In this chapter, I explore a selection of musical games performed at seventeenth-century French literary salons, where members of a coterie quoted recitative, parodied airs, and reimagined entire opera scenes. Though musical conversations were ephemeral, the outlines of the social practices can be reconstructed through a combined study of various types of sources. Letters crystallize conversations interwoven with opera fragments, while plays depict galant men courting women by interspersing sung quotations from contemporary operas into conversations, repurposing voguish spectacles as declarations of love. Manuscript chansonniers preserve parodies of complete opera scenes, substituting operatic characters with recognizable contemporary figures and refashioning the verse. By fostering spaces where participants ascended social hierarchies through their witty abilities as conversationalists, salon hosts transformed opera into an interactive social practice.

During the Early Republic, Virginia’s cities grew rapidly, creating a cosmopolitan society without precedent in the Old Dominion. Both the salon and amateur musicianship were hallmarks of a new elite urban society, as demonstrated in the life of Adeline Myers (1791–1832), the eldest daughter of the first Jewish couple to settle in Norfolk. The Myerses’ home had two capacious salons, household spaces that had come en vogue in elite Virginian townhomes at the turn of the nineteenth century. In these salons, young women like Adeline did more than display their musical accomplishments; they asserted their place as cultural leaders and innovators, especially during the social seasons that brought together the state’s belles and beaux. Beyond Norfolk, Adeline engaged with salon culture in Richmond and Philadelphia, where she regularly enjoyed the company of other Jewish women who shared her devotion to literature, music, and learning.

This chapter argues that composer Margaret Bonds (1913–1972) profoundly influenced American art song traditions through mentorship she received in her mother Estella’s salon. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from Daphne A. Brooks and Patricia Hill Collins, we triangulate evidence within Bonds’s art songs with musical techniques from composers associated with the salon, particularly Abbie Mitchell (1884–1960). Mitchell brought a network of socio-musical connections that linger audibly in Bonds’s art songs, documenting years of salon mentorship. We unspool three entwined musical genealogies from these relationships: in one, the music cautions “things are not ok;” in another, the music depicts layered meanings of locations and characters in Black America; in the third, Black resistance and agency rewrite minstrelsy to proclaim Black art song’s place on American stages. These sonic legacies play out in the compositions of Bonds’s student, Ned Rorem, exposing Estella Bonds’s salon as a vital node in the genealogy of American art song.

Flow is a concept used in studies of electronic dance music to articulate a range of social and bodily experiences on dance floors, centred around the musical performances of DJs. It is also used in other scholarly fields and applied in therapeutic and corporate contexts. The catch-all, plural, and positive quality of the concept makes flow easy to apply to many settings and phenomena. This chapter examines flow experiences on dance floors in conjunction with existing notions that club cultures epitomise neoliberal conceptions of creative labour. Overall, it suggests that capitalist logics of flow configure a social environment on dance floors where people can enjoy themselves with others while looking inward, rather than reaching outward in the pursuit of action and social change.

Offering a brief overview of electronic dance music formations, this chapter not only addresses readers who are new to the subject but also experienced participants and researchers who wish to engage with the topic from a broad perspective. In doing so, we offer a consolidation of issues in the development and definitions of extant genres and subgenres that constitute electronic dance music cultures. Drawing out common threads across these genres, the introduction locates several theoretical themes that can be found woven through electronic dance music research, such as immersion, liveness, musicking, technological affordances and affect, as well as challenges of various research methodologies and discourses in this area. Finally, we conclude with an overview of the volume in terms of dance settings, global and local contexts, genre aesthetics, production practices, embodied subjectivities and identities.

In 1599, the English organ builder Thomas Dallam prepared an instrument for voyage to the Ottoman Empire, a diplomatic gift for Sultan Mehmed III (r. 1595–1603) on behalf of the English crown. Funded by merchants of the Levant Company, the instrument was installed in Constantinople in the Sultan’s harem, the female-centered space of the Ottoman court. The negotiations for this gift were entrusted to two women who navigated the space between the Sultan and the world outside the court: the Sultana, Ṣāfiye Sultan (d. 1619), and her kira, a Jewish woman by the name of Esperanza Malchi (d. 1600). Women negotiated this musical–diplomatic relationship at a time when England was fiercely pursuing trade with the East. By centering a marginalized individual whose actions were enabled by trust and knowledge, I complicate the notion that the harem was an environment in which sexual transactions were the only economy of power.

