The Tunisian–Libyan Maluf Slam Collaborative was a multinational group of musicians, poets, artists, educators, journalists, and stakeholders that created a series of music concerts featuring Tunisian and Libyan maluf in July 2019. Maluf is considered cultural heritage across eastern Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya and manifests with great variety between and inside each nation-state. Sourced from ethnography in Libya (2014) and Tunisia (2018–2019), this article documents the collaborative’s work, queries the dynamics of transnational traditions, and analyses musical modes and histories of Sufism in order to explain similarities and differences within performances of maluf today.

Now mostly derided as a musical vandal, the cellist Friedrich Grützmacher (1832–1903) was seen during his lifetime as a noble and serious artist, highly respected as a performer and sought-after as a teacher. His numerous and heavily annotated performing editions – and in particular his pedagogical editions of older works – represent his attempt to preserve and disseminate a style of playing that was referred to at the time as ‘classical’ (classisch or klassisch). While the concept of classic works, as it developed in the nineteenth century, has been studied in depth by Lydia Goehr, William Weber and others, the related yet distinct concept of classical musicianship is relatively unexplored. This chapter traces the cultural resonances of the term ‘classisch’ as it was used in the German-speaking press over the course of Grützmacher’s lifetime, arguing that it represents a complement or parallel to the idea of classic works, with an independent connection to Romantic Idealism and Hellenism. The chapter then examines the performance practice implications of classical musicianship through the lens of Grützmacher’s editions, with a particular focus on a disciplined sense of tempo, a grand and tranquil physical presence, and a highly nuanced use of the bow in the service of musical character. Viewing classical musicianship in this way clears Grützmacher’s editions of the charge of vandalism by challenging us to reconsider the ideal relationship between composer and performer, as well as the fundamental purpose of an edition.

This article revisits Bertolt Brecht’s interpretation of Mei Lanfang, whose Moscow performance reportedly sparked Brecht’s idea of the V-effect. By placing both figures within the early twentieth-century media landscape, characterized by a fascination with attractions, this exploration delves into the transmedial and transcultural currents that sculpted Brecht’s misunderstanding that Mei appeared surprising to the audience. Framed by his exposure to early, particularly silent, cinema, Brecht views Mei’s performance through a cinematic lens, further amplified by Mei’s emphasis on exhibitionist visuality and traditional Chinese theatre’s inherent attraction-based tendencies. Brecht, moreover, overlooked the historical and practical aspects of Mei’s artistry, which sought to enchant rather than shock the audience. This article endeavours, through its transmedia exploration, to cast new illuminations on the myriad pathways of interpreting global theatrical dialogues.

This article addresses the gaps between ethnographic archives and community members who are often deprived of accessing their own materials. In reflecting on results from collaborative research with a Nepalese immigrant community in Alberta, Canada, where we created a Digital Community Archive (DCA), I draw attention to the benefits of combining strategies from applied ethnomusicology and Participatory Action Research (PAR). I propose a new model for archiving in ethnomusicology, the Community Collaborative Participatory Archive (CCPA). This model can improve ethnomusicological archival practice by focusing on collaborative, egalitarian, and grassroots participation, shared roles, and authority in the archival creation and development process.

Focusing on the Sufi festival (mawsim) of Nabi Rubin, which used to take place near Jaffa in Palestine, this article explores the indigenous performance traditions that were an important part of Palestinian cultural life prior to the mass displacement of Palestinians by Zionist forces in the Nakba of 1948. Using the extinct festival of Nabi Rubin as a specific example, the article sheds light on a significant and neglected part of Palestinian theatre and performance history: indigenous Palestinian performance practices which have been omitted from the literature on Palestinian theatre. Thus the article advocates for a more inclusive approach to the study of performance that gives value to indigenous performance practices, which form a fundamental part of Palestine’s rich cultural history. It also examines the sociocultural changes that accompanied the Arab Nahda (‘renaissance’) and the manner in which it influenced cultural life in Jaffa and the festival of Nabi Rubin.

This essay takes as its point of departure the so-called ‘Verdi A’, 432Hz. From the late 1860s through to the 1880s, the opera composer was intensely preoccupied with the question of tuning, weighing in several times on the matter of where A should sit. Verdi was concerned for the strain that high tunings should place on singers’ voices. He advocated on multiple occasions for global acceptance of an A well below 440, and sent Arrigo Boito to argue in favour of A=432 at the Congresso dei Musicisti Italiani, held in Milan on 16–21 June 1881. In the 1880s, Italy remained one of the only nations in Europe that had not adopted equal temperament wholesale for fixed-tone instruments; as in the case of its spoken languages during this same period, and the locations of its A, temperament varied by region, with the southern part of the peninsula clinging to meantones. This article argues that ‘Verdi tuning’ represents the end point of a number of longer shifts in the conceptualization of musical sound, particularly in the Italian context: from temperament to tuning (accordatura); from relative conceptions of musical pitch to an absolute one; from local and regional variations towards a standardized system; from an older notion of all-encompassing nature to a presumed separation between nature and culture. Tracing this history through the Italian long nineteenth century will involve concentrating on what this article calls music-adjacent sound: that is, interrogative play with musical pitch; sound experiments from musical materials and operatic voices; instrument tuning by ear; listening for overtones; legislating preferred ratios and (eventually) frequencies for musical use; and constructing a theory of music that draws together these means of sounding. Music-adjacent sound is where the conditions for music-making were and still are established. This article argues that an attention to these sonic and nearly musical moments can demonstrate how listening and the musical imagination were cultivated outside the boundaries of any work or performance.

In this article, I argue that the musical landscape in Panama during the nineteenth century was much more active, diverse and globally connected than previously observed by authors of traditionally accepted music historiography of the country. Particularly, I discuss the heightened activity in the second half of the century through primary sources concerning violinist Miguel Iturrado (d. 1879). I further argue that the violin culture fostered by Iturrado and his contemporaries became a solid platform for cultural exchange which allowed for the development of early-twentieth-century music production in Panama. I conclude that the flourishing of numerous fin-de-siècle concert violinists, as well as the advent of the violinist-composers of dance music now known as the Azuero School in the first third of twentieth-century Panama, are directly related to Iturrado’s –and his colleagues’– musical and cultural achievements.