This collection of articles proposes a theoretical model for understanding and analysing the persistence of music making as a response to urban catastrophe. In the Introduction, the authors present an overview of recent humanistic literature on ruin aesthetics, positioning music as a vital yet overlooked dimension of aesthetic responses to disaster. The forum delves into the moral and ethical complexities of performing in ruins from second-century Jerusalem to contemporary Haiti. By tracing the sound of music in and about ruins, this forum offers a timely reflection on the nature of post-catastrophic music making, proposing new directions for analysing the relationships between music, traumatic memory, and spaces of performance.

This article analyses composer Pamela Z's work in light of critiques of posthumanism from Black studies and sound/music studies. Z's large-scale multimedia work Voci (2003), which the artist describes as a ‘polyphonic mono-opera’, consists of a series of eighteen scenes that combine vocal performance with digital video and audio processing. Z manipulates these sources using the BodySynth, an alternate controller interface that converts bodily gestures into expressive control signals. Z's work has been considered through cyborgian, Afrofuturist, and posthumanist discourses. But rather than affirm her practice as fully consonant with technological visions of the posthuman, I argue that she challenges the very liberal humanism upon which the posthuman is built. For a key tenet of liberal humanism, as Alexander G. Weheliye observes, was the racial and gendered apportionment of humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans. We have never been completely human, he suggests, let alone posthuman.

Z uses technologies of the embodied voice to confront both the posthuman imaginary and the continued effects of its ideological preconditions in racio-colonial liberal humanism. In a Voci scene entitled ‘Voice Studies’, for instance, Z engages the problem of ‘linguistic profiling’ as it applies to housing discrimination, citing the work of Stanford linguistics researcher John Baugh. Against a backdrop of percussive vocalizations, Z explains, ‘Studies reveal that people can often infer the race of an individual based on the sound of their voice’, subsequently playing back recordings of housing applicants containing vocal signifiers of racial difference. The article then contrasts this kind of ‘aural dimension of race’ found in Jennifer Lynn Stoever's notion of the ‘sonic color line’ with Pierre Schaeffer's attempt to separate sound from the social – as well as from bodies and identities – in his practice of acousmatic reduction. With this in mind, I show how Z construes the voice as an acous(ma)tic technology of embodiment while reframing opera's humanist legacy through Voci's allegorical narration of the ‘prehuman’, ‘human’, and ‘posthuman’. Moving with and against a posthuman imaginary, Z suggests that although we have never quite been human or posthuman, we may nevertheless narrate new versions of each.

This article explores the strategies employed by user-creators as they listen to, sense, make, and share digital audiovisual memes of musicking non-human animals on social media. Memes, reels, and other forms of audiovisual social media posts are a form of cultural expression that reveals the varied ways humans relate to, connect with, and represent non-human animals – especially their pets – through sound, music, and the moving image. By listening to the plurality of musicking animals circulating on social media platforms and networks, I argue that user-creators conspicuously use music and performance to express alternative ideas of what it means to be musical, to feel closer to and connect with the important animals in their lives, and to explore the ways they can represent non-human animals using sound and music to explore musical concepts. Using a varied selection of viral musicking animal memes shared across social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, I frame musicking animal participatory media as a creative space for exploring different approaches to listening, performing with, and scoring sound and music to the behaviour, movement, and acoustic communication of the non-human animal. Non-human animal musicking takes a variety of forms across this particular kind of participatory media making by online user-creators.

The sonic aftershocks of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti continue to reverberate throughout the cultural landscape, particularly within the relatively small but long-standing mizik klasik community. In this article, I analyse the sometimes divergent performances of a composition that commemorates that tragedy. Haitian-American composer Sydney Guillaume wrote ‘N'ap Debat’ (‘We're Hangin’ On’) from Los Angeles shortly after the earthquake. One performance of this work takes place far from the site of ruin, voiced by distant observers. The other performance happens in Haiti, sung by its survivors. Both performances transform rubble into ruin.

This article examines gender, nation, and identity in the popular song of folk roots ‘Alfonsina y el mar’. Written by Félix Luna and Ariel Ramírez, the song is based on the suicide of feminist poet Alfonsina Storni and achieved worldwide popularity through Mercedes Sosa's 1969 rendition on the album Mujeres argentinas. Using Butler's theory of gender performance, Cusick's proposals for a feminist music theory, and Plesch's concept of dysphoric topics in Argentine nationalist music, this article deconstructs the song's poetic, musical, and visual discourses to critique its underlying cultural signification. It concludes that by infantilizing, romanticizing, and nationalizing Storni's public figure, her legacy was adapted to the patriarchal expectations of decorum and historical narrative about nation pervasive in Argentina in the late 1960s. Storni's white European urban background was adapted to more ‘authentic’ Argentine values through Sosa's performance and public image.

