Another scholarly journal has apparently decided that no book should be reviewed by somebody named in the book’s acknowledgements. Margaret Bent has over seventy names in her main list, and she warmly thanks or praises dozens of others in the course of her book, which is a definitive report on the state of play in research on the motet repertory of the years 1300–1420. It is safe to say that nobody who is at all qualified to review the book is omitted. That is partly because Bent has been inviting authorities from across the world to speak at her monthly All Souls seminars for over thirty years, and since the time of the Covid lockdown the seminars have been seen internationally on Zoom, with respondents also from across the world. An astonishing and massive public has contributed to making her book what it is. (Declaration: I am indeed named, but I learnt so much from the book that I feel required to make my statement.)

Over a quarter of a century ago, as an insecure doctoral candidate at a US university, I was faced with the overwhelming task of presenting my research progress as a stipendium fellow at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, in front of not only the Foundation’s supportive staff but also musicologists affiliated with the Foundation as members of the Board of Trustees. After I finished my less-than-satisfactory presentation on the German composer Wolfgang Rihm, whose music resists tightly knit modernist compositional language, one very prominent musicologist from a Berlin university made a comment that still resonates with me today, especially when I advise non-Japanese students on topics related to Japan’s musical culture: he said that I, as a Japanese person studying at a US university, was ‘brave’ for tackling ‘one of the most “German” composers of our time’. He also muttered that I would need to read Adorno (which I had done but did not incorporate into my presentation), since Adorno’s texts are key to understanding the ‘Germanness’ of Rihm’s music. Perhaps it was his way of kindly reminding me that I would have no chance of acquiring a career as a German music specialist. However, I was still taken aback, especially since my nationality had never been a factor in evaluating my research output in the US.

The erection of the Berlin Wall in November 1961 gave the separation between the West and the Eastern Bloc, and particularly between the two Germanies, an enduring symbol. It also concretized the division of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, which had been separated by the Second World War, in a seemingly unsurmountable way. But while the wall made cross-border academic collaborations considerably more difficult, it did not prevent them entirely. This article relies on previously unexplored primary sources to relate and contextualize the extraordinary story of how two ethnomusicologists were able to bring together a large part of the cylinder collections of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, even as the geopolitical situation surrounding them grew ever more tense. From 1966 to 1967, Kurt Reinhard, then head of the Berlin Phonogram Archive and the Ethnomusicology Department of the Ethnological Museum in West Berlin, and Erich Stockmann, an academic employee of the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin and caretaker of the archival recordings returned by the Soviets, succeeded in exchanging and copying over 5,000 cylinder recordings and their documentation despite a litany of political and financial difficulties. Their collaboration illuminates a little-known aspect of the history of this foundational archive, while raising important questions about ethnomusicology’s political history and the roles the Cold War and Second World War played in the discipline’s formation.

In 1911, Italy invaded the region now known as Libya, then part of the Ottoman Empire, as part of a larger Italian colonizing foray into northern Africa. Many scholars have pointed out in recent years how intense the sonic environments of war can be, and the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12 was no exception. Not only was the war itself full of sound and sonic media such as gramophones and telephones, the narration of the war, including most (in)famously that of Futurist author F.T. Marinetti, focused from the outset on the sonic intensities of the conflict. In addition, the war became a site for the cultivation of sonic media: Guglielmo Marconi not only deployed his radio technology for the Italian cause, he personally travelled to Libya to test and refine radio in the unique geographies there. In this article, I consider these Italian-centric narratives of war alongside accounts of the sonic experiences of the Arab and Ottoman Turkish forces in their resistance to the Italian occupation, considering the sonic techniques deployed both for and against Italian colonialism. I focus on three particular sonic techniques of that resistance: first, ‘counterlistening’, or ways of listening that subvert empire’s auralities; second, ululation (mostly by women) on the battlefield and beyond; and third, jihad, especially its sonic articulations as a set of declarations, battle cries, religious chanting, and even poetry. For both sides, sound played a much greater role in the war than just being a by-product of activity; these sonic techniques both shaped the war and were shaped by it, producing new forms of sonic experience that played important roles in constituting the colonial and anticolonial in Libya.

Recently, over the course of a month in Taipei, I took in twenty-five opera performances, each opening a window onto the vast and varied world of Chinese opera.1 The performances were drawn from different genres: Peking opera (both canonical repertoire and new works), Taiwanese opera (kua-á-hì, or gezaixi), Hakka opera, Beiguan opera, Kunqu opera, Yu opera (Henan opera) and glove puppet opera (pòo-tē-hì). Although I was well aware of Taiwan’s vibrant operatic and theatrical scene – indeed, it was the very reason I pursued this residency – I was nonetheless surprised by the volume, variety and vitality of the performances I experienced. My visit coincided with one of the peak periods in the ritual calendar (the third lunar month), during which one could easily choose from more than ten outdoor opera performances each day, held at various temples throughout the greater Taipei area. In addition, meticulously crafted and lavishly mounted productions were featured at formal venues such as the Taiwan Traditional Theatre Center and Dadaocheng Theater. The performing culture of Chinese opera in Taiwan nowadays remains vibrant, imaginative, colourful and remarkably robust.