This essay reflects on a new digital realization by Andrew Hugill of the ‘Christian ballet’ Uspud (1892) by Erik Satie and J. P. Contamine de Latour. The creative process of making the realization entailed a critical re-examination of existing scholarship and revealed that the relationship between music and drama is closer than has previously been understood. The essay situates Uspud in the context of 1890s Montmartre and demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that it was conceived as a shadow play and scored for solo harmonium. It analyses the music in detail, considering how its motivic construction and use of timbral contrasts both supports the action and conveys the inner states of uspud himself. It considers the humorous and serious aspects of Uspud, arguing that this was a key work in the evolution of Satie’s artistic and personal identity.

This article offers an archival study of free improvisation and sibling practices at the London Musicians Collective (LMC) during this institution’s heyday in the 1970s and 80s. In the process, I seize upon Collective activities to scrutinize theories of music and democracy in contexts of improvisation, proposing that stylistic, ideological, and experiential fractures among LMC members — which were legion — index an adversarial mode of organizing that contrasts with sunnier depictions of improvisation and democratic self-determination. Such differences, I suggest, arose from fundamentally yet productively opposed articulations of subjectivity, which I regard as assuming feminist, posthuman, entrepreneurial, and other reflexive forms.

This article develops an approach to music history that centres performers and their artistic work, drawing on insights from musical performance studies. It responds to criticisms of the practice turn and builds on recent scholarship on Soviet music to contextualize the life of pianist Maria Yudina in the years 1959–63, in which she dedicated herself (at great cost) to new, avant-garde music. Case studies include Yudina’s key role in performing the first Soviet twelve-tone composition in 1961 — Andrei Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta: Fantasia Ricercata — and her advocacy of Igor Stravinsky in the build-up to his homecoming in 1962.

Hanns Eisler’s Kampfmusik, his revolutionary music for the working class, is famous for its rhythmic energy. Its steady beat has been understood as a legacy of the military march. I argue that this ‘Eisler Bass’ was instead ‘refunctioned’ from interwar German jazz. Using jazz pedagogical manuals to demonstrate how Eisler adapted the steady beat, I position Eisler’s writings and music within discourses of rhythm and rationalized factory labour. While this was central to Eisler’s political ambitions, it also led to his music participating in a larger practice of erasure of racial difference typical of the German Communist Party.

Responding to Kenneth Smith’s recent essay, I theorize that Lisztian two-dimensional sonata form and Stravinskian ‘block’ structure exhibit a tightly bound relationship in Alexander Scriabin’s late sonatas. Such analysis stitches Scriabin both backwards in time towards Liszt, through the latter’s disciple Alexander Siloti, and forwards in time towards Stravinsky and the fragmented aesthetic of much twentieth-century musical modernism. Thus Scriabin’s late works, often thought to be hermetically sealed from traditions before and after him, are situated in direct contact with two practices. Though of little note in isolation, biographical connections to Liszt and Stravinsky are also compelling from a sonata-specific perspective. I examine not just how Scriabin’s mature sonatas are Lisztian-Stravinskian, but why.

The music written for submission to the music degrees of English universities during the nineteenth century forms a significant body of works which, while important, present challenges for the historian, music analyst, and performer. Changes to the nature of music degrees, including the compositional exercises, during the nineteenth century received a mixed reception, which illustrates concerns over the separation of the ‘academic’ and ‘aesthetic’ elements of music, as well as deeper anxieties about the state and status of English music and composition. This paper examines in detail a small selection of exercises by William Crotch, F. A. G. Ouseley, and William Pole, considering the contextual and ontological problems raised by the works in light of the changing nature of music histories, narratives, and values.

