Mendelssohn worked out his publishing career strategically. His first opus numbers established his place in various genres and styles. In his maturity, regular publication of roughly one major work per year supported his reputation as a composer of serious music. Modestly scored pieces accommodated the domestic music market, as did larger works in two- or four-hand piano arrangements. Early nineteenth-century laws established copyright within countries, but no international agreements prevented pirated editions beyond borders. Negotiations with publishers therefore occupied much of Mendelssohn’s time and energy. Mendelssohn undertook two substantial editions of music by his eighteenth-century forebears, Handel’s Israel in Egypt, and Bach’s organ music. Insisting on a rigorous editorial policy, he anticipated now-standard musicological principles. Fanny Hensel began publishing late, the small number of her publications reflecting social and familial constraints. Seven opus numbers appeared during her lifetime, all within her last year and all addressing the bourgeois, domestic audience. Four posthumous works resulted from her family’s project to honour her and promulgate her music.

Music criticism mushroomed in Germany and elsewhere in Europe during Felix Mendelssohn’s lifetime, playing a key role in the transformation of musical ideals and values. While Mendelssohn – unlike his contemporaries Schumann and Wagner – refrained from publishing his views on music, he was well acquainted with the major German, French and English critics of the day and acknowledged the importance of criticism in helping to drive musical reforms. The chapter examines the reasons behind Mendelssohn’s reluctance to write criticism, his attitudes towards different forms of music criticism and his troubled encounters with individual critics, including François-Joseph Fétis and Heinrich Heine. It also explores his relationships with critics who supported him over his career and in some cases helped shape his music, such as Ludwig Rellstab, Adolf Bernhard Marx, Henry Fothergill Chorley, James William Davison, Johann Christian Lobe and Alfred Julius Becher.

In this chapter, examines the hard graft and disagreements with bookers and bar managers over equipment, conditions and pay. She explains how why and how her life went from wonderland to warzone and discusses the importance of planning one’s career. Killing a DJ does not require the employment of an expensive hitman. Keyboard warriors can achieve it with an itchy send finger, aided by the ensuing social media circus and cancel culture. The most painful death anyone can experience is the hung, drawn and quartered torture of their support network collapsing. DJ Magazine and Mixmag created two, groundbreaking magazine events that will stand as an incriminating reflection of the times and celebration of the Black electronic music culture with their Dance Music Is Black Music and Blackout issues. As a Black artist in a majority white environment, she knows how important it is to keep one’s profile high.

This essay places Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Hensel’s Protestant faith in the context of the complex religious and theological world of early nineteenth-century northern Germany. The Mendelssohns’ religious education and practice was deeply influenced by the early nineteenth-century creation of the Prussian Union of Churches. In this context, the Mendelssohns’ approach to religion was ecumenical, non-dogmatic, and influenced by rationalism. While the siblings both relied on Reformed or Prussian Union churches for major personal events throughout their lives, they engaged with the German Lutheran tradition in their musical practices, including both performance repertoire choices and compositional influences. The essay explores extant documents and known events that indicate the Mendelssohns’ theological perspectives. It also examines the Mendelssohns’ relationships with noteworthy theologians, including Friedrich Wilmsen, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Julius Schubring, and Christian Bunsen, and the range of religious ideas expressed by these thinkers.

According to his father, Mendelssohn had to fulfil his destiny as a professional musician by becoming a music director at a major institution; this chapter explores his relationship with musical life in the city with which he became most closely associated, Leipzig. When Mendelssohn was appointed Kapellmeister at the Gewandhaus in 1835, most of the closely entangled institutions which formed the basis of Leipzig’s musical life were already in existence. The reputation of the Gewandhaus concerts was achieved not only by their quality and frequency but also by a close cooperation with other institutions, especially with the city’s music publishers and their music journals. The canonisation of the Austro-German repertory, meanwhile, was already underway well before Mendelssohn’s arrival. Mendelssohn built on this legacy while reforming the city’s musical institutions with remarkable success. In addition to the established institutions, like the Gewandhaus and the Theatre, Leipzig possessed a lively musical culture in its salons and homes of the well-educated bourgeoisie, and the final section of the chapter looks at this private musical world and Mendelssohn’s role within it.

This chapter is DJ Paulette’s brief confessional on how she got up to all sorts, good and bad, while DJ’ing. While she loved high-end service, she didn’t love hotels, as they are just rooms that other people have slept and behaved badly in. She took two months off from DJ’ing to sit her finals and concentrate on presenting the TV programme Juice. She then learned that she had a low tolerance for drugs: prescription and illegal. DJ Paulette relates her adventures: her road trips, driving cars the wrong way, the media’s encouragement of bad behaviour, her first dab of brown MDMA from a vintage powder compact, and the least favourite leg of her drugs journey. Occasionally, she would leave the DJ booth to dance or vibe with the crowd. Loneliness, a hangover, beer glasses, bad decisions and an early journey were never a good combination.

