Starting in the 1830s, French musicians began to fully engage with the concept of nostalgia as an affective category and as a musical trait. The deliberate artistic process of naming music and musical works as ‘nostalgia’ contributed to the demedicalization of the term while transforming its original meaning as homesickness into a spectrum of spatiotemporal emotions. Musical renditions of nostalgia also displaced expressions and discussions of this emotion away from the countryside, where it had originally been rooted, towards the city. Musicians thus directly participated in the transformation of nostalgia into a commodity, a fashionable product that could be purchased in music stores, experienced firsthand in entertainment venues, and tailored to the needs and desires of an urban population.

This article traces the shift in the evocation of nostalgia in music and the musical press during the nineteenth century in Paris, where it became most prevalent in dozens of vocal romances and instrumental pieces. The compositions that I analyse, rather than forming a unified depiction of the city, offer a range of sonorous and thematic ideas that provide a more comprehensive understanding of the place nostalgia played in the imagination of an urban population increasingly conscious of its artistic value and impact. I thus uncover three main stages in this shift, which show how successive generations of musicians, influenced by different attitudes to urbanity, conceived nostalgia. I investigate why composers drawn to nostalgia were attracted to certain types of musical and formal models, what these choices reveal about their understanding of nostalgia and its purpose, and, more importantly, what this musical nostalgia sounded like. This article provides the first overview of works that deliberately use nostalgia as an explicit topic across genres and generations in nineteenth-century Paris.

Approaches to different listening practices rarely extend beyond human ears. During the nineteenth century, anatomists’ fascination with non-human hearing emerged in tandem with the professionalization of comparative anatomy. This existed in tension with the professionalization of European music criticism, where the only model for listening was human. Theories of sensationalism, developed particularly in Feuerbach’s and Marx’s writings on the human senses, grounded an anthropocentric outlook, yet numerous commentators considered animal hearing as materially related to that of humans. This article traces the process of decentring human listening. It uncovers a discourse on the materiality of the senses, and asks when did the penny drop that human hearing was neither the only aural reality, nor necessarily the ‘highest’ in the natural world.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s early opera Oprichnik is overdue for rediscovery as one of the composer’s most overt forays into the queer themes that critics and scholars have long appreciated in his mature works. Oprichnik features the composer’s most extensive and provocative employment of travesti in its depiction of a historical figure mostly remembered for his rumoured sexual relationship with tsar Ivan IV. This paper takes a detailed look into this and other queer features of the opera within their cultural, historical and biographical contexts. These contexts, including the development of trouser roles in Russian opera, transformations in public discourse on sexuality and gender, and Tchaikovsky’s relationship with his pupil Vladimir Shilovsky, help bring into focus the special appeal the sixteenth-century Muscovy of Ivan the Terrible and his oprichniki had as a topos for a Russian artist experimenting in the artistic depiction of sexual and gender variance.

The story of opera in what was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire tends to be particularly convoluted, given the complexity of the region’s history and its political twists and turns. It is perhaps not a stretch to say that nowhere else in Europe had the same level of interest in opera and art music combined with the remarkable mutability of borders, governments and nationalist allegiances across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; indeed, as the three books discussed here show in great detail, opera was a key reason for, and indicator of, the social and political ferment of Habsburg Central Europe. Ranging across a chronological scope that stretches from the eighteenth century into the twenty-first, each book explores operatic life in one of three important regional capitals: Vienna, Prague and Budapest, with occasional departures to other places like Brno/Brünn, Sarajevo and Lviv/Lwów/Lemberg. Each volume focuses on the work of a single canonic composer: Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) and Jacques Offenbach (1819–80), though in the final case calling the works discussed Offenbach’s is tenuous at best. Finally, each book uses the lens of reception history, exploring the context for operatic creation and performance, and how the meanings of the various operas examined here – Die Frau ohne Schatten (1917), Don Giovanni (1787), Orphée aux enfers (1858) and others – changed according to the shifts in various political, cultural and social environments over time.

In the newly fluid territory between jazz, rock, performance art, and the avant-garde in the late 1960s, members of the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) in Paris initiated experiments in improvised electronic music. This article focuses on two iterations of a group centred on Alain Savouret, Pierre Boeswillwald, and Christian Clozier, who were either students on the GRM’s 1968 course at the Paris Conservatoire or researchers at the GRM. The article follows the group’s development from a practice of ‘live musique concrète’ with hand-built electroacoustic devices, tape effects, and synthesizers to a pluralist improvisation that engaged collaborators from free jazz and European and non-European folk traditions. This history results in two lines of argument: the first concerns the relationship between new electronic instruments and new modes of performance around 1970, while the second concerns the promise of electronic music as the site of a cross-cultural fusion of genres and traditions.

Louise Farrenc’s Nonet, which features an allusion to Beethoven’s Third Symphony, premiered to positive reviews in 1850. Around the same time, Farrenc successfully petitioned for her salary as a piano professor at the Paris Conservatoire to match that of her male colleagues. Indeed, much of Farrenc’s career involved subtly challenging the gender norms and social boundaries of nineteenth-century France. In this article, I examine Farrenc’s career in terms of nineteenth-century French feminist praxis. I analyse Farrenc’s sociohistorical context to demonstrate how she played by and subverted gender norms, and examine her Conservatoire students’ careers to illustrate her support of female students, providing them with instruction and performance opportunities. Finally, I read Farrenc’s Nonet as a musical challenge to normative gender roles, a nod to the declining popularity of her colleague and rival Henri Herz, and a response to the 1848 Revolution.

Brazilian sculptor Ernesto Neto’s gigantic artwork ‘Our Ship Drum Earth’ was featured in Lisbon for five months in 2024. Taking the form of a ship, the piece played on and critiqued the omnipresent nautical emblem of Lisbon’s iconography that celebrates the ‘Age of Discovery’ as sacrosanct history of Portugal. The installation contained percussion instruments from diverse cultures around the world, making reference to the musical traditions that were encountered and forged through Portuguese colonialism. During the exhibition, visitors were invited to freely play the instruments, forging musical hybridities that might represent new, convivial possibilities for global conversation. The ship also hosted several performance events featuring predominantly immigrant ensembles from ex-colonies of the Portuguese Empire. In this article, I argue that, through performance, the sculpture accumulated new meanings, providing a foundation to experimentally and collaboratively respond to Neto’s invitation to musically construct decolonial futures arising from the postcolonial present.