In the early nineteenth century, concert reviews often judged pianists and pianos on their combined value. This critical tendency is exemplified in the professional career of virtuoso pianist Anna Caroline de Belleville. This article examines the reciprocal relationship between Belleville and her pianos — particularly Érard’s and Streicher’s — within the contexts of the technological development of piano-making and piano performance culture. I argue that the distinct advantages of Belleville’s pianos helped her develop a well-rounded pianism that combined both brilliancy and lyricism, winning her a place among the most distinguished pianists of the day. Furthermore, Belleville’s active engagement with and promotion of her pianos enhanced the instruments’ own reputation and commerciality. This understudied yet illuminating story about the interdependency of the virtuoso and her instruments (and attendant instrument makers) enriches our understanding of nineteenth-century performance culture by highlighting the inextricable relationship between technology, virtuosity, commerciality, and entrepreneurship.

In this article we ‘read against the grain’ of the archive to explore the sound world of an Indigenous rebellion against Spanish colonial rule in Chiapas in 1712. Although this topic has often interested historians and anthropologists, none of them explicitly engage the rebellion’s sonorities. Contending that a focus on sound may allow new features of the rebellion to come to light, we explore the use of sonorous objects and musical instruments in the rebels’ religious worship and military practices. Building on this analysis, we emphasize the place of ideas about ‘quietude’ within practices for violently reasserting colonial power.

This article presents the psalm differentiae in the fifteenth-century Olivetan Psalter kept at the Łódź Archdiocesan Museum, the only book of this provenance that has been identified in Poland. The author identifies psalm differentiae and determines the degree to which they belong to the most widely applied euouae schemata in musical manuscripts and to what extent this book may contains euouae melodic variants without a correspondence in the chant tradition. The codex contains single psalm cadences which, if confirmed by further source research, may be considered original.

Fact: the shellac disc — aka the 78 — was the dominant format for the circulation of sound recordings until it was eclipsed by vinyl — the LP —in the 1950s. Saying so seems obvious, indisputable. Yet within this commonplace lurks a bit of complexity. For one thing, every phonograph (aka gramophone) disc was made of many materials in addition to shellac, which made up only a portion of the whole. Somehow this one ingredient garnered synecdochical sway over all of the others, becoming our total idea of the 78 within what we might call the phonographic imaginary. For another thing, calling a ten- or twelve-inch disc played at 78 rpm a ‘format’ confounds additional uses of this same term. Suppose, for instance, we want to call ten-inch discs one format and twelve-inches another? Or suppose by ‘format’ we want to draw a distinction between discs in general — including LPs — and the (non-shellac) cylinder records played on phonographs designed specifically for them? Can ‘format’ be the correct usage in all of these cases? Both of these wrinkles, it should be clear, have less to do with fact than they have to do with language. The curiously expansive and differently imprecise meanings of shellac and format are minor media-historical conundrums of the sort that beg larger questions about media as cultural phenomena and the ways that we approach media as objects of study.

Before a cyberattack in October 2023 knocked out most of the British Library’s online resources, audible voices from the First World War were only a click away: sixty-six British soldiers, recorded in prisoner-of-war camps in Germany between 1915 and 1918, all reciting the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son.1 In their erstwhile digital home, these recordings sat alongside other surveys of English accents and dialects, offering a taste of the variety and richness of vernacular speech across the British Isles before the influence of radio and television began to iron out regional idiosyncrasies. In the prevailing mood of historical curiosity and uncanny self-recognition surrounding these recordings — English used to sound like that? — little attention was paid either to the conditions of captivity that shaped these men’s lives or to the scholarly project that produced these sounds. Recordings of English speech, in fact, made up only a small fraction of the massive wartime output of the Prussian Phonographic Commission, an interdisciplinary team of German scholars who conducted anthropological, linguistic, and musicological research on soldiers and internees from Allied countries and their colonial territories. In total, some 2600 sound recordings, comprising speech, song, and instrumental music, were made in German POW camps or nearby recording studios (Lange, p. 70). Forgotten or ignored for the better part of a century, the recordings held today in institutions in Berlin and Vienna have been the subject of increased critical attention over the past fifteen years.2 Thanks to this work, we are getting closer to understanding one of the most ambitious yet fatally flawed research projects in the history of world music.