Discussions of sample-based music are traditionally single-authored, despite the frequency of multi-genre content found within this repertoire. This article builds a case for a new approach for future analyses, justified by highlighting repertoire that embeds samples from different genres, times, and cultures and that calls upon a variety of disciplinary expertise to attend to these disparate contents. Multi-voice commentary is an approach that includes insider voices to speak to the content of sample-based music, building a reception network that runs counter to single authorial modes, broadening the narrative around sample-based music and its lineage. Certain sample-based works are most in need of this new approach, based on situations of ‘sampling up’, ‘down’, or ‘sideways’, tendencies developed from Nader’s concept of ‘studying up’ and Walser’s writings on ‘appropriations from below’. Theoretical ideas from Fish and Barthes are also brought into this discussion to further the case for a multiplicity of readings.

This article contributes to theories of music and affect, highlighting listeners’ affective engagement with music as a key site for the operation of power and ideology. I take as a case study listeners’ experiences of Hindustani music in performance. In contrast with work that emphasizes the capacities of musical affect to transcend social boundaries and operate separately from (or prior to) signification, I show how the affective practices of listening in this context contribute to the reproduction of existing discourses and social formations. Drawing especially on work by Sara Ahmed, I suggest that a useful starting point for understanding how affect intersects with structures of power is to examine the affective economies and the affective orientations that shape live musical listening.

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.

During the early twentieth century, Catalonia experienced a period of great cultural and musical development through the Noucentisme movement, which aimed to elevate its national culture to a symbol of high art. The xeremies (shawms) of the cobla ensemble, which played the sardana genre, were integrated into symphonic and chamber repertoire. This required the technical improvement of the tible (treble) and tenora (tenor) xeremies, but also encouraged the invention of new instruments in the shawm family. The barítona (baritone shawm) was premiered in 1930 by the Banda Municipal de Barcelona and represents a milestone in Catalan music in the tumultuous period before the Spanish Civil War.

Through ethnographical, historical, archival, and analytical lenses, this article explores Zheng Xiaoying’s (1929–) Mandarin re-translations of Das Lied von der Erde as a prism that refracts critical light on intersections of translation, epistemology, interculturality, and post-/decoloniality. The article first provides a reception history of Das Lied in China to contextualize Zheng’s re-translations, and then examines her archives to discuss the cultural dynamics of translation and musical knowledge-making in China. The article ends with a provocation from Hong Kong to reflect on the stakes of celebrating translation as a theoretical apparatus for transnational music-historical flows and decolonial goals, and to position translation in intercultural musical exchange as an arbiter of knowledges, cultures, nationhood, and politics.

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.

Malta was a British colony for over 150 years until it became independent in 1964. Though the presence of the British in Malta was considerable and permeated all sectors of Maltese life and culture, the island’s commercial and cultural ties with neighbouring Italy never ceased. This article aims to analyse how Malta’s cultural sympathies and affinities with Italy alongside British colonialism contributed to the musical growth of the wind band tradition in Malta between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. The co-existence in Malta of the political and cultural conflict brought about by the two competing cultures at this time and, paradoxically, their confluence transpire here as central to processes of musical growth through opportunities for syncretism.

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 magician Robert Heller performed virtuoso piano repertoire as part of his magic act while touring in the 1860s. He linked other musical performances in his shows to minstrelsy and spiritualist seances, and briefly featured an unsuccessful musical effect, ‘Tartini’s Dream’, that illustrated the limits of transnational marketing. Expectations of recital audiences shifted in the 1870s, leading to questions about Heller’s capacity to play ‘serious’ repertoire. Throughout his career, he benefited from an emergent celebrity culture that treated conjurers and virtuosos as kin, with musicians like Liszt, Thalberg, and Paganini frequently described in magical terms. Heller’s musical virtuosity functioned as an illusory effect, transforming the piano’s sound while masking his physical presence.

Louise Farrenc’s Nonet, which features an allusion to Beethoven’s Third Symphony, premiered to positive reviews in 1850. Around the same time, Farrenc successfully petitioned for her salary as a piano professor at the Paris Conservatoire to match that of her male colleagues. Indeed, much of Farrenc’s career involved subtly challenging the gender norms and social boundaries of nineteenth-century France. In this article, I examine Farrenc’s career in terms of nineteenth-century French feminist praxis. I analyse Farrenc’s sociohistorical context to demonstrate how she played by and subverted gender norms, and examine her Conservatoire students’ careers to illustrate her support of female students, providing them with instruction and performance opportunities. Finally, I read Farrenc’s Nonet as a musical challenge to normative gender roles, a nod to the declining popularity of her colleague and rival Henri Herz, and a response to the 1848 Revolution.

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.

Approaches to different listening practices rarely extend beyond human ears. During the nineteenth century, anatomists’ fascination with non-human hearing emerged in tandem with the professionalization of comparative anatomy. This existed in tension with the professionalization of European music criticism, where the only model for listening was human. Theories of sensationalism, developed particularly in Feuerbach’s and Marx’s writings on the human senses, grounded an anthropocentric outlook, yet numerous commentators considered animal hearing as materially related to that of humans. This article traces the process of decentring human listening. It uncovers a discourse on the materiality of the senses, and asks when did the penny drop that human hearing was neither the only aural reality, nor necessarily the ‘highest’ in the natural world.

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.

This article establishes the overwhelming association of the key of E♭ minor with expressions of profound melancholy. Subthemes include deep depression, ghosts, and spiritual darkness, represented by ombra style markers, sea storms represented by the tempest style, and representations of Scotland and Ossianic melancholy. C. F. D. Schubart’s well-known statements on E♭ minor are examined concerning its use, though those statements themselves may have been conditioned by prior usage of the key, contemporary tuning systems, and the prevalent psychological association of flat-side keys with melancholy. Topical analysis is served by the history of E♭ minor, which differs greatly from its relative major.

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.

Over a quarter of a century ago, as an insecure doctoral candidate at a US university, I was faced with the overwhelming task of presenting my research progress as a stipendium fellow at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, in front of not only the Foundation’s supportive staff but also musicologists affiliated with the Foundation as members of the Board of Trustees. After I finished my less-than-satisfactory presentation on the German composer Wolfgang Rihm, whose music resists tightly knit modernist compositional language, one very prominent musicologist from a Berlin university made a comment that still resonates with me today, especially when I advise non-Japanese students on topics related to Japan’s musical culture: he said that I, as a Japanese person studying at a US university, was ‘brave’ for tackling ‘one of the most “German” composers of our time’. He also muttered that I would need to read Adorno (which I had done but did not incorporate into my presentation), since Adorno’s texts are key to understanding the ‘Germanness’ of Rihm’s music. Perhaps it was his way of kindly reminding me that I would have no chance of acquiring a career as a German music specialist. However, I was still taken aback, especially since my nationality had never been a factor in evaluating my research output in the US.

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.