Étude n°1 is a solo for feedback and effects pedals by David Caulet. Originally designed to enrich the electric guitar’s timbre, effects pedals have been widely repurposed by experimental and improvising musicians. Although their use is now common, notation practices associated with these devices remain underdeveloped. This work explores the development of a graphic system dedicated to representing instrumental gestures and opens perspectives for a notation framework adapted to contemporary musical practices incorporating electronic technologies.

Music notation has evolved to accommodate music and musical instruments as they have changed over time. However, the rapid advancement of musical technology has not been accompanied by a corresponding development and consensus in notation. This paper examines the challenges faced by notation in representing music written for augmented instruments. We contend that a novel understanding of musical works is necessary and propose a work-concept that recognises the significance of the technology – medium – that composers develop alongside their creations. We emphasise the role of the score within this work-concept model and present an instrumental augmentation system as a case study. Finally, we propose notation guidelines for augmented instruments and argue that standardising notation could facilitate the discovery of common ground that guides the development of augmented instruments and music written for them.

This study examines audience responses to the European virtual idol Noonoouri using an audience reception approach. While Japanese virtual idols have been widely studied, audience reception in European contexts remains underexplored. Using Python-assisted sentiment analysis combined with qualitative thematic analysis of YouTube comments, the study investigates how audiences evaluate Noonoouri’s music and digital persona regarding creativity, legitimacy, and cultural context in European mainstream music. Findings reveal predominantly negative responses, with scepticism regarding emotional expressiveness, originality, and impacts on human creativity, alongside occasional recognition of technical innovation. Audience interpretations clustered into three frameworks: ‘Emotional Authenticity and Affective Engagement’, ‘Authorship, Labour Ethics, and Creativity’, and ‘Cultural Value and European Mainstream Integration’. The results show that virtual idol reception cannot be understood through technical criteria alone; audiences actively negotiate cultural, ethical, and authenticity meanings, providing insight into how legitimacy is constructed for AI-generated music and virtual idols in European popular music contexts.

This article proposes queernotation as a lens to understanding existing works and as a way forward for composers and musicians who find themselves limited by traditional forms of music notation. Applying queer ways of knowing and creating, I investigate the inherent boundaries in notation and how queer theory can guide us to break out of them. Queernotation connects score types to three key areas of queer theory: queer erotics, queer temporalities and queer futurity. Extending these theoretical approaches to their musical possibilities, I identify three modes of queering notation. These approaches are demonstrated in this article through existing historical and recent works and practically applied in a chamber opera that tests concepts of queernotation in directing improvisers to perform conceptual ideas on the stage. Notation for electronic instruments and with digital mediums demonstrates how technology facilitates new approaches that can queer music notation.

This article revisits the concept of the instrument’s inherent score, exploring how musical instruments can embody a form of notation that both shapes and inspires performance. Building on earlier research (Tomás 2016; Tomás and Kaltenbrunner 2014), the study examines the historical and theoretical foundations of this idea, tracing its roots to experimental music practices of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly within the Sonic Arts Union collective. Composers such as Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma and Nicolas Collins have described how electronic instruments embody compositional elements, effectively functioning as scores. The paper argues that the instrument’s score emerges from the material and symbolic affordances of the instrument, mediating the performer’s engagement with its sonic and physical properties. This concept has influenced contemporary digital instrument design, where the boundary between composition and instrument becomes blurred. The study also engages with theoretical frameworks from Vilém Flusser and Friedrich Kittler, situating the instrument’s score within broader discourses on technology and embodiment. Finally, the paper explores the challenges of notating such scores, drawing parallels with choreographic practices, and concludes by emphasising the body’s central role in interpreting and enacting these inscriptions during performance.

Since the mid-20th century, approaches to musical notation have multiplied, giving rise to a multitude of terminologies and classifications. While there exists an extremely rich literature on new approaches to musical notation, it is easy to be confused by a nomenclature that is still under construction and has yet to be formalised. Based on a narrative review of the scientific literature comprising over 250 documents on new forms of notations, this article aims to present the main terminologies used to describe the different approaches to notation. This article proposes a framework illustrating what we observed as the most prominent notation approaches (action-based scores, animated scores, graphic scores, etc.) according to the types of indications (prescriptive and/or descriptive), the notation encoding (semantic and temporal encoding), and the mediums used for transmission (screen, printed, etc.). The contemporary notation framework aims to provide tools for the further analysis and classification of musical notation used in contemporary instrumental, electronic, and electroacoustic music.

