Luciano Berio's name appears once in the 1,134-page Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (2021), yet his poetics sits among the most profound and expansive of the twentieth century. By the mid-1960s Berio was writing lucidly about tensions between synchronic and diachronic meaning. Such works as Sinfonia, the Sequenze and the electroacoustic output are radical applications of these ideas, yet they have been claimed by the proponents of the very structures they challenge and their meanings effectively reduced, notwithstanding Berio's insistence and clarity across his substantial writings. This article characterises Berio's work according to his poetics, demonstrating the ways in which Sinfonia actively stages the mechanisms of musical meaning, before situating Berio's writing in a context of contemporary theories of meaning. Particular comparison is made to the work of Harold Bloom, whose words transformed poetic discourse in the 1970s.

One of the world's most enduring and successful cultural diplomacy organizations, the British Council (BC) has played a prominent role in promoting and exporting British theatre, literature, and language across the globe since its founding in 1934. A key component of the BC's self-proclaimed remit of “forging links between Britain and other countries through cultural exchange,” the organization's Drama Division has over its lifetime worked to sponsor and facilitate the overseas touring of a significant number of British theatrical enterprises, exporting both large-scale national company productions with substantial casts and a repertoire of shows, as well as individual actors, directors, and academics embarking on speaking tours. From the stage, renowned actors and star names such as Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Vivien Leigh, Peggy Ashcroft, and John Gielgud were routinely chosen by the BC to appear in series of “theatrical manifestations,” serving in dual capacities both as actors in productions and ambassadors for a nation—the word “manifestation” being the BC's own preferred terminology used to refer to the export of a cultural event during the middle of the past century. Yet unlike comparable accounts of the relationship between the Arts Council and theatre, we possess no systematic study of the BC's involvement in this field, meaning that fundamental questions about the nature, range, and impact of the BC's cultural activity remain unanswered. Indeed, until comparatively recently, the history of the BC has failed to generate much scholarly interest at all, but the nature of its imbrication within British theatrical culture in particular remains severely occluded.

The practice surrounding Éliane Radigue's Occam Océan works may be read as a new form of work concept, one which poses a productive contradiction against the work concept as it has been (and in some cases has been forgotten) and the work concept as we experience it today. Occam Océan poses a challenge to conventional conceptual understandings on many fronts, namely the practice's lack of notation; its collaborative creation; its particular structural criteria; its contingent, iterative and combinatorial manifestations; and, perhaps most significantly, its social reinscription within bodies. By historicising her work against the established work concept structures and identifying how its qualities create friction against them, Radigue's music is shown to create a small rupture at the heart of the concept itself, demonstrating the possibility of establishing radically alternative practices of music exchange and discourse.

Emanating beyond the confines of academia, the poignant narrative of the renowned Turkish thespian Afife Jale has garnered widespread recognition within Türkiye. Amid a pantheon of successors, her tale stands as the most profoundly heartrending. It has been immortalized through theatrical productions and cinematic adaptations. Despite the widespread familiarity with her story, the enigmatic underpinnings of her tragedy have perpetually shrouded it in mystery. In an effort to cast light upon the chronicle of her life, a convergence of political and societal truths has emerged. Afife Jale's story, in its very essence, embodies the ideals expounded by Joan W. Scott. The realm of feminist historiography endeavors to bring prominence to women's narratives, elucidating their endeavors to champion their entitlements and autonomy within historical contexts. It seeks to delve into the causalities behind the historical obscurity that has veiled women's contributions, while also revealing the obstructions that have curtailed their authority and efficacy. This article aspires to achieve this objective by scrutinizing the careers of the first Turkish Muslim actresses, Afife Jale (1902–41) and Bedia Muvahhit (1896–1994), who commenced their artistic journeys at the onset of the twentieth century. Whereas Afife Jale's stage debut in 1920 coincided with the twilight of Ottoman rule, Bedia Muvahhit made her inaugural appearance in 1923, the very year that saw the founding of the Turkish Republic. Despite this seemingly minor difference, the professional journeys of these two actresses were characterized by stark disparities. Afife Jale bore the weight of authoritarian oppression and persecution, and her legacy remained largely overlooked, even after the Turkish Republic was founded. In contrast, Bedia Muvahhit thrived under the patronage and backing of the political elite, leading to a lengthy and prosperous career.

