of Chambon, a dependency of the Abbey of St Martial, suggests Pa 887 was produced for that monastic community.

This paper discusses Roman Jakobson’s concept of metonymy as a form of theatre and performance historiography. Following traces of elephants in Europe during the early modern period, the paper suggests that these fragmentary documents – be they textual, visual or material – do not align with a grand récit but hint at multiple layers of cultural negotiation, concerning questions of ontology, anthropology, politics and even technology. The proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ is a provocation to reflect on these larger categories, while its cultural impact is firmly grounded in its theatrical and performative qualities. Drawing on the paradigm of critical media history, fragmentary and scattered documents become legible as part of a larger process of cultural formation.