Lady Gaga's work is noted for her references to the work of other artists and is often criticized for borrowed content that is perceived as exceeding mere generic norms. In this study, we engage closely with the musical and lyrical content of two songs from her extended play release, The Fame Monster (2009), with the goal of identifying and interpreting the intertextual pathways that led to these works. Relying upon theories of intertextuality, we unearth a network of texts invoked in each of her songs and consider these connections to comprise a musical genealogy, invoking Foucault's conception of genealogy as the process of revealing historical knowledge.

Music technology undergraduate degree programmes are a relatively new phenomenon in British higher education, situated at the intersection of music, digital technologies, and sound art. Such degrees have exploded in popularity over the past fifteen years. Yet the social and cultural ramifications of this development have not yet been analysed. In looking comparatively at the demographics of both traditional music and music technology degrees, we highlight a striking bifurcation: traditional music degrees draw students with higher social class profiles than the British national averages, while their gender profile matches the wider student population; music technology degrees, by contrast, are overwhelmingly male and lower in terms of social class profile. We set these findings into analytical dialogue with wider historical processes, offering divergent interpretations of our findings in relation to a series of musical, technological, educational, social, political, and cultural-institutional developments in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We ask what such developments bode for future relations between music, gender, and class in the UK.

This article offers a revisionist perspective on the contested notion of Witold Lutosławski's authenticity as a modernist composer. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to musicology's increasingly nuanced narration of the story of musical modernism. The case is argued partly by relating Lutosławski's output to broader traditions in twentieth-century modernism, including musical representations of alienation, loss, violence, and nostalgia. Crucially, however, it is also argued by interpreting the more conventionally gratifying aspects of his pieces as something other than a hedonistic cop out. Adapting ideas from Michel Foucault, such passages are deemed heterotopian in function and interpreted in a wider-ranging sociohistorical context including Poland's responses to modernism and to Soviet Cold War oppression. The article's other main objective, therefore, is to interpret as heterotopian (and thus alternatively authentic) the expressive, structural and symbolic functions of passages in Lutosławski's works, thereby introducing Foucault's little-known idea to a wider audience of music scholars – given the concept's potential to contribute to critical explorations of a much wider diversity of musical texts and phenomena. Analysis of Lutosławski's Les espaces du sommeil for baritone and orchestra (1975) interconnects these strands.

Queen's ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (1975) has been the subject of many academic analyses; the song has not been considered, however, in the context of Queen's wider output. This article examines ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in relation to Queen's idiolect as identified from the group's songs written between 1973 and 1975. ‘Idiolect’ refers to the common musical details of an artist's output or segment of their output. I subdivide the category of an idiolect to include sonic patterns and compositional strategies. The former accounts for patterns that are consistent in their presentation across songs, the latter accounts for patterns that differ in their presentation across songs. The formal and harmonic structures of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ reflect the group's common compositional strategies; the song's textural arrangements highlight Queen's sonic patterns. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ occupies a unique place in Queen's output, as the first song to present all the major elements of the group's idiolect.

Focusing on a multimedia practice labelled ‘intermedia art’, this article shows how experimental musical practices complicate popular characterizations of the idea of politics in 1960s Japan that are polarized by their focus on extraordinary economic growth, on the one hand, and radical protest, on the other. Like their counterparts in art, experimental musicians and artists such as Shiomi Mieko, Kosugi Takehisa, and Yuasa Jōji took an interest in everyday sounds, spaces, and technologies as sites for artistic exploration. However, their musical approaches did not share the overtly political engagement with the scenes of protest playing out in the public sphere that played a central role in the visual arts. Through an investigation of the notion of ambiguity in the acoustics of intermedia, the article seeks to re-examine understandings about the role of sound in shifting perceptions about political participation.

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) is recognized as one of France's most well-known film directors, directing six films over a thirty-year period. This article argues that his film soundscapes occupy a unique position in the history of French film sound, providing a key link between contemporary experimentation in art music and the sonic experimentation of the New Wave filmmakers. This argument is best exemplified by Le Testament d'Orphée (1960), which represents the apotheosis of Cocteau's artistic output as well as the stage at which he was most confident in handling the design of a film soundscape. Indeed, Cocteau was comfortable with the selection and arrangement of sonic elements to the extent that his regular collaborator Georges Auric became almost dispensable. Nevertheless, Auric's willing support enriched the final film and Cocteau created a highly self-reflexive work through his arrangement of the composer's music with pre-existing musical borrowings. Cocteau's engagement with contemporary developments in film and art music can be heard throughout this film, highlighting his position as a poet simultaneously establishing himself in the canon of art and looking to the future.

The large-scale structure of Anton Webern's String Quartet (1905) is an ongoing conundrum in music scholarship. Initially inspired by Giovanni Segantini's Trittico della natura, the quartet has been interpreted by most commentators in terms of a tripartite episodic form. Through the lens of rotational theory, this article puts forward an understanding of the quartet that interprets it in dialogue with the sonata paradigm. Based on this reading, it will be argued that the quartet bears strong links to the early modernist discourse on musical form. This perspective will be further explored, with reference to Webern's manuscripts and sketches, in the way the quartet engages with the Zarathustra trope. In casting the quartet in this light, this article challenges the common historiographical interpretation that sees it merely as a precursor to the high modernism of Webern's later development.

This article argues that early twentieth-century debates about both musical modernism and the idea of Europe were conditioned by prevailing attitudes towards autonomy. It will challenge the current rendering of modernist autonomy as depoliticized by showing how the attribution of ‘cosmopolitan’ characteristics to the music and persona of Frederick Delius indicated both an absence of affiliation and a definitive marker of Englishness. Underpinning this argument is the idea that attending to the dialectical interplay between independence and cooperation in the notion of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ can offer a model for a renewed conception of autonomy and commitment in musical modernism. Delius’s devotion to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, and Nietzsche's own analysis of European nihilism, will act as the backdrop to this discussion and help to suggest how both ‘Europe’ and musical modernism can be understood – via the notion of cosmopolitanism – as dispositions extending beyond their conventional geographical and historical demarcations.