Gwendolen Bishop is a name that appears in the margins of my recent account of the English avant-garde theatre. Prior to that she barely made it even into the margins, and then often with some rather significant indecision as to how actually to spell her name. The aim of this essay is to retrieve her from the margins and bring her more centrally into view. In doing so I consciously weave together her arts practices and her personal life, for these are deeply connected. The making of an avantist culture in early twentieth-century England was done not simply by arts experiments but also by kinds of behavior that challenged dominant ideas. In our Western twenty-first century we note and make much of Edwardian behaviors that contested assumptions about gender and sexuality, but we should note, alongside that, some equally striking challenges to ideas about class. Both are apparent in the Bishop story, which I tell more or less as a biographical narrative. The danger when one recovers a person from the shadows is that, in trying to situate them among their contemporaries, one writes overmuch about those contemporaries, such that our person fades again into the mists. With our biographical focus fixed solidly on her we can, I hope, discover how Gwendolen Bishop made her very particular contribution to this exciting cultural period on the eve of modernism.

Unlike the pointillist-serial aesthetics of the mid-twentieth century, contemporary music employs narrative strategies that stimulate listeners to form mental constructs. This involves using the potential of mid-level formal units to establish orientation points for the listener, exploring two repetitive models (deadlocked time and frozen time) that emerge as discrete building blocks from the current cognitive-theoretical perspective. Through analogical thinking, this article seeks to explain the potential references of these repetition-occurrences towards a temporal suspension and provides multiple examples based on selected passages from Ivan Fedele (b. 1953), Matthias Pintscher (b. 1971), Gérard Pesson (b. 1958), Unsuk Chin (b. 1961) and Michael Jarrell (b. 1958). This inquiry suggests an apprehension capable of bringing an expressive stand to the forefront. It also scrutinises how cognitive approaches revolving around analogical thinking can be employed extensively in the analysis of post-tonal music.

Reading the news about theatre in Germany during the past few years, it is hard to avoid the impression that something new is happening: a theatre culture that long emphasized politics now just as often emphasizes ethics. There were the 2022 protests in Munich over claimed anti-Semitism in the play Vögel (Birds of a Kind) by Wajdi Mouawad, which led the Metropoltheater to cancel its planned production. Nicolas Stemann and Benjamin von Blomberg tried to make programming and ensemble changes to the Schauspielhaus Zürich, which they co-led, but the institution's governing board decided not to renew their contracts amid accusations that the theatre had become too “woke” for its audiences. Most prominently, a new artistic team at the prestigious Theatertreffen festival in Berlin curated in 2023 a series of events to coincide with its traditional presentation of the year's ten “most notable” productions. These events included a “Responsibility Treffen” that looked “at how we can show our responsibility toward those who have lost the personal and structural circumstances necessary for working in the theatre.”

How much is enough? The relevance of this question comes from individual expectations regarding value. What is value and how does it manifest through our daily interactions? There is a qualitative difference between the concept of value and individual and collective values. Is there such a thing as a common good when it comes to either? Values are a social construct formed through a process of analysis, dialogue, and assessment within any given community. Though each individual's value system has varying degrees of difference, an agreed-upon system of values is created within and through communication, communion, and coalition. In contemporary societies, it seems the importance of unified community values has diminished in favor of the individual due to the rise of late capitalism, consumer culture, mediatization, political polarization, and the various signposts of neoliberalism. Postdramatic scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann states, “It is a fundamental fact of today's Western societies that all human experiences (life, eroticism, happiness, recognition) are tied to commodities or more precisely their consumption and possession (and not to a discourse).” Lehmann's assertion leads me to ask some striking questions relating to the theatrical practices that guide this essay. Namely, how have large-scale social systems of the contemporary era increasingly divested from community values, instead opting for smaller and smaller factions of identification? Without belief in a larger community good, what use is democracy?