This article reconsiders ‘Marty’s tune’ (La note Martinet), a texted dance song of the thirteenth century that survives in two sources, one with musical notation. It evaluates older understandings of the song’s form and generic designation, attempting to use poetic variants between the texts to understand the factors that might have preceded the writing down of this rarely notated song type.

This article sketches an interpretation of Olga Neuwirth’s Le Encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie by focusing on the song by the Vocaloid Hatsune Miku in the last section of the composition. This Vocaloid song is disturbing because it expresses a conflicted form of subjectivity that is typical of our time. The article considers four different ways to read this expression: as pop-cultural negation of subjectivity, as postmodern celebration of singularity, as post-revolutionary longing for collectivity or as the contemporary mythical counterpart of the capitalist subject form. I argue that the fourth interpretation seems the most promising. According to this interpretation, Neuwirth stages Hatsune Miku as the sirene of digitalised capitalism – a technological mythos against which the contemporary subjectivity tries to constitute itself.

This article explores the relationship between musical aesthetics and evolving submarine imaginaries in an age of unprecedented threats to the ocean. The discussion is structured around two case studies: Björk's performance of the song ‘Oceania’ at the opening ceremonies of the 2004 Olympics, and John Luther Adams's 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning Become Ocean for orchestra. In these examples, culturally and historically situated visions of the ocean are modulated by compositional and sonic devices that ground oceanic imaginaries in bodily sensation. Björk and Adams cultivate an oceanic aesthetics: musical sensations that align with the phenomenology of submersion or that address the materiality and ecology of the undersea. Throughout the article the author asks what music and musicology can offer to the interdisciplinary endeavours dubbed the ‘blue humanities’. A turn to music foregrounds listening as a mode of perception and scholarly enquiry less defined by terrestrial categories. Music and sound-based art can be an intellectual resource in cases where visual terms and frameworks have a tough time accounting for the specificity of the oceanic environment.

In her influential 1988 essay “Feminist Theory, Poststructuralism, and Performance,” American performance theorist Peggy Phelan documented her “most disturbingly interesting” exposure to what she calls “Eastern dance forms” at an international gathering of scholars, performers, and the like.1 The conference is said not only to have fostered strenuous discussions of the female role in such traditions as Balinese dance-drama, Indian kathakali, Japanese kabuki, and “Chinese opera,” but also to have featured the performance of a youthful male performer of female roles in the Indian odissi tradition. Astonished, if not disappointed, by the conference’s disengagement with the politics of representing female roles, Phelan asserts that “[s]uch classical female roles played by men or women do not, by definition and design, penetrate the ‘identity’ of any female; they are surface representations whose appeal exists precisely as surface.”2 And this “surface femininity” is said to hinge upon “immediate recognition of the comic artifice and reverent idealization of the form,” which “reminds the spectator of the absence of the female (the lack) rather than of her presence.”3

This study investigates the extent to which a group of Australian preservice and early career secondary school music teachers of East Asian heritage are likely to teach aspects of their heritage music. It is positioned against a background of national multiculturalism and approaches to cultural inclusivity in Australian society, as well as the long-standing notion of ‘Asia literacy’ in Australian education and the national cross-curriculum priority (C-CP) of ‘Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia’. The study’s findings indicate that the participants identified with their ancestral cultures to varying extents, generally had very limited knowledge of and experience with their heritage music and in general were reluctant to teach their heritage music. The authors suggest that the slow rate of progress towards culturally diversifying Australian music classrooms is related to complex matters and attitudes surrounding race in the country. The study proposes developing Cayari’s concept of ‘Asian spaces’ as a means of increasing the presence of East Asian music in Australian schools and of supporting teachers of East Asian heritage in the workplace. Finally, the authors emphasise that culturally diversifying the content of music classrooms can be undertaken by teachers of any cultural background.

Recent governmental figures have demonstrated that the number of students taking an examination in A-Level Music across England has fallen by 41% in eleven years (Ofqual, 2023a). Furthermore, areas with lower POLAR ratings (i.e. historical rates of participation in higher education) and greater levels of deprivation correlate with lower uptake of A-Level Music (Whittaker et al., 2019). These findings have profound implications for equitable access to music education, especially at advanced levels. Against this challenging background, Sandbach School, the Love Music Trust and the Royal Northern College of Music have sought to respond by creating a new partnership approach to A-Level Music. Since September 2019, this specialist course has drawn students together from all over Cheshire whose access to A-Level Music has been geographically limited. Specifically aiming to facilitate progression into higher education, this course provides the young musicians with musical enrichment activities that are additional to the core curriculum, including performance opportunities, advanced musicianship classes, chamber music and instrumental tuition at the Royal Northern College of Music. This article presents a critical discourse analysis of data collected from these students and their teachers, contextualising their experiences within a broader analysis of recent socio-cultural trends and the associated political climate that has impacted on the provision of music education within English schools. Findings point to an important rearticulation of the meaning of ‘Music Hub’, where putting schools at the centre and enriching this provision through strategic partnerships with local ensembles, music services and higher education institutions can build musical cultures and communities that better enable equitable access to high-level music education and progression pathways into higher education.

In 1905, the Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor published his Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, a set of character pieces that includes arrangements of sixteen African American spirituals for piano solo. Despite this music's lasting popularity, scholars have done little to contextualize Coleridge-Taylor's statement that he wished to create a Black parallel to Brahms's Hungarian Dances or Dvořák's Slavonic Dances; most see the pieces as reflecting the influence of Dvořák. Yet these character pieces diverge from both Dvořák's and Brahms's precedent by including source citations with both melodies and lyrics. Coleridge-Taylor's compositional approach and his use of citations is much closer to Grieg and Stanford—two other role models whom scholars have regularly overlooked. The citations also rebalance the interpretative framework of the character piece as a genre, and, like W. E. B. Du Bois's use of spirituals in The Souls of Black Folk, can support several explanations. On one hand, they provide hidden texts for these instrumental pieces and provide a first line of defense against intentional (and bigoted) misunderstandings of the music. On the other hand, they also act as reference points for readers who want to learn more about the African American spiritual. Coleridge-Taylor's concern with cultural authenticity undoubtedly resulted from his close interactions with American spiritual singers, such as Frederick J. Loudin and Harry T. Burleigh. In this sense, the Negro Melodies served as Coleridge-Taylor's intervention in ongoing debates among Black Americans about the value and legacy of the spiritual.

Instrumental tuition is by many seen as the cornerstone of higher music education (HME) performance programmes. An increasing body of research looks into its strengths and weaknesses and calls for development in a number of ways. This study contributes to this debate by exploring the ways in which international instrumental tuition practices are different, however limited to Western classical music practices. The article reports on a qualitative interview study of 12 students with experiences from 11 countries across America, Europe and Asia. Analysis of the interview data suggests that instrumental tuition practices are different when it comes to teacher positions, lesson formats and social organisation, responsibility and student voice and subject matter foci. These differences seem to correspond to social, musical and pedagogical structures and assumptions, and they could, as a result, be seen as differences on an international, institutional and individual level. The study suggests further that instrumental tuition practices could be seen as various manifestations of and negotiations between two broad archetypes in education: a teacher-centred archetype and a student-centred archetype. Increased knowledge about the variety of instrumental tuition practices is potentially a crucial matter in the field of HME, not the least due to power issues, and the study provides an analytical framework to analyse international, institutional and individual practices.