This paper explores the literary value of popular song lyrics through the lens of intertextuality, using the Beatles’ songbook as a case study. It aims to bridge the gap between reader-oriented and author-oriented approaches to intertextual research, emphasizing the importance of viewing texts from a broad, interconnected perspective. The study analyses a selected corpus of 27 Beatles songs, ranging from their early hit “I Saw Her Standing There” to their final recordings such as “The End,” to uncover how intertextuality manifests itself in their lyrics. By doing so, the paper seeks to highlight the depth and complexity of pop lyrics, advocating for their recognition as a legitimate subject of academic inquiry. The findings suggest that the Beatles’ lyrics, rich with literary and cultural references, exemplify the postmodern characteristics of pop music, blending high and low culture and showcasing the dynamic, dialogical nature of language and texts. This research aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the literary qualities of popular music and underscores the enduring cultural significance of the Beatles.

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.

In the 1990s, a protest rock movement developed on the American continent within informational capitalism, the democratisation of information and communication technologies, and the development of transnational social movements that fought against global powers. To complement the interpretations that understand this type of musical practice as a cultural aspect of social movements, or as commodities that obey the imperatives of the market, I use Auslander’s concept of performance to analyse how these protest rock groups deploy political ideologies linked to international leftist struggles, in the space and time of concerts and other types of mediations. Through an interpretive analysis, I identify some spatial, gestural, corporeal, and sound elements used to act out leftist political ideologies.

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.