This article is an attempt to understand music theory from the perspective of written and sounding media. It examines three radically different music-theoretical practices, which operate with different forms of written notation and different musical instruments, and have surprisingly different purposes in mind: the monochord-based theory of Franchinus Gaffurius (1518), the siren-based theory of Wilhelm Opelt (1834) and the piano-and-score-based theory commonly practised in our age. The instruments used in these three music theories hold the key to a fuller understanding: they can be understood as ‘epistemic things’ – that is, in producing sounds, these objects simultaneously produce knowledge about music. From a media-archaeological perspective, I suggest, these three music-theoretical practices stand emblematically for Pythagorean, digital and textual approaches to music.

The MS Modena, Biblioteca Estense e Universitaria, α.F.9.9 is by far the most lavish collection produced in the short-lived history of the musical frottola. In its pages, unassuming four-voice secular settings are preceded by citations from Pliny and Isidore and surrounded by dazzling illuminations of birds, fruits and plants. If splendour is never amiss in gifts, one must wonder what the relationship was between the components of this intriguing artefact. In this article I investigate the gift value of the source by examining the musical repertory and style in conjunction with its other features. I propose that musical strambotti enabled fifteenth-century educated Italians to perform symbolic gestures associated with ancient music. The repertory was also perfectly congruous with the poetic and decorative choices made for the manuscript. The examination of this peculiar source helps shed more light on the musical strambotto, its uses and its implied cultural associations.

Facsimiles of musical autographs are typically thought to require photography, and to have a primary purpose of clarifying composers’ intentions. But there was a robust culture of music facsimile prior to photography. Made by transfer lithography, these facsimiles served different purposes and reading habits. The activity of collecting handwriting samples was paramount, as was the idea that handwriting was a mirror of character. This article surveys ways of using and finding meaning in composer autographs in the 1820s to the 1840s, focusing especially on music facsimiles in Paris. Here, composers used facsimiles to help shape their public image, and publishers used them to entice consumers. When facsimiles reproduced documents of friendship, they crossed private and public expression in ways that could be advantageous or problematic, as seen through a look at the publication in facsimile of a Rossini waltz by the Revue et gazette musicale and the ensuing legal battles.

This article explores the patronage relationship between Harriet Grote and Jenny Lind during the latter's visits to London in 1847, 1848 and 1849. Aiming to highlight the often neglected affective dimensions of individual music patronage in this period, it discusses Grote's activities as Lind's agent and chaperone as well as her efforts to support Lind in more personal ways and to create a home-like environment for her. It is argued that Grote's varied roles as Lind's patron should be interpreted in the context of an intense personal interest in the singer, and are characterized by a complex combination of public and private types of support. These, in turn, correspond to public and private music practice as settings for patronage, revealing the interdependence of these two modes of music-making in the period, especially in the case of elite music culture.

This article considers the statuomaniacal impulse sweeping Paris in the first years of the twentieth century, and how contemporary interest in the animation of antiquities resulted in new ways of seeing. Despite the shared aspects of setting and choreographic inspiration, Daphnis et Chloé and L'après-midi d'un faune staged profoundly divergent conceptions of how bodies could and should move, a result of emerging optical modes.

It has been claimed that Pavel Haas's string quartet ‘From the Monkey Mountains’ (1925) demonstrates the composer's alignment with the ‘Western’ musical avant-garde of the 1920s. However, Haas's avant-garde affiliations remain largely unexplained, as does the influence of Leoš Janáček, with whom Haas studied. Combining the methods of music analysis, semiotics and discourse analysis, I explain how Haas reconciled Janáčekian compositional technique with the ideas underpinning the contemporary Czechoslovak avant-garde movement known as Poetism. Focusing particularly on notions of the body, the grotesque and carnival, I propose an interpretative framework for and a reading of Haas's quartet ‘From the Monkey Mountains’. In doing so, I also illuminate the aesthetic and cultural context of Haas's music from the 1920s, which has received little attention in previous scholarship.

This article documents and analyses a creative collaboration between the composer Jeremy Thurlow and the violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved in the production of Ouija, a work for solo violin and laptop computer. The article situates the account of this creative process within recent literature on distributed and collaborative creativity, and focuses on three aspects of the project: verbal interaction between the two musicians, analysed in terms of ‘creative-talk’ and ‘face-talk’, and the relationship between immediate and more contextual concerns (‘inside/outside the room’); a quantitative analysis of changes in the musical material, focusing on timing; and a qualitative analysis of the role of the violinist's embodied and instrumental engagement with the music. The article discusses the findings in relation to forwards-orientated (process) and backwards-orientated (product) conceptions of creativity, the operation of different social components in creative collaboration and the relationship between craft, history and embodiment.

Drawing on the tradition of Formenlehre, this article puts forward a methodological historicism as a means of mediating between the disciplinary expectations of musical analysis, on the one hand, and philosophical aesthetics, on the other. Stylistic developments in the later music of Frank Bridge, perhaps British music's best claim to a high modernist of the generation of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, are illuminated by means of Theodor W. Adorno's notion of musical ‘reification’. A comparative analysis of the complementary modernism of Bridge's contemporary Ralph Vaughan Williams is also put forward, and a critical light shone on recent writing on British musical modernism in general.

The Studio di Fonologia Musicale of Milan, Italy's first electronic music studio, opened in 1955. Housed in the national broadcasting (RAI) studios in Milan, the studio was founded by two celebrated Italian composers: Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. The institution is often remembered nowadays for being the first electronic music studio to focus its activity on the human voice. As I argue, this focus was not only of an aesthetic nature, but rather reflected long-standing political and intellectual conceptions of voice, speech and public space that were rooted in Italy's early days as a republic, and in mid-twentieth-century Milan as the flagship city for this newly achieved political modernity.

Via a longitudinal case study of a studio project (Middlewood Sessions, 2004–12), this research explores processes of music-making in the increasingly prevalent context of the project studio to give an insight into contemporary music-making practices. Predicated upon technologies of decreasing size but increasing processing power, project studios represent a diversification of musical creativity in terms of the persons and locations of music production. Increasingly mobile technologies lead to increasingly mobile practices of music production, which presents a challenge to the seemingly simple question: where is the project studio? In response, I propose an ontology of project-studio music-making that sets out what conditions have to be met for location, as an active proposition, to take place.

In the 1950s, using electronic devices to make music seemed a new paradigm for composers eager to remove the effects of interpretation on their relationship with their audience. The promise was that compositional ideas could be directly made into sound with the help of a technician whose task it was to carry out instructions. By making a new realization of Stockhausen's Studie II, composed in 1954, I interrogate many of the original techniques and practices, and show that there are many sites which require interpretation and raise issues of performance practice. The implication of these discoveries is that there may be advantages to an analysis of early electronic music of the 1950s and 1960s from the perspective of the practice of instrumental music, and that where there are references to ‘technicians’, great care should be taken to understand and appreciate the range of musical skills often required by such individuals. This approach to realization also raises serious questions about the ontology of electronic music.