This article explores new approaches for notating the morphology of sound using the framework of CS Peirce’s concept of indexical signs. While pictographic and symbolic notation struggle to notate the lived dynamic experience of music, indexical notation offers new possibilities for attending to the material, temporal and spectral flux of sound. Drawing from theories outlined by Floris Schuiling, this article presents a case study of an interactive score titled Undersong1 for solo performer that eschews symbolic or pictographic notation in favour of establishing indexical causal relationships between performer and visual responses. The case study suggests that indexical signs may offer an accessible way to engage performers with spectral and morphological elements of sound, opening new pathways for notation to engage experiential phenomena.

The 1984 Helsinki Festival introduced Finnish and international audiences to contemporary Soviet composers via what was perhaps the largest repertory of contemporary Soviet music in the West up to that point. The week of concerts did not include any premieres, but several works by Schnittke, Gubaidulina, and Denisov that were performed during the festival were recent compositions that had received only a few performances at that point. And yet, the week was also a compromise, prominently featuring Khrennikov and other conservative composers. This article discusses the context and processes that led to the festival’s realisation and its relation to changes in the Soviet musical world at the time. In the past, Soviet authorities often torpedoed attempts to perform nonconformist works in the West and almost never allowed composers to travel. In Helsinki, Schnittke, Gubaidulina, and several other composers were allowed to attend.

When the nine-year-old Susan Knell wrote to Leonard Bernstein in March 1962 from her family home in Ossining, New York, she had very little — if any — concept of ‘the archive’. Nor were posterity or history-making remotely in her mind. The second child of highly educated Jewish parents, she had been studying the piano because ‘it was something that kids were expected to [do]’.2 Exactly how the letter came about she does not recall. Most likely, one of her parents encouraged her to write to him: ‘They were very impressed by […] famous people who were accomplished’, she reflected. ‘And we were Jewish. And so I think there was that connection with Bernstein.’ Armed with a sheet of lined paper, torn from the pad in such a way that one of the five pre-punched holes was left ripped, she penned her missive. The careful formatting reflected her awareness of ‘good etiquette’, but was also at odds with the childish scrawl, an incongruity suggestive of children’s tendency to do things ‘correctly’, up to a point. Once posted, the letter was sooner or later forgotten by Susan — and likewise was the photograph reportedly sent by return, which she has no memory of ever receiving.3

This article documents the lives of three female cathedral choristers and the impacts of cathedral choral training on their subsequent lives and careers. The participants reported the acquisition of musical skills such as sight-reading and knowledge of liturgical repertoire as key. Extra-musical skills were also reported, including being organised and flexible, focusing on details, working hard, behaving in a professional manner and taking up leadership roles. In addition to the many positive experiences, the choristers identified a need for targeted pastoral care in their cathedral choral training. Further research needs to investigate the environmental structures and supports in cathedral choirs and the dynamics between conductors and child female choristers.

This article concerns a ‘craze’ for the tango that dominated Paris from 1911 to 1914. The dance floor of the amusement park Magic-City was one of the most elite venues in the city, and a significant site of the transformations to tango culture that took place. The Parisian tango, as exemplified by music composed by Magic-City affiliates René André and Camille de Rhynal, fit into specifically French notions of cosmopolitanism and aligned the dance with the idealized urban woman, referred to in advertisements, fiction, and the press as la Parisienne. At venues such as Magic-City, the tango was shaped into a form that suited middle- and upper-class French urban life and is reflective of ‘cosmopolitan modernity’, a concept borrowed from cultural theorist Mica Nava.

Euphonia, or the Musical City: Tale of the Future, Hector Berlioz’s novella from 1844, is a testament to how the composer imagined a perfect city drawing from both the musical past and his autobiography. Euphonia envisions a community of artists striving for musical perfection, which is demonstrated during a recurring festival honouring Gluck, Berlioz’s first musical idol. Composers carefully monitor musical preparation, and only knowledgeable audiences attend concerts. Berlioz’s visionary, futuristic utopia is built on nostalgia for an alternate musical culture and recent musical heritage. This imagined city arose from the composer’s experiences in the urban locales where he lived. Euphonia is Berlioz’s dream to musically revisit La Côte-Saint-André, his native city, while it also expresses a desire to engage with the nostalgic aura of the German mountains. Nostalgia seeks to build alternative realities as a response to the bittersweet memories of times gone by and the perception that the culture of the present is declining. Rather than being solely directed at reminiscing about the past, the power of nostalgia relies on its ability to create the promise of a better future. Despite that Berlioz continued to enrich his artistic outlook in Paris, the composer also faced frustrations with the musical establishment in which he worked and about which he wrote. Berlioz considered that in Paris popular opinions and habits of the musical world had tarnished music’s integrity. As it became clear that his musical ideals were not met in the real world, he imagined a perfect city-conservatory, Euphonia, where Berlioz countered the artistic realities and hardships he faced in Paris and in exchange imagined new spaces where his ideas would flourish. The utopic yet so nostalgic city of Euphonia, like Berlioz’s music, commemorated the musical values of past eras and anticipated a future of creative possibility.