Postcards played an important role throughout the first half of the twentieth century in French-ruled Algeria, offering a fast and affordable means of communication between North Africa and Europe for French citizens working and travelling in the Maghreb. Alongside depictions of beautiful scenery and highly exoticized subjects, a large body of postcards portrayed musicians, musical instruments, and musical performances. This article considers how these postcards shaped French understanding of Algerian music, and Algerian culture more broadly. Algerian musicians were unlikely to appear on public radio broadcasts in France during this period, and these small, inexpensive, mass-produced images thus provided the way in which much of the French public would encounter Algerian music. The article also examines the ways in which postcards of the time depicted the role of music and sound within Algerian public spaces, and how they shaped the place of public and private sonic realms within colonial Algerian society.

In 2011, Alex Heitlinger, a senior at New England Conservatory, uploaded the video ‘The Lick’ to YouTube. The 1′34″ compilation excerpted a range of performances that each deployed the same seven-note ‘lick’. This article explores the digital dissemination of videos and memes that feature the Lick, suggesting its function as a mimetic device users can deploy to signal their belonging and individuality within a larger jazz community. The Lick, in its formulaic deployment within these ‘insider’ spaces, moves away from improvisation and becomes a calling card for performers and listeners alike to determine a legitimate participant, on and offline. The Lick's online proliferation becomes a gimmick through its repetition, pointing to its hyper-presence and complaints about the excessive posts of the Lick becoming recycled into over-repeated jokes. I argue the Lick serves as the basis for a study of humour and gimmickry in jazz identity formation.

This article explores how Marshallese radiation songs, written during and after the nuclear testing period as nuclear survivors tried to make sense of their sufferings, yield insight into processes of imperial ruination, rupture, and fragmentation by resounding the powerful impress of radioactive decay in Marshallese lives. In assessing the parameters through which radiation becomes sensible, how, and to whom, it becomes all the clearer how the US nuclear project can be considered in terms of ‘imperial ruination’. US geopolitical accrual has depended on the structural dispossession of Marshallese from their Indigenous agency rooted in and routed through their matrilineal culture. Focusing on women's performances from the Rongelapese community, the presence of radiation – lyrically and affectively – can be traced through vocalized moments of decay that intimate how rubble is embodied and shared in the aftermath of nuclear destruction.

The dual theatre complex of the Württembergische Staatstheater in Stuttgart sustained serious damage during the Second World War. While the larger theatre was eventually able to be repaired, the smaller theatre was destroyed, leading to a multi-phased and controversial process to determine how best to replace it. Many of Stuttgart's citizens publicly pleaded that the smaller theatre should be reconstructed according to its original design, in order to restore its historical beauty and its integrity with the complex. The company's Intendant and numerous architects, however, took a more modern approach that manifested in a variety of proposed designs, including that by Hans Volkart, which opened in 1962. Countering the binary represented by ‘faithful reconstruction’ on one end (Vienna, Munich) and by completely modern designs on the other (West Berlin, Cologne), the case of Stuttgart perhaps serves as a better metaphor for the compromises of continuity and change in post-war culture.

This article grapples with ‘Let It Rain’, the title track of Bishop Paul S. Morton and the Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship's 2003 release, which revises Michael Farren's contemporary Christian ballad by braiding it together with Prince's ‘Purple Rain’ and the formal logic of Black gospel tradition. As the Full Gospel version of this song commingles these seemingly discordant components, Morton, choir, and band turn a sung prayer into an assertion of interworldly presence. Building on its received musical materials, this gospel power ballad performs the Black gospel tradition's characteristic inflection – an arresting turn from one level of musicking to a heightened, ecstatic frame. In so doing, this song brings rain near, illuminating the links between performances of musical ecstasy and musical Blackness.