Although little of her music appeared during her lifetime, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was well known due to the numerous publications about her brother Felix. With the rise of feminism in the late nineteenth century, she was frequently mentioned as part of the larger discourse about the problems that women composers faced. After the publication of Sebastian Hensel’s Die Familie Mendelssohn (1879), Hensel came to serve as a symbol for women’s societal restrictions, most notably for pro-suffrage writers in the United States and England. Hensel was frequently at the centre of published arguments about women’s creativity, and her music was sometimes programmed to rebut assertions of their inability to compose. Knowledge of Hensel was transmitted through American women’s organizations, and children’s music clubs were named for her. Although Hensel’s fame faded in the mid twentieth century, publications and recordings of her music were stimulated by second-wave feminism beginning in the 1970s and 1980s.

Taking its cue from passages in the Mendelssohn family’s correspondence concerning aspects of Jewish tradition and Christian conversion, and drawing on the work of modern scholars, the chapter considers from a variety of angles the sense of Jewishness with which Fanny Hensel’s and Felix Mendelssohn’s lives were imbued. With reference to a range of literature on Jewish history, the question of the siblings’ Jewish identity is explored in the wider context of German Jewish social and religious life at the time, as well as its implications within the Mendelssohn family’s private circle, for example, inter-generational tensions. Attention is given to the reception history of the family’s Jewish identity in the context of anti-Jewish attitudes, reflected in a range of sources including the remarks of the siblings’ composition tutor, Carl Friedrich Zelter to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and the writings of Richard Wagner, while also identifying echoes in modern Mendelssohn scholarship.

The Mendelssohn family Sunday musicales were and are one of the most prominent examples of private music making from nineteenth-century Germany. Yet their importance lies not so much in their singularity, as in the way that they were an especially successfully representative of a much larger set of private music-making practices throughout Berlin and German-speaking cities more generally, some of which took place in Jewish-women-led salons. This chapter looks at a diverse range of private music-making practices during the period, many of which were important to the Mendelssohn family’s musical activities. Private music-making offered musicians and listeners an alternative to the public concert hall; travelling virtuosi chances to get to know the local music scene; and composers like Felix and Fanny a laboratory for trying out new works. Perhaps most importantly, private music-making offered women, including Fanny Hensel, an opportunity to shine in multiple overlapping organisational and musical roles at once.

In this chapter, Manchester legend DJ Paulette relates how she has evolved and grown. She discusses the awards won, seats earned, her music bibles, as well as her broadcasting, mentoring and teaching. She explains how she has been living authentically and unapologetically in her Blackness. This book is a thank you and an appreciation of the magnificent mavericks, the courageous chancers, the happy hustlers and the resilient ravers and rovers who have dedicated their lives to honing their craft, spreading the message of peace, love, unity and respect, touching lives, making stars and evolving this culture for others to enjoy. Representing every voice and every experience is essential if we are to project a more balanced image of club and DJ history into the global consciousness and historical canon. For aspiring DJs, she advises to dream big, follow tutorials, make contacts and get involved.

Moving between absolutist Prussia, urban bourgeois Leipzig, and late Hanoverian/early Victorian Britain, Felix Mendelssohn experienced and actively engaged with the (cultural) politics of pre-1848 Europe. His correspondence reveals him to have been distinctly inclined towards a reformist, liberal standpoint, yet increasingly sceptical of the political difference he or art could make. Despite remaining in Berlin, Fanny Hensel (as well as their younger sister Rebecka) appears to have greater radical sympathies – this in marked contrast to the conservative politics of her husband Wilhelm Hensel.

One of Mendelssohn’s most lasting historical legacies is his role in founding the Leipzig Conservatory, which became a model for higher musical training across Europe. Unlike Italy and France, prior to 1843 Germany had no conservatories. Mendelssohn proved to be a driving force in founding the institution mediating between the city of Leipzig, the Saxon king, the musical elite at home and abroad, and also in the acquisition of startup capital, which drew on all his diplomatic and political skills. As the oldest German Conservatory, the Leipzig Conservatory was a highly successful and sustainable approach to placing the education of musicians on a holistic and professional foundation.

This chapter begins by asking what music is. It first considers the idea that music is ‘humanly organised sound’ before progressing to a definition of music as social interaction. This idea is unpacked throughout the chapter and it is argued that musical interaction is embodied, multivalent and multiply embedded.

This chapter argues that musical interaction is often also economic interaction, involving interdependence and power. It elaborates upon these ideas, discussing both the music industry and the interplay of music and capitalism in doing so. It concludes with a discussion of the distinction between mainstream and alternative music.