Women’s musical clubs flourished in the United States between 1875 and 1925, as their activities shifted from the domestic space into more public and professional venues. The Amateur Musical Club of Chicago (AMC) was among the oldest in the country, conceived in 1873, founded in 1875, and incorporated not-for-profit in 1890. The AMC assumed a central role in Chicago’s musical landscape and provided a model for other fledgling clubs to formalize and expand their club operations. Rose Fay Thomas, the club’s second president, recognized this influence and shared the logistical and artistic concerns of many clubwomen. In 1893, Thomas convened an assembly of leaders from thirty-four women’s musical clubs at the Chicago World’s Fair. The four-day convention featured speeches and recitals on behalf of each club, collectively demonstrating their common missions, challenges, and rewards, as well as their musical talents and tastes. The meeting established a network of women’s musical clubs in the US and ultimately led to the foundation of the National Federation of Music Clubs.

This chapter explores the pivotal role of DJs in shaping electronic dance music through their dual function as curators and innovators in the genre’s evolution. The discussion traces the DJ’s influence from the early days of synthesised music, through the post-disco era, to contemporary digital practices. It emphasises how DJs, through their record collections and live performances, drive genre formation and preservation. Examples include the archival work of Frankie Knuckles and Sven Väth, and the establishment of the Museum of Modern Electronic Music (MOMEM). Fiketscher argues that DJs’ extensive music collections and their role in curating and presenting music are crucial in documenting and defining dance music history. This comprehensive view highlights DJs as both historical archivists and genre-defining artists in electronic dance music.

Since the eighteenth century, Vienna has been primarily thematized in music as the Habsburg capital, as a city of pleasure and as a utopian ideal. Moving beyond this idealization, this chapter looks at music that takes Vienna and its residents as its subject matter, including by Mozart, Haydn, Johann Strauss Jr, Franz Lehár and Falco.

The appropriation of black creativity has long driven the development of electronic dance music. While the electronic aspect of EDM, its distinctive relation to audio and computer technology, may seem an exception, a coherent discourse based in Afro-futurism sees black appropriation of technologies usually coded ‘white’ as itself creative, a form of bricolage that repurposes obsolete or deprecated technologies through transformative misuse. Tracking the evolution of this ‘secret technology’ requires careful attention to both dance music’s black roots and its silicon-coloured offshoots. Focusing on the technological underpinnings of acid house, UK rave, and breakbeat hardcore, this survey uses historical sources, technical manuals, and first-hand accounts to explore in detail how micro-generations of EDM producers built upon each other’s mistakes, turning the weaknesses of obsolete devices like the Roland TB-303 bassline synth, the Akai S950 digital sampler, and the Commodore Amiga PC into spurs for sonic innovation.

This chapter traces the development of musical life in Vienna after 1933, when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, until 1999, when the post-war era was starting to cede to the multi-polar landscape of the twenty-first century, exposing ruptures, paradoxes but also continuities. It focuses on activities at the Vienna State Opera and at the Vienna Philharmonic, as well as on Leonard Bernstein’s relationship with musical institutions and individuals in the city.

This chapter addresses issues in genre classification of electronic dance music. The discussion is particularly focused on how the genre negotiation of the techno genre is shaped by socio-cultural contexts and processes as it developed from specific localities and spaces to current online community-building and tagging practices. After locating the research context in genre theory, the chapter first evaluates historical narratives of the development of techno and argues that genre histories and categories are forged by the dynamic between genre cultures and the music industry. The engagement with genre definitions in the online world is addressed through a case study of an automatic genre classification and clustering algorithm that predicts stylistic repertoires of techno labels on the music distribution platform Bandcamp. The discussion leads to an understanding of how user-generated folksonomies enable DJs and producers to destabilise industry-prescribed taxonomies while remaining distinct from dominant forms of techno.