Music podcasts have proliferated as public discourse about popular music. A significant part of the expanding podcast industry, music podcasts include titles such as All Songs Considered, Switched on Pop, Song Exploder, Sound Opinions, New York Times Popcast, and Lost Notes. These podcasts often feature a combination of conversation and musical selections, which highlight aspects of the music for podcast listeners. In this article, I argue that we should think of music podcasts as persuasive demonstrations of music consumption. Music podcasts present music as a subject for discussion and also implicitly model listening techniques, convincing podcast listeners to adopt specific approaches to music recordings. I explore three podcasts: All Songs Considered, Switched on Pop, and Disability Visibility. I examine how these podcasts present music as their subject, while advancing particular theories of listening that can serve or subvert privileged modes of music reception.

In this article, I analyse the implications of autoplaying video as a driver of ‘audile techniques’ in the 2010s digital ecosystem – in particular, techniques that respond to the realities of the separability of image and sound, even in media that contain both elements. I then examine a number of strategies through which this audio/visual split has been negotiated, monetized, and creatively bridged by consumers, creators, and corporate personnel – from the creation of new audiovisual genres and aesthetics, to the rise of particular platform pricing models, to the adoption (and, potentially, exploitation) of accessibility features. Ultimately, I seek to show how negotiations of sound and listening factor deeply into contemporary attempts to harness and monetize ‘attention’ as a commodity in a digital economy of platforms, advertisements, and data.

During the Second World War, the American composer George Rochberg served as an infantryman with the US Army in Europe. There, he witnessed first hand the aftermath caused by massive firebombing of the French countryside by both Allied and Axis bombers, an image that would remain with him for the remainder of his life. In his post-war writings, the rubbled city of Saint-Lô soon became a metaphor for the precarious state of Western culture, which he believed had suffered a grave injury. This article considers how Rochberg reconstructed his wartime sketches – short miniatures composed during the European campaign – into material for his Sixth Symphony (1986). I argue that Rochberg clearly conceived of musical reconstruction as a means by which to symbolically confront the modernist forces he believed accountable for the decline of Western culture that he increasingly perceived towards the end of his life. The article ends with a cautionary epilogue to this time-worn narrative of rubble, reconstruction, and redemption that challenges Rochberg's false sense of moral superiority and the motivations of ‘rubble narratives’ more generally.

The performance practice of European serial music has long been misunderstood. This article uses Stockhausen's Klavierstück I (1952–3) as a lens through which to view the realities of this practice, drawing on close contextual analysis of the affordances of the score and the now significant corpus of recordings. These findings are used to extend M. J. Grant's view of serial aesthetics and to provide a practical basis for what she calls ‘serial listening’. Three principal styles of performance are identified and attendant modes of listening suggested, relating to the non-thematic principles and hermeneutic contexts of serial music, which include the embodied response of the performer to defamiliarized musical material and the nascent dialectic of instrumental and electronic composition. This investigation – informing serious judgements of value and taste – has broader implications for the development of Stockhausen's notation and temporal theory in the 1950s and for the performance practice of new music.

The transformation of rubble into aestheticized ruins turns on the relation of aesthetics, politics, and power alongside questions of memory, imagination, and embodiment. Working outward from this suggestive confluence, I investigate contemporary practices of commemorative composition that resituate elements of the historical archive, and so turn sonic rubble into ruin. Using Mary Kouyoumdjian's 2014 composition Bombs of Beirut as an example, I consider how the composer uses witness testimony and archival recordings of wartime sounds from the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) to first construct, and then destroy, a version of the city of Beirut. In so doing, she engages in what Marianne Hirsch would call a ‘postmemorial act’ that reconfigures the relationships between physical, mental, and social spaces. The resulting palimpsest of meanings not only offers an important contemplative space for approaching the past but also suggests intriguing futures for the musical art of the ruin.

This article analyses the rise of YouTube in India between 2008 and 2018 by focusing on two central themes: first, shifts in digital infrastructure that enabled the widespread consumption of streaming media; and second, the importance of music-media aesthetics in supporting the platform's predominance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and close readings of videos by significant early Indian YouTube performers, I trace how an ‘aesthetics of intimacy’ facilitated the practices of ‘engagement’ that drove YouTube's expansion and monetization. The article thus highlights the infrastructuralizing capacities of musical aesthetics as they have allowed YouTube to become the predominant online platform for the circulation of videos and attention in India and beyond. Ultimately, I suggest that scholars of digital music cultures must attend to the intertwining of aesthetics and infrastructure to gain insight into the corporate industry imaginaries that guide platform expansion in emerging digital markets.